The "idea stagnation" in Hollywood is not caused as much by copyrights, but trademarks. When Hollywood makes Hellraiser 23 they don't use the copyrights of the first movie that much but the trademarks involved. And Trademarks are forever to prevent people from hijacking on other people's franchises. The real reason for Hollywood's stagnation was control of the distribution chain, which is what Netflix changed.
And if I may add, Hollywood should stop selling movies on "remakes" of old formats nobody wants, such as spinning optical discs. Aka, what Blu-Ray is. Most people nowadays watch movies on devices that don't even have an optical drive. But you see, if Hollywood embraces streaming as a first-class medium, they won't be able to charge upwards of 50 bucks for a movie and even more for "collector's editions". You see, Hollywood doesn't want to give up on the idea that some a fancy case and some plastic stuff bundled inside makes a movie worth up to 10 times more compared to the streaming price.
This. In this age of Slack, I can ask any question I want to any developer (for example which certificate to use for internal site X, because there is no documentation for that on the internal wiki) and he can answer at his own leisure and configure his notifications at any level he wants, and we are supposed to believe the open floor plan exists because cooperation? No sir, the open floor plan is so that your developer lead knows if you are wasting time on Reddit Facebook at work. Interruptions are collateral damage. Since the alternative is arbitrary performance goals (to prevent you from wasting time excessively), I will take the open floor plan. I use plugins and custom css to make Reddit and Facebook look like the company's internal wiki anyway;-)
The Gig Economy in a nutshell: Have workers engage in a race to the bottom with each other over who can work the most hours for the least pay. Sorry, but that's where piece-work leads to, and that's what Uber and similar services lead to.
Motto: Your grand-dad didn't get paid minimum wage when driving his horse-drawn hackney carriage, nor did he have employee benefits, and you shouldn't either when driving your Uber car(tm)
Uber should be forced to pay minimum wage and have their drivers work only 8 hours.
PS: No need for guillotines. The last time that was tried, the revolution got stolen by Napolen. All people need is to wake up and demand any workaround against minumum wage and 8-hour work (aka what Uber is) to be forced to comply with minimum wage and 8 hours...
Nah, the worst is behind us, considering TV doesn't own the majority of people's free time anymore, but instead the internet does. Remember how TV tried to brand ISIS as "rebels" and "fighters" (ahh, so poetic) during the first years of the Syruan civil war and The Economist called for an airstrike on Assad so the job of ISIS would be made easier, while many independent news websites correctly identified ISIS as murderers and jihadists, which is exactly what they are? I want to see more of that happening in the future. It means we 've passed peak stupid, where "peak stupid" is basically a news cartel force-feeding doublethink on people according to what servers their interest at the given time, destroying critical and rational thought in the process.
Does Lubuntu rely on distro-specific repositories as the recommended way to install software? Answer: Yes, it does. If so, it cannot be used for this sort of refurbishing because this is not what people want.
Repositories delay users from getting new apps at best and prevent them at all usually (for example,I can't have the latest VLC and LibreOffice on my Ubuntu 14.04 despite being a relatively new release, while my 6-year old Windows 7 netbook runs these apps perfectly).
So, no, Lubuntu can't be used. When WinXP support gets completely dropped in the following months by most apps, I expect people to switch to pirate Win7 which gives them instant access to new apps just by downloading a generic exe without having to wait for the repository middlemen.
Android is similar, aka one or two generic apks, and they work on all (non-completely-ancient) Androids from Nexus to Sansung TouchWiz Android to LG Android to ODROID. No need for specific repos. But Android doesn't have a mouse friendly UI (yet).
Does Lubuntu rely on distro-specific repositories as the recommended way to install software? Answer: Yes, it does. If so, it cannot be used for this sort of refurbishing because this is not what Does Lubuntu rely on distro-specific repositories as the recommended way to install software? Answer: Yes, it does. If so, it cannot be used for this sort of refurbishing because this is not what people want.
Repositories delay users from getting new apps at best and preventing them at all usually (for example, I can't gave people want from their OS.
Repositories delay users from getting new apps at best and preventing them at all in the most common scenario (for example, I can't have the latest VLC and LibreOffice on my Ubuntu 14.04 despite being a relatively release, while my 6-year old Windows 7 netbook runs these apps perfectly).
So, no, Lubuntu can't be used. When WinXP support gets completely dropped in the following months from most apps, I expect people to switch to pirate Win7 which gives them instant access to new apps just by downloading a generic exe without having to wait for the repository middlemen.
Android is similar, aka one or two generic apks, and they work on all (non-completely-ancient) Androids from Nexus to Sansung TouchWiz Android to LG Android to ODROID. No need for specific repos. But Android doesn't have a mouse friendly UI (yet).
There is no such thing as "Win7 refurbished edition". There is Win7 (some_valid_version_here) licensed under the OEM DSP license if that's what you you meant. But there is no "Win7 refurbished edition" and you should not see something like that in any control panel screen or boot screen. If you see something like that you may have bought a PC with counterfeit software. But anyway, the actual price (50 bucks or not) is irrelevant, the point is that WinXP computers along with their license are still being "refurbished" and sold to the third world for peanuts, which explains XP's 8.5%
WinXP has 8.5% because really old PCs get "refurbished" (aka have WinXP re-installed on them using the existing license) and then are sold for peanuts to the third-world. It's legal and people can buy a PC for 50 bucks or so. They don't care if they are vulnerable to two-year-old font exploits (sadly).
So... any PC with Windows purchased after mid-2009 will run the newest version of Firefox. That's what keeps me to Windows. No need to upgrade the OS if you don't want to, and no need to wait for someone to "package" the app specific to your OS version to be able to enjoy the app or mess with stuff like 0install which is a pain. Just download the same generic exe or msi everyone else if downloading, double click on it, next-next-finish and enjoy the app.
The NES lightgun STILL NEEDS A CRT to work because the display lag of LCD screens throws off the timing. Most people forget that even a 16.7 millisecond delay introduced by the LCD screen is enough for the screen output to be off by an entire NTSC frame, compared to the practically instant appearance of the frame on the screen that the NES assumes from a CRT. And I am talking about total delay here, from input to photons, not panel response time. Google "Best low-lag HDTVs for serious gamers - CNET" to see how the LCDs they tested performed. Expect things to have improved a bit since the article was written, but not by much.
...aaand it looks like what was needed to convince Intel to bring down their inflated prices was some competitive x86 ship (aka a competitive drop-in replacement product), not ARMed unicorns that would require users to retool part of their software library. Who would have thought that?
It makes you wonder what the course of history would have been if all the effort and money companies like Mandriva, Novell and Xandors wasted onto Linux had been put to make a functional clone of MS-DOS, Windows 95 and their APIs. A proprietary fucntional clone sold at half the price.
But that's crazy talk, I know...
aannd... still no Direct3D 9 support. One of the reasons I avoid FOSS is those eternal feature requests that languish forever while the developers focus on more "important" stufff (such as porting Wine into Windows, no really). If Wine was a commercial package, this problem would have been addressed one way or another. Just like LibreOffice still doesn't do OOXML perfectly, but WPS Office does. Or just like how PowerDVD supported Bluray discs shortly after they were introduced while no media players does it yet (not even unencrypted ones). Because commercial interest. Because money.
So sad... I actually liked 3D TV. Glad I managed to grab a 2015 Bravia a while ago before they become extinct. At the very least, I can use it to watch the superb 3D photos I take with the LG Optimus 3D (which btw is evolving into a collective piece, can't find one on the internet below 200 dollars in good condition despite being an ultra-low-end Android device).
" There's no reason why Windows should take tens of minutes after boot before it becomes usable"
Windows 7 boots in 1.5 minute or less on my Acer Aspire One (sporting a first-gen Atom N270 and 2GB of RAM) and it also boots in a minute on my HP Compaq NX9420 from 2006 (which has a 32-bit CoreDuo T2500, 3GB of RAM and a harddrive so slow it buffer underruns when burning DVDs, if not recently defragged). My secret? I ditched Avast and other annoying agent-smiths and only use Security Essentials (get real and ditch the malware paranoia, if you haven't messed with windows update settings, you don't need anything more). I defrag every 2-3 months and remove junk from startup (though the last bit only shaves seconds if your PC doesn't contain a ton of software). I am always amused that linuxeros will boast about the performance of GNU/Linux, ignoring that none of them runs any heavyweight antivirus (which used to be a must for WinXP systems and earlier, but not for modern windows). Still not convinced? On the nx9420, my startup time gradually grew to 4 minutes after installing the "lightweight" BitDefender once.
Another endorsement for Brave from me. My only gripe with Brave is that it doesn't offer tab sync across devices. Of course, none of the "adblocker" browsers do, because they think anybody who wants to block ads is some kind of a privacy nutter. Also, the "force HTTPS everywhere" feature (which brave has enabled by default on every site) breaks facebook and disqus plugins, and you have to disable it manually. Still better than having Chrome running 3 ad scripts in parallel tho on most sites.
Malware nowadays is not written by some script kiddie in his parent's basement. Malware creation is funded by crime rings in third-world countries who employ developers to analyze known exploits and code-hiding techniques, and hence the malware attacks are very sophisticated. This is what I say to various relatives who come and say their computer "is so slow it must have a virus". Modern malware tries to be as stealthy as possible, so slowing down your PC is the last thing they want to do. But that Avast hog you have (instead of a much lighter antivirus) and your never-defragged harddisk does make your computer slower.
PS: Does Google ads filter the malicious JS code?
If you remove the 3 million or so illegals who voted without showing a citizen ID, then Trump won the popular vote. This is the reason the Electoral College exists. Because the Feds don't control the election process, the states do, so the Electoral College contains the damage that the vote-rigging some states do (such as allowing people to vote without showing a citizen ID) does to election results.
I never understood the constant whining about "Tivo-ization". The software is FOSS, whether the hardware it is sold with covers your needs is irrelevant. This is why companies (and most individuals) don't care about "free software" and just stick to the letter of the licenses. You can't really win because the rules of the game are constantly being changed by the FSF. Recently they attack Debian for having proprietary drivers *in the repositories* (aka as an optional download not necessary to run the OS). No amount of protests on the part of the FSF will make companies (and most individuals) pursue the asinine task of pleasing the FSF and its crowd. Even Debian Foundation has quit that futile effort. Enjoy your circle-jerk FSF guys and gals, I guess...
To be 100% accurate, Nexus devices are yours. You can load a ROM that is pre-rooted and then do everything you want. Bootloader locks are a side-effect of the way Americans buy their smartphones, which is basically that they do not own them for the first one or two years but instead borrow them from the carrier 'till they pay them off during the course of the contract. So, the device is not yours to tinker with. Even before Android, there were all kinds of locks in the software for the carrier's behest.
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The "idea stagnation" in Hollywood is not caused as much by copyrights, but trademarks. When Hollywood makes Hellraiser 23 they don't use the copyrights of the first movie that much but the trademarks involved. And Trademarks are forever to prevent people from hijacking on other people's franchises. The real reason for Hollywood's stagnation was control of the distribution chain, which is what Netflix changed.
And if I may add, Hollywood should stop selling movies on "remakes" of old formats nobody wants, such as spinning optical discs. Aka, what Blu-Ray is. Most people nowadays watch movies on devices that don't even have an optical drive. But you see, if Hollywood embraces streaming as a first-class medium, they won't be able to charge upwards of 50 bucks for a movie and even more for "collector's editions". You see, Hollywood doesn't want to give up on the idea that some a fancy case and some plastic stuff bundled inside makes a movie worth up to 10 times more compared to the streaming price.
This. In this age of Slack, I can ask any question I want to any developer (for example which certificate to use for internal site X, because there is no documentation for that on the internal wiki) and he can answer at his own leisure and configure his notifications at any level he wants, and we are supposed to believe the open floor plan exists because cooperation? No sir, the open floor plan is so that your developer lead knows if you are wasting time on Reddit Facebook at work. Interruptions are collateral damage. Since the alternative is arbitrary performance goals (to prevent you from wasting time excessively), I will take the open floor plan. I use plugins and custom css to make Reddit and Facebook look like the company's internal wiki anyway ;-)
The Gig Economy in a nutshell: Have workers engage in a race to the bottom with each other over who can work the most hours for the least pay. Sorry, but that's where piece-work leads to, and that's what Uber and similar services lead to. Motto: Your grand-dad didn't get paid minimum wage when driving his horse-drawn hackney carriage, nor did he have employee benefits, and you shouldn't either when driving your Uber car(tm) Uber should be forced to pay minimum wage and have their drivers work only 8 hours. PS: No need for guillotines. The last time that was tried, the revolution got stolen by Napolen. All people need is to wake up and demand any workaround against minumum wage and 8-hour work (aka what Uber is) to be forced to comply with minimum wage and 8 hours...
Nah, the worst is behind us, considering TV doesn't own the majority of people's free time anymore, but instead the internet does. Remember how TV tried to brand ISIS as "rebels" and "fighters" (ahh, so poetic) during the first years of the Syruan civil war and The Economist called for an airstrike on Assad so the job of ISIS would be made easier, while many independent news websites correctly identified ISIS as murderers and jihadists, which is exactly what they are? I want to see more of that happening in the future. It means we 've passed peak stupid, where "peak stupid" is basically a news cartel force-feeding doublethink on people according to what servers their interest at the given time, destroying critical and rational thought in the process.
Does Lubuntu rely on distro-specific repositories as the recommended way to install software? Answer: Yes, it does. If so, it cannot be used for this sort of refurbishing because this is not what people want. Repositories delay users from getting new apps at best and prevent them at all usually (for example,I can't have the latest VLC and LibreOffice on my Ubuntu 14.04 despite being a relatively new release, while my 6-year old Windows 7 netbook runs these apps perfectly). So, no, Lubuntu can't be used. When WinXP support gets completely dropped in the following months by most apps, I expect people to switch to pirate Win7 which gives them instant access to new apps just by downloading a generic exe without having to wait for the repository middlemen. Android is similar, aka one or two generic apks, and they work on all (non-completely-ancient) Androids from Nexus to Sansung TouchWiz Android to LG Android to ODROID. No need for specific repos. But Android doesn't have a mouse friendly UI (yet).
Does Lubuntu rely on distro-specific repositories as the recommended way to install software? Answer: Yes, it does. If so, it cannot be used for this sort of refurbishing because this is not what Does Lubuntu rely on distro-specific repositories as the recommended way to install software? Answer: Yes, it does. If so, it cannot be used for this sort of refurbishing because this is not what people want. Repositories delay users from getting new apps at best and preventing them at all usually (for example, I can't gave people want from their OS. Repositories delay users from getting new apps at best and preventing them at all in the most common scenario (for example, I can't have the latest VLC and LibreOffice on my Ubuntu 14.04 despite being a relatively release, while my 6-year old Windows 7 netbook runs these apps perfectly). So, no, Lubuntu can't be used. When WinXP support gets completely dropped in the following months from most apps, I expect people to switch to pirate Win7 which gives them instant access to new apps just by downloading a generic exe without having to wait for the repository middlemen. Android is similar, aka one or two generic apks, and they work on all (non-completely-ancient) Androids from Nexus to Sansung TouchWiz Android to LG Android to ODROID. No need for specific repos. But Android doesn't have a mouse friendly UI (yet).
There is no such thing as "Win7 refurbished edition". There is Win7 (some_valid_version_here) licensed under the OEM DSP license if that's what you you meant. But there is no "Win7 refurbished edition" and you should not see something like that in any control panel screen or boot screen. If you see something like that you may have bought a PC with counterfeit software. But anyway, the actual price (50 bucks or not) is irrelevant, the point is that WinXP computers along with their license are still being "refurbished" and sold to the third world for peanuts, which explains XP's 8.5%
WinXP has 8.5% because really old PCs get "refurbished" (aka have WinXP re-installed on them using the existing license) and then are sold for peanuts to the third-world. It's legal and people can buy a PC for 50 bucks or so. They don't care if they are vulnerable to two-year-old font exploits (sadly).
So... any PC with Windows purchased after mid-2009 will run the newest version of Firefox. That's what keeps me to Windows. No need to upgrade the OS if you don't want to, and no need to wait for someone to "package" the app specific to your OS version to be able to enjoy the app or mess with stuff like 0install which is a pain. Just download the same generic exe or msi everyone else if downloading, double click on it, next-next-finish and enjoy the app.
The NES lightgun STILL NEEDS A CRT to work because the display lag of LCD screens throws off the timing. Most people forget that even a 16.7 millisecond delay introduced by the LCD screen is enough for the screen output to be off by an entire NTSC frame, compared to the practically instant appearance of the frame on the screen that the NES assumes from a CRT. And I am talking about total delay here, from input to photons, not panel response time. Google "Best low-lag HDTVs for serious gamers - CNET" to see how the LCDs they tested performed. Expect things to have improved a bit since the article was written, but not by much.
...aaand it looks like what was needed to convince Intel to bring down their inflated prices was some competitive x86 ship (aka a competitive drop-in replacement product), not ARMed unicorns that would require users to retool part of their software library. Who would have thought that? It makes you wonder what the course of history would have been if all the effort and money companies like Mandriva, Novell and Xandors wasted onto Linux had been put to make a functional clone of MS-DOS, Windows 95 and their APIs. A proprietary fucntional clone sold at half the price. But that's crazy talk, I know...
(i meant no open-source media player obviously)
aannd... still no Direct3D 9 support. One of the reasons I avoid FOSS is those eternal feature requests that languish forever while the developers focus on more "important" stufff (such as porting Wine into Windows, no really). If Wine was a commercial package, this problem would have been addressed one way or another. Just like LibreOffice still doesn't do OOXML perfectly, but WPS Office does. Or just like how PowerDVD supported Bluray discs shortly after they were introduced while no media players does it yet (not even unencrypted ones). Because commercial interest. Because money.
So sad... I actually liked 3D TV. Glad I managed to grab a 2015 Bravia a while ago before they become extinct. At the very least, I can use it to watch the superb 3D photos I take with the LG Optimus 3D (which btw is evolving into a collective piece, can't find one on the internet below 200 dollars in good condition despite being an ultra-low-end Android device).
That's socialism (aka "liberalism") in action: Land for the Nomenclature (of which Zuckerberg is part of), not for you.
" There's no reason why Windows should take tens of minutes after boot before it becomes usable" Windows 7 boots in 1.5 minute or less on my Acer Aspire One (sporting a first-gen Atom N270 and 2GB of RAM) and it also boots in a minute on my HP Compaq NX9420 from 2006 (which has a 32-bit CoreDuo T2500, 3GB of RAM and a harddrive so slow it buffer underruns when burning DVDs, if not recently defragged). My secret? I ditched Avast and other annoying agent-smiths and only use Security Essentials (get real and ditch the malware paranoia, if you haven't messed with windows update settings, you don't need anything more). I defrag every 2-3 months and remove junk from startup (though the last bit only shaves seconds if your PC doesn't contain a ton of software). I am always amused that linuxeros will boast about the performance of GNU/Linux, ignoring that none of them runs any heavyweight antivirus (which used to be a must for WinXP systems and earlier, but not for modern windows). Still not convinced? On the nx9420, my startup time gradually grew to 4 minutes after installing the "lightweight" BitDefender once.
Another endorsement for Brave from me. My only gripe with Brave is that it doesn't offer tab sync across devices. Of course, none of the "adblocker" browsers do, because they think anybody who wants to block ads is some kind of a privacy nutter. Also, the "force HTTPS everywhere" feature (which brave has enabled by default on every site) breaks facebook and disqus plugins, and you have to disable it manually. Still better than having Chrome running 3 ad scripts in parallel tho on most sites.
Malware nowadays is not written by some script kiddie in his parent's basement. Malware creation is funded by crime rings in third-world countries who employ developers to analyze known exploits and code-hiding techniques, and hence the malware attacks are very sophisticated. This is what I say to various relatives who come and say their computer "is so slow it must have a virus". Modern malware tries to be as stealthy as possible, so slowing down your PC is the last thing they want to do. But that Avast hog you have (instead of a much lighter antivirus) and your never-defragged harddisk does make your computer slower. PS: Does Google ads filter the malicious JS code?
Flash Player peasant using YouTube Flash Player extension to play stutter-free video in his netbook (me) is worried....
Godwin's law in my Slashdot? I thought you Slashdot people had enough internet experience to avoid that.
If you remove the 3 million or so illegals who voted without showing a citizen ID, then Trump won the popular vote. This is the reason the Electoral College exists. Because the Feds don't control the election process, the states do, so the Electoral College contains the damage that the vote-rigging some states do (such as allowing people to vote without showing a citizen ID) does to election results.
Milo's all the way.
I never understood the constant whining about "Tivo-ization". The software is FOSS, whether the hardware it is sold with covers your needs is irrelevant. This is why companies (and most individuals) don't care about "free software" and just stick to the letter of the licenses. You can't really win because the rules of the game are constantly being changed by the FSF. Recently they attack Debian for having proprietary drivers *in the repositories* (aka as an optional download not necessary to run the OS). No amount of protests on the part of the FSF will make companies (and most individuals) pursue the asinine task of pleasing the FSF and its crowd. Even Debian Foundation has quit that futile effort. Enjoy your circle-jerk FSF guys and gals, I guess...
To be 100% accurate, Nexus devices are yours. You can load a ROM that is pre-rooted and then do everything you want. Bootloader locks are a side-effect of the way Americans buy their smartphones, which is basically that they do not own them for the first one or two years but instead borrow them from the carrier 'till they pay them off during the course of the contract. So, the device is not yours to tinker with. Even before Android, there were all kinds of locks in the software for the carrier's behest.