All these years we've been giving MS monopoly rent for OS software
I don't know about you, but I made a one-off payment for XP Pro about 3 years ago and haven't had to pay a penny more since. If you've entered into some sort of a rental agreement then while I sympathise, you only really have yourself to blame.
Similarly, I remember here in the UK much talk of "the four minute warning" as it was called - that's the amount of time we'd have between detection of a launch and impact.
money not spent on buying cds and dvds is spent elsewhere. the argument that 'illegal downloading costs the industry 100 billion dollars (finger in mouth corner) per year' is pretty close to a broken-window-fallacy.
Yes it's spent somewhere, but the media industry's point is that it's not spent on their products, so they are "losing" money (by which they mean that they're not gaining as much as they could have done). The economy remains the same, as the money is indeed spent elsewhere, but there's no guarantee that it's spent on a different DVD or CD.
how bad is it for the recording industry, that an unloved spotty teenager has illegal copies of 300 films on his harddrives? he wouldn't have bought them anyway. no sales have been lost.
Well, their point is not only that he's not paid for stuff he should have done, but that he's made it available to others (via p2p, ftp, physical copies, whatever). The argument is that that has cost them money, as at least some of those people would have otherwise bought the item.
Now, having said all that, I happen to agree with you. I think that most people who download or otherwise copy a film or CD probably wouldn't have paid for it. However, the law's the law, and it's that way for a reason. I don't agree with the way in which copyright laws are being abused (I'm looking at *you*, Disney), but I think the basic intention is sound. I also don't have a lot of sympathy for people who infringe copyright, get caught and whine about it. There are copyright notices on every copyrighted article, and at the start of every DVD and cinema showing; I do not believe that there's a single person who is capable of copying a copyrighted work who doesn't know that it's illegal. They may not believe that it's wrong, but that doesn't really matter, it's still illegal.
the rest is almost pure profit directly in your pocket
Profit is what's left over when you take salary bill, maintenance, taxes, etc off the money you have coming in. In the case of WoW, they'll have server maintenance, bandwidth bills, possibly hosting charges, staff salaries, etc.
I know what point you were trying to make - that they get more of the money - but it's wrong to describe it as being "pure profit".
Punishment should be DIRECTLY related to the cost/impact of he crime.
Someone else has already pointed out the murder/manslaughter distinction, so I'll leave that. There are other distinctions too, where the end result is the same but the exact circumstances of the crime can make a large difference to the punishment.
Even ignoring that, however, there's another factor that can greatly increase the punishment - the perceived ease of commiting the offence and likelyhood of getting away with it. If it's seen as not really being of any consequence, and is hard to detect and prosecute people, you're going to get more people thinking "why not?" and doing it. To help combat that, you make the punishment harsh; the theory being that people will think "I probably won't get caught, but if I do... it's not worth it". That's part of the reason why these laws all have such stupidly high penalties. It's not just the companies lobbying for unrealistic punishments, it's meant to bea deterrent too.
Many politicians defended the new law, amongst them Günther Krings, the Christian Democrat legal affairs spokesman, who claimed: 'There should be no legal distinction between stealing chewing gum from a shop and performing an illegal download.'
In that case, they either need to lower the maximum sentence for illegal downloads, or raise the maximum sentence for stealing the DVD (or chewing gum). After all, a difference in sentencing constituents a legal distinction...
Virtual desktops have been available in Windows via a Powertoy since at least Win 2k, and teh NVidia drivers have had the capability built in to them for years.
My guess would be never. People have been asking for this sort of thing for years, and while I admit I've never looked at slashcode, conceptually it really isn't a very hard thing to do.
I know it's easy to say when you have the luxury of not being in that position, but seriously, tell them to shove their job. They're asking for the impossible and not even paying you for attempting it.
Short answer: go read about general (not special) relativity.
Slightly longer answer: gravity is essentially the warping of space-time by the mass of an object. You can think of it as being like putting a heavy object on to a trampoline - the surface is pulled down under it. If you put a ball on it near the object, it'll roll down the sheet towards it.
Gravity is a bit like that, but in three dimensions.
What will it mean for upgrades?
on
Office Delayed, Too
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
It'll mean that they won't happen until it's out, and money will be saved that can be spent somewhere else.
Businesses don't upgrade just so they can use the latest and greatest; my company (a large multi-national) is still perfectly happy with its Office 2000 site licence. It sees no reason to upgrade, and why would it? The licence is still valid, and the products do what is required of them. I'm sure we'll upgrade eventually, but we wouldn't go to OpenOffice (or a previous version of MS Office) just because Office 2007 was a bit late; we'd simply wait.
I know from bitter experience that while a bug fix may involve only a small handful of lines (or even a single one), it could take literally days to work out what line is at fault.
My favourite story is one that was related to me a couple of years ago by a coworker. A previous job he'd had was at a place that wrote software for EPOS systems - tills mainly. They received a bug report, and one of the guys was assigned to track down the fault.
To cut a long story short, he spent six months working on it, until he finally tracked it down to being a hardware fault. Now that's an extreme case, but so is the mythical "5 minutes and one line of code" you seem to imply is common.
That's exactly what I thought when I heard the news last night - I believe that the price quoted was £25 for Kong. My immediate reaction was "Why the fuck would I want to download it when I could buy the DVD for about £15?! They *want* it to fail!"
I quite like this quote from the FA:
"Universal's research showed that 12- to 18-year-olds in particular are keen to watch films on their laptops or portable devices."
I'm sure they are - but at these prices, this won't be how they do it. (Oh and 12 year olds have laptops?!)
As far as I am aware, the only way to correctly fire a javascript: link or onclick handler in Firefox is to left-click it. Nothing else I've ever tried has worked, which is a complete pain in the arse when you really *don't* want the damn thing to open a popup or - worse - the javascript does a form submission or similar, but you really wanted it in a new tab.
That's not so much this company's fault, as it is the fault of the firefox team. What's the point of giving users an easy way to open links in a new tab, then only implementing partial functionality?
For #2, I mean you shouldn't need a current-gen system to render everything. If Vista came out today, I don't want to be required to have an nVidia 6800GT to view the desktop with the defaults on. If you required a Geforce 2 or 3, then fine
NVidia's current generation of card is the 7900; before that was the 7800, then the 6800s and 6600s, and before that the GeForce FX if memory serves. You then have the GeForce 4s and 4 MXs before finally getting to the 3s and 3 Tis then 2s. At point 2, you say "around 3 generations ago" - so depending on exactly how you count, either a 6800 or a 6600 should be acceptable, or perhaps an FX if you're being picky. At any rate, GeForce 2s and 3s are a lot older than 3 generations.
Not that I'm arguing with you, merely pointing out that in fact, that 6800GT you say shouldn't be necessary very nearly fulfills your original requirement on card age.
Konqueror would be integrated as a component of X and would run under the root account
Neither IE nor Windows Explorer are integrated into the Windows display subsystem, and neither of them run as the SYSTEM account (the closest parallel to root). It is also possible to replace Windows Explorer as the desktop shell (see for example Aston Shell, although there are others); from memory, there is a registry key that specifies the program to launch on logging in. By default, it starts explorer, but that can be changed.
I know I know, not entirely accurate
Not even close really, but thanks for trying - you're the first to bother:)
How so? It's not uncommon for "special" system processes to need to be started as root but to give up the extra privileges as quickly as possible, but I have never heard of an "ordinary" user process switching to an even less privileged user account.
Besides which, the security model in NT-based systems is much richer than that in Linux-based systems. Unfortunately a few poor design/marketing decisions and a generation of sloppy coders too used to 9x-based systems has gone a long way to obviate that advantage, as far too many people simply run with administrative privileges.
That said, the clueless will always be a danger to themselves, whatever system they run.
I remember playing both The Bard's Tale and The Bard's Tale 2 on my Speccy +3, and loving every minute of it, so I was pretty excited to learn that they were remaking it for the PC.
Slashdot Mirror
All these years we've been giving MS monopoly rent for OS software
I don't know about you, but I made a one-off payment for XP Pro about 3 years ago and haven't had to pay a penny more since. If you've entered into some sort of a rental agreement then while I sympathise, you only really have yourself to blame.
Similarly, I remember here in the UK much talk of "the four minute warning" as it was called - that's the amount of time we'd have between detection of a launch and impact.
money not spent on buying cds and dvds is spent elsewhere. the argument that 'illegal downloading costs the industry 100 billion dollars (finger in mouth corner) per year' is pretty close to a broken-window-fallacy.
Yes it's spent somewhere, but the media industry's point is that it's not spent on their products, so they are "losing" money (by which they mean that they're not gaining as much as they could have done). The economy remains the same, as the money is indeed spent elsewhere, but there's no guarantee that it's spent on a different DVD or CD.
how bad is it for the recording industry, that an unloved spotty teenager has illegal copies of 300 films on his harddrives? he wouldn't have bought them anyway. no sales have been lost.
Well, their point is not only that he's not paid for stuff he should have done, but that he's made it available to others (via p2p, ftp, physical copies, whatever). The argument is that that has cost them money, as at least some of those people would have otherwise bought the item.
Now, having said all that, I happen to agree with you. I think that most people who download or otherwise copy a film or CD probably wouldn't have paid for it. However, the law's the law, and it's that way for a reason. I don't agree with the way in which copyright laws are being abused (I'm looking at *you*, Disney), but I think the basic intention is sound. I also don't have a lot of sympathy for people who infringe copyright, get caught and whine about it. There are copyright notices on every copyrighted article, and at the start of every DVD and cinema showing; I do not believe that there's a single person who is capable of copying a copyrighted work who doesn't know that it's illegal. They may not believe that it's wrong, but that doesn't really matter, it's still illegal.
the rest is almost pure profit directly in your pocket
Profit is what's left over when you take salary bill, maintenance, taxes, etc off the money you have coming in. In the case of WoW, they'll have server maintenance, bandwidth bills, possibly hosting charges, staff salaries, etc.
I know what point you were trying to make - that they get more of the money - but it's wrong to describe it as being "pure profit".
Punishment should be DIRECTLY related to the cost/impact of he crime.
Someone else has already pointed out the murder/manslaughter distinction, so I'll leave that. There are other distinctions too, where the end result is the same but the exact circumstances of the crime can make a large difference to the punishment.
Even ignoring that, however, there's another factor that can greatly increase the punishment - the perceived ease of commiting the offence and likelyhood of getting away with it. If it's seen as not really being of any consequence, and is hard to detect and prosecute people, you're going to get more people thinking "why not?" and doing it. To help combat that, you make the punishment harsh; the theory being that people will think "I probably won't get caught, but if I do... it's not worth it". That's part of the reason why these laws all have such stupidly high penalties. It's not just the companies lobbying for unrealistic punishments, it's meant to bea deterrent too.
Many politicians defended the new law, amongst them Günther Krings, the Christian Democrat legal affairs spokesman, who claimed: 'There should be no legal distinction between stealing chewing gum from a shop and performing an illegal download.'
In that case, they either need to lower the maximum sentence for illegal downloads, or raise the maximum sentence for stealing the DVD (or chewing gum). After all, a difference in sentencing constituents a legal distinction...
Virtual desktops have been available in Windows via a Powertoy since at least Win 2k, and teh NVidia drivers have had the capability built in to them for years.
Yes, but so what? No-one is claiming that the feature is unique to Vista, he was merely pointing out that it's actually likely to be pretty cool.
OS 9 seemed faster because the first iteration of OS X, which people tended to run on the same hardware, was dog slow.
:)
So you're saying that OS 9 seemed faster than OS X because it was?
What an appropriate sig, given your comment.
My guess would be never. People have been asking for this sort of thing for years, and while I admit I've never looked at slashcode, conceptually it really isn't a very hard thing to do.
Heh - until a little over a year ago, I was using a GeForce 3 Ti 200...
Of course since then I've upgraded to a 7800 GTX, but I digress. (The time gap is due to the 6800GT I had for a while between the two)
OMG TIM IS TOOOOOOOOO CUUTE!!!!!11!!11!!!
Aw shucks, they noticed!
I know it's easy to say when you have the luxury of not being in that position, but seriously, tell them to shove their job. They're asking for the impossible and not even paying you for attempting it.
Life's too short, and no job is worth that.
Well, evil is defined as being immoral, cruel or very unpleasant (adj) or something that is very bad and harmful (n).
Note that nowhere in that definition is there the word "senseless" or "pointless", which would be the case if killing for a reason were not evil.
Just because you have a reason for doing something, that doesn't by itself make that thing any less evil.
Short answer: go read about general (not special) relativity.
Slightly longer answer: gravity is essentially the warping of space-time by the mass of an object. You can think of it as being like putting a heavy object on to a trampoline - the surface is pulled down under it. If you put a ball on it near the object, it'll roll down the sheet towards it.
Gravity is a bit like that, but in three dimensions.
It'll mean that they won't happen until it's out, and money will be saved that can be spent somewhere else.
Businesses don't upgrade just so they can use the latest and greatest; my company (a large multi-national) is still perfectly happy with its Office 2000 site licence. It sees no reason to upgrade, and why would it? The licence is still valid, and the products do what is required of them. I'm sure we'll upgrade eventually, but we wouldn't go to OpenOffice (or a previous version of MS Office) just because Office 2007 was a bit late; we'd simply wait.
I know from bitter experience that while a bug fix may involve only a small handful of lines (or even a single one), it could take literally days to work out what line is at fault.
My favourite story is one that was related to me a couple of years ago by a coworker. A previous job he'd had was at a place that wrote software for EPOS systems - tills mainly. They received a bug report, and one of the guys was assigned to track down the fault.
To cut a long story short, he spent six months working on it, until he finally tracked it down to being a hardware fault. Now that's an extreme case, but so is the mythical "5 minutes and one line of code" you seem to imply is common.
That's exactly what I thought when I heard the news last night - I believe that the price quoted was £25 for Kong. My immediate reaction was "Why the fuck would I want to download it when I could buy the DVD for about £15?! They *want* it to fail!"
I quite like this quote from the FA:
"Universal's research showed that 12- to 18-year-olds in particular are keen to watch films on their laptops or portable devices."
I'm sure they are - but at these prices, this won't be how they do it.
(Oh and 12 year olds have laptops?!)
As far as I am aware, the only way to correctly fire a javascript: link or onclick handler in Firefox is to left-click it. Nothing else I've ever tried has worked, which is a complete pain in the arse when you really *don't* want the damn thing to open a popup or - worse - the javascript does a form submission or similar, but you really wanted it in a new tab.
That's not so much this company's fault, as it is the fault of the firefox team. What's the point of giving users an easy way to open links in a new tab, then only implementing partial functionality?
For #2, I mean you shouldn't need a current-gen system to render everything. If Vista came out today, I don't want to be required to have an nVidia 6800GT to view the desktop with the defaults on. If you required a Geforce 2 or 3, then fine
NVidia's current generation of card is the 7900; before that was the 7800, then the 6800s and 6600s, and before that the GeForce FX if memory serves. You then have the GeForce 4s and 4 MXs before finally getting to the 3s and 3 Tis then 2s. At point 2, you say "around 3 generations ago" - so depending on exactly how you count, either a 6800 or a 6600 should be acceptable, or perhaps an FX if you're being picky. At any rate, GeForce 2s and 3s are a lot older than 3 generations.
Not that I'm arguing with you, merely pointing out that in fact, that 6800GT you say shouldn't be necessary very nearly fulfills your original requirement on card age.
Konqueror would be integrated as a component of X and would run under the root account
:)
Neither IE nor Windows Explorer are integrated into the Windows display subsystem, and neither of them run as the SYSTEM account (the closest parallel to root). It is also possible to replace Windows Explorer as the desktop shell (see for example Aston Shell, although there are others); from memory, there is a registry key that specifies the program to launch on logging in. By default, it starts explorer, but that can be changed.
I know I know, not entirely accurate
Not even close really, but thanks for trying - you're the first to bother
How so? It's not uncommon for "special" system processes to need to be started as root but to give up the extra privileges as quickly as possible, but I have never heard of an "ordinary" user process switching to an even less privileged user account.
Besides which, the security model in NT-based systems is much richer than that in Linux-based systems. Unfortunately a few poor design/marketing decisions and a generation of sloppy coders too used to 9x-based systems has gone a long way to obviate that advantage, as far too many people simply run with administrative privileges.
That said, the clueless will always be a danger to themselves, whatever system they run.
I remember playing both The Bard's Tale and The Bard's Tale 2 on my Speccy +3, and loving every minute of it, so I was pretty excited to learn that they were remaking it for the PC.
Then I played the demo.
Oh well, that's another company on my List.
I think the New Model Army said it best; that's from the 80s, if memory serves, and things are hardly getting any better.