Go to the Dell website. Click on the computers (either notebook or desktop) for Small/Home Office, instead of for consumers. There, you'll find a product line called the Vostro, which offers the same hardware as the Inspiron line of product, but a different aesthetic look/feel. The difference? On the Vostro, you have an option to upgrade from Vista Home Basic to Vista Business edition... last I checked, it was $90. One of the two Business options is to have it come with XP Professional pre-installed.
It's not hard. You don't have to lie. You don't have to be a business to order it. And you can order it through the website without having to speak to a sales rep. (though you can also ask for it over the phone)
You laugh... but I've known people who live in Maine that couldn't find Canada on a map. I could understand from the deep south, where Canada is a mythical land of igloos and Eskimos, but Maine?!? There's parts of Canada that are further south than Maine, and there was a time when that state was part of Canada, for crying out loud....
The funny thing is... it's not even a new technology. It's been done... my 42" LG 42LB5D has a feature that's eerily similar to what's described in the summary... It can be hooked up to a USB hard drive, and display pictures, play mp3s, and other media content. *shrugs*
That makes as much sense as any other explanation I've heard. More than others actually... and may explain why my own router seems to be defective, in that I can't remember the last time I had to reboot it.... Mine's a WRT54G, and it's even using the original stock Linksys/Cisco firmware.:) It's not on a UPS any more, but it was on one until I decomissioned the server that was running through its wired net.
Instead of working like every other cache system in the world, Superfetch tries to guess what files you might need in RAM. Based on the complaints, it appears that it guesses wrong most of the time.
Superfetch is like early speech recognition software (and some current gen stuff). At the beginning, it makes a lot of mistakes and generally sucks. As you use it more, it learns your patterns. It needs to be trained, and over time the miss rate goes down drastically, and it really does improve things. You can also improve the sluggishness in Vista by going into the performance settings and letting it auto-tune itself to your computer's capabilities.
Funny... but also insightful. As much of an environmentalist as I am (and I am), I'd say give it to them on paper. Maybe compromise, on 100% post-consumer fibre paper.... They want reams and reams of information that they don't really have a right to, and a judge is going along with it, so give it to them. In a format that will take them a decade to sift through, by which time it won't be relevant any more.
Hey... I still use Altavista. Though admittedly, mostly for Babelfish. Who doesn't like a game of Babelfish Tag, where you take a simple message like "I like Chinese food", pass it through Babelfish 10 times, and then give it to the person sitting next to you at work so they can guess what the message was.:)
My ICQ number was in the 386,000 range... can't remember the last 3 digits. Of course, I haven't used it since 1999, so I doubt the account is still up and running.
My big concern about this is whether this is a test to measure reaction before they start blocking 3rd party clients on AIM, which I do use. (though mostly I'm on Yahoo and MSN)
How have you been hurt by the inability to copy something for which you haven't paid? Provide a concrete example.
And yet how has the copyright holder been hurt by people making copies of their stuff? Authors, computer programmers, musicians, etc. all need to eat. If you steal their work without paying for it, then you are taking money out of their pockets, and in turn, taking food out of their mouths. Some of them choose to give away their work... usually those are the ones who have an alternate source of income on which they actually survive, but sometimes they give it away in the hopes that donations will support them. If they've chosen not to give it away for free, then they probably have a reason for doing so.
In the case of music, piracy has been happening for as long as there has been recorded music. But the technologies which enable it haven't been ubiquitous enough to make a significant dent in their bottom line. Sales losses due to piracy have been lost in the white noise. Now that most of us have a computer or two, it's not the case any more. It's just too easy to copy it, and people who have built their business model around the inability to copy the work are running scared.
I'm not saying that they shouldn't be updating their business model to reflect the current trends, but I am saying that the idea that copying something hurts nobody is ill-informed. In the end, it hurts an awful lot more than just the billion-dollar corporations, though it may take a while to trickle down to the little guy.
And before some nit says it, it costs money to make a record. Time in a proper recording studio costs money, setting up your own recording studio costs money, and engineering the sound properly is a major undertaking. It's a difficult task, and one that most of us can't do without training. Having decent sound engineering on a CD can, and has, made the difference between selling 1 million copies, and selling 20 million copies. (as happened with Metallica on the Black album). The technologies are there to allow you to record, engineer, and promote your own stuff, but that's a varied skill set that most of us just don't have, and as a result, it makes more sense to pay somebody to do it for you.
Whenever I buy a CD (and yes, I do still buy them) I check the label. If it's a member off the RIAA, I don't buy it. It's not that hard to avoid them, if you know where to look. And because they aren't afraid of taking a risk (well, aren't *as* afraid) you tend to find better music on the indy labels anyway.
Sadly not... they're spending more money to produce the crap that they're making now than they did to make the truly good works of art of yesteryear. The movie industry has been going steadily downhill since 1939 (slowly at first, but with gaining moment recently), and the music industry has been going downhill since the 1970's. There's still a few places you can go to see real talent, but it's mostly been stifled by people who would rather not take risks.
Your friends in Canada will mock you too... I'm on 10/1 cable, for $60/month. It doesn't officially have a static IP, but their DHCP lease is 1 month and automatically extends every time you renew it.. and it's tied to your MAC address, so it is, for all intents and purposes, static as long as you reboot the router once every 3 weeks.
The only alternative is $cableCompany, which is another monopoly with either throttling or lower bandwidth caps, and at a higher price (the specific cable company varies from province to province)
I still ended up switching to Rogers, in Ontario. I'm paying less than I was for my DSL through Magma (now Primus), and getting faster service. Admittedly, throughput sucks royally when I download a bittorrent, but one of the advantages of having a server in colocation is that I can use some of its spare bandwidth to download torrents (capping it at 1mbit, still faster than I get on Rogers despite being on a 10mbit cable connection)...
But what I really wanted to point out was that not all of the cable monopolies suck worse than Bell. If I lived in Quebec, I'd be on Videotron without a 2nd thought... you can get a 30mbit cable connection from them for what I was paying for my 3mbit/800kbit DSL through Primus. And they offer connections up to 50mbit.
AverMedia M780 is a dual-tuner PCIe X1 card whose driver allows it to be used as a hardware MPEG decoder for DVD or Blu-Ray. Coincidentally, it gives the best reception of any card I've ever used. Unfortunately, as of right now it does not work under Linux, but a 1.5GHz C7 w/ 2GB of RAM and the onboard Via graphics is powerful enough to run Vista Ultimate edition with Aero turned on at S-Video or component video 480p resolution. Not that you'd actually use that particular OS. (Well, my HTPC is running it, but I got a free copy through my work MSDN subscription.) It's probably not powerful enough for 1080p, but you can install a discrete graphics card if you prefer.
As far as I'm concerned the moment you hack your console to do homebrew or whatever else, you forfeit the expectation that purchased software released in the future will work or be compatible.
Oh, I agree with you fully. I haven't hacked my Wii, and I have no intention of doing so. I have an HTPC and a laptop computer for stuff like that, and have absolutely no reason to void the warranty on my console. I bought the console for specifically that reason: so I can buy games for years to come and have no worries about whether it'll work, or whether I'll have to spend hundreds of dollars every 2 years to keep it up to date. The fact that the Wii was cheaper than a new computer in the first place was just a pleasant bonus.
some of the updates are manditory, and they do have the ability to force one through a game... I had to install an update to my console the first time I played Mario Kart.
I've seen patches forced by games, though... specifically, when I bought and played Mario Kart Wii, it pushed an update to my console, saying it couldn't play without the current version of the software.
There's no reason they can't keep doing that in order to push newer updates on people.
I'm not really worried about it... *shrugs* maybe I'm in the minority here, but I'd rather have something that just works, rather than try to hack at it. I have a laptop for playing things like MAME, and said laptop has an HDMI output to my TV, so it can carry higher resolution than the Wii. Throw in a Logitech gamepad, and you're doing just as well as playing them on the Wii.
And most of those games are still on an Atari 7800 level in 2008. And before I'm told that I don't understand Linux/FOSS; I use Linux every day, but the Linux gaming situation is pitiful. Now, I'll expect one of the following responses from someone here: 1. "But it runs World of Warcraft (in Wine)!" 2. "Linux users aren't worried about games, buy an XBox 360. Lack of games is a feature of Linux!"
*shrugs* you're right. There's actually only two Linux-native games I play... One of them is SL, and that's largely to keep in touch with the other half while she's away. The other is Wormux. There are other games that are Linux-native, but you don't tend to see games like, say, Jade Empire, appearing native in Linux.
Most of the PC games I play run under Wine, but many of them don't.... that is why I've been moving my gaming over to console.:) Much cheaper to run in the long run, because I don't have to worry about upgrading the hardware of the console every 6 months just to be able to play the current games.
That said, I've not used the balance board yet so I don't know how realistic the skiing/boarding is.
I don't snowboard, so can't really comment on how realistic that part is. As for the skiing, I found it's too responsive. I used to race GS and Super GS on my school team, and the Wii version thereof is far too responsive... hugely oversteering. That could be the difference between parabolic skis and traditional skis... the last pair I bought was a pair of 210cm K2 Extreme, almost 15 years ago. I want to get back into the sport, but I'm still recovering from a serious knee injury.:( (trauma... torn meniscus, ACL, and fractured patella and tibia)
Slashdot Mirror
Go to the Dell website. Click on the computers (either notebook or desktop) for Small/Home Office, instead of for consumers. There, you'll find a product line called the Vostro, which offers the same hardware as the Inspiron line of product, but a different aesthetic look/feel. The difference? On the Vostro, you have an option to upgrade from Vista Home Basic to Vista Business edition... last I checked, it was $90. One of the two Business options is to have it come with XP Professional pre-installed.
It's not hard. You don't have to lie. You don't have to be a business to order it. And you can order it through the website without having to speak to a sales rep. (though you can also ask for it over the phone)
You laugh... but I've known people who live in Maine that couldn't find Canada on a map. I could understand from the deep south, where Canada is a mythical land of igloos and Eskimos, but Maine?!? There's parts of Canada that are further south than Maine, and there was a time when that state was part of Canada, for crying out loud....
On the other hand... if your process looks like this:
int main() {
while (TRUE) {
fork();
}
}
It might do a pretty good job of tying up resources. :)
*whooosh*
DNF = Duke Nukem Forever
The funny thing is... it's not even a new technology. It's been done... my 42" LG 42LB5D has a feature that's eerily similar to what's described in the summary... It can be hooked up to a USB hard drive, and display pictures, play mp3s, and other media content. *shrugs*
That makes as much sense as any other explanation I've heard. More than others actually... and may explain why my own router seems to be defective, in that I can't remember the last time I had to reboot it.... Mine's a WRT54G, and it's even using the original stock Linksys/Cisco firmware. :) It's not on a UPS any more, but it was on one until I decomissioned the server that was running through its wired net.
Superfetch is like early speech recognition software (and some current gen stuff). At the beginning, it makes a lot of mistakes and generally sucks. As you use it more, it learns your patterns. It needs to be trained, and over time the miss rate goes down drastically, and it really does improve things. You can also improve the sluggishness in Vista by going into the performance settings and letting it auto-tune itself to your computer's capabilities.
Funny... but also insightful. As much of an environmentalist as I am (and I am), I'd say give it to them on paper. Maybe compromise, on 100% post-consumer fibre paper.... They want reams and reams of information that they don't really have a right to, and a judge is going along with it, so give it to them. In a format that will take them a decade to sift through, by which time it won't be relevant any more.
Hey... I still use Altavista. Though admittedly, mostly for Babelfish. Who doesn't like a game of Babelfish Tag, where you take a simple message like "I like Chinese food", pass it through Babelfish 10 times, and then give it to the person sitting next to you at work so they can guess what the message was. :)
My ICQ number was in the 386,000 range... can't remember the last 3 digits. Of course, I haven't used it since 1999, so I doubt the account is still up and running.
My big concern about this is whether this is a test to measure reaction before they start blocking 3rd party clients on AIM, which I do use. (though mostly I'm on Yahoo and MSN)
That was kinda the idea... deliberately reply to all of the spam in order to document what happens. She's not an idiot, she was pretending to be one.
I'd say RTFA, but then you might say I must be new here >.>
How have you been hurt by the inability to copy something for which you haven't paid? Provide a concrete example.
And yet how has the copyright holder been hurt by people making copies of their stuff? Authors, computer programmers, musicians, etc. all need to eat. If you steal their work without paying for it, then you are taking money out of their pockets, and in turn, taking food out of their mouths. Some of them choose to give away their work... usually those are the ones who have an alternate source of income on which they actually survive, but sometimes they give it away in the hopes that donations will support them. If they've chosen not to give it away for free, then they probably have a reason for doing so.
In the case of music, piracy has been happening for as long as there has been recorded music. But the technologies which enable it haven't been ubiquitous enough to make a significant dent in their bottom line. Sales losses due to piracy have been lost in the white noise. Now that most of us have a computer or two, it's not the case any more. It's just too easy to copy it, and people who have built their business model around the inability to copy the work are running scared.
I'm not saying that they shouldn't be updating their business model to reflect the current trends, but I am saying that the idea that copying something hurts nobody is ill-informed. In the end, it hurts an awful lot more than just the billion-dollar corporations, though it may take a while to trickle down to the little guy.
And before some nit says it, it costs money to make a record. Time in a proper recording studio costs money, setting up your own recording studio costs money, and engineering the sound properly is a major undertaking. It's a difficult task, and one that most of us can't do without training. Having decent sound engineering on a CD can, and has, made the difference between selling 1 million copies, and selling 20 million copies. (as happened with Metallica on the Black album). The technologies are there to allow you to record, engineer, and promote your own stuff, but that's a varied skill set that most of us just don't have, and as a result, it makes more sense to pay somebody to do it for you.
Whenever I buy a CD (and yes, I do still buy them) I check the label. If it's a member off the RIAA, I don't buy it. It's not that hard to avoid them, if you know where to look. And because they aren't afraid of taking a risk (well, aren't *as* afraid) you tend to find better music on the indy labels anyway.
Sadly not... they're spending more money to produce the crap that they're making now than they did to make the truly good works of art of yesteryear. The movie industry has been going steadily downhill since 1939 (slowly at first, but with gaining moment recently), and the music industry has been going downhill since the 1970's. There's still a few places you can go to see real talent, but it's mostly been stifled by people who would rather not take risks.
Your friends in Canada will mock you too... I'm on 10/1 cable, for $60/month. It doesn't officially have a static IP, but their DHCP lease is 1 month and automatically extends every time you renew it.. and it's tied to your MAC address, so it is, for all intents and purposes, static as long as you reboot the router once every 3 weeks.
I still ended up switching to Rogers, in Ontario. I'm paying less than I was for my DSL through Magma (now Primus), and getting faster service. Admittedly, throughput sucks royally when I download a bittorrent, but one of the advantages of having a server in colocation is that I can use some of its spare bandwidth to download torrents (capping it at 1mbit, still faster than I get on Rogers despite being on a 10mbit cable connection)...
But what I really wanted to point out was that not all of the cable monopolies suck worse than Bell. If I lived in Quebec, I'd be on Videotron without a 2nd thought... you can get a 30mbit cable connection from them for what I was paying for my 3mbit/800kbit DSL through Primus. And they offer connections up to 50mbit.
Maybe you've developped an astigmatism.
Somehow, I knew I could come to Slashdot and find somebody who'd find a way to blame Microsoft for Apple's fuckup.
Indeed. Then he can tell us all about how he likes traffic lights.
AverMedia M780 is a dual-tuner PCIe X1 card whose driver allows it to be used as a hardware MPEG decoder for DVD or Blu-Ray. Coincidentally, it gives the best reception of any card I've ever used. Unfortunately, as of right now it does not work under Linux, but a 1.5GHz C7 w/ 2GB of RAM and the onboard Via graphics is powerful enough to run Vista Ultimate edition with Aero turned on at S-Video or component video 480p resolution. Not that you'd actually use that particular OS. (Well, my HTPC is running it, but I got a free copy through my work MSDN subscription.) It's probably not powerful enough for 1080p, but you can install a discrete graphics card if you prefer.
Oh, I agree with you fully. I haven't hacked my Wii, and I have no intention of doing so. I have an HTPC and a laptop computer for stuff like that, and have absolutely no reason to void the warranty on my console. I bought the console for specifically that reason: so I can buy games for years to come and have no worries about whether it'll work, or whether I'll have to spend hundreds of dollars every 2 years to keep it up to date. The fact that the Wii was cheaper than a new computer in the first place was just a pleasant bonus.
some of the updates are manditory, and they do have the ability to force one through a game... I had to install an update to my console the first time I played Mario Kart.
I've seen patches forced by games, though... specifically, when I bought and played Mario Kart Wii, it pushed an update to my console, saying it couldn't play without the current version of the software.
There's no reason they can't keep doing that in order to push newer updates on people.
I'm not really worried about it... *shrugs* maybe I'm in the minority here, but I'd rather have something that just works, rather than try to hack at it. I have a laptop for playing things like MAME, and said laptop has an HDMI output to my TV, so it can carry higher resolution than the Wii. Throw in a Logitech gamepad, and you're doing just as well as playing them on the Wii.
*shrugs* you're right. There's actually only two Linux-native games I play... One of them is SL, and that's largely to keep in touch with the other half while she's away. The other is Wormux. There are other games that are Linux-native, but you don't tend to see games like, say, Jade Empire, appearing native in Linux.
Most of the PC games I play run under Wine, but many of them don't.... that is why I've been moving my gaming over to console.
I don't snowboard, so can't really comment on how realistic that part is. As for the skiing, I found it's too responsive. I used to race GS and Super GS on my school team, and the Wii version thereof is far too responsive... hugely oversteering. That could be the difference between parabolic skis and traditional skis... the last pair I bought was a pair of 210cm K2 Extreme, almost 15 years ago. I want to get back into the sport, but I'm still recovering from a serious knee injury.