Uh, I don't know what you're on, but the Xbox controller is enormous. Think Dreamcast controller, only bigger. And I wouldn't call the N64 the best controller out of the last bunch, you couldn't even access the analog stick and the D-pad at the same time. It was a three-handed design, which worked okay I guess, but I was more fond of the PSX controller (which, to be fair, was a modified SNES controller with an extra shoulder button and, later, analog sticks.) I will agree that Nintendo makes some damn durable products though, my original gameboy STILL works. As do most of my SNES games, even after my house flooded and most of them swam in sewer water.
Why does everything on slashdot have to incorporate a political stance? Can't we just accept things as what they are and let it be? Oh wait.. We're geeks, nevermind.
The Alamo Drafthouse North in Austin, TX will be showing this movie for a couple weeks. While not a wonderful piece of filmmaking, it's an interested watch. Plus the Drafthouse has good sandwitches and cold beer (though you might be confused by the free speech, free beer thing because you had to pay for yours.)
Even with Ricochet coming back, this seems like a much better idea if it catches on. Granted, if there are no gateways, nobody can use it, but it'd be a lot faster than Ricochet and (it seems) based off actual usage, not monthly fees. It seems there's a lot of potential for abuse here, but I'd definately like to check this out, it seems like a good way to make a little extra cash (though I'm curious if there's a way to block out abusive users, I don't need any m4d h4x0rz cracking machines through my IP.) This will also probably violate a lot of ISPs ToSes, but who cares, most of us are violating them anyway.:)
Yeah, but death and rebirth suck.:) They're just rehashes of the series that Gainax released to raise money to produce End of Eva. There's like 5 minutes worth of animation that isn't ripped directly from the series, most of that probably just picked up off the cutting room floor. Not that I fault them for doing it (EoE was worth it) but if you've seen the series, I wouldn't reccomend watching Death and Rebirth (unless you just want a quick review of 24 episodes crammed into an hour and a half) if you've seen the series, you'll be pretty bored. Though I am glad that EoE is actually being released here, it's one of the best anime movies I've ever seen, and I'll definately be grabbing the DVD.
Is that even some of the media companies are balking at this thing. A lot of tech companies (Intel has been vocal on this front) really don't want this thing to happen, because (from what I've read about the bill, I could be wrong) it requires anything with a digital display to have copy protection. This includes things which have absolutely no need or want for it, including medical devices and pocket calculators. It seems to me like Senator Hollings is trying to further his own political career by trying to impress the media companies with some sweeping legislation, maybe hoping to get some large campaign donations, but I doubt he has any real concept of the wide-reaching implications of this bill. It's kind of backfired on him, a lot of major players in the arena have come out as against this, as it's unnecessary and too far reaching. This is an issue that IMO, and apparently that of the industry as well, should be solved by technology, not legislation. Congress should leave this issue alone and let the industry figure it out themselves. Anyway, IANAL, so I could be totally wrong. $0.02 applies.
Heh, while Evangelion is a great series, it's definately not a kid series. There are some very heavy subjects that Eva deals with, and it's not presented in the most easily digestible fashion. This is more the reason Eva will probably never make it to TV. Well, that, and End of Evangelion isn't licensed for the US (ADV got screwed out of the license, and nobody has officially released it here,) and the series is about 100 times better if you cut episodes 25 and 26 and just show End of Eva.
The only way Eva and other similarly intense shows (X TV, among others) will ever hit American TV is if Toonami spins off to its own channel (which is seeming more and more likely, as Toonami is already most of CN's lineup, it'd make sense for them to spin it off) and they show more "mature" stuff at night (Eva is pretty much the definition of "mature" anime, hentai and the like is usually actually very juvenile.) It'd be nice to see all this stuff on TV, but I think we'll just have to settle for buying the DVDs and downloading fansubs.
Re:Why did it take so many posts?
on
Abusing the GPL?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Nah, you don't need a good lawyer, just a non-tech savvy judge.
Soyo boards are not cheap crap. I have one now (K7 Dragon Plus, KT266A based,) this thing comes packed with so many extras it's not funny (IDE RAID? Optical AND coax S/PDIF in AND out? Smart Card reader? Extra USB ports on said smart card reader? 10/100 onboard?) A "cheap" board you're lucky if it comes with a manual. Soyo is a respected motherboard maker, their motherboards are just as good as any of the other top makers out there. I'd be pretty sure the board is not at fault, Soyo is one of the few companies (Tyan and MSI also come to mind) who sells stuff in shiny boxes at computer stores.
I would be frankly scared to have a computer geek girlfriend. Why? Computer geek girls are no different than most computer geek guys, socially inept, needlessly argumentative and obsessed with the minutae of Star Wars. There's a reason most computer geek guys don't have girlfriends, and vice-versa. Personally, I have a very non-geeky artsy theater major girlfriend, she helps me keep perspective on the rest of the world when I take breaks from Dew-fueled coding marathons. It's nice to be able to talk to someone who has no idea what a pointer or compiler is.
Mostly because slashdot actually has good ads most of the time. They're not at all intrusive (a single banner ad at the top of a page) and they're generally for stuff I'm at least marginally interested in. I'd probably consider paying if all the ads I saw were for "herbal viagra" or online casinos, but I really don't mind the ads on slashdot as they are. Not to mention the fact that if you scroll down a little, the ad is gone. I only hope that the ads don't get more intrusive as they try to provide an incentive for people to register (though I doubt this, the backlash would be too severe with this audience.) I might sign up out of mere principle, but it wouldn't be to get rid of the ads. I don't wish death upon slashdot, and I don't think it's a bad idea to offer a pay-for-premium service, but until there's the promised extra "subscriber only" content (extra from what's free, don't pull an IGN;) I don't see there being a ton of value provided to the reader. Anyway, $0.02.
I know it's faux paux to stick up for big business here on slashdot, but while the premises and overall stories might not have been original, the telling was. Christ, look at Tolkien, one of the favorites around here; The Hobbit and LotR are pretty much a blatant ripoff of every European epic ever written (The Odyssey, Legend of Arthur, Beowulf, among many others.) It's not the story, it's how it's told. Disney uses bright colors and catchy songs to tell the story, which their audience seems to like.
Or in geeky terms, just because Pine is an e-mail client and it exists, does it mean I haven't created something new if I write another mail reader? No, and Disney has taken old stories and told them in a new, creative (just because you don't like it doesn't mean it's not creative) way. If you don't like them, just don't grace them with your cash.:)
Everyone assumes that "Moore's Law" is infallible, where this simply is not true. It's more of a pattern than a law, and it'll come screeching to a halt within the next decade. As soon as we hit 1 atom-wide circuits, that's it, we can't get any smaller. Currently we're about 40 atoms across, though it's hard to 100% accurately count.
Same thing with hard drives. A single atom can't hold more than one charge at once (well, it can, but that's a whole different concept,) and we've gotten pretty small on the hard drives as well. The only way to increase capacity is to increase the number of platters or the diameter (and the diameter is limited as well, I'd hate to see what centrifugal force would do to a 5' wide iron disk spinning at 7200 RPM.. or the amount of power required to spin it)
Of course, there are always quantum computers, holographic storage, etc, so then I could just be totally wrong. But with our current technology, we're close to maxing out. We should probably dedicate more time and effort to these new fields rather than just extending and band-aiding what we already have.
Rambus got a bad rap over the years, the PR part was deserved, but the performance part was not. See, Rambus really didn't provide any real benefit for the extra cost on a P3 platform (which the Athlon/Tbird is also based on.) However, on P4 based systems, Rambus performs wonderfully (much better than DDR,) as these machines are designed to use more memory bus speed than bus width. Where DDR pushes 2-32 bit chunks at 133 mHz, Rambus pushes 16 bit chunks at 400 or 533 mHz. Neither technology alone is "better" (though many people favor DDR/SDRAM for obvious licensing and cost reasons) but paired with the right CPU and chipset, they can be just as fast. Toms Hardware has an excellent comparison between the platforms here.
Note that I personally use an Athlon XP with DDR. It's just that I hate to see misconceptions running around. In the past, yes, DDR was faster than Rambus, but that's not really the case anymore.
Re:...and there was much rejoicing.
on
Photoshop for OS X
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Sorry, this is probably a bit offtopic.. but it really irks me how people compare GIMP and Photoshop. GIMP is a cool program, don't get me wrong, but if you're doing any sort of serious image manipulation, it's not even close to Photoshop. There's a reason that Photoshop is the only program that anyone professionally considers for graphics manipulation.
Sure, GIMP is about as good as Photoshop 3.0. But keep in mind that Photoshop 3.0 was released about 7 or 8 years ago. GIMP is great if you're just going to stick with web graphics, but if you ever have to do any print quality stuff, you'll see why the Adobe line of software is so popular. Where Photoshop really starts to kick ass is with large files (>200 MB, yes, this size files are common, many people work with them on a daily basis.) GIMP would slow to an unusable crawl just trying to render the 15 or so layers, but Photoshop is so highly optimized that it doesn't even flinch. In fact, the main speed bottleneck in Photoshop is the hard drive, not the program. Photoshop is one of the few expensive pieces of software that I consider worth the price.
The moral of this story is that while yes, GIMP is sufficient for people's needs (read: web site graphics, basic file resizing type things, etc,) it's not in the same ballpark as Photoshop. It's not even playing the same game, and it's ludicrous to say that "GIMP will eventually beat Photoshop." If you think that, you've never really used Photoshop.
This could be countered by placing the battery somewhere where it most likely wouldn't get shot, say, the sole of a boot. Also, a bullet through a lithium battery is probably no more hazardous than a bullet through a full magazine.
Heh, debian potato still comes with a 2.2 kernel. How's that for old?;)
Personally, though, I doubt the programmers spent much time (if any at all) on the English version. I would imagine that this distro would be a boon to the, oh, billion or so people in the world who speak Chinese. Translating all the manpages, etc, that's probably what took the time. I'd be more interested in a review of the Chinese version by a native Chinese speaker than a review of the English version of a Chinese OS.
Well, eventually, that will happen, without a doubt. Moore's law pretty much assures it, in fact. The big question mark is whether or not the Itanium can match the price/performance of the Pentium like before someone else does. Seeing as Itanium is currently running at clock speeds around 800 mhz when it would need about 1600 to be equivalent to a P4, even Intel's not betting on this (hence the Yamhill) and they're seemingly relegating the Itanium to high-end servers (to take over where the Suns and Alphas left off) which seems to be where they're best suited. At least for now, it looks like the x86-64 (Hammer/Yamhill) is the platform of the future, and Itanium will be just another expensive non-consumer platform.
The luxury Apple had in this situation was control of the operating system, which Intel doesn't have. Ironically, Apple will also be moving to a 64-bit architecture within the year (conservative rumors say Q3/Q4 2002.) The transition is supposed to go very smoothly, as developers are being told to prepare their programs with the 64-bit OS X libs and OS X-64-bit is being developed in concurrence with the 32 bit version. FAT binaries helped immenseley in the 68k-PPC transition, and probably will again for the G4-G5 transition.
Though honestly, if Microsoft gets what they want with the entire.NET plan (not the framework, the entire plan) then architecture will become largely irrelevant. In any case, I doubt that many people will need frequent execution of their old 32-bit apps much more than 2 years after any sort of major switch happens. It happened with Mac OS, and it'll happen with Windows. Linux is irrelevant here, as most Linux software can be easily patched and recompiled.
Then what we really need is a team of top notch researchers to develop, debug and test a video encoding algorithm.. Oh yeah, and all for free. MPEG (the group, not the standard) invests lots of time and money into developing these standards, and that's why they work so well. OGG is nice and all, but video is significantly more complex than audio and as such, a free (speech and beer) video encoding format that achieves the compression ratios of MPEG-4 is (for now at least) a pipe dream. The MPEG4 encoders now are slow, and they're super-optimized for the processors they run on, imagine if the standard was cross-platform (read: C) and compiled with a non-optimal compiler (read: gcc.) MPEG4 would still be the standard.
What sort of crack are you smoking? Extra compatability is always a good thing. Get the notion that Microsoft has nothing to offer out of your fucking head. At some point, Linux has to grow up beyond the "fight-the-power" angst-filled culture that is quickly alienating it from the corporate market (wonder why you don't see quite so many people pushing Linux anymore? It has a bad rep in corporate America.) If you're in favor of a less functional operating system just because "Microsoft is evil! Fight the man!" you need to grab a bottle of Clue (tm) and take twice daily. Sure, I don't approve of everything Microsoft does, but you don't see me running around like a spoiled 6 year old who is mad because a girl wants to play with his friends.
Well, that, and the fact that OGL is a generation behind D3D. This is a non-issue right now, but in the 6 months it won't be. OpenGL development is much slower as it has to be done on many platforms at once, while MS and NVidia pretty much design the D3D spec to run on Windows and NVidia hardware, and then they let ATI and Matrox catch up later. Pretty soon we'll start to see games that don't support OpenGL, or where OpenGL is more or less unusable.
Heh, I personally didn't think Pi was even remotely about math. It was about a delusional paranoid schizophrenic who thought the entire world was out to get him (and he just happened to be a math genius.) Anyway, it was a good movie, just I didn't think the central conflict of the movie focused around the fact that he was a math genius, more the fact that he was fucking nuts.
Actually, Apple sued Microsoft over copying Mac OS. The judge then threw it out because Xerox already had the "windowed OS" prior art, and he said you can't patent a "look and feel." Anyway, long story short, it's supposedly only feasible to patent an implementation (i.e. you can't patent the idea of a "mouse trap," but you can patent your design of a mouse trap so long as it's significantly different than others out there.) However, the USPTO doesn't really check these things too carefully and a lot of things get through that probably shouldn't. They then leave it up to the courts to decide, and the courts have made a mess of the entire situation with inconsistant and occaisionally biased (read: bribed) rulings.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, I don't know what you're on, but the Xbox controller is enormous. Think Dreamcast controller, only bigger. And I wouldn't call the N64 the best controller out of the last bunch, you couldn't even access the analog stick and the D-pad at the same time. It was a three-handed design, which worked okay I guess, but I was more fond of the PSX controller (which, to be fair, was a modified SNES controller with an extra shoulder button and, later, analog sticks.) I will agree that Nintendo makes some damn durable products though, my original gameboy STILL works. As do most of my SNES games, even after my house flooded and most of them swam in sewer water.
Why does everything on slashdot have to incorporate a political stance? Can't we just accept things as what they are and let it be? Oh wait.. We're geeks, nevermind.
The Alamo Drafthouse North in Austin, TX will be showing this movie for a couple weeks. While not a wonderful piece of filmmaking, it's an interested watch. Plus the Drafthouse has good sandwitches and cold beer (though you might be confused by the free speech, free beer thing because you had to pay for yours.)
Even with Ricochet coming back, this seems like a much better idea if it catches on. Granted, if there are no gateways, nobody can use it, but it'd be a lot faster than Ricochet and (it seems) based off actual usage, not monthly fees. It seems there's a lot of potential for abuse here, but I'd definately like to check this out, it seems like a good way to make a little extra cash (though I'm curious if there's a way to block out abusive users, I don't need any m4d h4x0rz cracking machines through my IP.) This will also probably violate a lot of ISPs ToSes, but who cares, most of us are violating them anyway. :)
Yeah, but death and rebirth suck. :) They're just rehashes of the series that Gainax released to raise money to produce End of Eva. There's like 5 minutes worth of animation that isn't ripped directly from the series, most of that probably just picked up off the cutting room floor. Not that I fault them for doing it (EoE was worth it) but if you've seen the series, I wouldn't reccomend watching Death and Rebirth (unless you just want a quick review of 24 episodes crammed into an hour and a half) if you've seen the series, you'll be pretty bored. Though I am glad that EoE is actually being released here, it's one of the best anime movies I've ever seen, and I'll definately be grabbing the DVD.
Is that even some of the media companies are balking at this thing. A lot of tech companies (Intel has been vocal on this front) really don't want this thing to happen, because (from what I've read about the bill, I could be wrong) it requires anything with a digital display to have copy protection. This includes things which have absolutely no need or want for it, including medical devices and pocket calculators. It seems to me like Senator Hollings is trying to further his own political career by trying to impress the media companies with some sweeping legislation, maybe hoping to get some large campaign donations, but I doubt he has any real concept of the wide-reaching implications of this bill. It's kind of backfired on him, a lot of major players in the arena have come out as against this, as it's unnecessary and too far reaching. This is an issue that IMO, and apparently that of the industry as well, should be solved by technology, not legislation. Congress should leave this issue alone and let the industry figure it out themselves. Anyway, IANAL, so I could be totally wrong. $0.02 applies.
Heh, while Evangelion is a great series, it's definately not a kid series. There are some very heavy subjects that Eva deals with, and it's not presented in the most easily digestible fashion. This is more the reason Eva will probably never make it to TV. Well, that, and End of Evangelion isn't licensed for the US (ADV got screwed out of the license, and nobody has officially released it here,) and the series is about 100 times better if you cut episodes 25 and 26 and just show End of Eva.
The only way Eva and other similarly intense shows (X TV, among others) will ever hit American TV is if Toonami spins off to its own channel (which is seeming more and more likely, as Toonami is already most of CN's lineup, it'd make sense for them to spin it off) and they show more "mature" stuff at night (Eva is pretty much the definition of "mature" anime, hentai and the like is usually actually very juvenile.) It'd be nice to see all this stuff on TV, but I think we'll just have to settle for buying the DVDs and downloading fansubs.
Nah, you don't need a good lawyer, just a non-tech savvy judge.
Soyo boards are not cheap crap. I have one now (K7 Dragon Plus, KT266A based,) this thing comes packed with so many extras it's not funny (IDE RAID? Optical AND coax S/PDIF in AND out? Smart Card reader? Extra USB ports on said smart card reader? 10/100 onboard?) A "cheap" board you're lucky if it comes with a manual. Soyo is a respected motherboard maker, their motherboards are just as good as any of the other top makers out there. I'd be pretty sure the board is not at fault, Soyo is one of the few companies (Tyan and MSI also come to mind) who sells stuff in shiny boxes at computer stores.
I would be frankly scared to have a computer geek girlfriend. Why? Computer geek girls are no different than most computer geek guys, socially inept, needlessly argumentative and obsessed with the minutae of Star Wars. There's a reason most computer geek guys don't have girlfriends, and vice-versa. Personally, I have a very non-geeky artsy theater major girlfriend, she helps me keep perspective on the rest of the world when I take breaks from Dew-fueled coding marathons. It's nice to be able to talk to someone who has no idea what a pointer or compiler is.
Mostly because slashdot actually has good ads most of the time. They're not at all intrusive (a single banner ad at the top of a page) and they're generally for stuff I'm at least marginally interested in. I'd probably consider paying if all the ads I saw were for "herbal viagra" or online casinos, but I really don't mind the ads on slashdot as they are. Not to mention the fact that if you scroll down a little, the ad is gone. I only hope that the ads don't get more intrusive as they try to provide an incentive for people to register (though I doubt this, the backlash would be too severe with this audience.) I might sign up out of mere principle, but it wouldn't be to get rid of the ads. I don't wish death upon slashdot, and I don't think it's a bad idea to offer a pay-for-premium service, but until there's the promised extra "subscriber only" content (extra from what's free, don't pull an IGN ;) I don't see there being a ton of value provided to the reader. Anyway, $0.02.
I know it's faux paux to stick up for big business here on slashdot, but while the premises and overall stories might not have been original, the telling was. Christ, look at Tolkien, one of the favorites around here; The Hobbit and LotR are pretty much a blatant ripoff of every European epic ever written (The Odyssey, Legend of Arthur, Beowulf, among many others.) It's not the story, it's how it's told. Disney uses bright colors and catchy songs to tell the story, which their audience seems to like.
:)
Or in geeky terms, just because Pine is an e-mail client and it exists, does it mean I haven't created something new if I write another mail reader? No, and Disney has taken old stories and told them in a new, creative (just because you don't like it doesn't mean it's not creative) way. If you don't like them, just don't grace them with your cash.
Everyone assumes that "Moore's Law" is infallible, where this simply is not true. It's more of a pattern than a law, and it'll come screeching to a halt within the next decade. As soon as we hit 1 atom-wide circuits, that's it, we can't get any smaller. Currently we're about 40 atoms across, though it's hard to 100% accurately count.
Same thing with hard drives. A single atom can't hold more than one charge at once (well, it can, but that's a whole different concept,) and we've gotten pretty small on the hard drives as well. The only way to increase capacity is to increase the number of platters or the diameter (and the diameter is limited as well, I'd hate to see what centrifugal force would do to a 5' wide iron disk spinning at 7200 RPM.. or the amount of power required to spin it)
Of course, there are always quantum computers, holographic storage, etc, so then I could just be totally wrong. But with our current technology, we're close to maxing out. We should probably dedicate more time and effort to these new fields rather than just extending and band-aiding what we already have.
Rambus got a bad rap over the years, the PR part was deserved, but the performance part was not. See, Rambus really didn't provide any real benefit for the extra cost on a P3 platform (which the Athlon/Tbird is also based on.) However, on P4 based systems, Rambus performs wonderfully (much better than DDR,) as these machines are designed to use more memory bus speed than bus width. Where DDR pushes 2-32 bit chunks at 133 mHz, Rambus pushes 16 bit chunks at 400 or 533 mHz. Neither technology alone is "better" (though many people favor DDR/SDRAM for obvious licensing and cost reasons) but paired with the right CPU and chipset, they can be just as fast. Toms Hardware has an excellent comparison between the platforms here.
Note that I personally use an Athlon XP with DDR. It's just that I hate to see misconceptions running around. In the past, yes, DDR was faster than Rambus, but that's not really the case anymore.
Sorry, this is probably a bit offtopic.. but it really irks me how people compare GIMP and Photoshop. GIMP is a cool program, don't get me wrong, but if you're doing any sort of serious image manipulation, it's not even close to Photoshop. There's a reason that Photoshop is the only program that anyone professionally considers for graphics manipulation.
Sure, GIMP is about as good as Photoshop 3.0. But keep in mind that Photoshop 3.0 was released about 7 or 8 years ago. GIMP is great if you're just going to stick with web graphics, but if you ever have to do any print quality stuff, you'll see why the Adobe line of software is so popular. Where Photoshop really starts to kick ass is with large files (>200 MB, yes, this size files are common, many people work with them on a daily basis.) GIMP would slow to an unusable crawl just trying to render the 15 or so layers, but Photoshop is so highly optimized that it doesn't even flinch. In fact, the main speed bottleneck in Photoshop is the hard drive, not the program. Photoshop is one of the few expensive pieces of software that I consider worth the price.
The moral of this story is that while yes, GIMP is sufficient for people's needs (read: web site graphics, basic file resizing type things, etc,) it's not in the same ballpark as Photoshop. It's not even playing the same game, and it's ludicrous to say that "GIMP will eventually beat Photoshop." If you think that, you've never really used Photoshop.
This could be countered by placing the battery somewhere where it most likely wouldn't get shot, say, the sole of a boot. Also, a bullet through a lithium battery is probably no more hazardous than a bullet through a full magazine.
Heh, debian potato still comes with a 2.2 kernel. How's that for old? ;)
Personally, though, I doubt the programmers spent much time (if any at all) on the English version. I would imagine that this distro would be a boon to the, oh, billion or so people in the world who speak Chinese. Translating all the manpages, etc, that's probably what took the time. I'd be more interested in a review of the Chinese version by a native Chinese speaker than a review of the English version of a Chinese OS.
Well, eventually, that will happen, without a doubt. Moore's law pretty much assures it, in fact. The big question mark is whether or not the Itanium can match the price/performance of the Pentium like before someone else does. Seeing as Itanium is currently running at clock speeds around 800 mhz when it would need about 1600 to be equivalent to a P4, even Intel's not betting on this (hence the Yamhill) and they're seemingly relegating the Itanium to high-end servers (to take over where the Suns and Alphas left off) which seems to be where they're best suited. At least for now, it looks like the x86-64 (Hammer/Yamhill) is the platform of the future, and Itanium will be just another expensive non-consumer platform.
.NET plan (not the framework, the entire plan) then architecture will become largely irrelevant. In any case, I doubt that many people will need frequent execution of their old 32-bit apps much more than 2 years after any sort of major switch happens. It happened with Mac OS, and it'll happen with Windows. Linux is irrelevant here, as most Linux software can be easily patched and recompiled.
The luxury Apple had in this situation was control of the operating system, which Intel doesn't have. Ironically, Apple will also be moving to a 64-bit architecture within the year (conservative rumors say Q3/Q4 2002.) The transition is supposed to go very smoothly, as developers are being told to prepare their programs with the 64-bit OS X libs and OS X-64-bit is being developed in concurrence with the 32 bit version. FAT binaries helped immenseley in the 68k-PPC transition, and probably will again for the G4-G5 transition.
Though honestly, if Microsoft gets what they want with the entire
Yes, but he didn't do it with a Pringles can or some chunky beef stew. That's where the cool factor comes from :)
Why, the security hole IS Office X. All your Resume are belong to us....
Then what we really need is a team of top notch researchers to develop, debug and test a video encoding algorithm.. Oh yeah, and all for free. MPEG (the group, not the standard) invests lots of time and money into developing these standards, and that's why they work so well. OGG is nice and all, but video is significantly more complex than audio and as such, a free (speech and beer) video encoding format that achieves the compression ratios of MPEG-4 is (for now at least) a pipe dream. The MPEG4 encoders now are slow, and they're super-optimized for the processors they run on, imagine if the standard was cross-platform (read: C) and compiled with a non-optimal compiler (read: gcc.) MPEG4 would still be the standard.
What sort of crack are you smoking? Extra compatability is always a good thing. Get the notion that Microsoft has nothing to offer out of your fucking head. At some point, Linux has to grow up beyond the "fight-the-power" angst-filled culture that is quickly alienating it from the corporate market (wonder why you don't see quite so many people pushing Linux anymore? It has a bad rep in corporate America.) If you're in favor of a less functional operating system just because "Microsoft is evil! Fight the man!" you need to grab a bottle of Clue (tm) and take twice daily. Sure, I don't approve of everything Microsoft does, but you don't see me running around like a spoiled 6 year old who is mad because a girl wants to play with his friends.
Karma to burn, baby.
Well, that, and the fact that OGL is a generation behind D3D. This is a non-issue right now, but in the 6 months it won't be. OpenGL development is much slower as it has to be done on many platforms at once, while MS and NVidia pretty much design the D3D spec to run on Windows and NVidia hardware, and then they let ATI and Matrox catch up later. Pretty soon we'll start to see games that don't support OpenGL, or where OpenGL is more or less unusable.
Heh, I personally didn't think Pi was even remotely about math. It was about a delusional paranoid schizophrenic who thought the entire world was out to get him (and he just happened to be a math genius.) Anyway, it was a good movie, just I didn't think the central conflict of the movie focused around the fact that he was a math genius, more the fact that he was fucking nuts.
Actually, Apple sued Microsoft over copying Mac OS. The judge then threw it out because Xerox already had the "windowed OS" prior art, and he said you can't patent a "look and feel." Anyway, long story short, it's supposedly only feasible to patent an implementation (i.e. you can't patent the idea of a "mouse trap," but you can patent your design of a mouse trap so long as it's significantly different than others out there.) However, the USPTO doesn't really check these things too carefully and a lot of things get through that probably shouldn't. They then leave it up to the courts to decide, and the courts have made a mess of the entire situation with inconsistant and occaisionally biased (read: bribed) rulings.