the first to include color support in their computers
Unless you're referring to the IIc, I wouldn't award this point in Apple's favor. In the mid 1980's PCs and their clones progressed from 4-color CGA to 16-color EGA to 256-color VGA, while Macs stayed in the realm of black and white...
(OK, the Mac displays generally had better resolution. But IBM had larger CRTs. So let's call that one a draw.)
They provide you with programming for the low price of watching commercials.
NO.
The airwaves are owned by the public, not by the networks. WE provide THEM with the right to use part of the frequency spectrum for the low price of providing us with programming.
Once that TV signal comes into my home, it's mine to do whatever I like with it (within the bounds of copyright). There is no obligation, explicit or implicit, to dutifully watch all ad breaks.
Is it also wrong to get up and leave the room when the commercials come on?
that may well prevent anyone from running any operating system on commodity PC hardware besides that of Microsoft
Do you really think Intel has any interest in locking themselves into Microsoft? They're not dumb; they've seen how many companies have gotten into bed with MS only to wake up in the morning to the corporate equivalent of a bathtub full of ice and a missing vital organ.
Intel is working with MS today because it's the best way for Intel to make money. But I'm sure Intel could forecast a possible future where MS goes out of business and some other OS dominates the Intel hardware market. They'd be dumbasses to make a decision today that would doom them as well to failure should that ever happen.
For those who do not know, Media Center is Microsoft's first attempt at highly integration of DRM (Digital Rights Management) into the core functionality of the OS.
???
The DRM hooks may be present in XP Media Center Edition, but that doesn't mean you have to use them. I've been running the OS for weeks, and haven't even had to sign up for a Passport.
My HP Media Center PC even came with software to convert video files captured by MS'S PVR codec into free-and-clear MPEG's.
If there was a standard, effective method of effecting a point to point communication, over IP or whatever, and it was reasonably priced, all those extra wires would go away.
This is a TERRIBLE idea.
There is a finite amount of wireless bandwidth available in the world -- only so many frequencies at which information can be beamed from place to place. Technological advances have slowly increased the upper bounds of what is feasible, so that we can use Gigahertz bands that weren't possible with the electronics of a generation ago, but at the same time transmission power is increasing, so the same frequency cannot be "re-used" in as many local areas. The more bandwidth we allocate and utilize, the more scarce of a resource it will become.
Wired communication, on the other hand, is practically limitless. A single bundle of fiber can carry staggering amounts of information in a reasonable amount of physical space. And it's a renewable resource -- if all the existing fiber is lit, if we run out of available bandwidth, it's possible (probably not cheap or easy, but possible) to just dig a trench and lay down more cable.
The installation costs of wired communications are far higher than those of wireless. But the long-term effects of wireless on future bandwidth ought to be considered.
All the graphic chip makers need to get their act together and release better drivers for linux.
They NEED to?
What happens if they don't? Some Linux-using gamers get pissy (rather, they STAY pissy) and not much else.
Sorry to sound flamebait-ish, but 3D accelerator manufacturers have no financial incentive to give a damn about the Linux market at this point in time. It's cheaper for them to ignore that tiny sliver of the market than to invest highly expensive developer time in developing Linux drivers.
Hell, we as consumers are lucky if they even bother completing fully-functional WINDOWS drivers before the product hits the shelves.
If we all to 30 minutes per day to fight spam, I think we would be far better off.
Maybe the mail admins here would be, but as an individual end user, it's far easier and more efficient for me to try and ignore spam than to aggressively fight it back to its sources.
Filter what I can, manually get rid of whatever I can't... it requires maybe 1 minute of active work on my part per day. I certainly am not at a loss for other things to do with the other 29 minutes.
Your analogy is horrible... prohibition didn't work because people want alcohol. The war on drugs doesn't work because people want drugs.
Nobody wants spam!
It's not about who wants to GET spam, though. It's about who wants to be allowed to SEND spam.
And obviously, SOME people don't mind getting spam... the response rate needed to sustain a spam operation may be miniscule, but it's still greater than zero. If zero people respond, if companies that resort to spamming see that it's costing them more money than it's bringing in, they'll stop.
When the vast majority of a society is violating a certain law, it is a sign that the law, not the society needs to change.
Most people routinely travel 5-10 miles above the speed limit on the highway -- regardless of what the posted limit is. Should we change the limit from 65 to 75 so most of us aren't breaking the law anymore? Should we consider the studies that show traffic fatalities increase when speed limits are raised?
It's human nature to choose the course of action that benefits one's self the most, but if that action has a net effect of reducing benefits to others (by not compensating them for their work, or by killing them in a car crash), it is right for the state to restrict your ability to follow that course of action.
Most people were content to make their pop-ups IE only.
What are you talking about? As far as I know the Javascript "window.open" method functions the same in every browser that's matured in the past 6 or 7 years.
If I use Netscape 4.x, I get popups. If I disable blocking in Firebird, I get popups. There's very little IE-specific about it.
Now the whole site is unusable unless the user disables pop-up protection.
Good riddance to that site, then. There will always be webmasters out there who won't be willing to re-code their entire site to accomodate some douchebag marketer's desires to splatter untargeted advertising all over you screen.
Microsoft will not win over linux in the market place
Have you seen the latest figures for desktop operating systems?
Hey, while we're at it, can I get a copy of your house key? What do you mean, 'no'? Why not? Isn't restricting what people copy an inherent burden that is no longer workable in the information age?
I'm aware that the videos were generated via a Famicom emulator, but I haven't seen anything that proves they were accomplished using savepoints and timing hacks.
And even if so, it doesn't make the videos any less entertaining to watch...
Of course, when you destroy your top-of-the-line, bleeding-edge processor chip trying to Extreme Overclock it, you're out several hundred dollars. Unless you can convince Intel that the unit was broken right out of the fabrication plant and get them to replace it under warranty; maybe that strategy works.
What's the point of overclocking a 3.0GHz chip to 3.5GHz anyway? Unless you're similarly overclocking your peripheral bus, memory, hard drives, the electron gun in your CRT, and the fingers typing on your keyboard, you're going to run into performance bottlenecks long before that extra processing power comes into play, in most every situation.
Sure, yeah, it's fun to hack for hack's sake, but there's got to be cheaper ways to indulge in the hobby...
Look, the laws of physics mandate that to get "unlimited" (that is, infinite) bandwidth is impossible. Even just extrapolating as far as the physical limits of the medium, if an ISP were to offer you truly unlimited bandwidth, they would have to devote 100% of all the pipe they have going in an out to a single individual: you. The ISP can't pay its upstream providers on your $39.95 alone.
"Unlimited" has NEVER meant "unlimited" on an ISP contract. But then, your contract probably avoids that word altogether -- it's marketing, pure marketing, and we all should know that by now.
If I had the money, I would gladly hire "Morimoto" to do nothing but create more of "Time Attack Videos" like the ones floating around for Super Mario Bros 3 and Megaman 2.
Watching someone tear through a classic game you used to spend hours on as a kid and go from start to finish in under 30 minutes has got to be worth $100K/year.
The original article may have been flaimbait, but it really didn't require another article to point out all of the obvious flaws.
Maybe to the Slashdot crowd no rebuttal was necessary to the original article's "obvious flaimbait". But what about PHBs?
If they read one article titled "MacOS = teh suXor", they might come to the conclusion that MacOS is The Suxor. But if they read a second article, title "No, Windows = teh suXor", they would instead come to the conclusion that BOTH platforms are The Suxor -- or at least, that they need more information before they can make a decision.
Slashdot Mirror
the first to include color support in their computers
Unless you're referring to the IIc, I wouldn't award this point in Apple's favor. In the mid 1980's PCs and their clones progressed from 4-color CGA to 16-color EGA to 256-color VGA, while Macs stayed in the realm of black and white...
(OK, the Mac displays generally had better resolution. But IBM had larger CRTs. So let's call that one a draw.)
They provide you with programming for the low price of watching commercials.
NO.
The airwaves are owned by the public, not by the networks. WE provide THEM with the right to use part of the frequency spectrum for the low price of providing us with programming.
Once that TV signal comes into my home, it's mine to do whatever I like with it (within the bounds of copyright). There is no obligation, explicit or implicit, to dutifully watch all ad breaks.
Is it also wrong to get up and leave the room when the commercials come on?
that may well prevent anyone from running any operating system on commodity PC hardware besides that of Microsoft
Do you really think Intel has any interest in locking themselves into Microsoft? They're not dumb; they've seen how many companies have gotten into bed with MS only to wake up in the morning to the corporate equivalent of a bathtub full of ice and a missing vital organ.
Intel is working with MS today because it's the best way for Intel to make money. But I'm sure Intel could forecast a possible future where MS goes out of business and some other OS dominates the Intel hardware market. They'd be dumbasses to make a decision today that would doom them as well to failure should that ever happen.
For those who do not know, Media Center is Microsoft's first attempt at highly integration of DRM (Digital Rights Management) into the core functionality of the OS.
???
The DRM hooks may be present in XP Media Center Edition, but that doesn't mean you have to use them. I've been running the OS for weeks, and haven't even had to sign up for a Passport.
My HP Media Center PC even came with software to convert video files captured by MS'S PVR codec into free-and-clear MPEG's.
I'm rooting for the Chinese faction. I want a digital standard that's NOT written by the content owners.
But couldn't the alternative be even worse? I mean, it's not exactly as if the Chinese government has a reputation for openness and cooperation...
there is nothing wrong with [the iPod having a non-user-serviceable battery]. It is not fundamentally flawed in any way.
Bull.
If users are complaining about it, it's a flaw. Because the flaw can not be fixed without significant re-engineering, it's fundamental.
Apple, your customers are speaking. Are you listening?
I just keep mine plugged in in the car and have 10 hours of charge whenever I leave the car. Easy enough?
I have a message from the future. It's "I'm sorry to hear that someone smashed your car window and made off with your $400 portable music player."
I would really like to know why it took a hardware manufacturer to bring in a system of legal digital content delivery (Apple and iTunes)
I guess eMusic didn't count, even though it was up and running for years before iTunes was launched?
If there was a standard, effective method of effecting a point to point communication, over IP or whatever, and it was reasonably priced, all those extra wires would go away.
This is a TERRIBLE idea.
There is a finite amount of wireless bandwidth available in the world -- only so many frequencies at which information can be beamed from place to place. Technological advances have slowly increased the upper bounds of what is feasible, so that we can use Gigahertz bands that weren't possible with the electronics of a generation ago, but at the same time transmission power is increasing, so the same frequency cannot be "re-used" in as many local areas. The more bandwidth we allocate and utilize, the more scarce of a resource it will become.
Wired communication, on the other hand, is practically limitless. A single bundle of fiber can carry staggering amounts of information in a reasonable amount of physical space. And it's a renewable resource -- if all the existing fiber is lit, if we run out of available bandwidth, it's possible (probably not cheap or easy, but possible) to just dig a trench and lay down more cable.
The installation costs of wired communications are far higher than those of wireless. But the long-term effects of wireless on future bandwidth ought to be considered.
All the graphic chip makers need to get their act together and release better drivers for linux.
They NEED to?
What happens if they don't? Some Linux-using gamers get pissy (rather, they STAY pissy) and not much else.
Sorry to sound flamebait-ish, but 3D accelerator manufacturers have no financial incentive to give a damn about the Linux market at this point in time. It's cheaper for them to ignore that tiny sliver of the market than to invest highly expensive developer time in developing Linux drivers.
Hell, we as consumers are lucky if they even bother completing fully-functional WINDOWS drivers before the product hits the shelves.
If time_t was unsigned, various functions, such as time(2) could not return an error code.
Additionally, you'd be unable to represent any date that occured BEFORE the epoch in 1970.
So was I born in the year 1968, or the year 2020?
I have a P90 that ever since Y2K, firmly believes the year is 2094. Oddly enough, NWDOS7 thinks this is a perfectly acceptable date!
That should be sufficient proof to stave off the "NWDOS* is Dying" trolls for another 90 years or so!
If we all to 30 minutes per day to fight spam, I think we would be far better off.
Maybe the mail admins here would be, but as an individual end user, it's far easier and more efficient for me to try and ignore spam than to aggressively fight it back to its sources.
Filter what I can, manually get rid of whatever I can't... it requires maybe 1 minute of active work on my part per day. I certainly am not at a loss for other things to do with the other 29 minutes.
Your analogy is horrible... prohibition didn't work because people want alcohol. The war on drugs doesn't work because people want drugs.
Nobody wants spam!
It's not about who wants to GET spam, though. It's about who wants to be allowed to SEND spam.
And obviously, SOME people don't mind getting spam... the response rate needed to sustain a spam operation may be miniscule, but it's still greater than zero. If zero people respond, if companies that resort to spamming see that it's costing them more money than it's bringing in, they'll stop.
What we NEED is a way to share files in such a manner as the receiver has no idea what your IP is.
Unless it's email, in which case the sender ought to be fully and accurately identified.
Am I the only one who sees a problem with reaching simultaneously for More Anonymity AND More Accountability?
When the vast majority of a society is violating a certain law, it is a sign that the law, not the society needs to change.
Most people routinely travel 5-10 miles above the speed limit on the highway -- regardless of what the posted limit is. Should we change the limit from 65 to 75 so most of us aren't breaking the law anymore? Should we consider the studies that show traffic fatalities increase when speed limits are raised?
It's human nature to choose the course of action that benefits one's self the most, but if that action has a net effect of reducing benefits to others (by not compensating them for their work, or by killing them in a car crash), it is right for the state to restrict your ability to follow that course of action.
Most people were content to make their pop-ups IE only.
What are you talking about? As far as I know the Javascript "window.open" method functions the same in every browser that's matured in the past 6 or 7 years.
If I use Netscape 4.x, I get popups. If I disable blocking in Firebird, I get popups. There's very little IE-specific about it.
Now the whole site is unusable unless the user disables pop-up protection.
Good riddance to that site, then. There will always be webmasters out there who won't be willing to re-code their entire site to accomodate some douchebag marketer's desires to splatter untargeted advertising all over you screen.
Microsoft will not win over linux in the market place
Have you seen the latest figures for desktop operating systems?
Hey, while we're at it, can I get a copy of your house key? What do you mean, 'no'? Why not? Isn't restricting what people copy an inherent burden that is no longer workable in the information age?
I'm aware that the videos were generated via a Famicom emulator, but I haven't seen anything that proves they were accomplished using savepoints and timing hacks.
And even if so, it doesn't make the videos any less entertaining to watch...
Of course, when you destroy your top-of-the-line, bleeding-edge processor chip trying to Extreme Overclock it, you're out several hundred dollars. Unless you can convince Intel that the unit was broken right out of the fabrication plant and get them to replace it under warranty; maybe that strategy works.
What's the point of overclocking a 3.0GHz chip to 3.5GHz anyway? Unless you're similarly overclocking your peripheral bus, memory, hard drives, the electron gun in your CRT, and the fingers typing on your keyboard, you're going to run into performance bottlenecks long before that extra processing power comes into play, in most every situation.
Sure, yeah, it's fun to hack for hack's sake, but there's got to be cheaper ways to indulge in the hobby...
like In Soviet Finland, refridgerators heat your house?
You are misinformed.
Refrigerators are actually used to heat houses in the land of Rand McNally, where they wear hats on their feet and hamburgers eat people!
Look, the laws of physics mandate that to get "unlimited" (that is, infinite) bandwidth is impossible. Even just extrapolating as far as the physical limits of the medium, if an ISP were to offer you truly unlimited bandwidth, they would have to devote 100% of all the pipe they have going in an out to a single individual: you. The ISP can't pay its upstream providers on your $39.95 alone.
"Unlimited" has NEVER meant "unlimited" on an ISP contract. But then, your contract probably avoids that word altogether -- it's marketing, pure marketing, and we all should know that by now.
If I had the money, I would gladly hire "Morimoto" to do nothing but create more of "Time Attack Videos" like the ones floating around for Super Mario Bros 3 and Megaman 2.
Watching someone tear through a classic game you used to spend hours on as a kid and go from start to finish in under 30 minutes has got to be worth $100K/year.
The original article may have been flaimbait, but it really didn't require another article to point out all of the obvious flaws.
Maybe to the Slashdot crowd no rebuttal was necessary to the original article's "obvious flaimbait". But what about PHBs?
If they read one article titled "MacOS = teh suXor", they might come to the conclusion that MacOS is The Suxor. But if they read a second article, title "No, Windows = teh suXor", they would instead come to the conclusion that BOTH platforms are The Suxor -- or at least, that they need more information before they can make a decision.
ipod? ogg? bah!
.BAH files, anyway?
When is XMMS going to get support for