Um, isn't this their right? Most DVD players that I know of default to a set region anyway. Regions = better marketing data about where certain DVD's are being sold = more DVD's in America that we play and like.
If we used players that'd switch regions on choice, wouldn't the data get all skewed and make DVD's hard to get in America?
Some publishers and artists forgo accepting payment for more airtime. Instead of being paid as much, they ask to be played more often and accept less money.
It's sort of like having the radio station pay the the publisher to use the music, then the publisher paying back the radio station to be rotated and played more on the playlist.
In some cases this goes to an even higher extreme, with the publisher not accepting pay at all (the radio station gets the music for free, but must play it often) or even the publisher paying the radio station (where they then have to play it very often).
I know that is how the major station here in New York, K-Rock, does it.
Somewhat "offtopic", but not really, has anyone tried the solution Dell offers for wireless? I bought a laptop from them a few days ago and decided to opt for their wireless cards and base station. Thank god for payment plans.
And not for the better. This is why there's no Plug and Play on the Wintel platform; because the various companies never got around to standardizing even the simplest of hardware operations (well, except maybe the BIOS and processor instruction set, and even the instruction set isn't fully standardized anymore with MMX and KNI and 3DNow! and God only knows how many others), you're trapped in Driver Hell, without which nothing works. Contrast this with Mac hardware, where you can get at least basic functionality out of almost any device without the drivers (printers notwithstanding, but that's for another rant), but you can get drivers for the more extended stuff.
That's funny. When I install most standard hardware in Windows 2000 (like my USB Zip drive and a digital camera) the computer recognizes it immediately and loads up the proper drivers. They are already there in the OS.
Contrast that with installing the same drive on the Mac. The system does *not* have the drivers available. Heck, it doesn't even know the thing is a mountable volume.
Mac is more plug-and-play friendly, but *only* to its hardware. 3rd party hardware support is the same, if not worse, than on Wintel machines.
Not to be hypocritical, but did the poster just mention the word "Linux" to get the article accepted more easily? I would have thought the hardware news would've carried on its own.
Star Trek Next Generation: A Final Unity was an amusing one (#349004 of the Star Trek games if I believe).
It had all the voice actors from the show including Reading Rainbow's Levar Burton, along with all kinds of fun and interesting ways to disarm your opponents (having the doctor kill enemies with the medical reader was highly enjoyable).
Sadly, the game suffered from too many flaws: it only ran in DOS (don't even try to run in it Win95/98), Captain Picard's voice was extremely repetitive (if I had to hear "Make it so, number one" one more time I'd shoot myself) and there was a number of strange graphic blunders, the funniest being the way number one continually turned and stared at Picard's butt whilst on the bridge. No joke.
Nothing I found more funny then having Picard issue the order "Make it so, number one" and have number one stare at his ass right afterwards. He kind of had this look on his face that said "Captain? Right now?"
I was thinking they could just open up an airlock and kill the stuff with a quick vacuum. That is, assuming the fungi needs air to exist (which I surmise it would).
Fewer bugs than MS Windows? The whole 65,000 bug story was complete propoganda. Only 1 of those bugs has actually surfaced with users. The only service pack issued has been to address compatibility concerns with older apps never meant to be run in Windows 2000. Microsoft worked on this and now they can.
RedHat comes out with an OS with over 2,000 documented bugs by the public. Why should anyone get Linux if it has more bugs than Windows? The whole point why I originally tried Linux was stability. I don't care about "free" software, either in the "beer" or "freedom" way - I'll pay for a different OS if it's better.
RedHat releases an OS with 2,000 documented, viewed bugs that the general public experience. Microsoft releases an OS -- Win2000 -- with 65,000 supposed bugs, only 1 of which ever is actually seen in public. Later, it is determined that sites like CNet, ZDNet and Slashdot embellished the 65,000 bug story, and that very few of these bugs will actually ever be seen by the public.
I sincerely hope this does not spell doom for WordPerfect, because it is a dramatically superior product to Word, at least for those willing to learn a few ropes.
If this were the case, why does MS have such a vastly greater marketshare than WordPerfect. This isn't the same Windows monopoly: people are actually going to purchase Office over WordPerfect.
As an example, I had a brief parttime job at a computer store over one summer. WordPerfect and Office came out with new editions at roughly the same time. I saw people completely walk past the huge ad display set up for WordPerfect (which sat in the middle of the aisle) and walk straight to Office. They didn't have to buy Word. They wanted to.
The point is, most people don't find WordPerfect better than Word. The people who do normally have been using it for years and have it stuck in their organizations (I find IT divisions have a real hard time removing WordPerfect completely from their company networks. The program and things like Netware gradually get intertwined). Most others, however, find Word superior.
This purchase gives MS a cornerstone into making Office for Linux. You have a competitor who has ported most of their libraries over to Linux in WordPerfect, and try as you might, the two products are virtually identical. Converting the widgets and dialog boxes from WordPerfect to Word would be a synch.
The idea is to take their libraries, bend them to fix the MS Office motif and publish a single word processor. They don't have voting rights now, but they will have them soon, I can guarantee it.
I don't think I agree with the choice to use PalmOS as the operating system of choice to guide a robot. You're going to want as much low-end control as possible considering the small processor, so wiping the memory and writing from assembly would've been my plan.
Of course, some of the memory can't be "erased" because of the way 3Com writes basic apps into a small PROM section. Why games like Hardball needed to be written to PROM was always beyond me...
OK, this is going to seem flamebaitish, but it's really not. Why is Linus on this list? Granted, it's a good operating system and its free, but it's not the first. Considering, as well, the hundreds of students that have created free OS's in Operating Systems courses in college, having Linus makes me more skeptical.
Woz I totally agree with. He should be on the list. I also agree with the idea that Gates should be somewhere near the top. We're talking "most influential to technology" not "what's best for technology". There are, however, thousands of other technophiles creating software, chips, and hacks that deserve to be on this list. When you summarize it down to 10, you lose the work of those people.
There's a more important reason why it's meaningless. The Playstation is no longer a viable system to drive profit share.
Granted, it still has a few games coming out for it (amazing considering the console's age), but I've never actually seen a court go after a emulator for something that wasn't currently profitable.
Keep in mind the PSX's age, the introduction of the PS2 and the N64/Ultra HLE case. The Ultra HLE N64 emulator was almost immediately taken down, because Nintendo was going to sue the makers for lost profits. The PSX is old and by the time this particular case came around the courts no longer wanted to hear it.
I'm hedging my bet that if someone creates a PS2 emulator within the next year (a much more impressive task, given its highly customized chips) that Sony will go after them immediately, and the courts will cite the emulator as a much more viable case of profit loss.
While I'm all for new tools with Win2000 (it's my operating system of choice currently, until there is a decent distribution of Linux with antialiased fonts, support for my USB hub, correct support for my HP printer, etc.) and while it's nice to see Microsoft let people into an arena, I'm a little concerned about the nature of this announcement.
Company A decides to make it easier to port things back and forth between Windows NT and Linux. Company B (Microsoft) originally decides they don't want these tools. They'd rather make the tools themselves, but won't because it would ruin marketshare at the time.
Then Company B decides to be crafty. Sure, other people can make the tools. Symantec makes a defragmenter. Adaptec makes a CD-burner driver. Company A makes some tools to get into Linux and WinNT cross-compatibility easier.
Company B buys Symantec's defragmenter and makes it a critical part of the system. They license the CD-burner driver for a rock-bottom price to use in their new Media Player to burn music easier. They buy Company A's tools to force them out of the market, or they just buy Company A entirely.
I like Microsoft products. I like Windows 2000. I think it's a good example of bucking the trend of bad programming plaguing the entire industry. However, I don't like Microsoft's business practices, and this seems like a devil in disguise.
Slashdot Mirror
If we used players that'd switch regions on choice, wouldn't the data get all skewed and make DVD's hard to get in America?
It's sort of like having the radio station pay the the publisher to use the music, then the publisher paying back the radio station to be rotated and played more on the playlist.
In some cases this goes to an even higher extreme, with the publisher not accepting pay at all (the radio station gets the music for free, but must play it often) or even the publisher paying the radio station (where they then have to play it very often).
I know that is how the major station here in New York, K-Rock, does it.
Not "flamebait", but an observation. They can put together a three-dimensional display but they can't handle being Slashdotted?
It should also be interesting to see if I can get it to play nicely with Linux. I'll keep a Windows 98 partition around just in case.
Is it is as good as Airport?
That's funny. When I install most standard hardware in Windows 2000 (like my USB Zip drive and a digital camera) the computer recognizes it immediately and loads up the proper drivers. They are already there in the OS.
Contrast that with installing the same drive on the Mac. The system does *not* have the drivers available. Heck, it doesn't even know the thing is a mountable volume.
Mac is more plug-and-play friendly, but *only* to its hardware. 3rd party hardware support is the same, if not worse, than on Wintel machines.
Not to be hypocritical, but did the poster just mention the word "Linux" to get the article accepted more easily? I would have thought the hardware news would've carried on its own.
Does it make much of a difference that the server was IIS? It's still a crack.
Why "unfortunately"? I happen to use Windows 98 SE and NT 4.0 on some of our lab machines.
It had all the voice actors from the show including Reading Rainbow's Levar Burton, along with all kinds of fun and interesting ways to disarm your opponents (having the doctor kill enemies with the medical reader was highly enjoyable).
Sadly, the game suffered from too many flaws: it only ran in DOS (don't even try to run in it Win95/98), Captain Picard's voice was extremely repetitive (if I had to hear "Make it so, number one" one more time I'd shoot myself) and there was a number of strange graphic blunders, the funniest being the way number one continually turned and stared at Picard's butt whilst on the bridge. No joke.
Nothing I found more funny then having Picard issue the order "Make it so, number one" and have number one stare at his ass right afterwards. He kind of had this look on his face that said "Captain? Right now?"
What the heck are you talking about? The original links work just fine here.
I was thinking they could just open up an airlock and kill the stuff with a quick vacuum. That is, assuming the fungi needs air to exist (which I surmise it would).
This is a detailed article on "the one bug".
Of course, you could just buy Windows 2000 and do all of the above, instead of having different OS's for different tasks.
RedHat comes out with an OS with over 2,000 documented bugs by the public. Why should anyone get Linux if it has more bugs than Windows? The whole point why I originally tried Linux was stability. I don't care about "free" software, either in the "beer" or "freedom" way - I'll pay for a different OS if it's better.
Why am I buying Linux?
If this were the case, why does MS have such a vastly greater marketshare than WordPerfect. This isn't the same Windows monopoly: people are actually going to purchase Office over WordPerfect.
As an example, I had a brief parttime job at a computer store over one summer. WordPerfect and Office came out with new editions at roughly the same time. I saw people completely walk past the huge ad display set up for WordPerfect (which sat in the middle of the aisle) and walk straight to Office. They didn't have to buy Word. They wanted to.
The point is, most people don't find WordPerfect better than Word. The people who do normally have been using it for years and have it stuck in their organizations (I find IT divisions have a real hard time removing WordPerfect completely from their company networks. The program and things like Netware gradually get intertwined). Most others, however, find Word superior.
I don't know why this was moderated as "insightful". Interesting, perhaps, but this is pretty much pure conspiratory speculation.
The idea is to take their libraries, bend them to fix the MS Office motif and publish a single word processor. They don't have voting rights now, but they will have them soon, I can guarantee it.
Of course, some of the memory can't be "erased" because of the way 3Com writes basic apps into a small PROM section. Why games like Hardball needed to be written to PROM was always beyond me...
Woz I totally agree with. He should be on the list. I also agree with the idea that Gates should be somewhere near the top. We're talking "most influential to technology" not "what's best for technology". There are, however, thousands of other technophiles creating software, chips, and hacks that deserve to be on this list. When you summarize it down to 10, you lose the work of those people.
Granted, it still has a few games coming out for it (amazing considering the console's age), but I've never actually seen a court go after a emulator for something that wasn't currently profitable.
Keep in mind the PSX's age, the introduction of the PS2 and the N64/Ultra HLE case. The Ultra HLE N64 emulator was almost immediately taken down, because Nintendo was going to sue the makers for lost profits. The PSX is old and by the time this particular case came around the courts no longer wanted to hear it.
I'm hedging my bet that if someone creates a PS2 emulator within the next year (a much more impressive task, given its highly customized chips) that Sony will go after them immediately, and the courts will cite the emulator as a much more viable case of profit loss.
And you know this because...?
Not entirely offtopic: what does "Kuro5hin" mean? Is it a hacker version of "Kuroshin" (which also doesn't make much sense)...
Company A decides to make it easier to port things back and forth between Windows NT and Linux. Company B (Microsoft) originally decides they don't want these tools. They'd rather make the tools themselves, but won't because it would ruin marketshare at the time.
Then Company B decides to be crafty. Sure, other people can make the tools. Symantec makes a defragmenter. Adaptec makes a CD-burner driver. Company A makes some tools to get into Linux and WinNT cross-compatibility easier.
Company B buys Symantec's defragmenter and makes it a critical part of the system. They license the CD-burner driver for a rock-bottom price to use in their new Media Player to burn music easier. They buy Company A's tools to force them out of the market, or they just buy Company A entirely.
I like Microsoft products. I like Windows 2000. I think it's a good example of bucking the trend of bad programming plaguing the entire industry. However, I don't like Microsoft's business practices, and this seems like a devil in disguise.