Wouldn't get too excited. It's still 625 line PAL, just with a single bit to tell the TV whether it's widescreen or not. Widescreen is the same picture resolution, just stretched horizontally. The US standard actually uses a higher resolution.
As for PAL's higher resolution vs. NTSC - That's true, but the difference isn't huge, and many people prefer the higher framerate of NTSC. It's apparently a slightly better format in that the way it deals with colour though.
I accept that it's bad to have strong copyright restrictions on abandonware, but unconstitutional? I can't see any real evidence for this. I can't see how it can be unconstitutional, when non-automatic copyright is not.
Not that this case is a bad idea. It's useful to make the public aware that copyright has some negative side effects. However, I really doubt that it will be succesful.
It appears this is going to be set in 1898, which is about the right time, but will the Aliens land in Woking in Surrey? If so, where will they film it? Woking today doesn't look a lot like it did 100 years ago. (Although there's a nice statue of an alien war machine in near the shopping centre).
The other question is will it follow the plot of the book reasonably closely, or will it diverge after a few pages, like Minority Report did?
Thinking about it, I'm wondering whether I've got the wrong end of the stick. Forcing MS to release a cut down version of the OS would make sense as a punishment for other violations.
Should Windows include calc.exe, notepad.exe, explorer.exe, regedit.exe, winhelp.exe and cmd.exe? You can get third party equivalents for all of these applications. Which ones are part of the OS, and which are extras?
Re:Who decides what should and shouldn't be includ
on
Microsoft and EU Talks End
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· Score: 2, Informative
Windows 3.0 did not have media player as far as I remember. They made big fuss in 3.1 when some basic sound tools were introduced as "multimedia" R
Yup. Video players are simply an extension of basic sound utils.
M$ is a monopoly (repeat monopoly). That is why certain retriction apply (and more should) that do not exist if the market is competitive.
There is no crime in being a monopoly. Several companies are lucky enough to have a disproportionate amount of market share. This is nopt a crime, and no restrictions should apply. Microsofts crime was being anti-competitive. They were using their dominant position to bully providers into only supplying Microsoft applications. The only reason being a monopoly is at all relevant is that if they were not a monopoly, these tactics would not have worked. People would have simply switched to their competitors.
Who decides what should and shouldn't be included?
on
Microsoft and EU Talks End
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Windows has included at least some form of media player since 3.11 at least, and I suspect long before that. So do all Linux distributions, and so did BeOS. A media player of some sort is a part of a modern OS distibution.
Who are we to say what they can and can't add to their OS? If I released a third party calculator application, could I demand they remove calc.exe from Windows? How about telnet and ftp? Both of these have commercially available equivalents. So do disk utitilies, that are pretty much equivalent to disk defragmenter. Should Windows come with no applications at all? Can they even justify allowing them to bundle windows explorer (Not IE - I mean the file system browser)? It would be easy enough to write an alternative.
If I release an application for a platform that already contains the equivalent, I have no justification to complain that they're not playing fair. I can either make it better than the one that comes with the OS, try to sell it to the OS vendor, or try making my money some other way.
They can't unilaterally revoke the licence. They could only refuse to support the software. This would be a great benefit to their competitors, and we would see a whole slew of competing operating systems, some open source, others proprietry, to fill in the hole.
It's just marketing. They think people will have trouble dealing with dimensions. Also "Megapixels" sounds cooler. It suggests there are some fantastic versions of pixels in this camera, or if you know what the prexis "Mega" means, it says we're looking at milliions, rather than the rather mundane thousands of pixels in vertical and horizontal resolution.
I suppose you'd also prefer if auto manufacturers told you that a cars engine was a 84x90 vs simply stating that it has a 3litre engine?
That would be pretty useless. People care about the volume, because that's what they're dealing with. The dimensions are irellevant.
The actual dimensions of a digital image are relevant. I work in width and height. I don't try to reduce a 3 megapixel image to 1 megapixel. I convert an image from 2048x1526 to 1152x864. It is useful to know this information, because that's what people are dealing with. Monitors give maximum resolutions in widthxheight after all.
Does Project Gutenberg 2 have any affiliation with Project Gutenberg? It appears not. This would appear to be trademark infringement.
Apart from that, there's nothing wrong with it. People are making money off of public domain works. Good for them. That's one of the benefits of the public domain. People can do this. I'm not quite sure why people should want to buy something that they can get for free, but that's beside the point. If they want it, PG2 is providing the service.
Yeah, but my way's easiest, and better for both. If he doesn't visit, the website doesn't have any bandwidth costs, and he doesn't have to look at ads.
Of course not. I'm trolling. Details like facts get in the way.
Worst idea since spell checkers
on
Fault Tolerant Shell
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· Score: 4, Insightful
This will not improve people's skills. In fact, it willl make them more prone to mistakes, and more likely to get the result that they didn't expect. It's similat to computer spell checkers. Ever since people started relying on these, their spelling has gone way downhill simly because they don't bother thinking. Computer do all the spelling for them. They don;t need a spell checker. They need spelling lessons.
This si even worse. Computers will try to second guess what the user means, get get it wrong half tyhe time.
A qualified shell scripter will be not make these mistakes in the first place. Anyone who thinks they need this shell actually just need to learn to spell and to ytype accuratly.
Okay, so this is a jurisdictions thing. Gotta love these. The internet makes it all that much more fun. Can he really be extradited purely because the internet was involved, and therefopre the effect of the crime was felt in every country? If so, it's a very dangerous precedent. I gather he's been found Not guilty in Australia, so this will make it a retrial. But if this is about copyright infringement, then surely companies with a prescence in Britain, New Zealand, France, Germany, Japan, South African, Malaysia, China, and Saudi Arabia will also be affected. So even if he is cleared by the US court, can all of those countries also charge him with copyright infringement? Can he be tried repeatedly, until they either run out of countries, or one of them finds him guilty?
This could mean that the guy could spend the rest of his life defending himself against exactly the same charge, in any country that has a similar extradition treaty with Australia. There's a good reason that people should only be tried once.
This seems to be more dependent on graphics cards than CPU. I was quite surprised when my 500MHz Pentium 3 with a GeForce 4 totally outpaced a 2GHz machine with a GeForce 2.
I actually seem to have enough CPU power at the moment, or at least sufficient that I find the hassles and cost of upgrading a 4 year old machine to outweigh the benefits. I never thought I'd see that happen.
Slashdot Mirror
Wouldn't get too excited. It's still 625 line PAL, just with a single bit to tell the TV whether it's widescreen or not. Widescreen is the same picture resolution, just stretched horizontally. The US standard actually uses a higher resolution.
As for PAL's higher resolution vs. NTSC - That's true, but the difference isn't huge, and many people prefer the higher framerate of NTSC. It's apparently a slightly better format in that the way it deals with colour though.
I accept that it's bad to have strong copyright restrictions on abandonware, but unconstitutional? I can't see any real evidence for this. I can't see how it can be unconstitutional, when non-automatic copyright is not.
Not that this case is a bad idea. It's useful to make the public aware that copyright has some negative side effects. However, I really doubt that it will be succesful.
It appears this is going to be set in 1898, which is about the right time, but will the Aliens land in Woking in Surrey? If so, where will they film it? Woking today doesn't look a lot like it did 100 years ago. (Although there's a nice statue of an alien war machine in near the shopping centre).
The other question is will it follow the plot of the book reasonably closely, or will it diverge after a few pages, like Minority Report did?
Thinking about it, I'm wondering whether I've got the wrong end of the stick. Forcing MS to release a cut down version of the OS would make sense as a punishment for other violations.
Note to self: remember to preview before posting.
Should Windows include calc.exe, notepad.exe, explorer.exe, regedit.exe, winhelp.exe and cmd.exe? You can get third party equivalents for all of these applications. Which ones are part of the OS, and which are extras?
Windows 3.0 did not have media player as far as I remember. They made big fuss in 3.1 when some basic sound tools were introduced as "multimedia"
R Yup. Video players are simply an extension of basic sound utils.
M$ is a monopoly (repeat monopoly). That is why certain retriction apply (and more should) that do not exist if the market is competitive.
There is no crime in being a monopoly. Several companies are lucky enough to have a disproportionate amount of market share. This is nopt a crime, and no restrictions should apply. Microsofts crime was being anti-competitive. They were using their dominant position to bully providers into only supplying Microsoft applications. The only reason being a monopoly is at all relevant is that if they were not a monopoly, these tactics would not have worked. People would have simply switched to their competitors.
Windows has included at least some form of media player since 3.11 at least, and I suspect long before that. So do all Linux distributions, and so did BeOS. A media player of some sort is a part of a modern OS distibution.
Who are we to say what they can and can't add to their OS? If I released a third party calculator application, could I demand they remove calc.exe from Windows? How about telnet and ftp? Both of these have commercially available equivalents. So do disk utitilies, that are pretty much equivalent to disk defragmenter. Should Windows come with no applications at all? Can they even justify allowing them to bundle windows explorer (Not IE - I mean the file system browser)? It would be easy enough to write an alternative.
If I release an application for a platform that already contains the equivalent, I have no justification to complain that they're not playing fair. I can either make it better than the one that comes with the OS, try to sell it to the OS vendor, or try making my money some other way.
They can't unilaterally revoke the licence. They could only refuse to support the software. This would be a great benefit to their competitors, and we would see a whole slew of competing operating systems, some open source, others proprietry, to fill in the hole.
It's just marketing. They think people will have trouble dealing with dimensions. Also "Megapixels" sounds cooler. It suggests there are some fantastic versions of pixels in this camera, or if you know what the prexis "Mega" means, it says we're looking at milliions, rather than the rather mundane thousands of pixels in vertical and horizontal resolution.
I suppose you'd also prefer if auto manufacturers told you that a cars engine was a 84x90 vs simply stating that it has a 3litre engine?
That would be pretty useless. People care about the volume, because that's what they're dealing with. The dimensions are irellevant.
The actual dimensions of a digital image are relevant. I work in width and height. I don't try to reduce a 3 megapixel image to 1 megapixel. I convert an image from 2048x1526 to 1152x864. It is useful to know this information, because that's what people are dealing with. Monitors give maximum resolutions in widthxheight after all.
I, on the other had, had an 8-processor rs/6000, a sun sparc laptop, a dell laptop running linux ... I do let other people in my department use them.
Please tell me where you work - It sounds like geek heaven.
Try set up a MS 2 webpage...
Or call a Linux distribution "Lindows".
Does Project Gutenberg 2 have any affiliation with Project Gutenberg? It appears not. This would appear to be trademark infringement.
Apart from that, there's nothing wrong with it. People are making money off of public domain works. Good for them. That's one of the benefits of the public domain. People can do this. I'm not quite sure why people should want to buy something that they can get for free, but that's beside the point. If they want it, PG2 is providing the service.
Yeah, but my way's easiest, and better for both. If he doesn't visit, the website doesn't have any bandwidth costs, and he doesn't have to look at ads.
Rule #1: I can turn them off
You can. don't visit the site with the advertisement. Hey presto, no ads.
You mean one without decent multimedia support?
They can be blocked. The trick for the advertisers is to make people want enough of the ads that they would prefer not to block them.
You could simply avoid the sites that advertise. Avoid the web entirely.
MS clearly has a different way of spelling the words "computer" and "do".
Of course not. I'm trolling. Details like facts get in the way.
This will not improve people's skills. In fact, it willl make them more prone to mistakes, and more likely to get the result that they didn't expect. It's similat to computer spell checkers. Ever since people started relying on these, their spelling has gone way downhill simly because they don't bother thinking. Computer do all the spelling for them. They don;t need a spell checker. They need spelling lessons.
This si even worse. Computers will try to second guess what the user means, get get it wrong half tyhe time.
A qualified shell scripter will be not make these mistakes in the first place. Anyone who thinks they need this shell actually just need to learn to spell and to ytype accuratly.
Okay, so this is a jurisdictions thing. Gotta love these. The internet makes it all that much more fun. Can he really be extradited purely because the internet was involved, and therefopre the effect of the crime was felt in every country? If so, it's a very dangerous precedent. I gather he's been found Not guilty in Australia, so this will make it a retrial. But if this is about copyright infringement, then surely companies with a prescence in Britain, New Zealand, France, Germany, Japan, South African, Malaysia, China, and Saudi Arabia will also be affected. So even if he is cleared by the US court, can all of those countries also charge him with copyright infringement? Can he be tried repeatedly, until they either run out of countries, or one of them finds him guilty?
This could mean that the guy could spend the rest of his life defending himself against exactly the same charge, in any country that has a similar extradition treaty with Australia. There's a good reason that people should only be tried once.
I'm not a newbie. It's simply that the 2 machines I had before that didn't have a hard disk.
This seems to be more dependent on graphics cards than CPU. I was quite surprised when my 500MHz Pentium 3 with a GeForce 4 totally outpaced a 2GHz machine with a GeForce 2.
I actually seem to have enough CPU power at the moment, or at least sufficient that I find the hassles and cost of upgrading a 4 year old machine to outweigh the benefits. I never thought I'd see that happen.