Actually roaming capability totally depends on your mobile carrier. I'm in Australia, and big companies like Telstra (Aussie equivalent of your ATT), Vodafone and Optus have roaming agreement with practically the whole planet. I brought my cell phone on roaming to the US, Canada and China and can use it albeit with neck-strangling roaming charges.
For the American, this is not a problem of isolationism or anything. It's just simply corporate greed, nothing more. Anywhere in the world is the same. You should take a look at the prices here in Australia before the mobile operator called "3" came into the market and forces everyone to lower their prices. Right then, everyone realized how crazily overpriced mobile service really was.
Problem is, if you expect every customer of yours to read the manual, there goes 95% of your market. You have to accept that some people just don't want to read manuals, but that doesn't necessarily make them stupid. I accepted this fact a long time ago and stop bugging my friends about reading the manual of everything they buy. Me, I'm a compulsive manual reader. I have to read the manual first before touching anything. I even read the manual on my new guitar first before I use it. Most people in the world is not like us.
It shouldn't be this arcane just to turn off a device. It seems that Apple designed the iPhone in iPod fashion, where it never really turns off unless you leave it untouched for a long period of time. The problem is, an iPod doesn't incur a hefty bill. I don't think Apple made this bad design consciously, it's more likely that ATT just keep quiet about this fact and reap the benefit from the unknowing user later on (as most phone companies do). Apple is not totally blameless though. If they really want to compete in the global cell phone market, this mistake is inexcusable.
The TFA said it all: Apple spokeswoman Natalie Kerris points out in its terms and conditions that it will cost an arm an a leg to use an Iphone out of the US even if no services are intentionally used.
IANAL, but the customer is most likely out of luck if he tries to challenge this. After all, this is in the terms & conditions that he supposedly agreed upon.
This is another major blow to iPhone, on top of the recent price cut. Now we have an Apple spokeswoman admitting freely that the simple act of bringing it out of the country without using it actually cost "and arm and a leg". I have to point the blame to ATT for greed and Apple for letting this happen. How much more can you rip off from your early adopters (which are presumably loyal Apple customers)?
You don't need to use a hotmail account to keep using MSN. Once you're in, you can change the email (thus your msn ID) to whatever you want. If not for MSN, I don't think anyone would willingly want to use Hotmail anymore nowadays. Be warned that if you don't login to your Hotmail account in 3 months, it will disappear. This surprised me at first, seeing how my Yahoo account was practically untouched for more than two years but still intact.
Electrical engineering, and I do prefer normal working hours:)
What I found out was that my brain can only work 4 hours a day and no more. 5 if I'm lucky or have a deadline. I can considerably extend that 4 hours to do something else if I do normal working hours.
I think all of us got that stage of working weird hours. I used to work from 8pm to 2-3am, but after a while I saw the wisdom in working normal hours.
Re:Changes over time?
on
MacGyver Physics
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Hell I'm a grad student and I don't get treated like that. Dismantling someone's experiment out of some higher-ups whim is not what I would consider normal, or I'm just really lucky to have a supervisor that I can actually talk to instead of him expecting me to treat him like a royal subject or anything.
Now there's a lot of "don't-knows" in that little story, but that goddamn student is in the lab at an hour that I wouldn't consider normal working hours (on the weekend, no less), so it's probably safe to say that he/she's been working on that experiment for quite some time or simply just having a bad luck of getting elbowed all the time so there's no other hours available. Imagine waiting for a time slot in a lab and then when you're finally can get some work done, it's suddenly getting ripped apart by someone who has already elbowed your time many times over. If I were in that position, I would be considerably pissed and very likely to do something about it.
The point being, even if you're Einstein and Newton incarnate combined, you have no right whatsoever to do whatever you please to anyone else. Lederman should have the decency of helping the student to put his/her experiment back to the way it was before, it's very plausible that he has the ability to. However, judging from his tone of no regret in the interview, most likely he didn't care and just left the student to pick up the pieces of his brilliant experiment.
I believe the question is, did he actually repair the damage that he had done? Or he simply used the grad student's experiment because he thinks that a student's experiment is expendable and unimportant?
Re:Changes over time?
on
MacGyver Physics
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
From the TFA:
Intrigued by the experiments of Madame Chien-Shiung Wu, Lederman called his friend, Richard Garwin, to propose an experiment that would detect parity violation in the decay of the pi meson particle. That evening in January 1957, Lederman and Garwin raced to Columbia's Nevis laboratory and immediately began rearranging a graduate student's experiment into one they could use. "It was 6 p.m. on a Friday, and without explanation, we took the student's experiment apart," Lederman later recalled in an interview. "He started crying, as he should have."
That is just goddamn sick. You're pretty much expected never ever to screw up even once from the moment you're born. What I can foresee happening in the next 50 or so years is the constantly increasing standard on what will be called a "screwup". What? You cheated on a test in high school? Sorry, no job for you. What? You're smoking? no job for you. In a manner of speaking, this scheme inadvertently (or advertently?) create a caste system like what Japan has hundreds of years ago. I'm not a Japanese, but IIRC some people are considered sub-human while the samurai class can kill anyone below their caste at whim. The US is slowly moving back to feudal age, it seems.
What's disgusting is how some caste are immune to this so-called law. Take the celebrity caste, for instance. They can freely get rehab hundreds of times in their life and still have a job. For the rest of us, it'll be hopeless. I'm very sure that some in the politician caste also have gone to rehab, but somehow they can get exempted from this law.
There will be effort to connect various countries databases, I'm sure. At that time, if you screwed up once, the only option you have is to move to another planet. Or, you can always enter politics.
... the US government is treating citizens and non-citizens like criminals. If the no-job list gets through after the no-fly list, pretty soon there'll be more no-* lists created. Can you imagine? No-internet, no-insurance, no-buy-home, etc etc. What they don't realize is that they're practically discouraging people that WANTS to live and work LEGITIMATELY in the US to even go to the US by putting up so much red tape while solving none of the immigration problems in the first place.
Imagine if one day the databases got corrupted, and suddenly you find yourself in the no-job list even though you've built your career legitimately for decades in the US as a foreigner. Not a scenario I'd like to live with, and something I'd rather not risk to happen. I just hope the Australian govt don't go along with this brain-dead scheme.
How much you wanna bet that soon the politicians will help themselves to no-tax and no-small-income list. Or maybe they did that already? I know for sure that they're already in the no-brain list.
"This bill brings us closer to an immigration system that enforces our laws and upholds the great American tradition of welcoming those who share our values and our love of freedom," President Bush said in his radio address on Saturday.
Even though these typically fall outside the range of human hearing, we are still able to sense and feel them.
Nope, it's been proven that humans cannot hear ultrasonic sounds. Dogs, yes. Humans, no. Otherwise, you'll be reacting to a dog whistle.
The only argument against CD is that people are getting concerned that 16 bit is a little on the low side, and getting 24 bit or more is better. For the time being, there's no argument that the sampling rate is too low. What you hear coming out from your speaker is the result of the D/A converter, so if your CD sounds bad, it's probably your player/amps/speakers and not due to a defect in the CD technique itself.
A lot about music and hearing is subjective. You can convince yourself that your shower radio sounds better than a $10,000 equipment if you try really hard. It's fine by me if people judge vinyl sounds better than a CD, but from a technical standpoint, it is not.
I believe engineers know that the ear is non-linear. CD is linear simply because they throw everything into a single number (sampling rate and bit depth), but mp3 and aac most definitely not. They use human perception to vary the encoding of various bands to control the distortion and achieve "compression" by actually creating distortion in the parts where you'll not likely to notice due to masking effect and such.
For vinyl vs cd, the most damaging argument to vinyl is that it uses constant angular value instead of constant linear value, so you got more data at the edges compared to the inside tracks, hence you have lower fidelity as you go. I say if people like vinyl, let them be. Arguing which sounds better than which is purely subjective.
I think there's more to it than that. After I stare at the A and V for a while, I realize that what matters is probably the "weight" of the letters. By weight, I mean how complicated a letter look, and how that complexity is distributed throughout the text. So you're correct, this is not as simple as it sounds.
We humans like things regular. I would tend to think that what makes a text legible is that they have regular spacing on the whole, hence the kerning theory Wired made. However, that doesn't take into account about the complexity of each character. I remember I've read somewhere that serifs are supposed to make texts easier to read, arguably because the serifs made all letters look about the same in complexity. Notice that in a serif font, the serifs are not the same size. "I" and "X" have different lengths. Not to mention that they make a suggested line on top and bottom of words, and between letters. In other words, the serifs make the letters look more uniform. This unexplained "weight" is most likely why the new Wired logo have serifs in the I and E, and none on the other letters. It's not just the kerning; without the serif in the "I", their same-spacing theory wouldn't work since the "I" would look out of place even when the spacing are the same.
It's more complex if a font doesn't have serifs. That means that you can't artificially inflate a letter's complexity, and have to depend on individual letter's original complexity and play around with the kerning to get the complexity evenly distributed.
A more interesting research is when one looks at complex scripts like Chinese and Korean. They have complex "letters" and most of them are approximately square. I believe this "volume" thing is universal, and much more insight can be gained from Chinese scripts and comparing their readability against western fonts. This got a promising research value, as the original theory sounds so simple it couldn't possibly be true, and as you think a little more about it, more interesting facts start to emerge.
I wouldn't consider the lack of ability to have photographic memory is necessarily bad though. I have a really bad memory, forget people's names within 5 minutes of meeting them, can't seem to remember street names and address, etc.
This results in me getting really bad grades in memory-minded Asian school, since we're practically must memorize every single little thing in exams. However, this lack of ability also allows me to be very selective on what to memorize (e.g. I discovered rather quickly what is important and what is not) and allows me to develop other skills to compensate since I can't remember shit.
I have to say that my lack of strong memory actually helped me a lot in later life. I learned at an early age, much unlike my peers, that if I understand something I don't need to memorize it. When everyone in my class tried very hard to memorize an A4 paper full of formulas, I can get away with memorizing three of them (in parts no less; I have problem memorizing a full formula so I have to separate them into logical parts) and derive the rest during exam. Now as far as I know I'm the only person in my high school class doing a PhD in Engineering. And I still can't remember shit.
I think the connection itself got nothing to do with the input source. I've been observing that noise on a daily basis (Australia is mostly GSM) and it seems to get picked up by the speaker cables. I'm guessing that in your setup it is digital from the source to the amp, and analog from the amp to the speakers, which is what the majority are. Unless you have a really high end system with balanced connections to all speakers, I think this is the case.
That noise is heard every time I'm about to receive a call, and during a call when I position my phone just right relative to my speaker, but only when I connect my computer to the speakers using the analog plug. When I switched to USB speakers, the noise disappears.
For your tabletop radio, it's likely that the internal connection between the amp and the speaker inside the thing is about the right length for a GSM antenna. In your car, the cable to the speakers are probably way too long to act as an antenna. Remember that GSM is using 900/1800 MHz frequency, so the antenna is not very long.
I'm just shooting in the dark here. I have no expertise in this kind of stuff, but I think the previous poster is correct. If you're using balanced connections all the way to the speakers, the noise should disappear.
A better scenario is a concerted hacking effort for all players, hardware and software, and release all the cracked keys simultaneously. THAT is an occurrence I'd very much like to see.
Something is very very wrong with the whole dev process when a beta tester wanted to jump ship.
MS product quality has taken a nosedive pretty much when Ballmer became CEO. It used to be OK-ish, now it's disastrous.
I'm really curious as to how they get into this mess. There is no excuse whatsoever for poor video playback and slow file access on a pretty powerful computer with enough RAM to hit the upper limit of what's supported by most motherboards.
The trend with MS products are much like id's product. They were made for the next generation of hardware. Win95 was not made for 486, XP was not made for 256Megs of RAM, etc etc. But dog slow on a nearly top of the line machine with more RAM than what NASA had access to during the moon landing? It's insane.
One possible explanation is that they're getting overly paranoid on security, they check everything. Another not so flattering explanation is that they're doing much work to make sure you're not copying something you're not supposed to. It's either fundamentally poor coding (which is unlikely) or heavily DRM-compliant, none of which are very easy to fix.
I installed Vista on an old XP computer and I noticed that with 512 Megs of RAM, it's impossible to do anything. I didn't notice if copying file was slow, I'm too pissed that EVERYTHING was slow. Can't even open more than five windows without it grinding to a halt. They're trying to copy OSX security prompts, but failed miserably because as a user, I don't see any proper privilege escalation. Case in point, modifying the firewall rules is not possible with a standard user. I have to open the computer manager thingy to do it. What the hell is the difference?
I can go on and on and complain a lot about why MS move stuff around so I can't find anything anymore. I pulled my hair out trying to find out my IP address which used to be so simple by looking at the properties of the network interface. Now they're putting many many links on each window that just makes everything looks cluttered and confusing. I gave up and used the good old ipconfig instead, but now ipconfig listed so many interfaces I'm not sure which is which until I read them closely.
If Vista is hard to be used by me (and I think I can safely say that I'm pretty computer-literate), then I can't imagine how regular users would feel.
They might be better off by not fixing what's not broken in XP instead of reinventing a worse wheel. Give me my Windows 2000 back. THAT is an OS done right, by MS standards.
Someone remind me why I need to "upgrade" to an OS where everything is slower and comes with a restriction for pretty much anything. Not to mention it's not really more secure than a fully patched XP anyway. AND it requires me to upgrade my RAM to do less. How's that making any sense?
MS is pretty much mistaken when they thought people will blindly go for Vista when all they could offer as an improvement from XP was transparent windows. Bleh.
But isn't the current patent and copyright scheme could be viewed as a compromise between the two approaches you mentioned?
It all boils down to the question of reward for the artist. The RIAA/MPAA distort this heavily by hiding behind the artist while their true intention is to reward the distributor. One possible way out of this mess it for artists to become corporations themselves, where funding could be provided by VCs instead of recording companies as it is now. The artist could then potentially sell shares so the fan of the artist could also benefit from his/her popularity while enabling the artist not to sell their copyright to the recording companies, thus retaining full artistic freedom.
This way, everyone's happy (except the RIAA).
I think some artists are already creating their own label & studios to support them and any artist that they care to support (Steve Vai comes to mind). He stopped short of selling shares of himself, but I for one am willing to buy "Steve Vai shares" if he ever decide to sell some.
Slashdot Mirror
But... he's a lumberjack, so he must be OK.
Actually roaming capability totally depends on your mobile carrier. I'm in Australia, and big companies like Telstra (Aussie equivalent of your ATT), Vodafone and Optus have roaming agreement with practically the whole planet. I brought my cell phone on roaming to the US, Canada and China and can use it albeit with neck-strangling roaming charges.
For the American, this is not a problem of isolationism or anything. It's just simply corporate greed, nothing more. Anywhere in the world is the same. You should take a look at the prices here in Australia before the mobile operator called "3" came into the market and forces everyone to lower their prices. Right then, everyone realized how crazily overpriced mobile service really was.
Problem is, if you expect every customer of yours to read the manual, there goes 95% of your market. You have to accept that some people just don't want to read manuals, but that doesn't necessarily make them stupid. I accepted this fact a long time ago and stop bugging my friends about reading the manual of everything they buy. Me, I'm a compulsive manual reader. I have to read the manual first before touching anything. I even read the manual on my new guitar first before I use it. Most people in the world is not like us.
It shouldn't be this arcane just to turn off a device. It seems that Apple designed the iPhone in iPod fashion, where it never really turns off unless you leave it untouched for a long period of time. The problem is, an iPod doesn't incur a hefty bill. I don't think Apple made this bad design consciously, it's more likely that ATT just keep quiet about this fact and reap the benefit from the unknowing user later on (as most phone companies do). Apple is not totally blameless though. If they really want to compete in the global cell phone market, this mistake is inexcusable.
The TFA said it all: Apple spokeswoman Natalie Kerris points out in its terms and conditions that it will cost an arm an a leg to use an Iphone out of the US even if no services are intentionally used.
IANAL, but the customer is most likely out of luck if he tries to challenge this. After all, this is in the terms & conditions that he supposedly agreed upon.
This is another major blow to iPhone, on top of the recent price cut. Now we have an Apple spokeswoman admitting freely that the simple act of bringing it out of the country without using it actually cost "and arm and a leg". I have to point the blame to ATT for greed and Apple for letting this happen. How much more can you rip off from your early adopters (which are presumably loyal Apple customers)?
You don't need to use a hotmail account to keep using MSN. Once you're in, you can change the email (thus your msn ID) to whatever you want. If not for MSN, I don't think anyone would willingly want to use Hotmail anymore nowadays. Be warned that if you don't login to your Hotmail account in 3 months, it will disappear. This surprised me at first, seeing how my Yahoo account was practically untouched for more than two years but still intact.
Electrical engineering, and I do prefer normal working hours :)
What I found out was that my brain can only work 4 hours a day and no more. 5 if I'm lucky or have a deadline. I can considerably extend that 4 hours to do something else if I do normal working hours.
I think all of us got that stage of working weird hours. I used to work from 8pm to 2-3am, but after a while I saw the wisdom in working normal hours.
Hell I'm a grad student and I don't get treated like that. Dismantling someone's experiment out of some higher-ups whim is not what I would consider normal, or I'm just really lucky to have a supervisor that I can actually talk to instead of him expecting me to treat him like a royal subject or anything.
Now there's a lot of "don't-knows" in that little story, but that goddamn student is in the lab at an hour that I wouldn't consider normal working hours (on the weekend, no less), so it's probably safe to say that he/she's been working on that experiment for quite some time or simply just having a bad luck of getting elbowed all the time so there's no other hours available. Imagine waiting for a time slot in a lab and then when you're finally can get some work done, it's suddenly getting ripped apart by someone who has already elbowed your time many times over. If I were in that position, I would be considerably pissed and very likely to do something about it.
The point being, even if you're Einstein and Newton incarnate combined, you have no right whatsoever to do whatever you please to anyone else. Lederman should have the decency of helping the student to put his/her experiment back to the way it was before, it's very plausible that he has the ability to. However, judging from his tone of no regret in the interview, most likely he didn't care and just left the student to pick up the pieces of his brilliant experiment.
I believe the question is, did he actually repair the damage that he had done? Or he simply used the grad student's experiment because he thinks that a student's experiment is expendable and unimportant?
Great mind, horrible human being.
That is just goddamn sick. You're pretty much expected never ever to screw up even once from the moment you're born. What I can foresee happening in the next 50 or so years is the constantly increasing standard on what will be called a "screwup". What? You cheated on a test in high school? Sorry, no job for you. What? You're smoking? no job for you. In a manner of speaking, this scheme inadvertently (or advertently?) create a caste system like what Japan has hundreds of years ago. I'm not a Japanese, but IIRC some people are considered sub-human while the samurai class can kill anyone below their caste at whim. The US is slowly moving back to feudal age, it seems.
What's disgusting is how some caste are immune to this so-called law. Take the celebrity caste, for instance. They can freely get rehab hundreds of times in their life and still have a job. For the rest of us, it'll be hopeless. I'm very sure that some in the politician caste also have gone to rehab, but somehow they can get exempted from this law.
There will be effort to connect various countries databases, I'm sure. At that time, if you screwed up once, the only option you have is to move to another planet. Or, you can always enter politics.
Imagine if one day the databases got corrupted, and suddenly you find yourself in the no-job list even though you've built your career legitimately for decades in the US as a foreigner. Not a scenario I'd like to live with, and something I'd rather not risk to happen. I just hope the Australian govt don't go along with this brain-dead scheme.
How much you wanna bet that soon the politicians will help themselves to no-tax and no-small-income list. Or maybe they did that already? I know for sure that they're already in the no-brain list.
Heh. Yeah. Definitely no-brain list.
Nope, it's been proven that humans cannot hear ultrasonic sounds. Dogs, yes. Humans, no. Otherwise, you'll be reacting to a dog whistle.
The only argument against CD is that people are getting concerned that 16 bit is a little on the low side, and getting 24 bit or more is better. For the time being, there's no argument that the sampling rate is too low. What you hear coming out from your speaker is the result of the D/A converter, so if your CD sounds bad, it's probably your player/amps/speakers and not due to a defect in the CD technique itself.
A lot about music and hearing is subjective. You can convince yourself that your shower radio sounds better than a $10,000 equipment if you try really hard. It's fine by me if people judge vinyl sounds better than a CD, but from a technical standpoint, it is not.
I believe engineers know that the ear is non-linear. CD is linear simply because they throw everything into a single number (sampling rate and bit depth), but mp3 and aac most definitely not. They use human perception to vary the encoding of various bands to control the distortion and achieve "compression" by actually creating distortion in the parts where you'll not likely to notice due to masking effect and such.
For vinyl vs cd, the most damaging argument to vinyl is that it uses constant angular value instead of constant linear value, so you got more data at the edges compared to the inside tracks, hence you have lower fidelity as you go. I say if people like vinyl, let them be. Arguing which sounds better than which is purely subjective.
I think there's more to it than that. After I stare at the A and V for a while, I realize that what matters is probably the "weight" of the letters. By weight, I mean how complicated a letter look, and how that complexity is distributed throughout the text. So you're correct, this is not as simple as it sounds.
We humans like things regular. I would tend to think that what makes a text legible is that they have regular spacing on the whole, hence the kerning theory Wired made. However, that doesn't take into account about the complexity of each character. I remember I've read somewhere that serifs are supposed to make texts easier to read, arguably because the serifs made all letters look about the same in complexity. Notice that in a serif font, the serifs are not the same size. "I" and "X" have different lengths. Not to mention that they make a suggested line on top and bottom of words, and between letters. In other words, the serifs make the letters look more uniform. This unexplained "weight" is most likely why the new Wired logo have serifs in the I and E, and none on the other letters. It's not just the kerning; without the serif in the "I", their same-spacing theory wouldn't work since the "I" would look out of place even when the spacing are the same.
It's more complex if a font doesn't have serifs. That means that you can't artificially inflate a letter's complexity, and have to depend on individual letter's original complexity and play around with the kerning to get the complexity evenly distributed.
A more interesting research is when one looks at complex scripts like Chinese and Korean. They have complex "letters" and most of them are approximately square. I believe this "volume" thing is universal, and much more insight can be gained from Chinese scripts and comparing their readability against western fonts. This got a promising research value, as the original theory sounds so simple it couldn't possibly be true, and as you think a little more about it, more interesting facts start to emerge.
What? Did you forget that you were accepted the first time around?
I wouldn't consider the lack of ability to have photographic memory is necessarily bad though. I have a really bad memory, forget people's names within 5 minutes of meeting them, can't seem to remember street names and address, etc.
This results in me getting really bad grades in memory-minded Asian school, since we're practically must memorize every single little thing in exams. However, this lack of ability also allows me to be very selective on what to memorize (e.g. I discovered rather quickly what is important and what is not) and allows me to develop other skills to compensate since I can't remember shit.
I have to say that my lack of strong memory actually helped me a lot in later life. I learned at an early age, much unlike my peers, that if I understand something I don't need to memorize it. When everyone in my class tried very hard to memorize an A4 paper full of formulas, I can get away with memorizing three of them (in parts no less; I have problem memorizing a full formula so I have to separate them into logical parts) and derive the rest during exam. Now as far as I know I'm the only person in my high school class doing a PhD in Engineering. And I still can't remember shit.
Now what was that article about again?
I think the connection itself got nothing to do with the input source. I've been observing that noise on a daily basis (Australia is mostly GSM) and it seems to get picked up by the speaker cables. I'm guessing that in your setup it is digital from the source to the amp, and analog from the amp to the speakers, which is what the majority are. Unless you have a really high end system with balanced connections to all speakers, I think this is the case.
That noise is heard every time I'm about to receive a call, and during a call when I position my phone just right relative to my speaker, but only when I connect my computer to the speakers using the analog plug. When I switched to USB speakers, the noise disappears.
For your tabletop radio, it's likely that the internal connection between the amp and the speaker inside the thing is about the right length for a GSM antenna. In your car, the cable to the speakers are probably way too long to act as an antenna. Remember that GSM is using 900/1800 MHz frequency, so the antenna is not very long.
I'm just shooting in the dark here. I have no expertise in this kind of stuff, but I think the previous poster is correct. If you're using balanced connections all the way to the speakers, the noise should disappear.
A better scenario is a concerted hacking effort for all players, hardware and software, and release all the cracked keys simultaneously. THAT is an occurrence I'd very much like to see.
UNIX was made by researchers for their own security.
Windows was made by MS for their own "security".
There's a big difference there.
All the myriad of hooks you mentioned might just be intentional, for purposes that benefit some, and not so beneficial to many.
What??? I don't recall ever reading anything about this.
How was the XP key invalidated? You can't activate XP or what? What about OEM or volume keys?
I have thousands of files to process and I just spoke to God. He said don't even try.
Something is very very wrong with the whole dev process when a beta tester wanted to jump ship.
MS product quality has taken a nosedive pretty much when Ballmer became CEO. It used to be OK-ish, now it's disastrous.
I'm really curious as to how they get into this mess. There is no excuse whatsoever for poor video playback and slow file access on a pretty powerful computer with enough RAM to hit the upper limit of what's supported by most motherboards.
The trend with MS products are much like id's product. They were made for the next generation of hardware. Win95 was not made for 486, XP was not made for 256Megs of RAM, etc etc. But dog slow on a nearly top of the line machine with more RAM than what NASA had access to during the moon landing? It's insane.
One possible explanation is that they're getting overly paranoid on security, they check everything. Another not so flattering explanation is that they're doing much work to make sure you're not copying something you're not supposed to. It's either fundamentally poor coding (which is unlikely) or heavily DRM-compliant, none of which are very easy to fix.
I installed Vista on an old XP computer and I noticed that with 512 Megs of RAM, it's impossible to do anything. I didn't notice if copying file was slow, I'm too pissed that EVERYTHING was slow. Can't even open more than five windows without it grinding to a halt. They're trying to copy OSX security prompts, but failed miserably because as a user, I don't see any proper privilege escalation. Case in point, modifying the firewall rules is not possible with a standard user. I have to open the computer manager thingy to do it. What the hell is the difference?
I can go on and on and complain a lot about why MS move stuff around so I can't find anything anymore. I pulled my hair out trying to find out my IP address which used to be so simple by looking at the properties of the network interface. Now they're putting many many links on each window that just makes everything looks cluttered and confusing. I gave up and used the good old ipconfig instead, but now ipconfig listed so many interfaces I'm not sure which is which until I read them closely.
If Vista is hard to be used by me (and I think I can safely say that I'm pretty computer-literate), then I can't imagine how regular users would feel.
They might be better off by not fixing what's not broken in XP instead of reinventing a worse wheel. Give me my Windows 2000 back. THAT is an OS done right, by MS standards.
Someone remind me why I need to "upgrade" to an OS where everything is slower and comes with a restriction for pretty much anything. Not to mention it's not really more secure than a fully patched XP anyway. AND it requires me to upgrade my RAM to do less. How's that making any sense?
MS is pretty much mistaken when they thought people will blindly go for Vista when all they could offer as an improvement from XP was transparent windows. Bleh.
But isn't the current patent and copyright scheme could be viewed as a compromise between the two approaches you mentioned?
It all boils down to the question of reward for the artist. The RIAA/MPAA distort this heavily by hiding behind the artist while their true intention is to reward the distributor. One possible way out of this mess it for artists to become corporations themselves, where funding could be provided by VCs instead of recording companies as it is now. The artist could then potentially sell shares so the fan of the artist could also benefit from his/her popularity while enabling the artist not to sell their copyright to the recording companies, thus retaining full artistic freedom.
This way, everyone's happy (except the RIAA).
I think some artists are already creating their own label & studios to support them and any artist that they care to support (Steve Vai comes to mind). He stopped short of selling shares of himself, but I for one am willing to buy "Steve Vai shares" if he ever decide to sell some.