that depends, on if he gets called out for having made statements like that by his bosses now that slashdot is publicizing it... most likely he was hired because he was a big-shot with a great resume from working at google. His hire most likely is because nowadays in the music industry there are a lot of artists who buy off the shelf hardware and software, and put up 6" of insulation in their favorite spare bedroom to record music (and replace the door with a solid, insulation filled door, etc) instead of going to some very expensive recording studio and they transfer all these lossless files called 'wave files' or 'FLAC' files and they send all these files over the internet, of course, so now the music labels need really good IT guys because it's so much cheaper for an artist to convert a bedroom, than to fly to Nashville or LA, etc etc...
Dollar discs are generally put out for content that has lapsed into 'public domain' http://www.topiclink.com/info/article?page=5 according to that site, 16 episodes of Andy Griffith have fallen into public domain 55 episodes of Beverly hillbillies have gone PD
so they pay a bad music composer to make a cheap theme song, someone who's hard up for cash, and probably isn't in any guilds... it's highly unlikely they even approached the rights holders of the theme songs.
"they could have gradually improved XP" and missed out on selling old computer owners on buying the 'newest' 'latest' OS... why do you think directx 10 is vista only?
to force gamers to go vista, and get newer faster hardware, true pc gaming is a small target audience, but they've always been the most obsessed with performance. they spend more on their computers and more often than any other demographic. so even if they're a small demographic (in the millions) loads of companies are trying to get the gaming enthusiasts money.
True vista wasn't widely accepted and there are loads of people who don't like vista, and meanwhile Microsoft is busy coding windows 7 (to be released in 2 years are they nuts?)
Linux can gradually improve over time in a way a commercial OS doesn't benefit from. It's actually worse for the bottom line to keep using the same OS for ten years. although 'upgrade' sells are a small target as well, 'new' oses offer Microsoft a chance to make new deals with oems on pricing, even if they had a long term contract on XP pricing. Since a company that may have had an advantage 7 years ago when bargaining, now has to deal with 'anti-trust' policies that now prevent Microsoft from making unfair deals with OEM vendors... they probably make more money selling vista to OEMs than they did selling XP.
What really shocks me is that no OEM dared to invest in making Linux or BSD code into a viable desktop ala what apple did to make their 'current' OS. Are the major OEMS afraid of what might happen if people had a choice instead of being locked into windows?
Linux's success most likely is entirely due to the way windows ran itself as a business... there have been lots of geek spawned projects to make homebrew software for their computers etc, but none of them took off the way Linux did. why? IMO the predatory practices of Microsoft of promising every feature under the sun in some version of OS software from them for less, than the other companies could provide killed off real commercial competition for windows (except apple, but apple has sold 150 million ipods, which arguably has kept the company not only afloat but with plans to expand their technology offerings for perhaps decades to come(eg: iphone etc))
because companies trying to compete with Microsoft tanked, and because windows took decades to deliver a fraction of the feature sets they promised, and often wound up making various OSes they sold to be very buggy, and very unstable..
well, that's why I started using open source, because windows was horribly horribly broken on the network side, and 'fixes' from say novel cost way too much, and at the time FreeBSD was a more straightforward installer than Linux (1996/1997)
Now Microsoft has pathetic security, because they never designed windows to be secure, so I don't even dare put my windows machines on the net anymore(nasty problem with a rootkit that I'm still cleaning up)... Vista is supposedly better with security, but the hardware requirements are heavy... the only way they could have made it worse is to render the entire desktop with Ray Tracing (perhaps windows 7 will 'offer' that feature, or windows 8)
but yeah with Intel pushing new power saving chips, for portable computing, it's either stick with xp or put windows mobile on it, and since the atom goes to 1.8 ghz, its kind of a waste to use windows mobile.
It's way at the bottom of TFA but "Alchemy: My last ALchemy release (1.00.08) was completely unlocked and could be used with any sound device from any vendor."
So the reason why they shut him down was he released a version of their software that would enable advanced creative only (software) features to say, work on an integrated sound driver. His bad, and he did that as a result of creative 'removing' all links on their support forms to his (working) vista drivers.
According to his words in TFA he's still modding but 'not the forbidden mods' that creative really was upset at him for doing.
You know I'm actually starting to think that in below 24" displays they no longer make the displays that don't require dithering. I also looked at newegg, when i couldn't find any kind of specs on displays at dell or gateway, and i've noticed especially in the smaller displays that they either avoid the color issue or as you say report the dithering number of 16.2 or 16 million colors.
As far as most people not noticing, wikipedia is reporting that 'dithering displays make the individual pixel more noticeable to most users.' sure you might not notice that the color is off, but you will see the individual pixels more. They're also saying that the high end models are using H-IPS or S-IPS (IPS seems to have been replaced by those two specs) Including the 24" imac (it's using H-IPS)
So while 'major' OEMs are simply not publishing specs, many many LCD makers are publishing the 16.2 million spec of 'dithering' so that means while dell and the likes may have covered their butts by not publishing the Manufacturers specs there is nothing stopping a class action suit against the makers of the cheap 18-bit displays who are publishing the 16.2 or 16 million spec instead of the 16.7 million of 'true 24-bit color'
Sure those 18 bit displays have great response times for gamers, but they don't have true color, and that is something that does affect the way images show. claiming that a 18-bit display shows 16.2 millions colors 'because of dithering' is something that the courts may well have to decide if it's defrauding the individuals who really need 24-bit colors or not.
"Can you show me where any dell or gateway ad or page advertising a 6-bit display as showing 'millions of colors' without dithering?"
Why do i need to do that to not be a troll? explain I specifically stated that apple is using dithering to get 'millions of colors' and that rather than be tied up in a lawsuit they had settled (with the macbook)
Just because all the others use the 'XGA+/SXGA' crap to confuse the consumer into buying a non true-color display, doesn't mean that they aren't selling displays that use dithering to reach millions of colors, they're just not claiming 'millions of colors' on their websites, and are instead using 'computer terms' to hide the inferiority of their display technologies from the masses of computer illiterates who don't bother to go to wikipedia to find out what 'xga' stands for.
"So it's 6 bits per color (red, green, or blue) to achieve 18 bits total (thousands of colors). Versus a "real" monitor that can do 24 bits total, aka millions of colors. Yeah. Definitely false advertising."
Not really, the apple displays support 'dithering' which allows the creation of millions of colors on a 18-bit display by varying the color shades of nearby pixels, to the human eye, you still see millions of colors, even though the display only has a couple hundred thousand color states.
The problem is that for professionals dithering distorts photo chroma, so it's impossible to use an 18-bit display for professional photography uses, and even when you use it at 'home' for editing normal photos you wind up making them look worse for people who have true, 24-bit displays.
Apple should say upfront if a TFT is using dithering or not, but it's never stopped the likes of dell, or gateway or any other oem from selling 'dithering' displays as 'millions of colors TFT displays.' The reason why apple got caught with their pants down in their lawsuit is because for decades professional graphic artists and photographers have used and relied on apple.
See professional photographers don't buy dells, they buy macs, and when they realized their mac books weren't true 24-bit color they sued, and apple settled.
Wait why do we call is a 'pea' 'nut' when it's neither a pea, nor a nut. (it's a legume, specifically a indehiscent legume) while normal peas are indeed normal legumes they're not even closely related to peanuts...
Pea: Subfamily: Faboideae Tribe: Vicieae Genus: Pisum Species: P. sativum
Peanut: Subfamily: Faboideae Tribe: Aeschynomeneae Genus: Arachis Species: A. hypogaea
so now they're half-not-pea-not-nuts-not-shelled-but-deshelled
you missed your chance. I was able to get 256MB or RDRAM for about $50 for a person with RDRAM online in 2005 i think it was. I can't remember how much ram they originally had, but it wasn't an expensive upgrade, and it really made a difference.
I used around the ear style since ear buds hurt. it probably is a matter of decibels though i didn't have headphones with a inline volume, and it is really annoying to try to get the volume right in software (the allowed range and the speed it changes at is inconsistent with normal volume controls)
also, i have loud PCs (custom built long ago when a fast CPU had to run HOT and before larger radius cooling fans (zallman etc) had come out. so i had to drown out the noise of fans.. it only took 2 years for me to have a noticeable ringing in my ears, and speakers even when i make them LOUDER than my headphones ever were, never cause ringing.
Disclaimer: I am paranoid schizophrenic. Medications do not affect the Paranoid part, sorry.
Trusting companies is for fools, you can always create your own virtual machine with xen, see exactly which files which program modifies, if it's behaves badly only when given internet etc, and you might even be able to roll-back changes if you shut down the Virtual machine, just by copying files in a host environment... sure its a lot of work, but less than constantly rebooting between a windows and a Linux install to compare files changed manually, before safe listing an application for install on your 'real' system.
Virtual machines do take huge performance hits, so it's only advisable if you have good hardware, and running complex programs such as 3-d games may be hard to do, because afaik virtualization software cant run the native drivers on both the host and the virtual machine. it would be nice if you could seriously test the security of 3-d games with virtualization, but for now at least, that is the domain of dual-booting to verify which files change etc.
although I've not used virtualization for testing yet (I'm still doing it with dual booting) it is very nice to know exactly which files which program changes for my case it offers a bit of piece of mind, especially since I can post the Full Text of my Diff files (I output to a file using the '>' command string) on the net, with the full program name and version of any program I've installed.
although the latter could give hackers insight to which commercial software 'rolls back system files to a vulnerable state' despite the 'automatic update' feature of windows.. for instance my ATI graphic drivers/southbridge drivers create a system restore point of 283 files (those are the files it replaced right?) and adds 17 files to the windows prefetch folder (nobody online has explained to me what the prefetch folder is for, but every time a installer program runs it gets added to, or modified.)
if you're really curious i am going to put a link sometime in the future on my blog here @ slashdot to my diff files online when i figure out where to put the files online (the question of where to put files is also in by blog now).
Well it couldn't nail me down at ALL i spent easily 20 minutes trying it and it couldn't nail down what kind of joke I'd find funny at all, it finally wound up repeating a joke I'd modded down (i think it got confused)
the problem is i don't like generas of humor, if i find the individual joke tasteless I'll rank it down, if I lol at a joke i rank it high, even if i had to resort to google to get the joke....
"Say that somebody created a private torrent tracker site where the members paid a monthly access fee. Artists could seed their music on this torrent site and be paid a percentage of the gross according to how much their stuff is downloaded. No middlemen. No record companies."
in your review of history, you should have researched something a bit more modern than the Aztecs and a Maya civilizations. Like mp3.com http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3.com
your idea was tried, they started with Independent music artists, but then one day they made this service where people could 'scan' their audio CD-rs with software and download the mp3 version of the file... they could have fought in court but they settled with the music labels instead, and then the largest most successful independent music project ever was doomed to failure.
at their peak they had over 800.000 unique customers buying independent music 'off the net' it was truly a shame that they did something so foolish as offering the download of 'copyrighted' music just based off a scan of the contents of you cd-rom drive..
I'm going to take that back, there ARE mod chips, but any game that doesn't fit on a single DVD isn't going to work (the only modchip/programs i've seen are for DVD sized games) and it's a very painful 4 step process that requires about 7 programs total, and 3 hacks against the x-box 360 itself to do it all.
I know the original Xbox had a single disc compromise that would let you backup and play games from the Xboxes HDD , without needing a mod chip or anything but i don't see that yet for the 360 (at least it's not on page 1 of the google search i did)
no modchip installs are practically a requirement nowadays, you have to have special tools to modchip a modern console, and with ROHS compliance they can make EVEN smaller more close together solder points, that are impossible to solder to with lead solder. then you need to REALLY struggle to figure out how to solder on a mod chip, because it's not easy to get the right temperature point for lead free solder.
the last console i had steady enough hands to mod was the original playstation... now you need special tools even if you have the hands of a surgeon...
although you can always use microscopic needles instead of solder but that has it's own problems, where to insert them, will they hold right, will vibrations shake them loose, will they cut through the circuit board and hit a second lead frying out the system...
external mod solutions are the only viable 'mod' solution left IMO and I'd prefer a disc based one...
"Hasn't the 360 already been somewhat cracked anyway?"
only the HDD, only the HDD.
there are guides on how to copy movies to the 360's hd via Xsata etc, but they haven't gotten a way to say backup game discs to the 360's hd yet, or to put in a mod chip so you can play games backed up to hd-dvd-R discs.
the former is a better goal, more useful than the latter, after all the current crack lets you offload to a PC that could have an array of 750GB HDDS or something like that. HDs are way cheaper than hd-dvd-r's anyways.
I'm not 100% sure but since her son set it up, they could well be saturating the network with filler packets, generated by one of the computers at either end of the 1,242.75 mile link. she has the hardware needed to satisfy a 40 gigabit link, and it's working without repeaters. but the thing is, this 'feat' is no better than OC-768 lines, which also can run 2000 KM between repeaters. the next theing he's going to do is give her a 100 gigabit/sec link Which is a big deal, it's better than the suggested(non existent today) Oc-1536 by 20 gigabits in other words she'll have an OC-1920 line now That kind of technology will be great, I honestly think that he should have proven that you could get 2000 KM for a much much slower optical link, using cheap (not telco grade) equipment...
Well i have seen 13 year olds working in malls before... they might have just looked 13, but people can lie about their age when they're hard up for cash because one of their working parents gets sick... hard to tell, but of course i don't live in the big city in question, but i've gone shopping there often enough to wonder at the ages of quite a few workers...
if the kid is being driven to work by an older sibling, or is withing walking distance, it's hard to really tell what age they might claim to be (no Driver license, birth certificates can be forged easily enough if they even bother with proof of age etc..)
ahh... well I'm starting to think it's because tada, I'm in small town Wisconsin....
although now that i think back to it in one of the small towns nothing i would download went over 1.5 Mbit/sec but that was regular browser downloads AS well as bt traffic, I assumed (at the time) that the Cable setup was using a t-1 and i was the only one in town with cable internet... It could have been some kind of traffic shaping, but this was a REAL small town, a 1 factory town and the factory was a recent improvement (eg: from the 90s on) and that factory was probably the only reason this small town still existed (and had people working for it) I know the company has good high speed inet (they do hourly inventory transactions over the net the factory was originally owned by a small local owner who sold to jennie-o just before hormel bought jennie-o, so yeah they have AWESOME internet at the plant)
most of the people who work at the plant live in nearby communities, although some live locally with hormel they've increasingly been hiring hmong because the pay deteriorated so bad since hormel bought them out.. so i don't have any idea of how many people there would have been using loads of high speed internet in 2004... i moved out of there to a touristy town where i had better cable internet then went to worst for downloaders, hughesnet where i could dl literally 1 anime a day sigh, no movies, no tv shows they all faped you... one anime a day... then i moved into town and they have awesome cable internet here...
usually is shape my own traffic withing bt client here, because i don't want the bandwidth saturated to the point where my folks couldn't use web games(it's their internet my apartment is 1 block away, no internet or tv 'til some far off day when i have income again) but when it's just me i let it go fill throttle, no problems yet...
Slashdot Mirror
that depends, on if he gets called out for having made statements like that by his bosses now that slashdot is publicizing it... most likely he was hired because he was a big-shot with a great resume from working at google. His hire most likely is because nowadays in the music industry there are a lot of artists who buy off the shelf hardware and software, and put up 6" of insulation in their favorite spare bedroom to record music (and replace the door with a solid, insulation filled door, etc) instead of going to some very expensive recording studio and they transfer all these lossless files called 'wave files' or 'FLAC' files and they send all these files over the internet, of course, so now the music labels need really good IT guys because it's so much cheaper for an artist to convert a bedroom, than to fly to Nashville or LA, etc etc...
the times they are a changing...
Dollar discs are generally put out for content that has lapsed into 'public domain' http://www.topiclink.com/info/article?page=5
according to that site, 16 episodes of Andy Griffith have fallen into public domain 55 episodes of Beverly hillbillies have gone PD
so they pay a bad music composer to make a cheap theme song, someone who's hard up for cash, and probably isn't in any guilds... it's highly unlikely they even approached the rights holders of the theme songs.
It helps that modern p2p clients support the onion router, and the I2p network, and packet encryption.
plus there is peer guardian and the like firewalls to add an extra layer of security.
but clients that aren't configured correctly will get you DMCA'ed here in the states, not sure about overseas.
"they could have gradually improved XP" and missed out on selling old computer owners on buying the 'newest' 'latest' OS... why do you think directx 10 is vista only?
to force gamers to go vista, and get newer faster hardware, true pc gaming is a small target audience, but they've always been the most obsessed with performance. they spend more on their computers and more often than any other demographic. so even if they're a small demographic (in the millions) loads of companies are trying to get the gaming enthusiasts money.
True vista wasn't widely accepted and there are loads of people who don't like vista, and meanwhile Microsoft is busy coding windows 7 (to be released in 2 years are they nuts?)
Linux can gradually improve over time in a way a commercial OS doesn't benefit from. It's actually worse for the bottom line to keep using the same OS for ten years. although 'upgrade' sells are a small target as well, 'new' oses offer Microsoft a chance to make new deals with oems on pricing, even if they had a long term contract on XP pricing. Since a company that may have had an advantage 7 years ago when bargaining, now has to deal with 'anti-trust' policies that now prevent Microsoft from making unfair deals with OEM vendors... they probably make more money selling vista to OEMs than they did selling XP.
What really shocks me is that no OEM dared to invest in making Linux or BSD code into a viable desktop ala what apple did to make their 'current' OS. Are the major OEMS afraid of what might happen if people had a choice instead of being locked into windows?
Linux's success most likely is entirely due to the way windows ran itself as a business... there have been lots of geek spawned projects to make homebrew software for their computers etc, but none of them took off the way Linux did. why? IMO the predatory practices of Microsoft of promising every feature under the sun in some version of OS software from them for less, than the other companies could provide killed off real commercial competition for windows (except apple, but apple has sold 150 million ipods, which arguably has kept the company not only afloat but with plans to expand their technology offerings for perhaps decades to come(eg: iphone etc))
because companies trying to compete with Microsoft tanked, and because windows took decades to deliver a fraction of the feature sets they promised, and often wound up making various OSes they sold to be very buggy, and very unstable..
well, that's why I started using open source, because windows was horribly horribly broken on the network side, and 'fixes' from say novel cost way too much, and at the time FreeBSD was a more straightforward installer than Linux (1996/1997)
Now Microsoft has pathetic security, because they never designed windows to be secure, so I don't even dare put my windows machines on the net anymore(nasty problem with a rootkit that I'm still cleaning up)... Vista is supposedly better with security, but the hardware requirements are heavy... the only way they could have made it worse is to render the entire desktop with Ray Tracing (perhaps windows 7 will 'offer' that feature, or windows 8)
but yeah with Intel pushing new power saving chips, for portable computing, it's either stick with xp or put windows mobile on it, and since the atom goes to 1.8 ghz, its kind of a waste to use windows mobile.
It's way at the bottom of TFA but
"Alchemy: My last ALchemy release (1.00.08) was completely unlocked and could be used with any sound device from any vendor."
So the reason why they shut him down was he released a version of their software that would enable advanced creative only (software) features to say, work on an integrated sound driver. His bad, and he did that as a result of creative 'removing' all links on their support forms to his (working) vista drivers.
According to his words in TFA he's still modding but 'not the forbidden mods' that creative really was upset at him for doing.
He's lucky he's in Brazil, I guess.
You know I'm actually starting to think that in below 24" displays they no longer make the displays that don't require dithering. I also looked at newegg, when i couldn't find any kind of specs on displays at dell or gateway, and i've noticed especially in the smaller displays that they either avoid the color issue or as you say report the dithering number of 16.2 or 16 million colors.
As far as most people not noticing, wikipedia is reporting that 'dithering displays make the individual pixel more noticeable to most users.' sure you might not notice that the color is off, but you will see the individual pixels more. They're also saying that the high end models are using H-IPS or S-IPS (IPS seems to have been replaced by those two specs) Including the 24" imac (it's using H-IPS)
So while 'major' OEMs are simply not publishing specs, many many LCD makers are publishing the 16.2 million spec of 'dithering' so that means while dell and the likes may have covered their butts by not publishing the Manufacturers specs there is nothing stopping a class action suit against the makers of the cheap 18-bit displays who are publishing the 16.2 or 16 million spec instead of the 16.7 million of 'true 24-bit color'
Sure those 18 bit displays have great response times for gamers, but they don't have true color, and that is something that does affect the way images show. claiming that a 18-bit display shows 16.2 millions colors 'because of dithering' is something that the courts may well have to decide if it's defrauding the individuals who really need 24-bit colors or not.
"Can you show me where any dell or gateway ad or page advertising a 6-bit display as showing 'millions of colors' without dithering?"
Why do i need to do that to not be a troll? explain I specifically stated that apple is using dithering to get 'millions of colors' and that rather than be tied up in a lawsuit they had settled (with the macbook)
Just because all the others use the 'XGA+/SXGA' crap to confuse the consumer into buying a non true-color display, doesn't mean that they aren't selling displays that use dithering to reach millions of colors, they're just not claiming 'millions of colors' on their websites, and are instead using 'computer terms' to hide the inferiority of their display technologies from the masses of computer illiterates who don't bother to go to wikipedia to find out what 'xga' stands for.
"So it's 6 bits per color (red, green, or blue) to achieve 18 bits total (thousands of colors). Versus a "real" monitor that can do 24 bits total, aka millions of colors. Yeah. Definitely false advertising."
Not really, the apple displays support 'dithering' which allows the creation of millions of colors on a 18-bit display by varying the color shades of nearby pixels, to the human eye, you still see millions of colors, even though the display only has a couple hundred thousand color states.
The problem is that for professionals dithering distorts photo chroma, so it's impossible to use an 18-bit display for professional photography uses, and even when you use it at 'home' for editing normal photos you wind up making them look worse for people who have true, 24-bit displays.
Apple should say upfront if a TFT is using dithering or not, but it's never stopped the likes of dell, or gateway or any other oem from selling 'dithering' displays as 'millions of colors TFT displays.' The reason why apple got caught with their pants down in their lawsuit is because for decades professional graphic artists and photographers have used and relied on apple.
See professional photographers don't buy dells, they buy macs, and when they realized their mac books weren't true 24-bit color they sued, and apple settled.
Dell lets you pay extra to configure your laptop with a real screen. you pay through the nose, but still they let the person decide at checkout.
Wait why do we call is a 'pea' 'nut' when it's neither a pea, nor a nut. (it's a legume, specifically a indehiscent legume) while normal peas are indeed normal legumes they're not even closely related to peanuts...
Pea:
Subfamily: Faboideae Tribe: Vicieae Genus: Pisum Species: P. sativum
Peanut:
Subfamily: Faboideae Tribe: Aeschynomeneae Genus: Arachis Species: A. hypogaea
so now they're half-not-pea-not-nuts-not-shelled-but-deshelled
oh my... Everything is wrong about peanuts.
you missed your chance. I was able to get 256MB or RDRAM for about $50 for a person with RDRAM online in 2005 i think it was. I can't remember how much ram they originally had, but it wasn't an expensive upgrade, and it really made a difference.
I used around the ear style since ear buds hurt. it probably is a matter of decibels though i didn't have headphones with a inline volume, and it is really annoying to try to get the volume right in software (the allowed range and the speed it changes at is inconsistent with normal volume controls)
also, i have loud PCs (custom built long ago when a fast CPU had to run HOT and before larger radius cooling fans (zallman etc) had come out. so i had to drown out the noise of fans.. it only took 2 years for me to have a noticeable ringing in my ears, and speakers even when i make them LOUDER than my headphones ever were, never cause ringing.
Disclaimer: I am paranoid schizophrenic. Medications do not affect the Paranoid part, sorry.
Trusting companies is for fools, you can always create your own virtual machine with xen, see exactly which files which program modifies, if it's behaves badly only when given internet etc, and you might even be able to roll-back changes if you shut down the Virtual machine, just by copying files in a host environment... sure its a lot of work, but less than constantly rebooting between a windows and a Linux install to compare files changed manually, before safe listing an application for install on your 'real' system.
Virtual machines do take huge performance hits, so it's only advisable if you have good hardware, and running complex programs such as 3-d games may be hard to do, because afaik virtualization software cant run the native drivers on both the host and the virtual machine. it would be nice if you could seriously test the security of 3-d games with virtualization, but for now at least, that is the domain of dual-booting to verify which files change etc.
although I've not used virtualization for testing yet (I'm still doing it with dual booting) it is very nice to know exactly which files which program changes for my case it offers a bit of piece of mind, especially since I can post the Full Text of my Diff files (I output to a file using the '>' command string) on the net, with the full program name and version of any program I've installed.
although the latter could give hackers insight to which commercial software 'rolls back system files to a vulnerable state' despite the 'automatic update' feature of windows..
for instance my ATI graphic drivers/southbridge drivers create a system restore point of 283 files (those are the files it replaced right?)
and adds 17 files to the windows prefetch folder (nobody online has explained to me what the prefetch folder is for, but every time a installer program runs it gets added to, or modified.)
if you're really curious i am going to put a link sometime in the future on my blog here @ slashdot to my diff files online when i figure out where to put the files online (the question of where to put files is also in by blog now).
Well it couldn't nail me down at ALL i spent easily 20 minutes trying it and it couldn't nail down what kind of joke I'd find funny at all, it finally wound up repeating a joke I'd modded down (i think it got confused)
the problem is i don't like generas of humor, if i find the individual joke tasteless I'll rank it down, if I lol at a joke i rank it high, even if i had to resort to google to get the joke....
it was much easier to read the 'tags' section where taco labeled this as 'aprilfools' and 'fake'
;)
rtfa? why not read the fine tags
"Say that somebody created a private torrent tracker site where the members paid a monthly access fee. Artists could seed their music on this torrent site and be paid a percentage of the gross according to how much their stuff is downloaded. No middlemen. No record companies."
in your review of history, you should have researched something a bit more modern than the Aztecs and a Maya civilizations. Like mp3.com http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3.com
your idea was tried, they started with Independent music artists, but then one day they made this service where people could 'scan' their audio CD-rs with software and download the mp3 version of the file... they could have fought in court but they settled with the music labels instead, and then the largest most successful independent music project ever was doomed to failure.
at their peak they had over 800.000 unique customers buying independent music 'off the net' it was truly a shame that they did something so foolish as offering the download of 'copyrighted' music just based off a scan of the contents of you cd-rom drive..
then i would imagine that they would stop using HD-DVD capable drives in the xbox 360 to save manufacture cost?
that would have to save a significant cost for making new consoles if no games now or ever will use HD-dvd
I'm going to take that back, there ARE mod chips, but any game that doesn't fit on a single DVD isn't going to work (the only modchip/programs i've seen are for DVD sized games) and it's a very painful 4 step process that requires about 7 programs total, and 3 hacks against the x-box 360 itself to do it all.
I know the original Xbox had a single disc compromise that would let you backup and play games from the Xboxes HDD , without needing a mod chip or anything but i don't see that yet for the 360 (at least it's not on page 1 of the google search i did)
no modchip installs are practically a requirement nowadays, you have to have special tools to modchip a modern console, and with ROHS compliance they can make EVEN smaller more close together solder points, that are impossible to solder to with lead solder. then you need to REALLY struggle to figure out how to solder on a mod chip, because it's not easy to get the right temperature point for lead free solder.
the last console i had steady enough hands to mod was the original playstation... now you need special tools even if you have the hands of a surgeon...
although you can always use microscopic needles instead of solder but that has it's own problems, where to insert them, will they hold right, will vibrations shake them loose, will they cut through the circuit board and hit a second lead frying out the system...
external mod solutions are the only viable 'mod' solution left IMO and I'd prefer a disc based one...
"Hasn't the 360 already been somewhat cracked anyway?"
only the HDD, only the HDD.
there are guides on how to copy movies to the 360's hd via Xsata etc, but they haven't gotten a way to say backup game discs to the 360's hd yet, or to put in a mod chip so you can play games backed up to hd-dvd-R discs.
the former is a better goal, more useful than the latter, after all the current crack lets you offload to a PC that could have an array of 750GB HDDS or something like that. HDs are way cheaper than hd-dvd-r's anyways.
I wonder if the Chinese will hire this guy to crack the chip encryptions scheme discussed a while back... http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/06/2115223
sounds like he really knows what he's doing and he might just be the guy to break EPIC protection for the Chinese.
I'm not 100% sure but since her son set it up, they could well be saturating the network with filler packets, generated by one of the computers at either end of the 1,242.75 mile link. she has the hardware needed to satisfy a 40 gigabit link, and it's working without repeaters. but the thing is, this 'feat' is no better than OC-768 lines, which also can run 2000 KM between repeaters. the next theing he's going to do is give her a 100 gigabit/sec link Which is a big deal, it's better than the suggested(non existent today) Oc-1536 by 20 gigabits
in other words she'll have an OC-1920 line
now That kind of technology will be great, I honestly think that he should have proven that you could get 2000 KM for a much much slower optical link, using cheap (not telco grade) equipment...
"But we already have people associating Linux with virgins."
Real virgins use FreeBSD
I mean who would pick A GNU or a Tux over being in This pose
Well i have seen 13 year olds working in malls before... they might have just looked 13, but people can lie about their age when they're hard up for cash because one of their working parents gets sick... hard to tell, but of course i don't live in the big city in question, but i've gone shopping there often enough to wonder at the ages of quite a few workers...
if the kid is being driven to work by an older sibling, or is withing walking distance, it's hard to really tell what age they might claim to be (no Driver license, birth certificates can be forged easily enough if they even bother with proof of age etc..)
ahh... well I'm starting to think it's because tada, I'm in small town Wisconsin....
although now that i think back to it in one of the small towns nothing i would download went over 1.5 Mbit/sec but that was regular browser downloads AS well as bt traffic, I assumed (at the time) that the Cable setup was using a t-1 and i was the only one in town with cable internet... It could have been some kind of traffic shaping, but this was a REAL small town, a 1 factory town and the factory was a recent improvement (eg: from the 90s on) and that factory was probably the only reason this small town still existed (and had people working for it) I know the company has good high speed inet (they do hourly inventory transactions over the net the factory was originally owned by a small local owner who sold to jennie-o just before hormel bought jennie-o, so yeah they have AWESOME internet at the plant)
most of the people who work at the plant live in nearby communities, although some live locally with hormel they've increasingly been hiring hmong because the pay deteriorated so bad since hormel bought them out.. so i don't have any idea of how many people there would have been using loads of high speed internet in 2004... i moved out of there to a touristy town where i had better cable internet then went to worst for downloaders, hughesnet where i could dl literally 1 anime a day sigh, no movies, no tv shows they all faped you... one anime a day... then i moved into town and they have awesome cable internet here...
usually is shape my own traffic withing bt client here, because i don't want the bandwidth saturated to the point where my folks couldn't use web games(it's their internet my apartment is 1 block away, no internet or tv 'til some far off day when i have income again) but when it's just me i let it go fill throttle, no problems yet...