"If I'm in a car it's to drive, and drive I will. Music is nice, but there's no sound like a proper exhaust note at 140mph."
And, exactly how often do you get to drive at 140mph? Unless you live outside the US (which, from your use of miles, seems unlikely), you sure aren't going 140 on any public roads.
" don't thing so. Europe is 3,837,000 Sq. Miles and the US is 3,537,438 Sq. Miles."
That statement is misleading as it includes part of Russia.
The European Union, for example, is about 1/3 the size of the continental US, and it has about 150 million more people (1.5 times as many).
That's approximately 4.5 times more people per square-km as the US.
Go to Wyoming some time and tell me that a nationwide mass-transit system is feasable. It's not.
That said, we could do much better. Amtrak is a disaster, and we need more "short-haul" solutions. I can take the bus from my city (Fort Collins, ~100km north of Denver) to Denver, but there is no rail. There should be.
Now, the truth is that it's simply more convenient to drive. Everyone goes ~130kph on the Interstate, and there is rarely any traffic north of Denver, so it only takes about 45 minutes to get to Denver. Compare that to a rail service which would have to be much faster to even compete (to compensate for the time spent getting to the station).
In Windows XP, the visual styles (skins) actually include multiple DPI versions of the common UI elements. Try changing to 120dpi and watch what the titlebar does. The major problem in Windows today is that most apps still hard-code pixel counts.
"The scheduler is capable of only 32 processes (again I consider a bitmap scheduler great if it's an option, but when you realize that WinCE drivers and BSPs are built ASSUMING this is a constant it is quite bad)."
"On longer trips of predominately highway i have had mileage about around 52-53 miles per gallon, this is with cruising at 70 mph."
You have to remember soemthing:
Diesel has more energy per gallon than gasoline. Somewhere around 14% more, IIRC. So don't go bragging about your MPG figure until you realize that Diesel MPG != Gasoline MPG.
Not to mention that diesel has a number of emmissions problems, particularly sulfur diesel (as is most diesel in the US). A vehicle like the Prius not only delivers higher MPG, it also works hard to keep emissions as low as possible.
"The whole reason behind the rebooting problem is the registry, and if MS gets rid of it I'll gladly stop making fun of it. Until then you and the rest of the MS-defender crowd will just have to keep stretching your credibility trying to defend it."
No, it's not. The registry is simply another filesystem, just like/etc in UNIX.
The reason you need to reboot is that the software is replacing system DLLs that are loaded into memory. Windows is not flexible enough to reload those DLLs without rebooting.
Oh, and by the way, 95% of the time, you *don't have to* reboot, even when it says so. Most installers just tell you to reboot because it was common practice in the Windows 95 era.
Moreover, some installers are just lazy. They install system services but don't start them, forcing you to reboot.
"The whole reason behind the rebooting problem is the registry, and if MS gets rid of it I'll gladly stop making fun of it. Until then you and the rest of the MS-defender crowd will just have to keep stretching your credibility trying to defend it."
That's funny, because my arguments for using Windows have nothing to do with the fact that "I don't have to reboot". I'm just glad to be running an OS where the whole hardware issue isn't a massive clusterfuck. I don't want to have to recompile my fucking kernel to install a 3D driver. I don't want to have to get different binary modules for each kernel revision. I don't want to have to fuck with cardmgr to get my wireless card to work. I don't want to spend five fucking hours making my USB WiFi dongle work.
Oh, and I don't want to have to get special packages for my distro. And I don't want to have to compile software from source. And I don't want to limit myself to some repository of often-outdated packages.
Today, there are only two operating systems that can do this: Windows and Mac OS.
I have a managed Linux server. For this, Linux is great. It does what it needs to do without the expense of commercial software (of course, it did take me five fucking hours to get a damn mail server running).
But Linux on my desktop? Sorry, it's just not worth it. Even on my paltry salary, the time I would spend getting my (farily standard) hardware working with any Linux distro is simply not worth it.
Since this is an HP bash fest, I'm going to turn in my experience.
Why is my experience more relevent than the experiences of other slashdotters? Because, instead of working with one or two HP products, I've installed over one thousand HP computers this summer.
I work for the local school district, which has 42 schools, including a new high school opening this year that needs 750 new computers. We remove the old computers (HP Vectra and Kayak systems) and replace them with D530 desktops. This district is located in a town where 10% of the working population works for HP, so all of the computer gear is HP. If HP sells it, we use it. HP printers, scanners, networking gear, monitors, desktops, servers, and notebooks.
Of the 1000 systems we have installed so far throughout the district, only one has been DOA. And we have sent about 500 HP systems off to recycling - they are 6 years old and almost all are still working. Of the 1000 HP systems we installed last year, we have had three failures (all because of HDD failure).
The D530 is a solid product, and it is built with essentially whitebox components. It is standard through and through, with the possible exception of the power supply (it's a different shape so that it can fit in the case) and the heatsink (it has a centrifugal blower instead of a fan). We have dropped several of the systems, stacked them 12 high, and otherwise abused them. Our only complaint so far has been that they are too easy to open (this is a school district, remember).
These systems take a lot of abuse. They are power-cycled five or six times per day (teachers turn them off between periods even though we tell them not to), they are exposed to dirt and dust and other contamination (students bringing food into the labs), and sometimes students even open them and start touching things (we eventually found that zip-ties were an effective defense).
We have old (and new) LaserJet printers in service. We even replaced a LaserJet II this year. The new HP printers are cheaper, faster, and better. People who say "they don't build them like they used to" are right. I doubt that these new printers will last 15 years. That said, these new printers are far faster and cheaper than they used to be. It's a tradeoff.
So, when you say that "hp is crap", remember this: I've dealt with thousands of HP systems, and I can tell you that the failure rate is as low as can be reasonably expected.
"This fact, along with the AAC encoding, makes it so that a 128 kbit AAC encoded music file from iTMS is much higher quality than a 128 kbit MP3 file ripped from a CD."
Yes, but probably not as good as the ~700kbps FLAC file I ripped with cdparanoia.
Or the 24/96 5.1 channel uncompressed DVD-audio mix.
Not that 128kbps AAC is bad, mind you, but the CD is simply easier, primarily because I can rip to FLAC and then re-encode to any format of my choosing (usually Vorbis for my PDA; I have a program that lets you choose your tracks and then adjusts the quality setting to fit the space).
With the iTunes files, you have to use an iPod, waste a lot of space using FLAC (some MP3 players do handle FLAC), or use a CD player to listen to your music. When you buy the CD (I always buy used, by the way - from the $3 bin at the thrift shop), you can use MP3 or Vorbis or WMA and put it on the device of your choice (in my case, a Pocket PC Phone with a 512M SD card).
"When, or if, you americans actually do adopt the metric system, it's spelled Metre.."
Right. I'm going to go to the tyre centre and have them look under the bonnet.
I'll fill my auto with 40 litres of petrol, much less than my neighbour's red-coloured auto which requires 80 litres of petrol. My auto is awful, though, so it's going to the scrapheap. For now, maybe I can bodge something to make my auto look better. At least the two hundred kilogrammes of scrap aluminium are worth something, according to the recycling programme I watched yesterday.
"Of course, this is just me being a nit-picky bastard."
No, it's you not understanding that American English spells things differently from British English.
The accepted American English spellings are "Meter", "Liter", and "Gram".
"Yes, you do have a lot of work to do, Dave. Maybe you guys should have done the job right years ago rather than be in catch-up as well as damage-control mode."
Years ago, IE wasn't just a browser, it was *the* browser. Compare IE 4.0 to Netscape 4.0.
IE 4 was quite an impressive browser at the time. Mozilla and KHTML didn't exist. Opera has little CSS support.
They did do the job right the first time. But they abandoned what they had done. From IE 4.0 to IE 6.0 there are minimal changes in the rendering engine (IE 5 did see a nice speed boost).
It took Mozilla years to catch up to what IE had done. They did, however, continue working while Microsoft had ceased development. Today, Mozilla is more standards-complaint, more secure, and, in some cases, faster than IE (see below).
The IE vs. Mozilla performance debate is complex. IE waits for more of the page to load before rendering, so on slower machines with fast connections, it's faster. Mozilla is faster on fast machines with slow connections. On a fast machine with a fast connection, both browsers are pretty fast (Mozilla does better on large pages, though).
"Oh, ferchrissake, stop spouting that old FUD about how Windoze market dominance means it's the preferred target for viruses, and if Mac had a 90% share, it would be targeted too. It's just not true."
Right, and you know because Mac has 90% marketshare, right?
The fact is, we don't know *how many* bugs and flaws OS X has, and until it has the fabled 90% market share, it will not be targeted.
There are PLENTY of security flaws in Mac OS and Linux. Remember the SSH remote root compromise? Remember the kernel releases that allowed privelage elevation? Remember the whole URL-handler flaw?
There are probably millions of Macs out there that are STILL veulnerable to the URL flaw. Why haven't they been attacked? It's not because they couldn't be, it's because it's simply better business to write spyware for Windows.
The linked article gives counterexamples. It does not, however, make any compelling argument against the FACT that Windows is run on more desktops than any other OS. If you're going to write crap, who do you target, 92% or 4%?
Don't feed me this shit about how wrong I am in believing that the security of Mac OS X has yet to be tested. There have been flaws in Mac OS X, big ones. They have been patched, just like the Windows flaws. Millions of users are likely still running unpatched software.
The difference is that the exploits simply are not there for Mac OS. And, no, an exploit of the Microsoft type doesn't require root access.
You have no direct evidence to support your position, as I have no direct evidence to support mine. The jury is still out. Until Windows is no longer the dominant platform, any conclusion is just conjecture.
The US standard is indeed not DVB (EchoStar/Dish Network is, but it is encrypted so you can't decode it).
You can probably pick up over-the-air digital TV in your area. All you need is an antenna (often "rabbit ears" will do) and an ATSC card. Although ATSC can carry HDTV (and more and more programs are HD), not all ATSC streams are high definition.
If you have cable or satellite, you are indeed out of luck. Fortunately, digital cable is becoming more standardized.
There are also cards with hardware MPEG encoding, so you can take the load off of your CPU.
"I find it extremely interesting that you (and the vast majority of posts I've seen so far) automatically equate nudity with pornography. Thus comes the belief that Michaelangelo's "David" (sans figleaf) is automatically obscene.
Sounds like a pretty big restriction on freedom of expression to me."
It sure would be, except that nudity in a non-obscene sense is fine. Artwork such as "David" is frequently displayed in public, including in advertisements, public expositions, and on the covers of large magazines.
You're right, not all nudity is porn, and non-obscene artwork isn't illegal at all.
There is no restriction of freedom here. Move along.
Say what you will, but I personally find Office 2003 to be an excellent product. Even running on a modest system (PIII 500, 256M PC100, Windows XP), it's pretty peppy.
It hasn't crashed yet on me, it autosaves your work in case of the inevitable (my notebook has no battery and people have a habit of unplugging it), it is loaded with features (many that I find useful), and it's pretty easy to use.
"This isn't a bad thing, Just be aware of it when making comparisions. OOo is taking longer because it's not already there."
No, OOo is taking longer because it is *poorly optimized*. Word, even with the autostart *disabled* (as are all other startup items on my PC), loads in about 2-3 seconds on my PC.
OOo, like Mozilla, wastes a lot of time by being cross-platform. OOo has to reimplement many of the things provided by the OS, which means more memory usage and more time. Mozilla has improved recently, but it's still pretty bad.
"Completely different hardware architecture. It's a lot harder to emulate a hardware platform that it looks. Even with computers six times faster than the XBox there are no working XBox emulators out there. And look at the horsepower needed to emulate a PSOne on a PC."
Actually, there are working XBox emulators, and they can play (some) production games, albeit with glitches.
Remember, the XBox is x86 powered, so you don't need emulation, you need "virtualization". Moreover, the XBox is DirectX/Windows powered, so all you really need to run XBox games is a translation layer (ala Wine).
"How many people in the US think the prison abuse in Iraq is no big deal? 30-40%? How many people in Arab countries think it's ok to decapitate a person? Probably much less. Perhaps Muslims don't need be told every minute what's rigt and what's wrong. How about Christian "flocks"?"
<sarcasm>Right, because what the US soldiers did is *exactly* the same thing as decapitating a person.</sarcasm>
"But yeah, the US is has a far better track record when it comes to freedom of speech, unless it involves nudity, or strong language, or unpopular opinions, or bad comments about the president during a time of "war," or graphic images of destruction, or...."
"involves nudity, or strong language, or unpopular opinions, or bad comments about the president during a time of "war," or graphic images of destruction, or....""
Well, let's try this one out:
1: Nudity. Pornography is legal in the United States, so long as it is not child pornography, and so long as it is not displayed in public (e.g. broadcast TV).
2: Strong language. Again, legal unless it's in public, and even there, it's rarely an issue. There are 14 words that can't be said on broadcast TV or radio. You can say whatever you want on cable.
3: Bad comments. No problem there. Many prominent figures, including John Kerry, are saying "bad things" about the president. Remember, there is a difference between something being "legal" and it being "acceptable". Kerry can't say but so much or he would alienate the public. Note also that you may have liability with libel/slander, but this is extremely difficult to prove in the US (you must prove that the comments were untrue, intended to be damaging, and that they actually did damage).
4: Graphic images. The media has made a choice not to broadcast such images. It is not illegal to broadcast such images. Many websites in the US do just this.
Now, on the "US media sucks" point, I agree 100%. Fortunately, newspapers and public radio are far better than cable news. There are plenty of high-quality, objective news sources in the US. But most of them aren't on cable TV.
Because, as we know, IIS can't possibly power a big site. Particularly not one as big as microsoft.com (#4 according to Alexa) or msn.com (#2 according to Alexa).
"I, personally have given up on making my own webpages work with IE, it's not worth the effort..."
Why would you ever be hired with that attitude?
The fact is, all the IE moaning is a BIG MYTH.
Sure, IE has some quirks (did you know that you can turn most of these off using the proper DOCTYPE?). But it's not a "pain in the ass" to develop for.
The biggest quirk is that IE (when not in standards-compliant mode - see above) calculates "size" differently than other browsers (and the standard).
Frankly, unless you're building some fancy site with the absolute latest CSS and Javascript features, IE will render your page *just fine*. I have built *tons* of web pages for both IE and Mozilla. They render exactly the same in Opera, IE, KHTML, and Mozilla, they conform to the XHTML 1.1 spec, they are lightweight, and they look pretty good.
IE's second biggest quirk is it's (semi) lack of PNG alpha. Yet, why exactly do you need to be using 32-bit images on your page? It's quite easy (and beneficial for download speeds) to get by with 8-bit images. JPEG does better for photographs, anyway.
So, what's your problem with IE. Name the areas where IE doesn't conform to standards *in standards compliance mode* and tell me why they play such an integral part of your development process that you cannot find a way around them.
Do Mozilla, KHTML, and Opera conform to the standard better? Yes. Does that mean that it's a "pain in the ass" to develop for IE? No.
Web developers who say that it's "not worth the effort" to develop for IE are like an engine designer who says it's "not worth the effort" to develop for 87 octane petrol.
Slashdot Mirror
"If I'm in a car it's to drive, and drive I will. Music is nice, but there's no sound like a proper exhaust note at 140mph."
And, exactly how often do you get to drive at 140mph? Unless you live outside the US (which, from your use of miles, seems unlikely), you sure aren't going 140 on any public roads.
Cat returns lots of results:
See for yourself
How about rabbit?
Lots of results
How about wikipedia?
Lots of results, the first one wikipedia.org.
If you are trying to dump on Microsoft, you could at least get your facts right.
" don't thing so. Europe is 3,837,000 Sq. Miles and the US is 3,537,438 Sq. Miles."
That statement is misleading as it includes part of Russia.
The European Union, for example, is about 1/3 the size of the continental US, and it has about 150 million more people (1.5 times as many).
That's approximately 4.5 times more people per square-km as the US.
Go to Wyoming some time and tell me that a nationwide mass-transit system is feasable. It's not.
That said, we could do much better. Amtrak is a disaster, and we need more "short-haul" solutions. I can take the bus from my city (Fort Collins, ~100km north of Denver) to Denver, but there is no rail. There should be.
Now, the truth is that it's simply more convenient to drive. Everyone goes ~130kph on the Interstate, and there is rarely any traffic north of Denver, so it only takes about 45 minutes to get to Denver. Compare that to a rail service which would have to be much faster to even compete (to compensate for the time spent getting to the station).
In Windows XP, the visual styles (skins) actually include multiple DPI versions of the common UI elements. Try changing to 120dpi and watch what the titlebar does. The major problem in Windows today is that most apps still hard-code pixel counts.
No, it's not. If you had analyzed the data for five minutes with a packet sniffer, you would have noticed that it is certainly not HTML.
"The scheduler is capable of only 32 processes (again I consider a bitmap scheduler great if it's an option, but when you realize that WinCE drivers and BSPs are built ASSUMING this is a constant it is quite bad)."
This has not been the case since Windows CE 4.0.
"On longer trips of predominately highway i have had mileage about around 52-53 miles per gallon, this is with cruising at 70 mph."
You have to remember soemthing:
Diesel has more energy per gallon than gasoline. Somewhere around 14% more, IIRC. So don't go bragging about your MPG figure until you realize that Diesel MPG != Gasoline MPG.
Not to mention that diesel has a number of emmissions problems, particularly sulfur diesel (as is most diesel in the US). A vehicle like the Prius not only delivers higher MPG, it also works hard to keep emissions as low as possible.
"The whole reason behind the rebooting problem is the registry, and if MS gets rid of it I'll gladly stop making fun of it. Until then you and the rest of the MS-defender crowd will just have to keep stretching your credibility trying to defend it."
/etc in UNIX.
No, it's not. The registry is simply another filesystem, just like
The reason you need to reboot is that the software is replacing system DLLs that are loaded into memory. Windows is not flexible enough to reload those DLLs without rebooting.
Oh, and by the way, 95% of the time, you *don't have to* reboot, even when it says so. Most installers just tell you to reboot because it was common practice in the Windows 95 era.
Moreover, some installers are just lazy. They install system services but don't start them, forcing you to reboot.
"The whole reason behind the rebooting problem is the registry, and if MS gets rid of it I'll gladly stop making fun of it. Until then you and the rest of the MS-defender crowd will just have to keep stretching your credibility trying to defend it."
That's funny, because my arguments for using Windows have nothing to do with the fact that "I don't have to reboot". I'm just glad to be running an OS where the whole hardware issue isn't a massive clusterfuck. I don't want to have to recompile my fucking kernel to install a 3D driver. I don't want to have to get different binary modules for each kernel revision. I don't want to have to fuck with cardmgr to get my wireless card to work. I don't want to spend five fucking hours making my USB WiFi dongle work.
Oh, and I don't want to have to get special packages for my distro. And I don't want to have to compile software from source. And I don't want to limit myself to some repository of often-outdated packages.
Today, there are only two operating systems that can do this: Windows and Mac OS.
I have a managed Linux server. For this, Linux is great. It does what it needs to do without the expense of commercial software (of course, it did take me five fucking hours to get a damn mail server running).
But Linux on my desktop? Sorry, it's just not worth it. Even on my paltry salary, the time I would spend getting my (farily standard) hardware working with any Linux distro is simply not worth it.
Since this is an HP bash fest, I'm going to turn in my experience.
Why is my experience more relevent than the experiences of other slashdotters? Because, instead of working with one or two HP products, I've installed over one thousand HP computers this summer.
I work for the local school district, which has 42 schools, including a new high school opening this year that needs 750 new computers. We remove the old computers (HP Vectra and Kayak systems) and replace them with D530 desktops. This district is located in a town where 10% of the working population works for HP, so all of the computer gear is HP. If HP sells it, we use it. HP printers, scanners, networking gear, monitors, desktops, servers, and notebooks.
Of the 1000 systems we have installed so far throughout the district, only one has been DOA. And we have sent about 500 HP systems off to recycling - they are 6 years old and almost all are still working. Of the 1000 HP systems we installed last year, we have had three failures (all because of HDD failure).
The D530 is a solid product, and it is built with essentially whitebox components. It is standard through and through, with the possible exception of the power supply (it's a different shape so that it can fit in the case) and the heatsink (it has a centrifugal blower instead of a fan). We have dropped several of the systems, stacked them 12 high, and otherwise abused them. Our only complaint so far has been that they are too easy to open (this is a school district, remember).
These systems take a lot of abuse. They are power-cycled five or six times per day (teachers turn them off between periods even though we tell them not to), they are exposed to dirt and dust and other contamination (students bringing food into the labs), and sometimes students even open them and start touching things (we eventually found that zip-ties were an effective defense).
We have old (and new) LaserJet printers in service. We even replaced a LaserJet II this year. The new HP printers are cheaper, faster, and better. People who say "they don't build them like they used to" are right. I doubt that these new printers will last 15 years. That said, these new printers are far faster and cheaper than they used to be. It's a tradeoff.
So, when you say that "hp is crap", remember this: I've dealt with thousands of HP systems, and I can tell you that the failure rate is as low as can be reasonably expected.
"This fact, along with the AAC encoding, makes it so that a 128 kbit AAC encoded music file from iTMS is much higher quality than a 128 kbit MP3 file ripped from a CD."
Yes, but probably not as good as the ~700kbps FLAC file I ripped with cdparanoia.
Or the 24/96 5.1 channel uncompressed DVD-audio mix.
Not that 128kbps AAC is bad, mind you, but the CD is simply easier, primarily because I can rip to FLAC and then re-encode to any format of my choosing (usually Vorbis for my PDA; I have a program that lets you choose your tracks and then adjusts the quality setting to fit the space).
With the iTunes files, you have to use an iPod, waste a lot of space using FLAC (some MP3 players do handle FLAC), or use a CD player to listen to your music. When you buy the CD (I always buy used, by the way - from the $3 bin at the thrift shop), you can use MP3 or Vorbis or WMA and put it on the device of your choice (in my case, a Pocket PC Phone with a 512M SD card).
"When, or if, you americans actually do adopt the metric system, it's spelled Metre.."
Right. I'm going to go to the tyre centre and have them look under the bonnet.
I'll fill my auto with 40 litres of petrol, much less than my neighbour's red-coloured auto which requires 80 litres of petrol. My auto is awful, though, so it's going to the scrapheap. For now, maybe I can bodge something to make my auto look better. At least the two hundred kilogrammes of scrap aluminium are worth something, according to the recycling programme I watched yesterday.
"Of course, this is just me being a nit-picky bastard."
No, it's you not understanding that American English spells things differently from British English.
The accepted American English spellings are "Meter", "Liter", and "Gram".
"Yes, you do have a lot of work to do, Dave. Maybe you guys should have done the job right years ago rather than be in catch-up as well as damage-control mode."
Years ago, IE wasn't just a browser, it was *the* browser. Compare IE 4.0 to Netscape 4.0.
IE 4 was quite an impressive browser at the time. Mozilla and KHTML didn't exist. Opera has little CSS support.
They did do the job right the first time. But they abandoned what they had done. From IE 4.0 to IE 6.0 there are minimal changes in the rendering engine (IE 5 did see a nice speed boost).
It took Mozilla years to catch up to what IE had done. They did, however, continue working while Microsoft had ceased development. Today, Mozilla is more standards-complaint, more secure, and, in some cases, faster than IE (see below).
The IE vs. Mozilla performance debate is complex. IE waits for more of the page to load before rendering, so on slower machines with fast connections, it's faster. Mozilla is faster on fast machines with slow connections. On a fast machine with a fast connection, both browsers are pretty fast (Mozilla does better on large pages, though).
Thankfully, the world leader in x86-on-PPC emulation was recently purchased by Microsoft.
"Oh, ferchrissake, stop spouting that old FUD about how Windoze market dominance means it's the preferred target for viruses, and if Mac had a 90% share, it would be targeted too. It's just not true."
Right, and you know because Mac has 90% marketshare, right?
The fact is, we don't know *how many* bugs and flaws OS X has, and until it has the fabled 90% market share, it will not be targeted.
There are PLENTY of security flaws in Mac OS and Linux. Remember the SSH remote root compromise? Remember the kernel releases that allowed privelage elevation? Remember the whole URL-handler flaw?
There are probably millions of Macs out there that are STILL veulnerable to the URL flaw. Why haven't they been attacked? It's not because they couldn't be, it's because it's simply better business to write spyware for Windows.
The linked article gives counterexamples. It does not, however, make any compelling argument against the FACT that Windows is run on more desktops than any other OS. If you're going to write crap, who do you target, 92% or 4%?
Don't feed me this shit about how wrong I am in believing that the security of Mac OS X has yet to be tested. There have been flaws in Mac OS X, big ones. They have been patched, just like the Windows flaws. Millions of users are likely still running unpatched software.
The difference is that the exploits simply are not there for Mac OS. And, no, an exploit of the Microsoft type doesn't require root access.
You have no direct evidence to support your position, as I have no direct evidence to support mine. The jury is still out. Until Windows is no longer the dominant platform, any conclusion is just conjecture.
Don't pretend that it's not.
You're confusing HDTV and DTV.
The US standard is indeed not DVB (EchoStar/Dish Network is, but it is encrypted so you can't decode it).
You can probably pick up over-the-air digital TV in your area. All you need is an antenna (often "rabbit ears" will do) and an ATSC card. Although ATSC can carry HDTV (and more and more programs are HD), not all ATSC streams are high definition.
If you have cable or satellite, you are indeed out of luck. Fortunately, digital cable is becoming more standardized.
There are also cards with hardware MPEG encoding, so you can take the load off of your CPU.
Yes.
Here is a copy on Amazon.
Here is a copy at Best Buy. You can also purchase it at the store.
Hmm, so two high-profile corporations are selling "Rage Against the Machine". What was your point, again?
"I find it extremely interesting that you (and the vast majority of posts I've seen so far) automatically equate nudity with pornography. Thus comes the belief that Michaelangelo's "David" (sans figleaf) is automatically obscene.
Sounds like a pretty big restriction on freedom of expression to me."
It sure would be, except that nudity in a non-obscene sense is fine. Artwork such as "David" is frequently displayed in public, including in advertisements, public expositions, and on the covers of large magazines.
You're right, not all nudity is porn, and non-obscene artwork isn't illegal at all.
There is no restriction of freedom here. Move along.
Say what you will, but I personally find Office 2003 to be an excellent product. Even running on a modest system (PIII 500, 256M PC100, Windows XP), it's pretty peppy.
It hasn't crashed yet on me, it autosaves your work in case of the inevitable (my notebook has no battery and people have a habit of unplugging it), it is loaded with features (many that I find useful), and it's pretty easy to use.
"This isn't a bad thing, Just be aware of it when making comparisions. OOo is taking longer because it's not already there."
No, OOo is taking longer because it is *poorly optimized*. Word, even with the autostart *disabled* (as are all other startup items on my PC), loads in about 2-3 seconds on my PC.
OOo, like Mozilla, wastes a lot of time by being cross-platform. OOo has to reimplement many of the things provided by the OS, which means more memory usage and more time. Mozilla has improved recently, but it's still pretty bad.
"Completely different hardware architecture. It's a lot harder to emulate a hardware platform that it looks. Even with computers six times faster than the XBox there are no working XBox emulators out there. And look at the horsepower needed to emulate a PSOne on a PC."
Actually, there are working XBox emulators, and they can play (some) production games, albeit with glitches.
Remember, the XBox is x86 powered, so you don't need emulation, you need "virtualization". Moreover, the XBox is DirectX/Windows powered, so all you really need to run XBox games is a translation layer (ala Wine).
"How many people in the US think the prison abuse in Iraq is no big deal? 30-40%? How many people in Arab countries think it's ok to decapitate a person? Probably much less. Perhaps Muslims don't need be told every minute what's rigt and what's wrong. How about Christian "flocks"?"
<sarcasm>Right, because what the US soldiers did is *exactly* the same thing as decapitating a person.</sarcasm>
"But yeah, the US is has a far better track record when it comes to freedom of speech, unless it involves nudity, or strong language, or unpopular opinions, or bad comments about the president during a time of "war," or graphic images of destruction, or...."
"involves nudity, or strong language, or unpopular opinions, or bad comments about the president during a time of "war," or graphic images of destruction, or....""
Well, let's try this one out:
1: Nudity. Pornography is legal in the United States, so long as it is not child pornography, and so long as it is not displayed in public (e.g. broadcast TV).
2: Strong language. Again, legal unless it's in public, and even there, it's rarely an issue. There are 14 words that can't be said on broadcast TV or radio. You can say whatever you want on cable.
3: Bad comments. No problem there. Many prominent figures, including John Kerry, are saying "bad things" about the president. Remember, there is a difference between something being "legal" and it being "acceptable". Kerry can't say but so much or he would alienate the public. Note also that you may have liability with libel/slander, but this is extremely difficult to prove in the US (you must prove that the comments were untrue, intended to be damaging, and that they actually did damage).
4: Graphic images. The media has made a choice not to broadcast such images. It is not illegal to broadcast such images. Many websites in the US do just this.
Now, on the "US media sucks" point, I agree 100%. Fortunately, newspapers and public radio are far better than cable news. There are plenty of high-quality, objective news sources in the US. But most of them aren't on cable TV.
How about here?
Because, as we know, IIS can't possibly power a big site. Particularly not one as big as microsoft.com (#4 according to Alexa) or msn.com (#2 according to Alexa).
"I, personally have given up on making my own webpages work with IE, it's not worth the effort..."
Why would you ever be hired with that attitude?
The fact is, all the IE moaning is a BIG MYTH.
Sure, IE has some quirks (did you know that you can turn most of these off using the proper DOCTYPE?). But it's not a "pain in the ass" to develop for.
The biggest quirk is that IE (when not in standards-compliant mode - see above) calculates "size" differently than other browsers (and the standard).
Frankly, unless you're building some fancy site with the absolute latest CSS and Javascript features, IE will render your page *just fine*. I have built *tons* of web pages for both IE and Mozilla. They render exactly the same in Opera, IE, KHTML, and Mozilla, they conform to the XHTML 1.1 spec, they are lightweight, and they look pretty good.
IE's second biggest quirk is it's (semi) lack of PNG alpha. Yet, why exactly do you need to be using 32-bit images on your page? It's quite easy (and beneficial for download speeds) to get by with 8-bit images. JPEG does better for photographs, anyway.
So, what's your problem with IE. Name the areas where IE doesn't conform to standards *in standards compliance mode* and tell me why they play such an integral part of your development process that you cannot find a way around them.
Do Mozilla, KHTML, and Opera conform to the standard better? Yes. Does that mean that it's a "pain in the ass" to develop for IE? No.
Web developers who say that it's "not worth the effort" to develop for IE are like an engine designer who says it's "not worth the effort" to develop for 87 octane petrol.