Your tale illustrates *exactly* why I feel that abandoned, unfinished, half-baked, and other not-yet-working stuff *should* be kept available on Sourceforge, rather than done away with (as I heard SF once discussed doing). Who knows what partly-baked idea might be just the right seed for another project, which DOES get finished??
Okay, I'll bite: *what* new concepts for the new browser? Seriously, what features do you feel are lacking in browsers today, and need innovation?
As to the ad campaign, yeah, I think you're right... I'm reminded of the last time I paid attention to a bunch of hype for some new version of Word, and found myself saying yep, had all that in WordPerfect since 1989 and version 5 for DOS.
WinME on decent hardware, with ordinary maintenance, is both very stable (my own WinME setup hasn't crashed in five YEARS!) and is the best of ALL WinVersions at playing nice with random hardware, especially the poorer stuff that Win2K won't have anything to do with. So if grandma brings home a cheap digital camera or printer, WinME will just accept the nasty thing without complaint; conversely WinXP might spit it back, and Win2K almost certainly will.
If your intent is to run a Windows server, or heavy-duty stuff, yeah, then you'd want Win2K. But Grandma only boots up her machine to check email once a week, and doesn't care about uptime. For grandma, it's more important that it be familiar and that it doesn't produce unexpected complaints when she does what she thought was obvious (like plug in a new printer -- sometimes XP decides that it has "found new hardware" EVERY time it boots up, much to grandma's confustion.)
Good observation -- indeed, it does look like the whole point of this is for companies to, er, opt out of the tedium of obeying those odious market forces. Why do as the market wishes when you have the power to do whatever the hell you want, and the power to enforce your desires upon a fundamentally unsuspecting market?
[laughing] Well, I guess it depends on how aware you are of what's going on with your computer. It's not an approach I'd recommend to newbies. But my point was that it can be done, with complete safety, and frankly it's much easier than fighting with ill-mannered crap like NAV, or backing out patches that generate conflicts.
As for myself, I do scan downloaded stuff before running it. I do make everything go thru the firewall. I don't use IE online. I've disabled the Windows scripting host, and don't allow ActiveX-anything. I use a braindead email client that doesn't execute anything.
I also have a nice zoo of captured viruses and trojans (I've ID'd two "new" viruses in the wild, just by eyeballing suspects with a hex viewer), but the worst they can do here is waste a little disk space.:)
Now, what I tell clients to do varies by what OS and apps they're using, but as a rule they do need to patch and run a resident AV and a firewall, and get beaten over the head about what NOT to do online and with email. I must be getting 'em on the right track, tho, cuz none has ever had an infection.
There was an episode of "Under Cover" (the wonderful tho short-lived 1991 series with John Rhys-Davies) where this young and still-full-of-himself agent was allowed to "accidentally" discover some satellite images showing hitherto-unknown Russian missile silos. So he runs to his superiors to brag about his find... and after he's made a sufficiently large fool of himself, an elder agent takes him into the imaging room and shows him the original satellite photos, with several condoms overlaid on the image. Who'da thunk condoms looked so much like silos?:)
[eyeing tagline] Sounds like something Sir Aubrey would say:)
Good luck with your novel, from a big Craig Thomas fan.
There are enough useful odds and ends in XP Pro that I miss when I find myself on a Win2K system, that I've come to prefer XP Pro in some ways (tho I detest XP Home for LACKING so many of these same nifty little tweaks), but definitely not for performance -- mainly because Win2K doesn't do that "looks like it's ready to go but actually it'll be 3 or 4 minutes before it can do anything" crap that XP does routinely. I'd rather see the damned hourglass and KNOW it's not yet ready!! Win2K is a bit too rigid in some ways, but if you've got a screen it's ready to go, no BS about it.
My fave for performance is Win95 OSR2 -- slick and efficient even on old hardware, and given decent drivers, is almost as crash-proof as Win2K. Anyone who says different just doesn't know how to set Windows up, or is skimping on hardware quality.
I'm not entirely sure what it is with XP Home's crap performance. I have XP Pro on a P3-500/768mb, and it runs rings around my neighbour's Celeron 2.5GHz with 256mb RAM and runs XP Home. It's not just memory, since her machine never comes close to using all of its piddly 256mb. -- The only thing I know for sure was *removed* from Home was some of the networking components, but unless it goes looking for nonexistent stuff every time it does anything at all, that wouldn't be enough to explain the performance hit. And default Pro and Home installs aren't THAT different as to what services they run. (Check out blackviper.com's "strange services" page!) But XP Home *does* remind me of WinME with the swapfile active; it does the same sort of heaving itself along whenever it has to do something new, or stop doing something like run a screensaver. (I have WinME as the alt boot my XP box; it's *much* faster with the swapfile turned off!!)
XP of either stripe is really bad with USB 1.x ports, half the time you plug something in and XP never does find it, or if it does find it, then acts like it's not working right. But XP works fine with USB 2.0.
Win 3.1x on 4mb... yeah, that was perfectly usable for most purposes. I remember when I bought my original 486 in May 1994, 4mb was still standard, and the clone dealer looked at me funny when I had him up it to 8mb. Eventually that machine got upped to 32mb, tho unless I was running 5 big apps all at once (which I think is sadly normal:) it really didn't make any difference you'd notice.
Said 486 has had a couple upgrades, first to a P90/32mb (WFWG was really nice on that!) and now it's a P3-550/1GB with Win98. If I can find a P3-800 CPU that speaks to a 100MHz bus, it'll get one more upgrade.
Another point about Win2K -- I think that programming team was really high on making clean, efficient code, more than any M$ coders before or since. At the Win2K pre-release seminar, they handed out the W2K team's internal version of IE5.0 (5.00.2314.1003c), tweaked to suit themselves, and man, was it ever fast and stable compared to any other version, and didn't generate the resource piggery that IE5.5 did (IE5.5 was much of WinME's problem with resource wastage). IE6.0-late-revisions seem to have recaptured some of that slickness and resource-efficiency, which makes me wonder if they went back to IE5.0 code rather than building up from 5.5; it certainly *feels* that way. (5.5 can't run on old hardware; 6.0.latemodel can.)
I have Win2K RC1 here somewhere, and you'd never know it was the same species. RC1 was slow, leaked memory like a sieve (128mb in less than an hour!), slow, crashed a lot, slow, after running 15 mintues or so got to where it took 15 seconds to acknowledge a mouse click, and did I mention it was slow? Made XP Home look good! They really did magic on Win2K to get from there to the final version.
I can deal with newer apps having "bloat", or big memory requirements, or whatever else comes of a meritorious upgrade.
But I agree with the parent poster that a lot of programmers are becoming lazy, or incompetent, or both, with respect to Windows memory and resource usage -- they've become accustomed to letting Win2K/XP clean up after them, so who cares if their app sucks up 100% of the resources available to it? Yet they claim these apps will run on Win98 -- yeah, if you don't mind out-of-resources freezes all the time. Note that it is NOT *system* RAM that's the issue, it's the resource heaps.
I see this all the time, to the point that I no longer install newer apps on my main box -- it has a full gig of RAM, but for various reasons it also runs Win98. These new apps don't stress the CPU and use only a small fraction of the system RAM, and WOULD run perfectly fine on this box if they didn't piss away the resource heaps -- typically via a resource leak. If they actually needed the heaps, well, I could nod and say okay, but pissing them away to no purpose is inexcuseably bad programming.
It does seem to be mostly commercial apps that have the problem; I rarely see it with freeware. Maybe because freeware authors had to buy their own setups and feel the pain if it gets abused, whereas commercial developers just whine to the boss that they need an upgrade and a newer OS.
[I do have an XP box where all the newer stuff now winds up, but it's quite annoying not to have all my usin' apps in one handy place anymore.]
Same here. My two internet-connected boxes run Win95 and Win98 -- never an infection of any sort (and their combined lifespan to date is about 11 years, with NO reinstalls), and I've done nothing more dramatic than 1) use a firewall, 2) not use IE online. I've applied no patches and don't run a resident AV, either; I just use common sense.
As the local user group's hardware guru, I've spent all my free time over the past two weeks fixing up donated machines that came with variously Win98SE, WinME, Win2K, or WinXP (both Pro and Home), all in at best a state of serious neglect. The last box I worked on today came up in Win98... and I found myself thinking, "Oh good, that will be WAY less work to get running right again."
I commonly deal with random devices on random setups. The one problem I've had with Win2K was that it refused to play nice with two specific sound cards -- one was an OPTi64, and the other was an SBLive. Round and round we went, with Win2K spitting back the drivers and refusing to disable the devices in hardware profile, so it kept rediscovering them as "new hardware" on every boot.
But otherwise, I can't think of anything I've encountered that it didn't like.
[laughing] That sounds like something I would do -- use some antique app that I prefer to its younger kin, and enjoy its spiffy performance on newer hardware!
[eyeing WordPerfect 5.1, which I still use when I want to get real work done]
I've found you can run XP Pro on 64mb in a pinch (it's sluggish, but usable, even on a PII-233), and have clocked its actual use, with typical stuff running, at about 95mb.
Conversely XP Home is sluggish with 128mb (on, say, a PIII-600 or better), even tho its actual use tends to be around 105mb. It seems to think it needs to thrash around in the swapfile even when it's not actually using it for anything; XP Pro doesn't do that.
As to older Windows' actual use for the OS itself: Win95, about 16mb, and can scrape by on 8mb without too much of a performance hit. Win98 needs about 32mb; it's not happy with less than that. Win98SE uses about 64mb, but isn't really happy with less than 128mb. WinME actually uses about 105mb, but would like to have 256mb (and it performs *much* better with the swapfile disabled). I don't know about NT4, having never used it. Lots of folk routinely ran Win3.1x on 4mb (it could limp along on 2mb, if badly), and it did really good on 16mb or more.
Win2K is a bit of an anomaly... Witness:
I have a 486DX4-100 that I use for testing 72pin SIMMs. When it's not busy doing that, it gets to keep 8mb of RAM for itself.
One day I had a need for a hard disk to test something or other, so grabbed a small one at random and hooked it to the above 486... and was amazed to see Win2K boot up (whoops, wrong hard disk!) -- on a lowly 486 with only 8mb RAM, and yes you read that right, EIGHT megs of RAM. Not only that, but it ran well enough to be usable for basic stuff!!
And this was a default install, originally set up on a P233 with 128mb RAM (where Win2K ran very nicely), and not tweaked, updated, or anything else.
I about fell over.:)
But it goes to show that Win2K's core is relatively efficient, making it a good choice if you need Windows on older hardware.
I have 16 P3 systems in my living room this instant, awaiting testing and software-cleanup, which were donated to our local user group (to be used both by the gaming SIG and the seniors education project). While some had been outgrown by their previous owners, others were just plain abused. One was full of spyware/adware and at least one trojan despite having AVG, AdAware, and some other cleanup tools installed. Poor thing ran like a 386. After merely using the tools that it already had ready to hand, it's now clean and running at normal speed.
You gotta wonder about some people...
Another thing I've noticed: used to be you mostly saw clones by the side of the road or given away. Now, despite that market percentages haven't changed any (clones then and now had about 40% of the market), I see almost NO dumped clones. Nearly all the discarded machines are name-branders.
I think what this indicates is that more OEM boxes are purchased by people who just don't know what the heck to do with a "broken" computer -- the same people who are comforted by having a Big Name backing their new system.
[On a related note, nearly all the dead hardware I see now are OEM systems. Used to run about half OEMs and half clones.]
One has to wonder if there's not pay-per-view in DVDs' future, too... partially enabled by this sort of DRM. Watch it all you like at "normal" (reduced) resolution, but if you want HD, cough up an extra couple bucks. EVERY time you watch it.
On further review, I don't think that's a joke. Given where Trusted Computing is going, the DRM'd monitor could be used to help ensure that you can't see a high-resolution image when someone sends you "unlicenced content", even if that's a still image.
There is no content in the world that I need to see bad enough to put up with this crap. I'll go read a book instead... at least until they start being published only as pay-by-the-page DRM'd ebooks. And then I'll have to go outside and birdwatch or stargaze... at least until someone patents that.
Yeah, something like that -- "kewl" implies more fervor and excitement, or perhaps more to the point, wanting to be *seen* as having fervor and excitement.
This is where I admit to reading the synonymy for its entertainment value:)
That's in fact why I consider "kewl" and "cool" to be different words, with related but different meanings. I'm not sure I could explain exactly how their meanings differ, but I know it when I hear it:)
Agreed, but I think it's a publicity stunt, pure and simple. Anything that you "can't open until X" generates anticipatory demand in the consumer.
I once tested a DRM'd download-on-demand ebook for a client. Not only did the stupid thing require an internet connection every time you wanted to read it, it became unusable when the "publisher" went tits-up, after less than two years in business. 'Nuf said!!
"One of the questions we need to ask ourselves is what our goal really is. Are we trying to develop useful code to help people (BSD/MIT), or are we trying to make other people develop useful code to help us (GPL/LGPL)?"
That's the best functional definition I've seen yet, and I think closest to the reality envisioned by those who wrote the license terms. You oughta put it in the public domain!:)
The GPL is useful to prevent code hoarding, yeah. But BSD's "do whatever the hell you want with it, so long as you note our contribution" is definitely more *free*, in every sense of the word.
Or could be that the offspring of such crossbreeding were generally sterile, as is commonly the case with matings outside the species (frex, horse + donkey = mule, typically sterile).
A: 4. For big productions, there are often multiple editions of this kind of stuff.
One of the original Darth Vader costumes was sold at auction about 15 years ago. (It was just the helmet and torso, the rest had been lost.) I vaguely recall that it was one of 8 partial or complete getups then known to exist, and that it went for about $2000.
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Your tale illustrates *exactly* why I feel that abandoned, unfinished, half-baked, and other not-yet-working stuff *should* be kept available on Sourceforge, rather than done away with (as I heard SF once discussed doing). Who knows what partly-baked idea might be just the right seed for another project, which DOES get finished??
Okay, I'll bite: *what* new concepts for the new browser? Seriously, what features do you feel are lacking in browsers today, and need innovation?
... I'm reminded of the last time I paid attention to a bunch of hype for some new version of Word, and found myself saying yep, had all that in WordPerfect since 1989 and version 5 for DOS.
As to the ad campaign, yeah, I think you're right
WinME on decent hardware, with ordinary maintenance, is both very stable (my own WinME setup hasn't crashed in five YEARS!) and is the best of ALL WinVersions at playing nice with random hardware, especially the poorer stuff that Win2K won't have anything to do with. So if grandma brings home a cheap digital camera or printer, WinME will just accept the nasty thing without complaint; conversely WinXP might spit it back, and Win2K almost certainly will.
If your intent is to run a Windows server, or heavy-duty stuff, yeah, then you'd want Win2K. But Grandma only boots up her machine to check email once a week, and doesn't care about uptime. For grandma, it's more important that it be familiar and that it doesn't produce unexpected complaints when she does what she thought was obvious (like plug in a new printer -- sometimes XP decides that it has "found new hardware" EVERY time it boots up, much to grandma's confustion.)
Good observation -- indeed, it does look like the whole point of this is for companies to, er, opt out of the tedium of obeying those odious market forces. Why do as the market wishes when you have the power to do whatever the hell you want, and the power to enforce your desires upon a fundamentally unsuspecting market?
I had a related thought whilst Reading TFA:
Is "identity" (or "trusted identity") about THEM knowing who WE are, or about WE knowing who THEY are??
That's because the page in question chose to remain anonymous.
[laughing] Well, I guess it depends on how aware you are of what's going on with your computer. It's not an approach I'd recommend to newbies. But my point was that it can be done, with complete safety, and frankly it's much easier than fighting with ill-mannered crap like NAV, or backing out patches that generate conflicts.
:)
As for myself, I do scan downloaded stuff before running it. I do make everything go thru the firewall. I don't use IE online. I've disabled the Windows scripting host, and don't allow ActiveX-anything. I use a braindead email client that doesn't execute anything.
I also have a nice zoo of captured viruses and trojans (I've ID'd two "new" viruses in the wild, just by eyeballing suspects with a hex viewer), but the worst they can do here is waste a little disk space.
Now, what I tell clients to do varies by what OS and apps they're using, but as a rule they do need to patch and run a resident AV and a firewall, and get beaten over the head about what NOT to do online and with email. I must be getting 'em on the right track, tho, cuz none has ever had an infection.
Clever... tho I'm reminded of this:
:)
:)
There was an episode of "Under Cover" (the wonderful tho short-lived 1991 series with John Rhys-Davies) where this young and still-full-of-himself agent was allowed to "accidentally" discover some satellite images showing hitherto-unknown Russian missile silos. So he runs to his superiors to brag about his find... and after he's made a sufficiently large fool of himself, an elder agent takes him into the imaging room and shows him the original satellite photos, with several condoms overlaid on the image. Who'da thunk condoms looked so much like silos?
[eyeing tagline] Sounds like something Sir Aubrey would say
Good luck with your novel, from a big Craig Thomas fan.
There are enough useful odds and ends in XP Pro that I miss when I find myself on a Win2K system, that I've come to prefer XP Pro in some ways (tho I detest XP Home for LACKING so many of these same nifty little tweaks), but definitely not for performance -- mainly because Win2K doesn't do that "looks like it's ready to go but actually it'll be 3 or 4 minutes before it can do anything" crap that XP does routinely. I'd rather see the damned hourglass and KNOW it's not yet ready!! Win2K is a bit too rigid in some ways, but if you've got a screen it's ready to go, no BS about it.
:) it really didn't make any difference you'd notice.
My fave for performance is Win95 OSR2 -- slick and efficient even on old hardware, and given decent drivers, is almost as crash-proof as Win2K. Anyone who says different just doesn't know how to set Windows up, or is skimping on hardware quality.
I'm not entirely sure what it is with XP Home's crap performance. I have XP Pro on a P3-500/768mb, and it runs rings around my neighbour's Celeron 2.5GHz with 256mb RAM and runs XP Home. It's not just memory, since her machine never comes close to using all of its piddly 256mb. -- The only thing I know for sure was *removed* from Home was some of the networking components, but unless it goes looking for nonexistent stuff every time it does anything at all, that wouldn't be enough to explain the performance hit. And default Pro and Home installs aren't THAT different as to what services they run. (Check out blackviper.com's "strange services" page!) But XP Home *does* remind me of WinME with the swapfile active; it does the same sort of heaving itself along whenever it has to do something new, or stop doing something like run a screensaver. (I have WinME as the alt boot my XP box; it's *much* faster with the swapfile turned off!!)
XP of either stripe is really bad with USB 1.x ports, half the time you plug something in and XP never does find it, or if it does find it, then acts like it's not working right. But XP works fine with USB 2.0.
Win 3.1x on 4mb... yeah, that was perfectly usable for most purposes. I remember when I bought my original 486 in May 1994, 4mb was still standard, and the clone dealer looked at me funny when I had him up it to 8mb. Eventually that machine got upped to 32mb, tho unless I was running 5 big apps all at once (which I think is sadly normal
Said 486 has had a couple upgrades, first to a P90/32mb (WFWG was really nice on that!) and now it's a P3-550/1GB with Win98. If I can find a P3-800 CPU that speaks to a 100MHz bus, it'll get one more upgrade.
Another point about Win2K -- I think that programming team was really high on making clean, efficient code, more than any M$ coders before or since. At the Win2K pre-release seminar, they handed out the W2K team's internal version of IE5.0 (5.00.2314.1003c), tweaked to suit themselves, and man, was it ever fast and stable compared to any other version, and didn't generate the resource piggery that IE5.5 did (IE5.5 was much of WinME's problem with resource wastage). IE6.0-late-revisions seem to have recaptured some of that slickness and resource-efficiency, which makes me wonder if they went back to IE5.0 code rather than building up from 5.5; it certainly *feels* that way. (5.5 can't run on old hardware; 6.0.latemodel can.)
I have Win2K RC1 here somewhere, and you'd never know it was the same species. RC1 was slow, leaked memory like a sieve (128mb in less than an hour!), slow, crashed a lot, slow, after running 15 mintues or so got to where it took 15 seconds to acknowledge a mouse click, and did I mention it was slow? Made XP Home look good! They really did magic on Win2K to get from there to the final version.
I can deal with newer apps having "bloat", or big memory requirements, or whatever else comes of a meritorious upgrade.
But I agree with the parent poster that a lot of programmers are becoming lazy, or incompetent, or both, with respect to Windows memory and resource usage -- they've become accustomed to letting Win2K/XP clean up after them, so who cares if their app sucks up 100% of the resources available to it? Yet they claim these apps will run on Win98 -- yeah, if you don't mind out-of-resources freezes all the time. Note that it is NOT *system* RAM that's the issue, it's the resource heaps.
I see this all the time, to the point that I no longer install newer apps on my main box -- it has a full gig of RAM, but for various reasons it also runs Win98. These new apps don't stress the CPU and use only a small fraction of the system RAM, and WOULD run perfectly fine on this box if they didn't piss away the resource heaps -- typically via a resource leak. If they actually needed the heaps, well, I could nod and say okay, but pissing them away to no purpose is inexcuseably bad programming.
It does seem to be mostly commercial apps that have the problem; I rarely see it with freeware. Maybe because freeware authors had to buy their own setups and feel the pain if it gets abused, whereas commercial developers just whine to the boss that they need an upgrade and a newer OS.
[I do have an XP box where all the newer stuff now winds up, but it's quite annoying not to have all my usin' apps in one handy place anymore.]
Same here. My two internet-connected boxes run Win95 and Win98 -- never an infection of any sort (and their combined lifespan to date is about 11 years, with NO reinstalls), and I've done nothing more dramatic than 1) use a firewall, 2) not use IE online. I've applied no patches and don't run a resident AV, either; I just use common sense.
As the local user group's hardware guru, I've spent all my free time over the past two weeks fixing up donated machines that came with variously Win98SE, WinME, Win2K, or WinXP (both Pro and Home), all in at best a state of serious neglect. The last box I worked on today came up in Win98... and I found myself thinking, "Oh good, that will be WAY less work to get running right again."
Goes to show ya...
I commonly deal with random devices on random setups. The one problem I've had with Win2K was that it refused to play nice with two specific sound cards -- one was an OPTi64, and the other was an SBLive. Round and round we went, with Win2K spitting back the drivers and refusing to disable the devices in hardware profile, so it kept rediscovering them as "new hardware" on every boot.
But otherwise, I can't think of anything I've encountered that it didn't like.
[laughing] That sounds like something I would do -- use some antique app that I prefer to its younger kin, and enjoy its spiffy performance on newer hardware!
[eyeing WordPerfect 5.1, which I still use when I want to get real work done]
I've found you can run XP Pro on 64mb in a pinch (it's sluggish, but usable, even on a PII-233), and have clocked its actual use, with typical stuff running, at about 95mb.
:)
Conversely XP Home is sluggish with 128mb (on, say, a PIII-600 or better), even tho its actual use tends to be around 105mb. It seems to think it needs to thrash around in the swapfile even when it's not actually using it for anything; XP Pro doesn't do that.
As to older Windows' actual use for the OS itself: Win95, about 16mb, and can scrape by on 8mb without too much of a performance hit. Win98 needs about 32mb; it's not happy with less than that. Win98SE uses about 64mb, but isn't really happy with less than 128mb. WinME actually uses about 105mb, but would like to have 256mb (and it performs *much* better with the swapfile disabled). I don't know about NT4, having never used it. Lots of folk routinely ran Win3.1x on 4mb (it could limp along on 2mb, if badly), and it did really good on 16mb or more.
Win2K is a bit of an anomaly... Witness:
I have a 486DX4-100 that I use for testing 72pin SIMMs. When it's not busy doing that, it gets to keep 8mb of RAM for itself.
One day I had a need for a hard disk to test something or other, so grabbed a small one at random and hooked it to the above 486... and was amazed to see Win2K boot up (whoops, wrong hard disk!) -- on a lowly 486 with only 8mb RAM, and yes you read that right, EIGHT megs of RAM. Not only that, but it ran well enough to be usable for basic stuff!!
And this was a default install, originally set up on a P233 with 128mb RAM (where Win2K ran very nicely), and not tweaked, updated, or anything else.
I about fell over.
But it goes to show that Win2K's core is relatively efficient, making it a good choice if you need Windows on older hardware.
I have 16 P3 systems in my living room this instant, awaiting testing and software-cleanup, which were donated to our local user group (to be used both by the gaming SIG and the seniors education project). While some had been outgrown by their previous owners, others were just plain abused. One was full of spyware/adware and at least one trojan despite having AVG, AdAware, and some other cleanup tools installed. Poor thing ran like a 386. After merely using the tools that it already had ready to hand, it's now clean and running at normal speed.
You gotta wonder about some people...
Another thing I've noticed: used to be you mostly saw clones by the side of the road or given away. Now, despite that market percentages haven't changed any (clones then and now had about 40% of the market), I see almost NO dumped clones. Nearly all the discarded machines are name-branders.
I think what this indicates is that more OEM boxes are purchased by people who just don't know what the heck to do with a "broken" computer -- the same people who are comforted by having a Big Name backing their new system.
[On a related note, nearly all the dead hardware I see now are OEM systems. Used to run about half OEMs and half clones.]
One has to wonder if there's not pay-per-view in DVDs' future, too... partially enabled by this sort of DRM. Watch it all you like at "normal" (reduced) resolution, but if you want HD, cough up an extra couple bucks. EVERY time you watch it.
"However, we can make an impact on the secure monitors."
Here's a sledgehammer. Have at 'em!!
On further review, I don't think that's a joke. Given where Trusted Computing is going, the DRM'd monitor could be used to help ensure that you can't see a high-resolution image when someone sends you "unlicenced content", even if that's a still image.
There is no content in the world that I need to see bad enough to put up with this crap. I'll go read a book instead... at least until they start being published only as pay-by-the-page DRM'd ebooks. And then I'll have to go outside and birdwatch or stargaze... at least until someone patents that.
Yeah, something like that -- "kewl" implies more fervor and excitement, or perhaps more to the point, wanting to be *seen* as having fervor and excitement.
:)
This is where I admit to reading the synonymy for its entertainment value
That's in fact why I consider "kewl" and "cool" to be different words, with related but different meanings. I'm not sure I could explain exactly how their meanings differ, but I know it when I hear it :)
Agreed, but I think it's a publicity stunt, pure and simple. Anything that you "can't open until X" generates anticipatory demand in the consumer.
I once tested a DRM'd download-on-demand ebook for a client. Not only did the stupid thing require an internet connection every time you wanted to read it, it became unusable when the "publisher" went tits-up, after less than two years in business. 'Nuf said!!
"One of the questions we need to ask ourselves is what our goal really is. Are we trying to develop useful code to help people (BSD/MIT), or are we trying to make other people develop useful code to help us (GPL/LGPL)?"
:)
That's the best functional definition I've seen yet, and I think closest to the reality envisioned by those who wrote the license terms. You oughta put it in the public domain!
The GPL is useful to prevent code hoarding, yeah. But BSD's "do whatever the hell you want with it, so long as you note our contribution" is definitely more *free*, in every sense of the word.
Or could be that the offspring of such crossbreeding were generally sterile, as is commonly the case with matings outside the species (frex, horse + donkey = mule, typically sterile).
A: 4. For big productions, there are often multiple editions of this kind of stuff.
One of the original Darth Vader costumes was sold at auction about 15 years ago. (It was just the helmet and torso, the rest had been lost.) I vaguely recall that it was one of 8 partial or complete getups then known to exist, and that it went for about $2000.
Exactly!!