You can rightly accuse Microsoft of many things but being dumb isn't one of them. Due to their lack of headway in the embedded systems market and the extreme popularity of Linux in this same market Microsoft is smart enough not to mortgage the Windows Media farm on the success of their embedded OSes.
The cynical among us might think that by porting Windows Media to Linux and then "enhancing" the Windows versions faster than the Linux version you could lure Linux-committed companies to make an "easy port" to CE. Personally I think it should be watched-for but unlikely as embedded-Windows is decent, companies are abandoning it not for functionality issues, but cost and choice -- things much more important in the embedded space.
You stupid jerks. I know that/. isn't supposed to be impartial but you took an email thread between a user and a sales rep and transformed it to "Microsoft Pirating its own Software?" You dirty louses there isn't a shred of proof or even credible sources, how do you know this page isn't complete fiction? Even when attacking companies we hate I expect to see some sort of credibility and evidence... This is the worst story that's ever reached your front page.
>I don't think it'd really happen, but the guy has a very very good point
Lots of people with gripes on Slashdot also have good points, they just don't get posted on the main page. This is some guy who felt like jerking his M$ rep around and thought it would be newsworth. A Microsoft sales rep making a mistake does not impress me, move along people real news found elsewhere...
Re:icculus guys rule
on
Duke3d in Linux
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Uhhhh... And if you warez it the data files will be sitting right there on your HD or a burned CD. I can think of much better reasons for buying games than simply having the data handy when it goes GPL. How about: if you don't buy the games you play, eventually there won't be anything to be GPLed...
I happen to collect games and own many GBC and SNES games, but not a console. If I ever want to play those games I can buy a GP32 instead of needing to buy both a GBA and SNES. Or I can play my SNES games on a PC emulator. I also own hundreds of PC games in the shrink-wrap with receipts but I usually download a copy so I don't need to open the pristine box. Legal all around.
And furthermore, why does the RIAA not allow this model? Why should they when they can use their monopoly to prevent change and stay smug in the current model? Why charge $1 for a song when they can charge you $15 for it and bundle 9 other songs you don't like? Why should they since they want music to be by subscription so they can milk you on a monthly basis rather than a fair trade: pay for what you need? Why should they take a risk on something new that people want when they can use monopoly and police to force people to swallow the same shit they've been shovelling at them for years? Indeed.
There's a tonne of money to be made on music, I don't know why people don't see this. Record companies should sell MP3s for a dollar each. That simple. I would pay $1 (and stop using Kazaa) for high speed xfers, no more broken downloads, consistent file naming, good quality recordings. If the web page let you preview songs and had buttons for "Show similar music" as well as a Top40 list by music type people would come. How many times have you heard a song you love on the radio and not known what to search for on Kazaa? Would you pay $1 for a web site that helped you find that song and download it? Of course!!!
Forget DRM, if you had a compelling product at a reasonable price Kazaa would naturally go away. Most people don't steal an apple from the fruit stand as they walk by. Why? Because they think the store owner is an honest person asking a fair price for a good product. The RIAA is the cause of [ Napster | Kazaa | Morpheus ] not the cure.
Re:Fibre is just a network cable, relax guys...
on
Last-Mile Fiber Optic
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· Score: 1
Agreed. The fact of the matter is that most NICs don't have chipsets efficient enough to fill a network cable, I read a benchmark (granted it was a few years ago) where the best of the best managed around 80Mbit/s with most averaging around 20Mbit/s. Not very efficient for a 100meg NIC. On top of that if you have multiple PCs on your segment you'll find Ethernet's CDMA algorithm causes performance to decrease exponentially with traffic, at 80% utilization most ethernets become basically useless. Not an issue in your typical home network but at a university or work you'll never ever see throughput close to 100%.
Yeah, I'm hoping that countries outside the USA have the common sense to offer non-GPS phones as I'm not an American resident. Fingers crossed...
Fibre is just a network cable, relax guys...
on
Last-Mile Fiber Optic
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· Score: 4, Insightful
For some reason people always mistake the word "fibre" for nirvana, computing paradise, the valhalla of networking. Fact is I've got cable internet and it can handle up to 10Mbps, far more than they actually give me. I'd kill for a 10Mbit link, let alone 100Mbit. The thing that kills you isn't the physical layer, it's the routing and throttling your ISP does -- fibre in itself changes nothing. Give me cable internet with fast routing and no bandwidth caps over fibre any day...
I love cool toys but this is one I'll definitely be boycotting -- any kind of GPS device. The last thing I want is for the US military to be tracking my every move, thanks but no thanks.
If you read the article you'll notice that this isn't a programmable computer. It's yet another test-tube experiment in which DNA was pre-programmed to return a pre-defined result, engaged in a chemical reaction, and then the resultant data read from the DNA at a later time. So while the experiment itself likely took many months or years, they claim that "330 trillion calculations per second" were performed because that's the duration of the chemical reaction divided by the number of bits of information that were changed. You can't ever access that data and you can't program the machine, but hell, that's how long the chemical reaction took... I'm decidedly unimpressed.
Standard units for sensationalist reporting
on
Building the A380
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· Score: 4, Funny
This report is riddled with holes. For example everyone knows that the standard unit for length in sensationalist reporting is the football field, not the soccer pitch. And the standard unit for height is the Empire State building, not the olympic swimming pool. Also conspicuously absent is any comparison to the width of a human hair, or to how many times we could go to and from the moon of we laid something-or-other end to end. Very disappointing...
While I realize you're just being a dick I've got to ask why you picked me for such an ignorant post. I'm the typical Irish-English moronic imigrant (as you so eloquently illustrate and personify) so I don't know why your anti-black comments are directed at me. If you're going to post ignorant insults like that shouldn't you at least know who you're talking to?
With NASA giving the one-fingered salute to the unfairly maligned "faster-better-cheaper" programme it's nice to see the ESA taking a more pragmatic approach to things. I have a great deal of respect for NASA but I also want to see Europe, China, India and others up the ante, and this seems like a perfect example.
"Your website indicates that you are an employee of IBM, a PCI-SIG member. We therefore request that you work through IBM to investigate the possibility of creating a similar database of PCI Vendor ID numbers which would be available on the official PCI-SIG website. In the meantime, however, be advised that PCI-SIG will not tolerate co-existence with your website, in its present form."
So basically this is an attempt to steal his content and have it added to their website. Or in other words, we love your content and we want it but we want it for free and if you argue we'll crush you. Sleazy bastards.
Nice revisionist history, I'm amazed how few people actually remember more than 5 years into the past.
1. AOL was not an internet company until long after the internet became a sensation. They spent a lot of time playing catch-up. 2. Prodigy? Compuserve? GEnie? Fidonet? Thousands of amateur BBSes? Have you never heard of these? AOL was not the innovator -- they were the big fish that swallowed everything that swam into their gaping maw. 3. The internet was not the domain of physicists because they were the only people capable of grasping the concept of text (yeah what a grand mystery; how did we ever learn it?). It's because until 1991 the NSF forbade commercial traffic on the internet backbone. Hence only the military, scientists, and educational institutions were allowed to use it. 4. 1991 was also the year the WWW was developed, the original internet GUI, 4 years before AOL even provided any semblance of internet access.
Not everyone slept through the internet revolution, you should do some reading... (Pssst! Al Gore didn't invent the internet! Pass it on...)
>N64 piracy mechanisms have been available for years now, be they zip drives or CD-based systems. Likewise for the SNES and NES systems, piracy has been done to death.
But these are all hardware solutions so they'll always be the realm of a few enthusiasts. However when you can buy an exact copy of a game or movie, that worries the content oligarchy immensely.
>The Gamecube, on the other hand, his seen no piracy at all.
I don't know a lot about GameCube drives but my understanding was they were just small-format DVDs, my assumption with encryption. Well mini-CDs were uncopyable for the longest time until someone realized they were part of the redbook standard and the only issue was lack of media. I'm sure GameCube is somewhat more complicated but isn't their hardware standards-compliant? Last time I was in Beijing you could buy a stack of burned movies for $20USD on the side of the road, I think this is what worries Nintendo...
Actually I think what he means is that in China you can get burned DVDs and CDs a dime a dozen, so they're afraid to release Gamecube in China. ROMs are much more difficult to copy so they'll release N64 instead.
I don't think it's got to do with preventing ROM piracy since no matter how long a game's been off the market it's still technically illegal to copy it.
So what you're saying is that it's the fault of Slashdot for their "criticize, condemn, and crash" strategy even though you then turn around and blame it on the "H1B monkeys"... Yes, it's the fault of all these immigrant monkeys, you hit the nail on the head. Has it ever occurred to you that these immigrant "monkeys" are stealing your jobs because you're a race of fat lazy shits, not because they're monkeys????????
1. Slashdot is a hosting site in that I can create my own journal on it and they have free membership.
Irrelevant and immaterial. This has nothing to do with my comment that/. is not a hosting site, it is not.
2. Common sense will tell you that if you aren't linking to a major, well known website or some sort of.edu site that it probably cannot handle it
Then you should not post your content into the free and clear public domain where there are no controls to stop people from viewing it. It's Slashdot's fault if you post shit with no security and lots of people click on it???
3. Sorry if you have no patience, but if you're expecting someone else to find news for you then you're already adding what should be, to you, an intolerable delay and instead you should be out combing the web to find news long before it shows up on slashdot.
If Slashdot didn't post current news then their competitor, Ampersand-tilde would. And ampersand-tilde would become the most travelled site on the internet and you would bitch at them for the ampersand-effect. Are you too dumb to realize this?
If you don't like Slashdot then don't read it and fer chrissake don't post in the messageboards. Do you genuinely think you're protesting Slashdot by hanging in their forums?
1. Slashdot is not a hosting site so they shouldn't offer to mirror.
2. They have no way of knowing if a site can't handle the load.
3. Waiting for a mirror to appear would make news show up incredibly slow.
4. The community automatically mirrors or pastes content that has been/.-ed you just need to spend 2 seconds reading the comments.
5. The guy with the Lego site is probably tickled pink that his site just got a billion hits and probably doesn't mind things crawling to a halt for a while. It's his 15 minutes of internet fame.
Slashdot Mirror
As in... performance hit?
You can rightly accuse Microsoft of many things but being dumb isn't one of them. Due to their lack of headway in the embedded systems market and the extreme popularity of Linux in this same market Microsoft is smart enough not to mortgage the Windows Media farm on the success of their embedded OSes.
The cynical among us might think that by porting Windows Media to Linux and then "enhancing" the Windows versions faster than the Linux version you could lure Linux-committed companies to make an "easy port" to CE. Personally I think it should be watched-for but unlikely as embedded-Windows is decent, companies are abandoning it not for functionality issues, but cost and choice -- things much more important in the embedded space.
You stupid jerks. I know that /. isn't supposed to be impartial but you took an email thread between a user and a sales rep and transformed it to "Microsoft Pirating its own Software?" You dirty louses there isn't a shred of proof or even credible sources, how do you know this page isn't complete fiction? Even when attacking companies we hate I expect to see some sort of credibility and evidence... This is the worst story that's ever reached your front page.
>I don't think it'd really happen, but the guy has a very very good point
Lots of people with gripes on Slashdot also have good points, they just don't get posted on the main page. This is some guy who felt like jerking his M$ rep around and thought it would be newsworth. A Microsoft sales rep making a mistake does not impress me, move along people real news found elsewhere...
Uhhhh... And if you warez it the data files will be sitting right there on your HD or a burned CD. I can think of much better reasons for buying games than simply having the data handy when it goes GPL. How about: if you don't buy the games you play, eventually there won't be anything to be GPLed...
Here's another legal use:
I happen to collect games and own many GBC and SNES games, but not a console. If I ever want to play those games I can buy a GP32 instead of needing to buy both a GBA and SNES. Or I can play my SNES games on a PC emulator. I also own hundreds of PC games in the shrink-wrap with receipts but I usually download a copy so I don't need to open the pristine box. Legal all around.
And furthermore, why does the RIAA not allow this model? Why should they when they can use their monopoly to prevent change and stay smug in the current model? Why charge $1 for a song when they can charge you $15 for it and bundle 9 other songs you don't like? Why should they since they want music to be by subscription so they can milk you on a monthly basis rather than a fair trade: pay for what you need? Why should they take a risk on something new that people want when they can use monopoly and police to force people to swallow the same shit they've been shovelling at them for years? Indeed.
There's a tonne of money to be made on music, I don't know why people don't see this. Record companies should sell MP3s for a dollar each. That simple. I would pay $1 (and stop using Kazaa) for high speed xfers, no more broken downloads, consistent file naming, good quality recordings. If the web page let you preview songs and had buttons for "Show similar music" as well as a Top40 list by music type people would come. How many times have you heard a song you love on the radio and not known what to search for on Kazaa? Would you pay $1 for a web site that helped you find that song and download it? Of course!!!
Forget DRM, if you had a compelling product at a reasonable price Kazaa would naturally go away. Most people don't steal an apple from the fruit stand as they walk by. Why? Because they think the store owner is an honest person asking a fair price for a good product. The RIAA is the cause of [ Napster | Kazaa | Morpheus ] not the cure.
Agreed. The fact of the matter is that most NICs don't have chipsets efficient enough to fill a network cable, I read a benchmark (granted it was a few years ago) where the best of the best managed around 80Mbit/s with most averaging around 20Mbit/s. Not very efficient for a 100meg NIC. On top of that if you have multiple PCs on your segment you'll find Ethernet's CDMA algorithm causes performance to decrease exponentially with traffic, at 80% utilization most ethernets become basically useless. Not an issue in your typical home network but at a university or work you'll never ever see throughput close to 100%.
Yeah, I'm hoping that countries outside the USA have the common sense to offer non-GPS phones as I'm not an American resident. Fingers crossed...
For some reason people always mistake the word "fibre" for nirvana, computing paradise, the valhalla of networking. Fact is I've got cable internet and it can handle up to 10Mbps, far more than they actually give me. I'd kill for a 10Mbit link, let alone 100Mbit. The thing that kills you isn't the physical layer, it's the routing and throttling your ISP does -- fibre in itself changes nothing. Give me cable internet with fast routing and no bandwidth caps over fibre any day...
I love cool toys but this is one I'll definitely be boycotting -- any kind of GPS device. The last thing I want is for the US military to be tracking my every move, thanks but no thanks.
If you read the article you'll notice that this isn't a programmable computer. It's yet another test-tube experiment in which DNA was pre-programmed to return a pre-defined result, engaged in a chemical reaction, and then the resultant data read from the DNA at a later time. So while the experiment itself likely took many months or years, they claim that "330 trillion calculations per second" were performed because that's the duration of the chemical reaction divided by the number of bits of information that were changed. You can't ever access that data and you can't program the machine, but hell, that's how long the chemical reaction took... I'm decidedly unimpressed.
This report is riddled with holes. For example everyone knows that the standard unit for length in sensationalist reporting is the football field, not the soccer pitch. And the standard unit for height is the Empire State building, not the olympic swimming pool. Also conspicuously absent is any comparison to the width of a human hair, or to how many times we could go to and from the moon of we laid something-or-other end to end. Very disappointing...
While I realize you're just being a dick I've got to ask why you picked me for such an ignorant post. I'm the typical Irish-English moronic imigrant (as you so eloquently illustrate and personify) so I don't know why your anti-black comments are directed at me. If you're going to post ignorant insults like that shouldn't you at least know who you're talking to?
With NASA giving the one-fingered salute to the unfairly maligned "faster-better-cheaper" programme it's nice to see the ESA taking a more pragmatic approach to things. I have a great deal of respect for NASA but I also want to see Europe, China, India and others up the ante, and this seems like a perfect example.
Copied directly from the cease-and-desist:
"Your website indicates that you are an employee of IBM, a PCI-SIG member. We therefore request that you work through IBM to investigate the possibility of creating a similar database of PCI Vendor ID numbers which would be available on the official PCI-SIG website. In the meantime, however, be advised that PCI-SIG will not tolerate co-existence with your website, in its present form."
So basically this is an attempt to steal his content and have it added to their website. Or in other words, we love your content and we want it but we want it for free and if you argue we'll crush you. Sleazy bastards.
Agreed. I submit he should rename his web page the "Pee See Eye Device List", just to piss them off...
Nice revisionist history, I'm amazed how few people actually remember more than 5 years into the past.
1. AOL was not an internet company until long after the internet became a sensation. They spent a lot of time playing catch-up.
2. Prodigy? Compuserve? GEnie? Fidonet? Thousands of amateur BBSes? Have you never heard of these? AOL was not the innovator -- they were the big fish that swallowed everything that swam into their gaping maw.
3. The internet was not the domain of physicists because they were the only people capable of grasping the concept of text (yeah what a grand mystery; how did we ever learn it?). It's because until 1991 the NSF forbade commercial traffic on the internet backbone. Hence only the military, scientists, and educational institutions were allowed to use it.
4. 1991 was also the year the WWW was developed, the original internet GUI, 4 years before AOL even provided any semblance of internet access.
Not everyone slept through the internet revolution, you should do some reading... (Pssst! Al Gore didn't invent the internet! Pass it on...)
>N64 piracy mechanisms have been available for years now, be they zip drives or CD-based systems. Likewise for the SNES and NES systems, piracy has been done to death.
But these are all hardware solutions so they'll always be the realm of a few enthusiasts. However when you can buy an exact copy of a game or movie, that worries the content oligarchy immensely.
>The Gamecube, on the other hand, his seen no piracy at all.
I don't know a lot about GameCube drives but my understanding was they were just small-format DVDs, my assumption with encryption. Well mini-CDs were uncopyable for the longest time until someone realized they were part of the redbook standard and the only issue was lack of media. I'm sure GameCube is somewhat more complicated but isn't their hardware standards-compliant? Last time I was in Beijing you could buy a stack of burned movies for $20USD on the side of the road, I think this is what worries Nintendo...
Actually I think what he means is that in China you can get burned DVDs and CDs a dime a dozen, so they're afraid to release Gamecube in China. ROMs are much more difficult to copy so they'll release N64 instead.
I don't think it's got to do with preventing ROM piracy since no matter how long a game's been off the market it's still technically illegal to copy it.
>Real states that MP3, AAC, and even OGG can now be released with a DRM wrapper.
Filthy, tricksy hobbitses!
So what you're saying is that it's the fault of Slashdot for their "criticize, condemn, and crash" strategy even though you then turn around and blame it on the "H1B monkeys"... Yes, it's the fault of all these immigrant monkeys, you hit the nail on the head. Has it ever occurred to you that these immigrant "monkeys" are stealing your jobs because you're a race of fat lazy shits, not because they're monkeys????????
Retorts to some very silly arguments:
1. Slashdot is a hosting site in that I can create my own journal on it and they have free membership.
Irrelevant and immaterial. This has nothing to do with my comment that /. is not a hosting site, it is not.
2. Common sense will tell you that if you aren't linking to a major, well known website or some sort of .edu site that it probably cannot handle it
Then you should not post your content into the free and clear public domain where there are no controls to stop people from viewing it. It's Slashdot's fault if you post shit with no security and lots of people click on it???
3. Sorry if you have no patience, but if you're expecting someone else to find news for you then you're already adding what should be, to you, an intolerable delay and instead you should be out combing the web to find news long before it shows up on slashdot.If Slashdot didn't post current news then their competitor, Ampersand-tilde would. And ampersand-tilde would become the most travelled site on the internet and you would bitch at them for the ampersand-effect. Are you too dumb to realize this?
If you don't like Slashdot then don't read it and fer chrissake don't post in the messageboards. Do you genuinely think you're protesting Slashdot by hanging in their forums?
My worthless opinion:
1. Slashdot is not a hosting site so they shouldn't offer to mirror. /.-ed you just need to spend 2 seconds reading the comments.
2. They have no way of knowing if a site can't handle the load.
3. Waiting for a mirror to appear would make news show up incredibly slow.
4. The community automatically mirrors or pastes content that has been
5. The guy with the Lego site is probably tickled pink that his site just got a billion hits and probably doesn't mind things crawling to a halt for a while. It's his 15 minutes of internet fame.
FWIW...