Actually the wireless card was a very common Linksys card (can't remember the model off the top of my head) and was known to work with Linux using NDISWrapper. Still couldn't get it to work for months until someone in the Ubuntu community figured it out. Also - how is it that so much of the Linux community pisses and moans about how much Windows costs and yet your answer is to just spend money on hardware? Especially since the card I had was "known" to run on Linux already.
I'm also a developer in the Windows sphere and I've also set up an Ubuntu machine at home. However, my experience was the polar opposite of yours. I had to tell Ubuntu what resolution to use, Windows just figured it out (yes, I needed to upgrade my NVidia driver manually). I had to jump through many fiery hoops to get Ubuntu to use my wireless card, Windows just figured it out for me. Installation of software on Windows is a breeze, installing anything not on Ubuntu's list is a pain. Most Linux software is online by necessity since brick & mortar locations won't carry it. Microsoft can keep all Microsoft software up to date, if they did that for competitors' products, they'd get sued by the DoJ again.
Linux and Ubuntu in particular are good products and it's great that you've had such good experience with it. But your experience is not typical and will definitely not be the norm for someone who is not an amazingly technical person like yourself.
For various reasons I won't go into here, I still haven't jumped on the HD Bandwagon yet. All my TV's in my house are SD. As luck would have it, the 80GB single tuner Series2 downstairs is starting to die - the hard drive occasionally makes clicking noises, and the screen freezes when this happens. So if that thing bites the dust, I figure I can pick up one of these guys.
Which then raises the question - am I right in thinking that it will work with my current all-SD setup? I figure within the next year I'll be diving into HDTV so it will be nice to have the HD TiVo in place, but will it really work?
Gamers remember The All-Seeing Eye, which for a time was the single best server browser on the market. It started out life as a shareware product and the owner eventually sold it to Yahoo, staying on for a time as the developer. Yahoo's support for the product waned, the developer moved on, and the product hasn't seen an update in years. Yahoo is good at buying out products and letting them die, it seems.
One who hit up on the genius idea of making sure that the packaging has to be destroyed in order to use the product, thereby ensuring that the product cannot be returned to a store for a refund.
I'm figuring the "mixed ethnicity" line was, like just about everything else, taken out of context.
I think it wasn't that so much as it was just a poorly chosen phrase to say. More of a "foot in mouth" thing than anything else. Couple that with the fact that he's an old white man and he can easily be put in the same generation as your grandfather (I don't know about your grandfather but one of mine was the nicest guy ever and the most racist old fart you'd ever know) and it wasn't much of a stretch to think he meant it in a racist way. Also remember that shortly after the film came out he announced he had Alzheimer's so that may have played a part as well.
I doubt most people noticed the different suit, lighting, etc
So you are saying that, gotcha (and yes, I realize the GP was an AC).
the part about the mayor telling him not to come there and that they were already there...that is blatantly deceptive editing and is dishonest.
But Heston did say that. And just like that. That line was unedited and the audience really did boo and hiss that the mayor had the nerve to ask them to please not hold the meeting there. Yes it makes Heston and the NRA look bad but seriously... but it did happen. As did Heston's "mixed ethnicity" line at the end of the film.
The problem with this is that Heston's "cold, dead, hands" speech wasn't even from his Denver speech... When you imply something untrue by using careful editing and splicing, you are lying
So you're saying that everyone who saw BfC, including you, completely missed the fact that Heston was wearing a different suit, in front of a different podium, with different lighting and camera angles? The point to including the "cold, dead hands" bit was not to fool the viewers, it was to say "here's Charlton Heston, he's the president of the NRA, here's the kind of shit he thinks and says..." Generally the people who say that Moore was trying to "trick" the viewers have an agenda to push and completely discredit the intelligence of the viewers in the process.
The only thing that makes gas taxes unfair is that they unfairly penalize people who have cars with poor gas mileage. The tax would more accurately go against the weight of the car and the number of miles driven, as those two factors have more to do with how much wear and tear you cause on the states infrastructure.
Yeah but one of the original perks of this sort of thinking was that fuel inefficient cars also tend to be the big huge SUV types that put a lot more wear and tear on the roads, so it balanced out. If you're grandma and you only go to the store and the beauty salon, you pay less than the soccer mom driving an H2 around all day. The "unfairness" came when suddenly fuel efficient cars showed up and gave a tax break to those who bought a Prius - this screwed things up and now people weren't paying their "fair share" (this led to unimplemented ideas like putting GPS units in cars to track usage instead).
I'm not saying I necessarily agree with the idea of the gas tax being the end-all, be-all solution but that's the real reason this person was being "fined" - he hadn't paid the taxes required of usage. Whether or not this stands up in court is another matter (assuming it ever gets there)
I'm not sure what the iPod of iPhone did that none of the other players didn't.
You must be trolling or perhaps you don't remember what the market was like when the iPod came out. The iPod had an awesome interface and a massive (for the time) capacity that no other player even came close to.
Well if you're going to play that card - the iPod sold 376,000 units in its first year. Impressive given that it was an expensive device, but if you look at this chart you'll see that it wasn't until the thing got cheaper that the sales took off. Apple is making 3 million iPhones and expects to be able to sell most of them at that $500-600 pricetag. Sure, there are more cell phones sold in any given span of time but as Sony demonstrated with the PS3 - you can price yourself right out of any market, even one you completely owned the generation before.
However, the iPhone does have this interesting disadvantage in that it is in an established market. iPod more or less invented the hard drive music player and nearly had the MP3 market to itself from day one.
Like the iPod, the iPhone does stuff that the other players on the market do not, or it does it better. The trick is, will anyone care at the price point involved? Honestly, I think the idea of carrying your entire music collection around with you at all times (something that the iPod did better over time once hard drive capacities inched up there) is considerably more useful than being able to pause Pirates of the Carribean to look up Calamari joints. But that's me.
Am I the only one who sees the irony in how Macintosh/Mac OS X users whine and moan when an app doesn't match the UI of the Macintosh, to the point where many developers don't think it's worth the effort, but then when Apple ports something to Windows, they keep the ugly, brushed metal, doesn't-act-like-or-match-anything-on-Windows interface?
You missed the point - TorrentSpy is a website where anyone in the world can go, click on a link, download a torrent file, and then hop onto their trackers to get what they're after
This person went and made an account there, and gave traceable information, for no real reason. It's not like you need an account to download anything. Now he's asking Slashdot if there's some way he could, um, delete that account.
Well actually I thought the same thing when they announced Lego Star Wars - let me get this straight, someone made dinky little toys of the Star Wars movies, and now they've made a video game of the dinky little toys of the Star Wars movies?
And then I saw/played the game. It's actually a heck of a lot of fun. It's not only a legitimately humorous take on the Star Wars universe, it was sanctioned by Lucas, so it proves he has a sense of humor about these things after all. It works amazingly well given the confines - Chewbacca rips off storm troopers' arms and clubs them with them, and they have a number of hilarious ways of working around the game mechanic that none of the characters talk. And the second game is even better.
If you never liked Legos and/or never liked Star Wars then yeah, the game was doubly retarded. But for the rest of us Star Wars Lego was pure genius and a guilty pop culture pleasure (added bonus: co-op play with your kids). So it only makes sense they would want to milk this thing to death in video game form. Maybe they'll keep up the magic, maybe they'll run it into the ground. Who knows.
So someone who has dealt with the nightmares of administering servers for many years now thinks Ubuntu is spiffy in comparison? Someone who deals with the hassles of configuring systems likes a system often chastised by some for requiring administration?
Jason Bergman (of 2K Games) a few years back posted that the problem with Steam is that it represents the "super hardcore" market (i.e., the people who play high-end first person shooters) and so it's not really representative of the rest of the market (that also spends most of the money). So while it's nice that 95% of the people who play games like Half-Life 2 and Counter-Strike Source also own DVD-ROM drives, it doesn't mean that 95% of the people who play The SIMS 2 do.
Granted, this was late 2005 before Steam started carrying a lot more games (including games from 2K) and a lot more casual games like PopCap entries, so it could have changed by now. Of course this is assuming that most "casual, normal" gamers say "why yes send statistics about me to some company named Valve" (which is sort of going against what we've been teaching casual computer users for years now)
Since you're a Microsoft shop anyway, check out Paint.NET. It requires the.NET Framework 2.0 but it's (IMO) 100x better than The GIMP. It's actually turning out to be a pretty good competitor to packages like Paint Shop Pro and has the interface down, to boot. Also, it's free. Did I mention it was Open Source (MIT License, whatever that is) and Microsoft is helping with it? Yes, Microsoft is helping with an open source project (another one, rather). For simplistic tasks, it works great.
I think the real question everyone wants to know is, who would pirate christian rock CDs?
At one point in time, my sister did. She was at the time the most die hard fundamentalist Christian you'll ever meet. Also at the time she could literally barely turn her computer on (I once had to "fix" it by turning it on - this was in College). And yet she figured out Napster (1.0, the old illegal version) and had filled out her puny 1GB hard drive with pirated Christian music
This says a few things.
First, it says Napster was so ubiquitous and easy to use a caveman could use it.
Second, it says that, at least at the dawn of P2P, even people who made it a big deal to live their life through religious teachings (i.e., thou shalt not steal) and criticize others for not doing so (I once stubbed my toe and said "SHIT!" and got an hour long lecture from her) saw no problem with pirating music.
But most of all it says that people didn't get P2P at the time, they just knew it gave them what they wanted. They don't want to buy CD's, they don't want to wait until the radio plays what they want, they just want to type in the name of a song and start listening to it. I honestly don't think my sister knew, at the time, what she was doing. She just wanted to listen to the songs she wanted to when she wanted to.
Chris Remo of Shacknews spoke to a developer off the record and apparently the problem with the PSP is that, because it's so close to a PS2 in terms of hardware (it's inferior, but it's closer than a DS is in terms of power) and it requires such a huge budget to make a top notch PSP title that it doesn't make sense to do so, given that you could much more effectively make a PS2 game and have 100 million people in the install base, as opposed to the anemic PSP numbers.
I think what might curb this would be when/if the PS2 ceases to be - but by that time Sony will have unveiled the PSP2 or bailed out of the market entirely.
Microsoft would be welcome to use as much GPL code as they liked, as long as they respected the requirements of the GPL. However, they don't want to do this, because they are in denial. For Microsoft to use GPL code would be to admit that someone else has written better software than they could, and that would raise all manner of awkward questions.
Two things
1. Your blanket statement that GPL code is better than Microsoft code is just as ludicrous as when Microsoft makes the opposite comment
2. I seriously doubt Microsoft is not using GPL code because they are in denial. They are not using GPL code because they have tons and tons of staff whose job it is to write code and they grow everything in house. To switch to GPL code would require they change their entire business model to open source or else run afoul of the GPL. And why do that when you have programmers on staff?
Some months back, the TWiT Podcast Network went down. Leo Laporte hosted the RSS feeds at The Planet (where the story's poster was working when he quit/got threatened). Leo was angry at The Planet's lack of response and feedback. Someone informed him that at some point in time, The Planet started to go downhill as a company for various reasons so a bunch of their employees got together, quit, then went off to form their own hosting company, Softlayer. A number of other employees followed as well. Leo took this advice and relocated the hosting to Softlayer.
I wonder if the missing part to the submitter's story is that he quit The Planet to move to Softlayer and so The Planet's management, mad that yet another employee was leaving for that company, threatened to sue him. It would jive with the theory that this was a warning to other employees. It will ultimately fail but in the meantime it works as a band-aid for the leakage of employees to the other company.
Actually (and I don't have a source for this other than watching MTV back in the 90's) during an interview with Robert Plant he revealed that, prior to the release of the first album, Led Zeppelin was playing a concert and someone with the last name Zeppelin (descended from Ferdinand von Zeppelin, who owned the Zeppelin airship company, wound up backstage. She was an older woman and she was pleased as punch that Led Zeppelin was using their family's name in such a way. Then they showed her what the album cover was going to look like. She was outraged, told them they couldn't use it, said that she would sue, etc. Of course they did it anyway...
So yeah, even thirty years later it was a controversial thing to do. I don't know if they ever got in any real trouble over it (they used the zeppelin/blimp imagery on other albums as well) but I think part of it is that "zeppelin" because so synonymous with blimps that any "trademarking" was long since a moot point (see: thermos)
(side note: for those who don't know, the saying that something is going bad is "that will go over like a lead balloon!", i.e., it will crash to the ground - someone morphed this into "going over like a lead zeppelin" and they took the name from that - dropping the "a" of course)
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Actually the wireless card was a very common Linksys card (can't remember the model off the top of my head) and was known to work with Linux using NDISWrapper. Still couldn't get it to work for months until someone in the Ubuntu community figured it out. Also - how is it that so much of the Linux community pisses and moans about how much Windows costs and yet your answer is to just spend money on hardware? Especially since the card I had was "known" to run on Linux already.
I'm also a developer in the Windows sphere and I've also set up an Ubuntu machine at home. However, my experience was the polar opposite of yours. I had to tell Ubuntu what resolution to use, Windows just figured it out (yes, I needed to upgrade my NVidia driver manually). I had to jump through many fiery hoops to get Ubuntu to use my wireless card, Windows just figured it out for me. Installation of software on Windows is a breeze, installing anything not on Ubuntu's list is a pain. Most Linux software is online by necessity since brick & mortar locations won't carry it. Microsoft can keep all Microsoft software up to date, if they did that for competitors' products, they'd get sued by the DoJ again.
Linux and Ubuntu in particular are good products and it's great that you've had such good experience with it. But your experience is not typical and will definitely not be the norm for someone who is not an amazingly technical person like yourself.
For various reasons I won't go into here, I still haven't jumped on the HD Bandwagon yet. All my TV's in my house are SD. As luck would have it, the 80GB single tuner Series2 downstairs is starting to die - the hard drive occasionally makes clicking noises, and the screen freezes when this happens. So if that thing bites the dust, I figure I can pick up one of these guys.
Which then raises the question - am I right in thinking that it will work with my current all-SD setup? I figure within the next year I'll be diving into HDTV so it will be nice to have the HD TiVo in place, but will it really work?
Gamers remember The All-Seeing Eye, which for a time was the single best server browser on the market. It started out life as a shareware product and the owner eventually sold it to Yahoo, staying on for a time as the developer. Yahoo's support for the product waned, the developer moved on, and the product hasn't seen an update in years. Yahoo is good at buying out products and letting them die, it seems.
One who hit up on the genius idea of making sure that the packaging has to be destroyed in order to use the product, thereby ensuring that the product cannot be returned to a store for a refund.
I'm not saying I necessarily agree with the idea of the gas tax being the end-all, be-all solution but that's the real reason this person was being "fined" - he hadn't paid the taxes required of usage. Whether or not this stands up in court is another matter (assuming it ever gets there)
However, the iPhone does have this interesting disadvantage in that it is in an established market. iPod more or less invented the hard drive music player and nearly had the MP3 market to itself from day one.
Like the iPod, the iPhone does stuff that the other players on the market do not, or it does it better. The trick is, will anyone care at the price point involved? Honestly, I think the idea of carrying your entire music collection around with you at all times (something that the iPod did better over time once hard drive capacities inched up there) is considerably more useful than being able to pause Pirates of the Carribean to look up Calamari joints. But that's me.
Am I the only one who sees the irony in how Macintosh/Mac OS X users whine and moan when an app doesn't match the UI of the Macintosh, to the point where many developers don't think it's worth the effort, but then when Apple ports something to Windows, they keep the ugly, brushed metal, doesn't-act-like-or-match-anything-on-Windows interface?
You missed the point - TorrentSpy is a website where anyone in the world can go, click on a link, download a torrent file, and then hop onto their trackers to get what they're after
This person went and made an account there, and gave traceable information, for no real reason. It's not like you need an account to download anything. Now he's asking Slashdot if there's some way he could, um, delete that account.
Well actually I thought the same thing when they announced Lego Star Wars - let me get this straight, someone made dinky little toys of the Star Wars movies, and now they've made a video game of the dinky little toys of the Star Wars movies?
And then I saw/played the game. It's actually a heck of a lot of fun. It's not only a legitimately humorous take on the Star Wars universe, it was sanctioned by Lucas, so it proves he has a sense of humor about these things after all. It works amazingly well given the confines - Chewbacca rips off storm troopers' arms and clubs them with them, and they have a number of hilarious ways of working around the game mechanic that none of the characters talk. And the second game is even better.
If you never liked Legos and/or never liked Star Wars then yeah, the game was doubly retarded. But for the rest of us Star Wars Lego was pure genius and a guilty pop culture pleasure (added bonus: co-op play with your kids). So it only makes sense they would want to milk this thing to death in video game form. Maybe they'll keep up the magic, maybe they'll run it into the ground. Who knows.
So someone who has dealt with the nightmares of administering servers for many years now thinks Ubuntu is spiffy in comparison? Someone who deals with the hassles of configuring systems likes a system often chastised by some for requiring administration?
So?
Jason Bergman (of 2K Games) a few years back posted that the problem with Steam is that it represents the "super hardcore" market (i.e., the people who play high-end first person shooters) and so it's not really representative of the rest of the market (that also spends most of the money). So while it's nice that 95% of the people who play games like Half-Life 2 and Counter-Strike Source also own DVD-ROM drives, it doesn't mean that 95% of the people who play The SIMS 2 do.
Granted, this was late 2005 before Steam started carrying a lot more games (including games from 2K) and a lot more casual games like PopCap entries, so it could have changed by now. Of course this is assuming that most "casual, normal" gamers say "why yes send statistics about me to some company named Valve" (which is sort of going against what we've been teaching casual computer users for years now)
Since you're a Microsoft shop anyway, check out Paint.NET. It requires the .NET Framework 2.0 but it's (IMO) 100x better than The GIMP. It's actually turning out to be a pretty good competitor to packages like Paint Shop Pro and has the interface down, to boot. Also, it's free. Did I mention it was Open Source (MIT License, whatever that is) and Microsoft is helping with it? Yes, Microsoft is helping with an open source project (another one, rather). For simplistic tasks, it works great.
This says a few things.
First, it says Napster was so ubiquitous and easy to use a caveman could use it.
Second, it says that, at least at the dawn of P2P, even people who made it a big deal to live their life through religious teachings (i.e., thou shalt not steal) and criticize others for not doing so (I once stubbed my toe and said "SHIT!" and got an hour long lecture from her) saw no problem with pirating music.
But most of all it says that people didn't get P2P at the time, they just knew it gave them what they wanted. They don't want to buy CD's, they don't want to wait until the radio plays what they want, they just want to type in the name of a song and start listening to it. I honestly don't think my sister knew, at the time, what she was doing. She just wanted to listen to the songs she wanted to when she wanted to.
I think what might curb this would be when/if the PS2 ceases to be - but by that time Sony will have unveiled the PSP2 or bailed out of the market entirely.
1. Your blanket statement that GPL code is better than Microsoft code is just as ludicrous as when Microsoft makes the opposite comment
2. I seriously doubt Microsoft is not using GPL code because they are in denial. They are not using GPL code because they have tons and tons of staff whose job it is to write code and they grow everything in house. To switch to GPL code would require they change their entire business model to open source or else run afoul of the GPL. And why do that when you have programmers on staff?
Some months back, the TWiT Podcast Network went down. Leo Laporte hosted the RSS feeds at The Planet (where the story's poster was working when he quit/got threatened). Leo was angry at The Planet's lack of response and feedback. Someone informed him that at some point in time, The Planet started to go downhill as a company for various reasons so a bunch of their employees got together, quit, then went off to form their own hosting company, Softlayer. A number of other employees followed as well. Leo took this advice and relocated the hosting to Softlayer.
I wonder if the missing part to the submitter's story is that he quit The Planet to move to Softlayer and so The Planet's management, mad that yet another employee was leaving for that company, threatened to sue him. It would jive with the theory that this was a warning to other employees. It will ultimately fail but in the meantime it works as a band-aid for the leakage of employees to the other company.
So does this mean the Ultimate upgrade works like the XP upgrade?
And can you have both the version of XP you own as well as a Vista upgraded from that same copy of XP on the same system?
So yeah, even thirty years later it was a controversial thing to do. I don't know if they ever got in any real trouble over it (they used the zeppelin/blimp imagery on other albums as well) but I think part of it is that "zeppelin" because so synonymous with blimps that any "trademarking" was long since a moot point (see: thermos)
(side note: for those who don't know, the saying that something is going bad is "that will go over like a lead balloon!", i.e., it will crash to the ground - someone morphed this into "going over like a lead zeppelin" and they took the name from that - dropping the "a" of course)