I suspect it will be built off of some form of ClickOnce technology which will, in theory, be the best of both worlds. A client-side application which launches with a click on a web page, remains available when offline, and auto-updates whenever online.
I agree that there will be a monthly or annual fee. Although a pay-as-you-go plan at, say, $0.03.minute might also be interesting. (Of course, it's bad enough when I forget to hang up my cell phone; just imagine keeping a web browser window accidently open over a long weekend!)
My point being that it will be nice when you can slap in the DVD and press 'OK' on the remote to start the copying and cataloging process. Right now, you have to drop out of MCE and into 'regular' Windows, use a mouse/keyboard to control DVDDecrypter, THEN use the My Movies Windows application to import the just-ripped DVD, etc. My MCE is in my living room, behind glass with the rest of my AV equipment, sans mouse and keyboard. (Well, I have a wireless keyboard with a built-in thumb mouse, but I would love to never have to use it.)
My MCE has replaced my 403 disc Kenwood DVD changer; I'd just like it to be easier to add discs to my collection. (Disclaimer: I own all of the discs that are ripped to the hard drive. Sure, not 100% legal, but let's call it 'close enough'.)
Sounds like a BIOS setting issue, which have to be just right for this to work. And your mobo has to fully support S3 sleep. Alternatively, it may be some other process or piece of hardware that is keeping the machine awake. But it's not MCE05. My MCE goes to sleep just fine, and is dead quiet when asleep. I even use the Windows Power settings to have it automatically go to sleep when idle (thankfully MCE is smart enough to disable this when music, TV or a movie is playing.)
MCE will even wake itself up to download the tv listings at 4am, then go right back to sleep when done. (And, of course, to record TV.)
I actually have a task which wakes up my MCE around 3:45am, does some system maintenance (virus updates, disk defrag,e tc.) and then puts the unit back to sleep when everything is done.
MCE is 'running' this whole time -- the MCE process/UI by itself will not prohibit your machine from going to sleep.
Actually, you only need the 3rd party software to RIP; you can play back IFOs/VOBs directly from MCE if you place them in the My Viedos folder and your decoder is up to the task (the Nvidia OEM decoder can be had for about $10 and works just fine).
Now, that being said, My Movies + DVDDecrypter is an excellent combination of free software for any MCE machine...makes the process much easier (and we look forward to the day when DVDDecrypter is supported directly within My Movies at 10 feet).
The standard Microsoft Media Center remote is programmable -- at least for a few of the buttons. Vol +/- happens to be two of them. I have my MCE hooked up to my reciever via S/PDIF, and the MCE remote's volume changes the volume on the reciever just fine.
Although I agree with a lot of your reasoning, this year's champs will be the 2005 Champions, not the 2006 Champions. Just take a peek at http://www.patriots.com/ -- they call themselves the 2004 Champions. (Which, granted, by your logic, is also true, but I think it's safe to assume that they are referring to the most recent Superbowl.)
Agreed. However, market pressures pretty much demanded this. In the not so distant past, Oracle's database was licensed by 'power units' (or some other similar term). Basically, they had this huge multidimensional chart based upon OS, CPU type, CPU speed, etc. It resolved to the 'power' of the system, and you paid based upon that.
If your computer died and you had the gaul to replace it with a faster machine (for the very likely reason that the slower speed machine was no longer available for sale), Oracle expected you to fork over more money.
In the end, the licensing scheme became way too confusing and out of control, so Oracle backed down and went with a strict # of CPUs based model. But, as you have observed, this led to the odd situation where a slower, dual-processor machine could actually have a higher licensing fee than a faster, single processor machine.
Oracle now faces the same problem mith mutli-core chips. Originally, they went to a # of cores licensing model. But, people complained that a dual core, single CPU machine is not as fast as a dual processor machine running at the same CPU individual speed. Oracle's response? Each core is a.75 CPU, oh, and please round up. So an 11 core machine would be licensed as 11 *.75 = 8.25. Ceiling(8.25) = 9 CPUs. I guess you might as well add a 12th core, because it will be 'free'.
I'm pretty sure you are in the right ballpark -- the license is about $10/copy. (Well, it used to be, back in the 90's. I'm not sure about today, but, given that games have always seemed to cost around $50, I assume the license fee has remained about the same.)
First, you have to understand how Google runs your ads. You set a daily budget, and once that budget is exceeded, your ad stops. You get a new daily budget a 'midnight' (adjusted for locality, of course).
So, there are times when, right at midnight, there is a sudden and dramatic rise in the number of queries which would produce my ad, and my CTR goes to 100%. They all come from the a block of IP addresses owned by one of my competitors. Sometimes they come somewhat more scattered in the IP address space, but a few whois searches reveals that all of the offending IPs are related (through business ventures, or have the same registered mailing address, etc.)
They click the ad until my daily budget is drained, and then my ad stops for the day.
Now that Google is public, I believe that Click Fraud will continue to increase. Think about it for a second:
1. Buy Google stock. 2. Perform random searches on Google. 3. Click every ad. 4. Google makes $$$ for those clicks. 5. Stock price goes to $300, $400,... 6. Profit!
It's hard to imaging any other company in which you can invest and, with so little effort, produce revenue for them. Hell, you could be doing something else at the same time! I bet while watching "Dancing with the Stars" you could flow several grand into Google's bank account. If even a small percentage of Google shareholders do the same, it's just like printing money.
I've been a vicitim of click fraud more than once. Sometimes, Google sees it and sends me a credit. (And by that I mean I did not notice it or report it -- they told me; that was early on in my advertising days, however.)
I have not had an automatic credit like that in a very long time, but my logs are indicative of click fraud. You can write to Google and get a credit, but, for some ad campaigns, it's just not worth it -- well over 90% of the clicks can be fraudulent. The time invested to keep getting credits may out weigh the value of the campaign. YMMV.
Actually, they were never really a search engine in the past, in the sense that they had their own search technology, although they were a self-classification directory (like dmoz); Yahoo! always made use of someone else's search on their main page (the big ones being AltaVista and Google).
Today they have their own search, based upon their acquisition of Inktomi. (They also acquired the internet-searching pieces of AltaVista and FAST, but the Yahoo! search code base is built on-top-of the Inktomi code.)
That being said, the folks improving Yahoo!'s search today come from all corners of the search world, including some engineers from those AltaVista and FAST acquisitions. (And Yahoo! also holds most of the patents as a result of those acquistions.) So, a lot of what was good about those other engines is making its way into Yahoo! search. [Yes, AltaVista did have it's good points, and the underlying technology was sound even if the marketing folks all but destroyed the usefulness of that technology.]
I do feel that, lately, Yahoo!'s search is better than Google's, and at times much better. For example, Yahoo!'s image search makes Google's image search look like a toy.
If only Yahoo! would bring back AltaVista's Prisma technology (built in conjunction with Teragram, I believe). [It was sort of like Teoma, but it seemed easier to use to me.]
I see no reason whatsoever why the old lady next door to me who doesn't even own a computer should be forced to pay for me to have free wireless in my house.
Why does a couple with no children, who have never had children, and never intend on having children pay local taxes which, to a large extent, go directly to the public schools?
Look, I'm not saying free internet access is nearly as important educating our children; the point is that there is precedence for taxes to be used to support services for which the tax payer is not a direct beneficiary.
Personally, I'm somewhat indifferent about this topic; I believe communities have a right to govern themselves. If my local government recommended a move to free wifi internet access, I'm not so sure I'd support it. If they could demonstrate that it truely would help the community by providing broadband to those who can truly not afford it, I think that would be a good thing. At the same time, I fear that the design and implementation would be mismanaged, at the money would be better spent paying $15/mo for a NetZero account for each of those folks. [Yes, I know that NetZero is not broadband; I'm saying that a poor WiFi installation could easily result in sub-dialup speeds for the citizens.] Geez, a $40/mo cable broadband connection for those who cannot afford my still be cheaper. (I live in a relatively small town, ~10,000 citizens. It's very hilly with lots of forest. WiFi would be difficult. I'd say the majority of the citizens are 'doing okay' and could afford cable internet if they wanted it. If we had to support 100 homes with taxpayer supported cable and paid full-price, that's $4000/mo. I could easily see an appropriate 'free' WiFi solution costing substantially more. The necessary head-end bandwidth alone could easily cost that much.)
Hard returns to terminate lines? No -- I actually know how to use a word processor...
I'm using OO.org 2.0 beta, and I don't see where you can change the default paper size, other than in the printer setup itself. And the printer setup dialog already had the correct size, as it simply gets that from the printer driver defaults.
I'll gladly try changing the default paper size, if someone can point me in the right direction.
The issue you're seeing is not relavent in a school environment.
That's only true if the software is being used by only the students. I got the impression that this was a system-wide license, likely to include all of the administrative offices and their likely 100's of existing Word documents.
If their existing 'Lunch Menu Template' doesn't open correctly in OO.org, it will never be accepted. If all of those documents have to be recreated by hand, suddenly 'free' isn't sounding so free.
Actually, not entirely true. I've got a lot of MSWord documents, and I wanted to convert them to PDF.
Sure, I could buy a PDF converter, but I saw this as a good opportunity to give OO.org a try -- open the Word document, then save/export to PDF.
OO.org could not correctly display ANY of my Word documents; I ddin't even bother trying to save as PDF at that point. And I'm not talking about minor display differences -- some documents were basically unreadable, as OO.org seemed to randomly flow the text.
I think OO.org is a great idea, but OO.org supporters have to more clearly understand that it is HARDLY a drop-in replacement for an organization which has been committed to MSWord for a long time. The Word importer is far from a useable state. (I don't doubt it handles simple Word documents well, but just using Word's built-in templates permit even a novice to quickly produce a "non-simple" document. Case in point, my documents are not all that complex.)
Also, why the FUCK can't I watch a DVD that has deleted scenes in it in place where they were deleted
When you play the 'Extended Edition' of "Ray", it pretty much does exactly that. Some of the transitions are jarring, and a lot of the deleted scenes never went through full post production. But, hey, it's what you wanted.
Now, if you want it for an arbitrary DVD, you could author your own ISO file (as in the ISO files on the DVD, not an ISO of the DVD) and play the scenes (including deleted ones) in any order that pleases you.
You are a little off the mark. MS does not have a patent on using XML to store a word processing document -- rather, they have a patent on their PARTICULAR format. In your example, it would be like Sony creating a very special power supply that plus into 110 (well, 120 these days, and, geez, I hope you meant volts and not watts...) and can drive a 100" TV at 5000 lumens but consumes only 12w. THAT they could patent.
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect it will be built off of some form of ClickOnce technology which will, in theory, be the best of both worlds. A client-side application which launches with a click on a web page, remains available when offline, and auto-updates whenever online.
I agree that there will be a monthly or annual fee. Although a pay-as-you-go plan at, say, $0.03.minute might also be interesting. (Of course, it's bad enough when I forget to hang up my cell phone; just imagine keeping a web browser window accidently open over a long weekend!)
My point being that it will be nice when you can slap in the DVD and press 'OK' on the remote to start the copying and cataloging process. Right now, you have to drop out of MCE and into 'regular' Windows, use a mouse/keyboard to control DVDDecrypter, THEN use the My Movies Windows application to import the just-ripped DVD, etc. My MCE is in my living room, behind glass with the rest of my AV equipment, sans mouse and keyboard. (Well, I have a wireless keyboard with a built-in thumb mouse, but I would love to never have to use it.)
My MCE has replaced my 403 disc Kenwood DVD changer; I'd just like it to be easier to add discs to my collection. (Disclaimer: I own all of the discs that are ripped to the hard drive. Sure, not 100% legal, but let's call it 'close enough'.)
Sounds like a BIOS setting issue, which have to be just right for this to work. And your mobo has to fully support S3 sleep. Alternatively, it may be some other process or piece of hardware that is keeping the machine awake. But it's not MCE05. My MCE goes to sleep just fine, and is dead quiet when asleep. I even use the Windows Power settings to have it automatically go to sleep when idle (thankfully MCE is smart enough to disable this when music, TV or a movie is playing.)
MCE will even wake itself up to download the tv listings at 4am, then go right back to sleep when done. (And, of course, to record TV.)
I actually have a task which wakes up my MCE around 3:45am, does some system maintenance (virus updates, disk defrag,e tc.) and then puts the unit back to sleep when everything is done.
MCE is 'running' this whole time -- the MCE process/UI by itself will not prohibit your machine from going to sleep.
Actually, you only need the 3rd party software to RIP; you can play back IFOs/VOBs directly from MCE if you place them in the My Viedos folder and your decoder is up to the task (the Nvidia OEM decoder can be had for about $10 and works just fine).
Now, that being said, My Movies + DVDDecrypter is an excellent combination of free software for any MCE machine...makes the process much easier (and we look forward to the day when DVDDecrypter is supported directly within My Movies at 10 feet).
The standard Microsoft Media Center remote is programmable -- at least for a few of the buttons. Vol +/- happens to be two of them. I have my MCE hooked up to my reciever via S/PDIF, and the MCE remote's volume changes the volume on the reciever just fine.
Although I agree with a lot of your reasoning, this year's champs will be the 2005 Champions, not the 2006 Champions. Just take a peek at http://www.patriots.com/ -- they call themselves the 2004 Champions. (Which, granted, by your logic, is also true, but I think it's safe to assume that they are referring to the most recent Superbowl.)
Sounds a lot like www.buddyzoo.com, which has been around a Real Long Time now.
Agreed. However, market pressures pretty much demanded this. In the not so distant past, Oracle's database was licensed by 'power units' (or some other similar term). Basically, they had this huge multidimensional chart based upon OS, CPU type, CPU speed, etc. It resolved to the 'power' of the system, and you paid based upon that.
.75 CPU, oh, and please round up. So an 11 core machine would be licensed as 11 * .75 = 8.25. Ceiling(8.25) = 9 CPUs. I guess you might as well add a 12th core, because it will be 'free'.
If your computer died and you had the gaul to replace it with a faster machine (for the very likely reason that the slower speed machine was no longer available for sale), Oracle expected you to fork over more money.
In the end, the licensing scheme became way too confusing and out of control, so Oracle backed down and went with a strict # of CPUs based model. But, as you have observed, this led to the odd situation where a slower, dual-processor machine could actually have a higher licensing fee than a faster, single processor machine.
Oracle now faces the same problem mith mutli-core chips. Originally, they went to a # of cores licensing model. But, people complained that a dual core, single CPU machine is not as fast as a dual processor machine running at the same CPU individual speed. Oracle's response? Each core is a
I'm pretty sure you are in the right ballpark -- the license is about $10/copy. (Well, it used to be, back in the 90's. I'm not sure about today, but, given that games have always seemed to cost around $50, I assume the license fee has remained about the same.)
I answered this question here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=154418&cid=129 50336 .
I agree with your analysis, but, if you read my other posting, I think you'll see that I have evidence of real click fraud.
First, you have to understand how Google runs your ads. You set a daily budget, and once that budget is exceeded, your ad stops. You get a new daily budget a 'midnight' (adjusted for locality, of course).
So, there are times when, right at midnight, there is a sudden and dramatic rise in the number of queries which would produce my ad, and my CTR goes to 100%. They all come from the a block of IP addresses owned by one of my competitors. Sometimes they come somewhat more scattered in the IP address space, but a few whois searches reveals that all of the offending IPs are related (through business ventures, or have the same registered mailing address, etc.)
They click the ad until my daily budget is drained, and then my ad stops for the day.
Now that Google is public, I believe that Click Fraud will continue to increase. Think about it for a second:
...
1. Buy Google stock.
2. Perform random searches on Google.
3. Click every ad.
4. Google makes $$$ for those clicks.
5. Stock price goes to $300, $400,
6. Profit!
It's hard to imaging any other company in which you can invest and, with so little effort, produce revenue for them. Hell, you could be doing something else at the same time! I bet while watching "Dancing with the Stars" you could flow several grand into Google's bank account. If even a small percentage of Google shareholders do the same, it's just like printing money.
I've been a vicitim of click fraud more than once. Sometimes, Google sees it and sends me a credit. (And by that I mean I did not notice it or report it -- they told me; that was early on in my advertising days, however.)
I have not had an automatic credit like that in a very long time, but my logs are indicative of click fraud. You can write to Google and get a credit, but, for some ad campaigns, it's just not worth it -- well over 90% of the clicks can be fraudulent. The time invested to keep getting credits may out weigh the value of the campaign. YMMV.
Your guess is likely wrong.
/ 416185.aspx
See this: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2005/06/28
and, in particular, this comment by the blog author:
"Atlas will work with all modern browsers. It will also work on non-Windows platforms."
Jeff's just upset because he's having trouble getting past lvl 14 on XBL. Be nice to him.
You are correct, sir! I didn't noticed that it had come back. Good to see it again.
Actually, they were never really a search engine in the past, in the sense that they had their own search technology, although they were a self-classification directory (like dmoz); Yahoo! always made use of someone else's search on their main page (the big ones being AltaVista and Google).
Today they have their own search, based upon their acquisition of Inktomi. (They also acquired the internet-searching pieces of AltaVista and FAST, but the Yahoo! search code base is built on-top-of the Inktomi code.)
That being said, the folks improving Yahoo!'s search today come from all corners of the search world, including some engineers from those AltaVista and FAST acquisitions. (And Yahoo! also holds most of the patents as a result of those acquistions.) So, a lot of what was good about those other engines is making its way into Yahoo! search. [Yes, AltaVista did have it's good points, and the underlying technology was sound even if the marketing folks all but destroyed the usefulness of that technology.]
I do feel that, lately, Yahoo!'s search is better than Google's, and at times much better. For example, Yahoo!'s image search makes Google's image search look like a toy.
If only Yahoo! would bring back AltaVista's Prisma technology (built in conjunction with Teragram, I believe). [It was sort of like Teoma, but it seemed easier to use to me.]
Why does a couple with no children, who have never had children, and never intend on having children pay local taxes which, to a large extent, go directly to the public schools?
Look, I'm not saying free internet access is nearly as important educating our children; the point is that there is precedence for taxes to be used to support services for which the tax payer is not a direct beneficiary.
Personally, I'm somewhat indifferent about this topic; I believe communities have a right to govern themselves. If my local government recommended a move to free wifi internet access, I'm not so sure I'd support it. If they could demonstrate that it truely would help the community by providing broadband to those who can truly not afford it, I think that would be a good thing. At the same time, I fear that the design and implementation would be mismanaged, at the money would be better spent paying $15/mo for a NetZero account for each of those folks. [Yes, I know that NetZero is not broadband; I'm saying that a poor WiFi installation could easily result in sub-dialup speeds for the citizens.] Geez, a $40/mo cable broadband connection for those who cannot afford my still be cheaper. (I live in a relatively small town, ~10,000 citizens. It's very hilly with lots of forest. WiFi would be difficult. I'd say the majority of the citizens are 'doing okay' and could afford cable internet if they wanted it. If we had to support 100 homes with taxpayer supported cable and paid full-price, that's $4000/mo. I could easily see an appropriate 'free' WiFi solution costing substantially more. The necessary head-end bandwidth alone could easily cost that much.)
Thanks -- I didn't see that dialog when I went looking.
Sadly, it was already set to Letter (8.5x11), so that's not the problem.
Hard returns to terminate lines? No -- I actually know how to use a word processor...
I'm using OO.org 2.0 beta, and I don't see where you can change the default paper size, other than in the printer setup itself. And the printer setup dialog already had the correct size, as it simply gets that from the printer driver defaults.
I'll gladly try changing the default paper size, if someone can point me in the right direction.
Yes -- I've been using the same PC for many years now. I ran OO.org on the same machine that created in dox, in the same instance of XP Pro.
That's only true if the software is being used by only the students. I got the impression that this was a system-wide license, likely to include all of the administrative offices and their likely 100's of existing Word documents.
If their existing 'Lunch Menu Template' doesn't open correctly in OO.org, it will never be accepted. If all of those documents have to be recreated by hand, suddenly 'free' isn't sounding so free.
Actually, not entirely true. I've got a lot of MSWord documents, and I wanted to convert them to PDF.
Sure, I could buy a PDF converter, but I saw this as a good opportunity to give OO.org a try -- open the Word document, then save/export to PDF.
OO.org could not correctly display ANY of my Word documents; I ddin't even bother trying to save as PDF at that point. And I'm not talking about minor display differences -- some documents were basically unreadable, as OO.org seemed to randomly flow the text.
I think OO.org is a great idea, but OO.org supporters have to more clearly understand that it is HARDLY a drop-in replacement for an organization which has been committed to MSWord for a long time. The Word importer is far from a useable state. (I don't doubt it handles simple Word documents well, but just using Word's built-in templates permit even a novice to quickly produce a "non-simple" document. Case in point, my documents are not all that complex.)
When you play the 'Extended Edition' of "Ray", it pretty much does exactly that. Some of the transitions are jarring, and a lot of the deleted scenes never went through full post production. But, hey, it's what you wanted.
Now, if you want it for an arbitrary DVD, you could author your own ISO file (as in the ISO files on the DVD, not an ISO of the DVD) and play the scenes (including deleted ones) in any order that pleases you.
You are a little off the mark. MS does not have a patent on using XML to store a word processing document -- rather, they have a patent on their PARTICULAR format. In your example, it would be like Sony creating a very special power supply that plus into 110 (well, 120 these days, and, geez, I hope you meant volts and not watts...) and can drive a 100" TV at 5000 lumens but consumes only 12w. THAT they could patent.