Look, I am usually the guy that is anti-open-source and anti-wiki and anti-[insert fad fud here], but the Wiki, in general, is really pretty good.
I won't share my political leanings, but after I read an article on/. earlier about Wiki-goodness, I decided to REALLY look some things up and see if it was as slanted and politicized as I believed it would be. Turns out, if you look up both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, you will get quite a bit of information, and it will be quite fair to all but the most kooky ideologs. The same goes for religion and a lot of other polarizing topics.
The only exception I would make might be that there are some articles that go TOO far to be "fair" and almost hint at being politically correct.
Someone said it above, it is an encyclopedia that can be edited by anyone...treat it as such.
"We're lagging far, far behind European and Asian companies on this critical technology, and it's due to corporate sloth and short-sighted greed coupled with badly regulated markets."
Holy COW! First an article that telling us that corporations want to make money from my wallet...when we all know that we have a God given right to buy anything that anyone else invents on the cheap. And now we see that the U.S. is imploding on the innovation front because the government isn't regulating it right and corporations are greedy. All is clear to me now.
I long for the day when slashdotters stop whining and set up the glorious utopia that they all seem to envision so well. FREE CELL PHONES AND REGULATIONS 4TW!!!111!
Well, at least it can be seen that there is overwhelming bias at slashdot. Not that I care, since I still read the news here.
If any MS (or should I say M$) product were to have been put in an article like that, the mobs would have screamed for Gates's head. However, since it is the all-powerful-silver-bullet-snake-oil open source, all I see are excuse makers and doubters. If anyone is to even take themselves seriously, they must be at least OPEN to the idea that something they believe in is not perfect, and possible quite flawed.
Its one thing to sit in an ivory tower, or garage, and pontificate on the utopian ideals of open source and free love without concern of ramification. It is a completely different thing to be tasked with the welfare of a nation and its people and just HOPE that the software is safe and will work as promised. I can appreciate the Linux/OpenSource/FreeLove ideals of slashdot and its readership, but there is a point when a person has to put personal bias asside and consider that there are greater things at risk than personl pride and being 1337.
The problem is that revisions tend to generally favor one side of the political/moral devide. Someone above said they'd edit star wars because you can't have a gay captain (loosely paraphrased), that's never going to happen. Every time anyone tries to edit out anything that is considered protected by "TOLERANCE", they get trounced in the media.
However, do think of what is edited. Han shooting first...wouldn't want to look aggressive or pre-emptive. Can't put the Anola Gay up in the Smithsonian...after all they nuked Japan...even if they did hit Pearl Harbor, slaughter the chinese in death camps, et al. Yes, yes...this all seems very inflamatory, I know, but thats the point, that's the WHOLE POINT.
Whom are we protecting? I don't want to be "PROTECTED" from liberal-morons like Bill Maher. I don't want to be saved the agony of hearing someone call GWB a fascist nazi so I won't have nightmares. And honestly, does anyone on the other side want to be protected from hearing that Clinton was a commie-pinko:). It all seems over the top, but that's where we are going.
Life has more than one perspective, and it IS POSSIBLE, that that perspective isn't mine (crazy I know). It's also possible that that perspective is RIGHT! (omg). Are we not better served being shown every side, irrelevant of how we think it might affect us?
It's much cooler to think of yourself a non-conformist fighting THE MAN!
WAIT! DON'T HIT THAT MOD BUTTON YET!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
There are pleanty of valid reasons to give linux a good ole' army try, but many of the script-kiddies living out on the interweb have either made the switch, or SAY they have made the switch because M$ is F'ING EV1L.
I think the Linux community likes the bad-boy 1337 HaX0r image it has...it brings in new converts. Kinda like advertising cigarettes to children, ya know, bring in the next generation and get 'em hooked while they are young.
Yeah...ok...I'll prolly get muy bad karma for this, but the underlying rationale, I think, stands up as a reason for the switch.
Maybe its only because I'm coming at this from the opposite direction that I think this post shows an utter lack of comprehension about what programming really is.
If you're looking for VS to provide you with a single text file that is unreadable and unformatted and un-(er...)-colorcoded, then go ahead and open the.vb or.cs files in notepad. VS is designed to allow developers to develop OO, event driven applications without FORCING them to do all the coding for the underlying connections, interfaces and networking.
So, while we're discussing being FORCED to do things, lets take a look at it for what it is. Anyone who has actually used VS for more than a day, or done anything with it beyond a cursory Hello World app with a button would know that while you CAN certainly click "new form" and drag a bunch of buttons onto it, and have it work, no code necessary, you can also custom write the window handler classes, subclass those darned buttons and build 'em all yourself the hard way. You CAN also drag a little DB icon onto your app, fill in the blanks, and have a ready-made SQL connector...or you CAN write that whole darned thing yourself, provided you need the control over it that is only provided if you do actually write it yourself. So, it may appear that you are being FORCED to do things the easy (or inferred BAD) way, you are not. You are merely being presented with an environment that will allow you to quickly do tasks that are often times very generic and overly-complicated for what they actually do. Continuing on that line of thinking, it makes doing 10 minute proof of concept work very simple and can lead, in the right environment, to time saved. Petzold could have told you that.
By comparrison, I was forced to use WSAD to do a distributed app in Java. Yep, I was a fish out of water. I may know ANSI C, C++, C#, VB, VB.Net, ASP, JavaScript, Assembly...I love me...Pascal, Prolog, and some other archaic crap, but I don't know Java. The interface seemed clumsy and crashed often. The code seemed overly compicated in places that should have been easy. Generic REQUIRED interfaces for beans were not auto-generated...which sucked for a guy with no clue what was going on. In the end, I read a book or two, sucked it up, looked at my laptop running VS and cried, and then got down to working with the tool I was provided. I still think WSAD is a complete joke when compared to VS.NET, but it didn't make my code suck...and it didn't make me a sucky programmer.
Point? There are places in the 'beans' I wrote that are most certainly not to standard (and boy, I KNOW how Java standards are worshipped from my experience)...that's my fault, if I could do it over they would be. However, where the rubber hits the road, so-to-speak, where the algorithms that REALLY ARE THE APPLICATION live, how THOSE are written...well, they are IMHO, quite elegant. That's not because of WSAD either...that's because I've been coding since I was 11...on a commodore vic 20...in BASIC...which is not OO...which may have taught me bad techniques.
Actually, it is you who misunderstand Free Speech as provided by the Constitution, insofar as you believe it to be premier and to exist in a bubble, which it does not.
Specifically; Amendment IX
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
No right provided by the Constitution goes so far as to deny the rights of others. This is the basis for making such free speech as yelling "FIRE!" in a crowded theater illegal, even without violating the First Ammendment.
You may have free speech, and the GOVERNMENT may not censor it, but all other citizens are equally protected and provided the same right, and may choose to use it in anyway they see fit, to include boycott of a product or service. If Haliburton were to provide civil services or products available to the public at large (which they may, I just don't feel like checking) I am hard pressed to believe that anyone on the left side of the political spectrum would be offended by people boycotting them. It cuts both ways, and it is supposed to cut both ways.
Still, this is about a private organization, with an inherent right to join in peaceful caucus without government intervention. Their rights also extend to a freedom of association. Those rights may not be trampled by an individual who seems to think that their own personal right to free speech extends so far as to deny the school their rights. The individual may leave, and then speak freely as they choose. The government is not involved.
Perhaps it is not off topic to consider other cases, such as a golf club (not the 9 iron, the actual group) choosing to be men only. It may seem unjust, but do they not have the right to choose their own rules without government intervention? Does a woman's right to play golf truley get violated since they may go start their own club or play at a place that allows women? Would you like it if the government came over to your house for your monthly poker game and said it was non-representative and that you must invite at least one mexican, one african american and one pakistani?
Private and Public are seperate for a reason, me thinks.
What exactly is your point? I'm going to infer that it is something along the lines that children are being oppressed by the system by being denied the ability to influence it directly. If that is the case, perhaps you think we should allow high-school and grade-school students to vote...maybe even run for office. I'm not sure that you meant to imply that, perhaps I misread your post.
The thing is, if anyone is complaining about freedom of speech, the only people that have standing are the parents, and in this case they are certainly entitled to remove their children from the school.
Children are not supposed to influence the system, as they are neither mature nor experienced enough to do so responsibly or with a wide enough perspective. I think I hated that idea when I was under the age of 21 too...but now I realize it was proper. Heck...I don't think I should have been able to influence anything outside my eating habbits before I was 25.
Joking aside, I think it is a bit unfair to suggest that a Catholic institution has no stake in protecting its students from online predators. This is like suggesting that a community (like say, a state such as MA) has no stake in protecting its citizens from murderers because the state has a certain percentage of murderers in it. Yes, there are predatory priests, but that does not define the Catholic church, nor its members.
Furthermore, Free Speech as provided by the First Ammendment, like so much of the Constitution, is completely misunderstood by a large portion of Americans, and a great deal of the rest of the world. There are pleanty of examples, not the least of which is the Dixie Chicks crying foul (and using the term censorship) when other free citizens decided to boycott their product. Free speech is for everyone, good and bad, and I'd argue that it is more important to protect the bad, since it needs the most protection. Having said that, and digressed, in this case the body silencing the speech is a private organization silencing its membership. That membership is neither a right, nor involuntary. They may do as they please legally, and the membership that doesn't like it can certainly leave.
Be careful what you wish for. If the fed gets control of what private organizations can do in every regard, its only a short put to your front door...your living room...your bedroom.
perhaps because the drivers are not certified for MCE. WHQL means nuffin' to an MCE machine, all devices have special drivers for MCE, it's a performance thing. Your BSOD was almost certainly caused by a driver issue. I'm not questioning your king-fu as sr. anonymouse did...but XP Pro and MCE are more different than most suspect.
Perhaps the "builder" did not realize that Google Provides All. There is a site called The Green Button (I think its UK based), that is currently the best MCE forum around. There were a couple of instances where I wanted to do something the MCE didn't natively do and TGB provided me with solutions.
I'd say anyone who wants a more balanced oppinion of what MCE IS and what MCE IS NOT, should spend 20 minutes flipping through that forum and seeing what people are praising, griping about, and generally doing with MCE. Either that, or believe the (oh my god, I'm going to use this horrible term, I swore I never would, omg...) FUD.
I thought I made that clear, but I may not have. CableCard is going to be the answer, but again, that's not MS, its Congress and the cable providers. I use OTA HD myself for the football games my cable company doesn't broadcast in HD. The picture is at least as good as what's coming off my STB...'cept for INHD1/INHD2 which do 1080i from time to time.
I'll try to put asside the apparent anti-M$ bias in the article and read it for what it is; a complaint based on poor hardware choices and a lack of understanding for what a media center should be.
Its pretty universal amongst geeks that computers belong in the living room controlling everything from lights to music to tv to door alarms...or maybe that's just me. No one, and I do mean no one, has managed to put it all together in one EASY TO USE AND REASONABLY PRICED package. You've gotta go in knowing that's the case, and you've gotta go in with a clear sense of what you want to accomplish in your price point.
I've been running MCE 2005 for about 6 months now and its doing everything I want it to do with only one major issue, HD, and that's not Microsoft's fault...its a mix of congress and cable companies. With a moderately priced 3ghz box and 1gb of ram, and a paultry 120gb of storage, I can record/watch tv, burn shows to DVD, play my music, do a funky slide-show of my pictures...and then do all of those things upstairs in a room with only a tv and an MCE extender. Add to that a wireless keyboard/mouse, and I'm editing pictures and video on my 50" HDTV. All of that is accessible by the average joe non-geek, and I think that is the whole point.
Throw in some geeky tweaks and hacks, and we're talking about streaming HD content to the box with firewire (stupid content flags), ripping and streaming DVDs and playing Age of Empires III the way it was intended...50" of pure glory.
Back to the gripes of the article, I'm having a hard time feeling sympathy. Leave the AMD thing out of it, I'm sure they make a fine product. -However, think AUDIO IN A MEDIA PC. What did you come up with, 16 bit Sound Blaster? One would assume that you'd want something phat like an Audigy or better. -Then there is this idea that "As a DVR, one tuner was just OK[...]", sorry, but TiVo and all similar devices have 2 tuners as well, that's why you can record one show and watch another, that gripe doesn't hold water. -I'm missing the problems recording VHS, never had any problems. -ATI and HDTVs as monitors is the bane of all media pc's from what I understand. Yeah, ok, I'll buy into that being a valid gripe, but I tossed my X300 in the garbage where it belonged and went nVidia and all is well. S-Video for HD...err...the guy needs to smoke another one. -The truly valid gripe is with music. The thing is that this is supposed to be accessible to non-geekers, so the default settings try to pull in all your music and catalog it for you. I've tried all sorts of auto-catalog software, and none have worked 100% on my collection. It's pretty darn easy to go into the settings for Media Player and UNCHECK A SINGLE BOX that says "Let Media Player Catalog My Music". After that, it will just use the standard tags, not try to rename andything, and refer to folder.jpg as the album cover. Easy easy easy.
I'm not saying its perfect, but when I think it needs to be said that this is the first OS/HW combo that has gone semi-mainstream in this realm, and pleanty have tried. Combine that with the fact the MS originally was INSISTING on OEM only so they could be sure the hardware could handle the load...but people complained...and now there are gripes that the hardware can't handle the load in non-OEM machines...err...
Because I am too lazy to google or anything at the moment, I'll just post and see what happens...
I'm a diver, so I pay a lot of attention to bouyancy, which is essentially displacement of water. Correct me if I am wrong here, but water expands as it freezes, right? Thus its volume increases and would displace more water than it would if it were not frozen. The WEIGHT of that water, frozen or otherwise, would not change. Therefor, would not the frozen ice, that is then melted, displace less volume once it becomes water, and therefor LOWER the sea level.
All that being said, it doesn't matter much as it is the land-based ice that really is at issue. I just felt like pointing that out.
Oh...and read State of Fear...and then google up Crichton's speach about environmentalist movements being akin to religious zealotry. All very interesting even if you don't agree with it.
Likening this to creationists is just silly. Darwinian theory, however, is still simply that, a theory. However, ample evidence suggests it is correct, though many scientists think it is incomplete...but I digress.
When it comes to global warming, the jury is still out. There is no CONCLUSIVE evidence. There is speculation. There is evidence supporting the theory. There is also evidence that disputes the theory. There are also alternative possibilities for the evidence that DOES support the theory.
This is not to say that it is untrue, or even inaccurate...it simply needs further research.
To the point though, which is lumping it into right-wing propaganda and bible-thumping lunacy, all you do is lower the argument, vilify a political party and jab at some people's religion.
All of this is of course falling on deaf ears no doubt, so I end it here.
There are compelling arguments on both sides, but they tend to get lost in the drivel of mud slinging. It never ceases to amaze me how quickly the membership here blames everything and anything on Micro$oft and George Bush. Just because you don't agree with a particular line of thinking does not make it right-wing lunacy, and calling it such makes it difficult to listen to anything else you may have to say.
I don't usually post, but this is some funny stuff. Is it so difficult being anti-ms that people need to resort to using a NON-STANDARD test to call for a boycott on a BETA product? I mean, Acid2 admits it dosen't promise compliance, and NOTHING out there passes its test, not Firefox, not Opera, not nothing. Anyhoo...please do continue the hell-raising about how evil M$ (I love the dollar sign...as if money canotes evil) is and the whole monopoly thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Um...can you tell me why its tagged REPUBLICAN and not DEMOCRAT?
Seriously? Like the Republicans are the only ones trying to mess with the vote?
No, it should be "I" /. is home of many a grammatically incorrect story, but that is not a mistake.
Look, I am usually the guy that is anti-open-source and anti-wiki and anti-[insert fad fud here], but the Wiki, in general, is really pretty good.
/. earlier about Wiki-goodness, I decided to REALLY look some things up and see if it was as slanted and politicized as I believed it would be. Turns out, if you look up both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, you will get quite a bit of information, and it will be quite fair to all but the most kooky ideologs. The same goes for religion and a lot of other polarizing topics.
I won't share my political leanings, but after I read an article on
The only exception I would make might be that there are some articles that go TOO far to be "fair" and almost hint at being politically correct.
Someone said it above, it is an encyclopedia that can be edited by anyone...treat it as such.
"We're lagging far, far behind European and Asian companies on this critical technology, and it's due to corporate sloth and short-sighted greed coupled with badly regulated markets."
Holy COW! First an article that telling us that corporations want to make money from my wallet...when we all know that we have a God given right to buy anything that anyone else invents on the cheap. And now we see that the U.S. is imploding on the innovation front because the government isn't regulating it right and corporations are greedy. All is clear to me now.
I long for the day when slashdotters stop whining and set up the glorious utopia that they all seem to envision so well. FREE CELL PHONES AND REGULATIONS 4TW!!!111!
Well, at least it can be seen that there is overwhelming bias at slashdot. Not that I care, since I still read the news here.
If any MS (or should I say M$) product were to have been put in an article like that, the mobs would have screamed for Gates's head. However, since it is the all-powerful-silver-bullet-snake-oil open source, all I see are excuse makers and doubters. If anyone is to even take themselves seriously, they must be at least OPEN to the idea that something they believe in is not perfect, and possible quite flawed.
Its one thing to sit in an ivory tower, or garage, and pontificate on the utopian ideals of open source and free love without concern of ramification. It is a completely different thing to be tasked with the welfare of a nation and its people and just HOPE that the software is safe and will work as promised. I can appreciate the Linux/OpenSource/FreeLove ideals of slashdot and its readership, but there is a point when a person has to put personal bias asside and consider that there are greater things at risk than personl pride and being 1337.
The problem is that revisions tend to generally favor one side of the political/moral devide. Someone above said they'd edit star wars because you can't have a gay captain (loosely paraphrased), that's never going to happen. Every time anyone tries to edit out anything that is considered protected by "TOLERANCE", they get trounced in the media.
:). It all seems over the top, but that's where we are going.
However, do think of what is edited. Han shooting first...wouldn't want to look aggressive or pre-emptive. Can't put the Anola Gay up in the Smithsonian...after all they nuked Japan...even if they did hit Pearl Harbor, slaughter the chinese in death camps, et al. Yes, yes...this all seems very inflamatory, I know, but thats the point, that's the WHOLE POINT.
Whom are we protecting? I don't want to be "PROTECTED" from liberal-morons like Bill Maher. I don't want to be saved the agony of hearing someone call GWB a fascist nazi so I won't have nightmares. And honestly, does anyone on the other side want to be protected from hearing that Clinton was a commie-pinko
Life has more than one perspective, and it IS POSSIBLE, that that perspective isn't mine (crazy I know). It's also possible that that perspective is RIGHT! (omg). Are we not better served being shown every side, irrelevant of how we think it might affect us?
It's much cooler to think of yourself a non-conformist fighting THE MAN!
WAIT! DON'T HIT THAT MOD BUTTON YET!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
There are pleanty of valid reasons to give linux a good ole' army try, but many of the script-kiddies living out on the interweb have either made the switch, or SAY they have made the switch because M$ is F'ING EV1L.
I think the Linux community likes the bad-boy 1337 HaX0r image it has...it brings in new converts. Kinda like advertising cigarettes to children, ya know, bring in the next generation and get 'em hooked while they are young.
Yeah...ok...I'll prolly get muy bad karma for this, but the underlying rationale, I think, stands up as a reason for the switch.
Maybe its only because I'm coming at this from the opposite direction that I think this post shows an utter lack of comprehension about what programming really is.
.vb or .cs files in notepad. VS is designed to allow developers to develop OO, event driven applications without FORCING them to do all the coding for the underlying connections, interfaces and networking.
If you're looking for VS to provide you with a single text file that is unreadable and unformatted and un-(er...)-colorcoded, then go ahead and open the
So, while we're discussing being FORCED to do things, lets take a look at it for what it is. Anyone who has actually used VS for more than a day, or done anything with it beyond a cursory Hello World app with a button would know that while you CAN certainly click "new form" and drag a bunch of buttons onto it, and have it work, no code necessary, you can also custom write the window handler classes, subclass those darned buttons and build 'em all yourself the hard way. You CAN also drag a little DB icon onto your app, fill in the blanks, and have a ready-made SQL connector...or you CAN write that whole darned thing yourself, provided you need the control over it that is only provided if you do actually write it yourself. So, it may appear that you are being FORCED to do things the easy (or inferred BAD) way, you are not. You are merely being presented with an environment that will allow you to quickly do tasks that are often times very generic and overly-complicated for what they actually do. Continuing on that line of thinking, it makes doing 10 minute proof of concept work very simple and can lead, in the right environment, to time saved. Petzold could have told you that.
By comparrison, I was forced to use WSAD to do a distributed app in Java. Yep, I was a fish out of water. I may know ANSI C, C++, C#, VB, VB.Net, ASP, JavaScript, Assembly...I love me...Pascal, Prolog, and some other archaic crap, but I don't know Java. The interface seemed clumsy and crashed often. The code seemed overly compicated in places that should have been easy. Generic REQUIRED interfaces for beans were not auto-generated...which sucked for a guy with no clue what was going on. In the end, I read a book or two, sucked it up, looked at my laptop running VS and cried, and then got down to working with the tool I was provided. I still think WSAD is a complete joke when compared to VS.NET, but it didn't make my code suck...and it didn't make me a sucky programmer.
Point? There are places in the 'beans' I wrote that are most certainly not to standard (and boy, I KNOW how Java standards are worshipped from my experience)...that's my fault, if I could do it over they would be. However, where the rubber hits the road, so-to-speak, where the algorithms that REALLY ARE THE APPLICATION live, how THOSE are written...well, they are IMHO, quite elegant. That's not because of WSAD either...that's because I've been coding since I was 11...on a commodore vic 20...in BASIC...which is not OO...which may have taught me bad techniques.
Actually, it is you who misunderstand Free Speech as provided by the Constitution, insofar as you believe it to be premier and to exist in a bubble, which it does not.
Specifically;
Amendment IX
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
No right provided by the Constitution goes so far as to deny the rights of others. This is the basis for making such free speech as yelling "FIRE!" in a crowded theater illegal, even without violating the First Ammendment.
You may have free speech, and the GOVERNMENT may not censor it, but all other citizens are equally protected and provided the same right, and may choose to use it in anyway they see fit, to include boycott of a product or service. If Haliburton were to provide civil services or products available to the public at large (which they may, I just don't feel like checking) I am hard pressed to believe that anyone on the left side of the political spectrum would be offended by people boycotting them. It cuts both ways, and it is supposed to cut both ways.
Still, this is about a private organization, with an inherent right to join in peaceful caucus without government intervention. Their rights also extend to a freedom of association. Those rights may not be trampled by an individual who seems to think that their own personal right to free speech extends so far as to deny the school their rights. The individual may leave, and then speak freely as they choose. The government is not involved.
Perhaps it is not off topic to consider other cases, such as a golf club (not the 9 iron, the actual group) choosing to be men only. It may seem unjust, but do they not have the right to choose their own rules without government intervention? Does a woman's right to play golf truley get violated since they may go start their own club or play at a place that allows women? Would you like it if the government came over to your house for your monthly poker game and said it was non-representative and that you must invite at least one mexican, one african american and one pakistani?
Private and Public are seperate for a reason, me thinks.
What exactly is your point? I'm going to infer that it is something along the lines that children are being oppressed by the system by being denied the ability to influence it directly. If that is the case, perhaps you think we should allow high-school and grade-school students to vote...maybe even run for office. I'm not sure that you meant to imply that, perhaps I misread your post.
The thing is, if anyone is complaining about freedom of speech, the only people that have standing are the parents, and in this case they are certainly entitled to remove their children from the school.
Children are not supposed to influence the system, as they are neither mature nor experienced enough to do so responsibly or with a wide enough perspective. I think I hated that idea when I was under the age of 21 too...but now I realize it was proper. Heck...I don't think I should have been able to influence anything outside my eating habbits before I was 25.
Joking aside, I think it is a bit unfair to suggest that a Catholic institution has no stake in protecting its students from online predators. This is like suggesting that a community (like say, a state such as MA) has no stake in protecting its citizens from murderers because the state has a certain percentage of murderers in it. Yes, there are predatory priests, but that does not define the Catholic church, nor its members.
Furthermore, Free Speech as provided by the First Ammendment, like so much of the Constitution, is completely misunderstood by a large portion of Americans, and a great deal of the rest of the world. There are pleanty of examples, not the least of which is the Dixie Chicks crying foul (and using the term censorship) when other free citizens decided to boycott their product. Free speech is for everyone, good and bad, and I'd argue that it is more important to protect the bad, since it needs the most protection. Having said that, and digressed, in this case the body silencing the speech is a private organization silencing its membership. That membership is neither a right, nor involuntary. They may do as they please legally, and the membership that doesn't like it can certainly leave.
Be careful what you wish for. If the fed gets control of what private organizations can do in every regard, its only a short put to your front door...your living room...your bedroom.
But hey...at least the term SPLOG wasn't used...
perhaps because the drivers are not certified for MCE. WHQL means nuffin' to an MCE machine, all devices have special drivers for MCE, it's a performance thing. Your BSOD was almost certainly caused by a driver issue. I'm not questioning your king-fu as sr. anonymouse did...but XP Pro and MCE are more different than most suspect.
...and another thing...
Perhaps the "builder" did not realize that Google Provides All. There is a site called The Green Button (I think its UK based), that is currently the best MCE forum around. There were a couple of instances where I wanted to do something the MCE didn't natively do and TGB provided me with solutions.
I'd say anyone who wants a more balanced oppinion of what MCE IS and what MCE IS NOT, should spend 20 minutes flipping through that forum and seeing what people are praising, griping about, and generally doing with MCE. Either that, or believe the (oh my god, I'm going to use this horrible term, I swore I never would, omg...) FUD.
I thought I made that clear, but I may not have. CableCard is going to be the answer, but again, that's not MS, its Congress and the cable providers. I use OTA HD myself for the football games my cable company doesn't broadcast in HD. The picture is at least as good as what's coming off my STB...'cept for INHD1/INHD2 which do 1080i from time to time.
I'll try to put asside the apparent anti-M$ bias in the article and read it for what it is; a complaint based on poor hardware choices and a lack of understanding for what a media center should be.
Its pretty universal amongst geeks that computers belong in the living room controlling everything from lights to music to tv to door alarms...or maybe that's just me. No one, and I do mean no one, has managed to put it all together in one EASY TO USE AND REASONABLY PRICED package. You've gotta go in knowing that's the case, and you've gotta go in with a clear sense of what you want to accomplish in your price point.
I've been running MCE 2005 for about 6 months now and its doing everything I want it to do with only one major issue, HD, and that's not Microsoft's fault...its a mix of congress and cable companies. With a moderately priced 3ghz box and 1gb of ram, and a paultry 120gb of storage, I can record/watch tv, burn shows to DVD, play my music, do a funky slide-show of my pictures...and then do all of those things upstairs in a room with only a tv and an MCE extender. Add to that a wireless keyboard/mouse, and I'm editing pictures and video on my 50" HDTV. All of that is accessible by the average joe non-geek, and I think that is the whole point.
Throw in some geeky tweaks and hacks, and we're talking about streaming HD content to the box with firewire (stupid content flags), ripping and streaming DVDs and playing Age of Empires III the way it was intended...50" of pure glory.
Back to the gripes of the article, I'm having a hard time feeling sympathy. Leave the AMD thing out of it, I'm sure they make a fine product.
-However, think AUDIO IN A MEDIA PC. What did you come up with, 16 bit Sound Blaster? One would assume that you'd want something phat like an Audigy or better.
-Then there is this idea that "As a DVR, one tuner was just OK[...]", sorry, but TiVo and all similar devices have 2 tuners as well, that's why you can record one show and watch another, that gripe doesn't hold water.
-I'm missing the problems recording VHS, never had any problems.
-ATI and HDTVs as monitors is the bane of all media pc's from what I understand. Yeah, ok, I'll buy into that being a valid gripe, but I tossed my X300 in the garbage where it belonged and went nVidia and all is well. S-Video for HD...err...the guy needs to smoke another one.
-The truly valid gripe is with music. The thing is that this is supposed to be accessible to non-geekers, so the default settings try to pull in all your music and catalog it for you. I've tried all sorts of auto-catalog software, and none have worked 100% on my collection. It's pretty darn easy to go into the settings for Media Player and UNCHECK A SINGLE BOX that says "Let Media Player Catalog My Music". After that, it will just use the standard tags, not try to rename andything, and refer to folder.jpg as the album cover. Easy easy easy.
I'm not saying its perfect, but when I think it needs to be said that this is the first OS/HW combo that has gone semi-mainstream in this realm, and pleanty have tried. Combine that with the fact the MS originally was INSISTING on OEM only so they could be sure the hardware could handle the load...but people complained...and now there are gripes that the hardware can't handle the load in non-OEM machines...err...
Because I am too lazy to google or anything at the moment, I'll just post and see what happens ...
I'm a diver, so I pay a lot of attention to bouyancy, which is essentially displacement of water. Correct me if I am wrong here, but water expands as it freezes, right? Thus its volume increases and would displace more water than it would if it were not frozen. The WEIGHT of that water, frozen or otherwise, would not change. Therefor, would not the frozen ice, that is then melted, displace less volume once it becomes water, and therefor LOWER the sea level.
All that being said, it doesn't matter much as it is the land-based ice that really is at issue. I just felt like pointing that out.
Oh...and read State of Fear...and then google up Crichton's speach about environmentalist movements being akin to religious zealotry. All very interesting even if you don't agree with it.
Likening this to creationists is just silly. Darwinian theory, however, is still simply that, a theory. However, ample evidence suggests it is correct, though many scientists think it is incomplete...but I digress.
When it comes to global warming, the jury is still out. There is no CONCLUSIVE evidence. There is speculation. There is evidence supporting the theory. There is also evidence that disputes the theory. There are also alternative possibilities for the evidence that DOES support the theory.
This is not to say that it is untrue, or even inaccurate...it simply needs further research.
To the point though, which is lumping it into right-wing propaganda and bible-thumping lunacy, all you do is lower the argument, vilify a political party and jab at some people's religion.
All of this is of course falling on deaf ears no doubt, so I end it here.
There are compelling arguments on both sides, but they tend to get lost in the drivel of mud slinging. It never ceases to amaze me how quickly the membership here blames everything and anything on Micro$oft and George Bush. Just because you don't agree with a particular line of thinking does not make it right-wing lunacy, and calling it such makes it difficult to listen to anything else you may have to say.
I don't usually post, but this is some funny stuff. Is it so difficult being anti-ms that people need to resort to using a NON-STANDARD test to call for a boycott on a BETA product? I mean, Acid2 admits it dosen't promise compliance, and NOTHING out there passes its test, not Firefox, not Opera, not nothing. Anyhoo...please do continue the hell-raising about how evil M$ (I love the dollar sign...as if money canotes evil) is and the whole monopoly thing.