Re:The ass-backwards solution
on
Cedega 5.1 Released
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· Score: 4, Informative
I hate to yank everyone back to reality here, but if you can't get your favorite Windoze games to run with Cedega, and you REALLY want to play those games, why not dedicate a true gaming PC running XP and not munge your clean Linux system with all this patchy crap ?
1) Games that have massive memory requirements often run better in wine than on XP. In Simcity 4, I've got some cities that will no longer load in XP, but can chug along in wine.
2) Laptop drives aren't big enough that I'm willing to have a windows partition, but I still want my gaming fix when I'm on the road.
In general, though, you are right. A dedicated gaming box often gives the best results.
Most of the less popular games require a little bit of tweaking before they work properly.
Yeah...'tweaking' called "Aw, fuck this", [CTRL]-[ALT]-[DEL], [DOWN], [ENTER]
I never figured out what I ever got for my $5/month. If it actually runs in Cedega, generally it also runs in wine. Point2Play is a pain in my ass, and probably everyone else's too. I'd rather they work on getting the games to actually run out-of-the-box than to write a braindead app launcher.
Keep in mind that it's the water pushing the blades, not the blades pushing the water...this is not like a ship screw.
Under steady-state conditions, a neutrally bouyant object will be pushed, by the current, through the whole turbine without ever touching it. The same water that is moving the objects is pushing the turbine blades out of the way.
For crying out loud, why is it every time there's a story about wind power, or ocean thermal power, or any other non-polluting technology, we always get somebody with NO concept of SCALE popping up with this same asinine question?
Because people are dumb. One turbine in the ocean is, literally, a fart in a hurricane.
On the other hand, don't blindly assume humans won't overbuild something. Do you think the first internal combustion engine spurred thoughts of smog-filled valleys hundreds of miles long? No, because it would take tens of millions of combustion engines running non-stop to do such a thing.
That's only if the prosecution is sufficiently idiotic as to execute code from your drive. Instead of booting your machine, they can always remove the drive, make copies, and analyze the data in a controlled environment.
If you are paranoid, hard drives in general are bad news...they are just too hard to physically destroy and hold information past a simple deletion. You could, for example, just use two computers that network-booted off each other, both with a mercury tumbler-switch in the power supply. Now the investigators need to do all their work on site against your running OS will all the booby traps active. Deleting your sensitive data requires nothing more than cutting power to both machines simultaneously.
Make a quality, enduring product that exactly fits the customers needs, and you'll never sell to that customer again. Crappy products make for a successful business, because crappy products keep you in contact with the customer.
Didn't you ever wonder why Microsoft rules the software world? There products have never been so poor that consumers abandon them...always just crappy enough that the users need to keep returning for the fix.
Getting two nukes to detonate sufficiently simultaneously that one does not simply destroy the other is much harder than actually building them in the first place.
That excuse is worthless. People like doctors, firemen, etc, who actually need to be on call figured out how to unobtrusively use pagers and cellphones a long time ago. The obnoxious asshats are the ones who are only trying to look important.
The first step toward making "polite cellphones" would be eliminating the walkie-talkie feature. I've never seen that feature used in a way that did not: make the users shout, make the conversation take longer, accomplish anything that could not be done with a normal phonecall.
Re:Because it solves the wrong problem.
on
Polite Cell Phones
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· Score: 1
You know, some people have cells that are actually small enough to forget about? Not everyone is constantly thinking about the blessid thing.
If they really did "forget" about their cellphone, they wouldn't have it on their person in the first place. The grandparent is right...it's not hard to train yourself to perform little things automatically. People who want the convenience of a cellphone but aren't willing to accept the reponsibility are just lazy asses.
It's just like those email systems that allow the sender to attach a priority level. There's always some dipshit in the office who thinks the reminder to not forget food in the fridge is Level 7, absofuckinglutely critical, when more reasonable coworkers are announcing a showstopper bug in a just-shipped product as Level 5, as-least-the-building-isn't-on-fire.
Caller-determined ring-through would only work well if the receiver can moderate who gets to use it. No telemarketer is going to be told their message isn't the most important thing on earth. Neither are some relatives, for that matter.
When a cell phone on vibrate is going to be too distracting to others, THEN TURN IT OFF!
You have two options:
1) Accept that cell-phone use in certain situations is inappropriate and don't use them. 2) Don't put yourself in those situations.
You used church as your example. Why are you there? To talk to God? (sorry, God, I need to take this call...wtf?) Or are you there just to be seen? (yeah, I'm here to look good, but I'm going to be an ass and disrupt the service dealing with my phone...wtf??)
Seriously, if your cellphone going ringy-dingy is more important than the service you are attending, why are you there?
Why can't we just pay one Federal Tax, one State Tax, and one Local Tax? (I imagine it's varied outside the US.) Why do we need to be nickeled and dimed to death?
Because it's far easier to pass a tax on a minority, i.e.:
People who use this particular highway/bridge. People who use this other highway/bridge. People who use the train. People who use the bus. Sooner or later, you've managed to levy a tax on everybody.
People don't mind taxes they don't pay, because of which, they get outvoted on the ones they do pay.
Re:Why they always gotta make it a fight?
on
The Great HDCP Fiasco
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· Score: 0, Troll
Take the music industry for example. How many consumers know that non-RIAA or even free music exists? Were it not for word of mouth I suspect NO ONE would.
Don't ignore the whole picture...why do people know about RIAA music but not non-RIAA music? RIAA spends money on advertising, and advertising is expensive.
The trouble with blindly shouting, "Down with RIAA!", or,"Labels are history!", is that you ignore the fact that someone needs to spread the news of a great new band, and someone is going to have to filter out the crap bands.
Asking the consumer to educate themselves is unrealistic. You will get steamrolled by the competition who is selling music to the blissfully ignorant and making money hand-over-fist in the process.
The public can not sell licenses to public domain works.
Of course it could, just like it can sell licenses to the public airwaves. If the public decided it would be a fun idea to hand the copyright to Canterbury Tales to the next winner on Jeopardy!, there is nothing to prevent that.
The only reason we don't do it is because it's a dumb idea, not because we can't.
Rights do not "revert", because they were never the public's rights to begin with. The public can not sell licenses to public domain works.
Of course they do...how else do you think the public has the right to expire a copyright?
IP, once published, no longer belongs to the author, it belongs to society. Society then gives somes rights of ownership back to the author, details depending on the jurisdiciton. Obviously society can't give and revoke rights it doesn't have.
In a nutshell, more people shop at Best Buy than at Newegg.
There may be alot of geeks that know what's going on, but there are far more Joes who just want to be the first guy on the block with the latest new shiny.
True. But wouldn't it be nice if there was a little shift from caring solely about shareholder profits and a little ethics got thrown in?
No, it's better to compartmentalize the responsibility.
Corporations work most efficiently at making money for the people in charge...nothing more. It's society's job to ensure corporations operate within strict legal guidelines. That vigilance is the cost of reaping the benefits of capitalism.
Corporations aren't entities with a philisophical soul capable of evaluating deep ethical dilemmas, they are just machines that generate wealth. It's your job to ensure they operate ethically...and my job...and everybody elses. Wield your wallet as you would a ballot.
NO ONE would have complained if they "only" received 45 movies per month
Hmm...45 movies * $0.20 postage * 2 directions...
Did you really expect some company to spend $18 in postage when you send them $14.99? That puts Netflix out of business, and you are back being stuck with Blockbuster as your only option.
Copying Netflix movies is like bringing a doggie bag to an all-you-can-eat buffet.
Suing them for throttling is like complaining when the waitress won't clear your plates every two minutes.
In advertising, "unlimited" is still used within the context of reasonable behavior. If copying a Netflix movie were "reasonable", you would not need to ship the discs back, since they could make a new copy themselves for less than the cost of the return postage and let you keep the old one instead of bothering with DVDShrink.
What is wrong with that behavior? It is our right as consumers to hold businesses accountable for what they SAY they are selling us. If they say UNLIMITED then consumers have the right (some say the duty, caveat emptor...) to take full advantage of the company's services within the limits of the agreement.
You sound like the kind of guy that takes a doggie bag to an all-you-can-eat buffet and sues the restaurant because the waitress stops clearing your table as quickly after your twentieth plate.
I really hate that this is happening, but it makes total sense. First, netfix has its customers by the balls. NF is guarateed that automatically billed monthly fee. They are counting on people being ignorant to new, abusive policies like this one that penalizes people for using the service they pay for.
Give me a break...am I supposed to believe that the Netflix customer that gets 12 movies per week is some wide-eyed babe struggling to understand this brave new world of technology?
Bullshit.
The only reason the abusers have been copying movies faster than they can watch them is they knew the deal was too good to last. Otherwise, what would be the hurry?
The people getting throttled aren't "ignorant to new, abusive polices"; they have been scrutinizing the Netflix TOS and dreading this day's arrival. They know they got a good ride. Now the ride is over. Deal with it.
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I hate to yank everyone back to reality here, but if you can't get your favorite Windoze games to run with Cedega, and you REALLY want to play those games, why not dedicate a true gaming PC running XP and not munge your clean Linux system with all this patchy crap ?
1) Games that have massive memory requirements often run better in wine than on XP. In Simcity 4, I've got some cities that will no longer load in XP, but can chug along in wine.
2) Laptop drives aren't big enough that I'm willing to have a windows partition, but I still want my gaming fix when I'm on the road.
In general, though, you are right. A dedicated gaming box often gives the best results.
Most of the less popular games require a little bit of tweaking before they work properly.
Yeah...'tweaking' called "Aw, fuck this", [CTRL]-[ALT]-[DEL], [DOWN], [ENTER]
I never figured out what I ever got for my $5/month. If it actually runs in Cedega, generally it also runs in wine. Point2Play is a pain in my ass, and probably everyone else's too. I'd rather they work on getting the games to actually run out-of-the-box than to write a braindead app launcher.
Keep in mind that it's the water pushing the blades, not the blades pushing the water...this is not like a ship screw.
Under steady-state conditions, a neutrally bouyant object will be pushed, by the current, through the whole turbine without ever touching it. The same water that is moving the objects is pushing the turbine blades out of the way.
For crying out loud, why is it every time there's a story about wind power, or ocean thermal power, or any other non-polluting technology, we always get somebody with NO concept of SCALE popping up with this same asinine question?
Because people are dumb. One turbine in the ocean is, literally, a fart in a hurricane.
On the other hand, don't blindly assume humans won't overbuild something. Do you think the first internal combustion engine spurred thoughts of smog-filled valleys hundreds of miles long? No, because it would take tens of millions of combustion engines running non-stop to do such a thing.
That's only if the prosecution is sufficiently idiotic as to execute code from your drive. Instead of booting your machine, they can always remove the drive, make copies, and analyze the data in a controlled environment.
If you are paranoid, hard drives in general are bad news...they are just too hard to physically destroy and hold information past a simple deletion. You could, for example, just use two computers that network-booted off each other, both with a mercury tumbler-switch in the power supply. Now the investigators need to do all their work on site against your running OS will all the booby traps active. Deleting your sensitive data requires nothing more than cutting power to both machines simultaneously.
Business school 101:
Make a quality, enduring product that exactly fits the customers needs, and you'll never sell to that customer again. Crappy products make for a successful business, because crappy products keep you in contact with the customer.
Didn't you ever wonder why Microsoft rules the software world? There products have never been so poor that consumers abandon them...always just crappy enough that the users need to keep returning for the fix.
Shielding is fairly easy for a self-contained electronic unit, and a simple 1mm thick welded-steel case for the device would suffice.
From a 50KT device at 100m? Your "shielding" won't stop the gamma pulse from triggering the krytrons.
Your 1mm estimate is off by about 4 orders of magnitude.
With a dual machine, you always have some extra room under the pedal, so to speak
If you need more room under the pedal, just cut a hole in your floorboard. Works great.
At this point, four 50kt nukes go off together
Getting two nukes to detonate sufficiently simultaneously that one does not simply destroy the other is much harder than actually building them in the first place.
Yeah, if you are a doctor...
That excuse is worthless. People like doctors, firemen, etc, who actually need to be on call figured out how to unobtrusively use pagers and cellphones a long time ago. The obnoxious asshats are the ones who are only trying to look important.
The first step toward making "polite cellphones" would be eliminating the walkie-talkie feature. I've never seen that feature used in a way that did not: make the users shout, make the conversation take longer, accomplish anything that could not be done with a normal phonecall.
You know, some people have cells that are actually small enough to forget about? Not everyone is constantly thinking about the blessid thing.
If they really did "forget" about their cellphone, they wouldn't have it on their person in the first place. The grandparent is right...it's not hard to train yourself to perform little things automatically. People who want the convenience of a cellphone but aren't willing to accept the reponsibility are just lazy asses.
It's just like those email systems that allow the sender to attach a priority level. There's always some dipshit in the office who thinks the reminder to not forget food in the fridge is Level 7, absofuckinglutely critical, when more reasonable coworkers are announcing a showstopper bug in a just-shipped product as Level 5, as-least-the-building-isn't-on-fire.
Caller-determined ring-through would only work well if the receiver can moderate who gets to use it. No telemarketer is going to be told their message isn't the most important thing on earth. Neither are some relatives, for that matter.
Vibrate is not always the best option:
When a cell phone on vibrate is going to be too distracting to others, THEN TURN IT OFF!
You have two options:
1) Accept that cell-phone use in certain situations is inappropriate and don't use them.
2) Don't put yourself in those situations.
You used church as your example. Why are you there? To talk to God? (sorry, God, I need to take this call...wtf?) Or are you there just to be seen? (yeah, I'm here to look good, but I'm going to be an ass and disrupt the service dealing with my phone...wtf??)
Seriously, if your cellphone going ringy-dingy is more important than the service you are attending, why are you there?
Why can't we just pay one Federal Tax, one State Tax, and one Local Tax? (I imagine it's varied outside the US.) Why do we need to be nickeled and dimed to death?
Because it's far easier to pass a tax on a minority, i.e.:
People who use this particular highway/bridge.
People who use this other highway/bridge.
People who use the train.
People who use the bus.
Sooner or later, you've managed to levy a tax on everybody.
People don't mind taxes they don't pay, because of which, they get outvoted on the ones they do pay.
Take the music industry for example. How many consumers know that non-RIAA or even free music exists? Were it not for word of mouth I suspect NO ONE would.
,"Labels are history!", is that you ignore the fact that someone needs to spread the news of a great new band, and someone is going to have to filter out the crap bands.
Don't ignore the whole picture...why do people know about RIAA music but not non-RIAA music? RIAA spends money on advertising, and advertising is expensive.
The trouble with blindly shouting, "Down with RIAA!", or
Asking the consumer to educate themselves is unrealistic. You will get steamrolled by the competition who is selling music to the blissfully ignorant and making money hand-over-fist in the process.
The public can not sell licenses to public domain works.
Of course it could, just like it can sell licenses to the public airwaves. If the public decided it would be a fun idea to hand the copyright to Canterbury Tales to the next winner on Jeopardy!, there is nothing to prevent that.
The only reason we don't do it is because it's a dumb idea, not because we can't.
Rights do not "revert", because they were never the public's rights to begin with. The public can not sell licenses to public domain works.
Of course they do...how else do you think the public has the right to expire a copyright?
IP, once published, no longer belongs to the author, it belongs to society. Society then gives somes rights of ownership back to the author, details depending on the jurisdiciton. Obviously society can't give and revoke rights it doesn't have.
In a nutshell, more people shop at Best Buy than at Newegg.
There may be alot of geeks that know what's going on, but there are far more Joes who just want to be the first guy on the block with the latest new shiny.
DRM will sell.
True. But wouldn't it be nice if there was a little shift from caring solely about shareholder profits and a little ethics got thrown in?
No, it's better to compartmentalize the responsibility.
Corporations work most efficiently at making money for the people in charge...nothing more. It's society's job to ensure corporations operate within strict legal guidelines. That vigilance is the cost of reaping the benefits of capitalism.
Corporations aren't entities with a philisophical soul capable of evaluating deep ethical dilemmas, they are just machines that generate wealth. It's your job to ensure they operate ethically...and my job...and everybody elses. Wield your wallet as you would a ballot.
NO ONE would have complained if they "only" received 45 movies per month
Hmm...45 movies * $0.20 postage * 2 directions...
Did you really expect some company to spend $18 in postage when you send them $14.99? That puts Netflix out of business, and you are back being stuck with Blockbuster as your only option.
Is that what you really want?
i pay $2500 on my home i paid $135,000 for. for some reason the village thinks we need 3 full time police officers.
for 900 people..
You need at least three of anything if you want 24/7 availability. The town population isn't really relevant.
Copying Netflix movies is like bringing a doggie bag to an all-you-can-eat buffet.
Suing them for throttling is like complaining when the waitress won't clear your plates every two minutes.
In advertising, "unlimited" is still used within the context of reasonable behavior. If copying a Netflix movie were "reasonable", you would not need to ship the discs back, since they could make a new copy themselves for less than the cost of the return postage and let you keep the old one instead of bothering with DVDShrink.
What is wrong with that behavior? It is our right as consumers to hold businesses accountable for what they SAY they are selling us. If they say UNLIMITED then consumers have the right (some say the duty, caveat emptor...) to take full advantage of the company's services within the limits of the agreement.
You sound like the kind of guy that takes a doggie bag to an all-you-can-eat buffet and sues the restaurant because the waitress stops clearing your table as quickly after your twentieth plate.
Get a life.
I really hate that this is happening, but it makes total sense. First, netfix has its customers by the balls. NF is guarateed that automatically billed monthly fee. They are counting on people being ignorant to new, abusive policies like this one that penalizes people for using the service they pay for.
Give me a break...am I supposed to believe that the Netflix customer that gets 12 movies per week is some wide-eyed babe struggling to understand this brave new world of technology?
Bullshit.
The only reason the abusers have been copying movies faster than they can watch them is they knew the deal was too good to last. Otherwise, what would be the hurry?
The people getting throttled aren't "ignorant to new, abusive polices"; they have been scrutinizing the Netflix TOS and dreading this day's arrival. They know they got a good ride. Now the ride is over. Deal with it.