That was the first thing that popped into my mind. Divx failed once, I have a feeling its going to fail again.
I do like the idea of buying a movie online, downloading and burning it. What I don't want is to pay $20 and only get to view the movie a few times, or for a limited time. This is defiantly a "wait and see" technology. If there playback is unlimited, and the price is not insane, I'd be willing to buy movies this way.
If it's data you care about someone else getting a hold of, I would recommend using Thermite. It's a wonderful, all purpose, cleanser of just about everything.
For Christmas my wife and I told our friends and family to just get us gift cards, as what we really want is a Wii. Got plenty of gift cards, just can't get a hold of a Wii. The nearest BestBuy, from which all of our cards came, sold out in under an half an hour on the second shipment, I managed to get there about 45 minutes after the store opened, due to having the wrong opening time, and so missed out until next year.
My parents, on the other hand (both in their 60's), managed to get a Wii held for them at CircuitCity by buying a big screen TV and a DirectTV subscription. Actually, they were buying those anyway, and asked about a Wii, and the salesman offered to hold one; I guess a good commission is a good way to get a salesman to go the extra mile. Now, if I want to play with a Wii I have to go back to my parents home. Yes, they were buying it for themselves, neither are really gamers but when my brother brought his over for Thanksgiving all of us got hooked on WiiSports Golf and Bowling. My father will probably be getting Tiger Woods golf for his birthday. Nintendo really has a hit system on their hands, all they have to do is make and let others make a lot of good games for it and they might just bury Sony this time around.
As it is Sony has once again proved it's proficency for sighting and and shooting the hell out of it's own foot.
Betamax - Bang!
MiniDisc - Bang!
UMD - Bang!
PS3 - Got it in my sights, sir!
The only thing they have going for them at the moment is that several movie studios are actually selling BluRay versions of movies. Problem is they are usually stacked up against the DVD version, leading people to ask, "why would I want to buy the Betamax^W BluRay version when I already have a VHS^W DVD player?" Once again, I think Sony has got their own foot just about lined up.
I'm wondering how vigorously the claims are checked. If it's mostly just a matter of filling in the applicable paperwork and waiting for it, I can see people just deciding to get free money and filing a claim, regardless of actual damage. Heck, it might be fun to figure out how/where to get the form, what needs to appear on it and get as many people as possible to send one in. Sort of 'slashdot' the system.
Having played with a Wii, I think that the Wii-mote is a better choice than a glove. Golfing without something in my hand would be awkward, at the very least I can hold the Wii-mote in one hand similarly to how I would hold a club, especially considering you have to hold the 'A' button to hit, it puts your hand in a similar position. Also, I would recommend everyone get get a Wiimote condom. They improve your grip on it and just generally look good.
Don't let him get to you, either he is trolling or he is one of the dumbfucks that are working to turn out a generation of irresponsible children who have no ability to deal with life. Kids, even as young as 5, should have enough sense to watch where they are going, and when they don't they will often get reminded of it via a bump or scrape. These things happen and are a useful part of growing up. It's one of the reasons humans have evolved to be more durable during their early years, so that these lessons don't kill them outright, as they may later in life.
As long as the child isn't seriously injured it becomes a good lesson in life and everyone moves on. Yup, adults need to keep their eyes open and watch out for kids making mistakes, but shit happens.
Yup, they work great. Both my brother and my father have bought Wiis (I've just been unlucky and not gotten one yet) and all 4 of the Wii-motes (2 for each system) have the condoms. The grip on them is great, we've played numerous hours of the Golf and Bowling games and never once had a Wii-mote slip out of hand. Of course, we are all rather sane in the amount of force we use, so this has not really been tested in extreme conditions. Also, they make Wii-mote identification easier. You get one in a color you like, and you can be fairly certain of which Wii-mote to use; sure they have the blue LED to tell them apart, but color coding is quicker (just ask any D&D player about dragons).
Might be, though both systems I have run it on have been bogged down a bit by it. Mobility Radeon X700 and NVidia 6600GS, neither of which is a top end card, but neither is exactly ancient hardware either. Then again, how much of that is the interface and how much of that is drivers is hard to tell.
I would just about kill for this sort of data density at the moment. I run a 4.5TB SAN at my office, and we're doing everything we can to free up space. A large part of the problem is that we have some very large datasets which are not needed regularly, but they are needed occasionally. Our current answer is tapes (we're getting a tape library which uses LTO-3 tapes soon) which work quite well, but they do degrade with time and don't handle being dropped well. Also, at $50 a tape, they can get expensive, and they are slow. Lastly, if you ever switch backup software you might have to deal with converting tapes to a new format.
We have actually used stacks of DVDs to backup some of the less used data, but at 8.5GB per dual layer DVD backing up a 100GB folder takes a lot of them, and is slow. Bring on the 1TB discs, I'll put them to use, and probably start complaining about how small they are soon.
As much as I am going to sound like a MS apologist: Go actually take a look at it before spouting off.
Vista has some nice features built into it. For starters they finally stole the way OSX has been keeping users from using full administrator access to run every program. Kernel mode drivers are now severely limited. And both the system folders and the registry now get virtualized when a stupid programmer decides that he really has to make changes that he shouldn't be. It's overall handling of networking is much better (my system doesn't hang while I'm connecting to a network share). And, most importantly, they added a great chess game to it.;)
On the down side, Microsoft has once again decided to bloat the hell out of their OS. While Aero Glass is nice to look at, it really does seem to cause performance problems. So, set you system to run "Windows Vista Basic", problem solved. Also, some of the keyboard shortcuts I am used to are gone. In XP <Windows Key> - U - <Enter> shuts down my computer, this is no longer true in Vista. Drivers are still hit and miss, My Creative Live! sound card does not have a Vista driver, though the XP one is working at the moment. I still can't get both displays functioning at the same time on my laptop while docked. Also, the various laptop function keys are not working.
Given that I run a Windows only environment, due to our primary application not having any sort of replacement, Vista is looking like a good upgrade. The additions to the group policies and the user handling alone are enough to convince me to want to switch.
I agree with khallow, the legislation would be hacked quick. The only thing business understands is money; therefore, the best way to curb a business activity is to make the risk/reward ratio so far out of whack that no one in their right mind would do it. Tell me, if you realized that your business was doomed, and you would personally be facing a year in jail, if a laptop with a 100,000 or so people's data was stolen, would you ever let that data be on a laptop? Would it make you take securing your database more seriously? Would you even consider keeping the data unless it was actually critical to your business?
Most businesses don't need all of the data they collect, they want it because they can use it to advertise at you and perform customer profiling. While there is probably some savings due to decreased marketing costs, it really isn't worth it to the people who get their data stolen and end up having to go about the joys of changing their social security number, credit cards, bank information, et al.
Legislating away this problem is indeed a simple idea, and like most simple ideas it's not a very effective one.
Stalin called, he wants his wet dream back.
Seriously, the idea that you you can be tracked any place any time and all of your thoughts and beliefs are open and exposed for scrutiny is a horrible idea. All its going to take is a few nutcases to pick out a group and persecute the hell out of them. Think the religious-right folks are tough on gays now, wait until they know how to find every single one. Might as well line 'em up and tattoo them for easy identification and "treatment".
I have a better idea, how about we make any company which collects personal information financially and criminally responsible for protecting that data. Say, if for every person's data you lose, misplace, have stolen or sell (no pre-canned allow it to be shared contracts, you can only get it for internal use), your company must pay 1% of the previous year's reported gross profits; and, all of the board members get a year in jail (no time off for good behavior). I'll bet you that after the first two or three occurrences every company will either put a huge amount of protection around that data, or just stop keeping it. A win either way.
Privacy is an important component to the Right to Liberty. In order to be able to have unpopular ideas it is sometimes necessary to be able to hide those ideas from general scrutiny. Without privacy everyone will either accept the popular opinion (popular being defined by the people with the guns) or they will simply disappear.
Frontpage, no wonder the page looks like shit.
Ok, so you can make a nice looking page using Frontpage, but for some reason it seems to be the source of many bad pages. And, while it would be nice to think that Frontpage is dying a much deserved death, its mostly just getting a name change. Office 2007 has Microsoft Office Sharepoint Designer 2007, which is the successor to Frontpage. One can only hope that no one notices it, and the few who do are scared off by the whole "Sharepoint" bit in the name.
I swear, if I have to work on one more Frontpage generated page, I'm going to kill someone. The code that it spits out is a mess, and trying to work with CSS in Frontpage is akin to having your testicles in a vice.
Hey, tag is a dangerous game. Just think, CHILDREN ARE TOUCHING EACH OTHER!!11ONE1one1! The next thing you know they will be screwing each other like rabbits in the playgrounds!
Ok, kidding aside, I actually did manage to end up with stitches in my eyebrow from a game of tag when I was young. I went for one of those high speed turns where you grab a pole and whip around, and another pole ran right out in front of me. The last thing I recall was seeing the school upside down, sometime after that I woke up on a couch in the office. I ended up with several stitches in my left eyebrow. (Is it just me or does the needle they use to do that look awfully similar to a fishhook?)
So, would I stop kids from playing tag because they might hurt themselves? HELL NO. It's a ton of fun, it gets kids out and running. Which, when you consider all of the health risks of kids being obese, I'll take the trade off of one or two of them getting knocked cold now and again. Also, any parent who sues over this sort of thing should be taken out and shot. Kids are going to run around and play, they are going to fall and get cuts, bruises, they will require stitches and they will break the occasional bone. This is why you have health insurance, to keep those occurances from breaking the bank. Use it as a teaching opportunity to explain why you need to be careful and GET OVER IT!
If you're looking for old games take a look at The Home of the Underdogs
They have just about all of the information on old games you could want, and are also useful when you have a dead disk. While 5.25" disks hold up ok, I have had more than one original disk die.
And while I'm pushing ideas DOSBox is invaluable for nostolgic gaming.
While you would probably not see cracks for games come out before the product was released, anything with this "protection" would have a 0-day crack. It wouldn't take too long to compile a list of possible questions and solutions. Put that into a convenient XML file, create a pretty front end to search it and post to your favorite copy protection removal site.
Remember, Google is your friend.
A while back I decided to pull out my old copy of Starflight I. This game had one of those wheels that you had to align and read out some silly code. While I probably do have the wheel somewhere around here still, it was faster to poke around the internet and find a utility which let me type in the two settings on the wheel and then gave me back the possible codes. I have a feeling that if you spent a few minutes with Google, you could have the codes to get the game working.
On my system, Task Manager reports that the two executables for IE7 (iexplore.exe and iuser.exe) are taking up about 10MB of memory total. By contrast FireFox is taking about 20MB. Both are freash instances of the browser sitting at the main google page. Of course, I have a bunch of extensions installed for FF along with all of my bookmarks, so it is probably a bit high.
Of course, this is running on Vista RC1 so, YMMV.
In all, if the security of IE7 is even half as good as MS is claiming, I'll be happy. I'm tired of cleaning spyware off my user's systems.
I will admit that the ability to use my cell phone as a watch is nice. My current phone (Samsung SGH-c417) has the front screen, which I do use to check the time. And size was an important factor in my choice.
The problem is, one good bump and I expect that I am going to lose that screen. In order to keep that from happening I now use a belt holster for my phone, and I always make sure to put the phone into it with the screen facing my hip. I figure that my body will have more give than a table or chair that I might accidentally bump against.
Am I the only person that hates the little screens put on the outside of the shells of flip cell phones?
The reason I buy a flip phone is because I want to protect the screen when it is in my pocket. Now, insted of a nice protective plastic cover, I have another LCD screen which can get broken. Now they want to do this to my laptop? No! The last thing my laptop needs is a screen that will get destroyed the firt time I accidentally hit a table with my laptop bag.
The clamshell top has a purpose, to protect the screen, it is not just wasted space which could use another fragile part.
Unfortunatly, I do not have any involvement in this, so I'm not familiar with how it was done (My position is directly linked to a research institute inside the University, I'm sort of the red-headed step child of the IT department). I'm just the unlucky sap who has to inform people about it when they hit it.
Slashdot Mirror
That was the first thing that popped into my mind. Divx failed once, I have a feeling its going to fail again.
I do like the idea of buying a movie online, downloading and burning it. What I don't want is to pay $20 and only get to view the movie a few times, or for a limited time. This is defiantly a "wait and see" technology. If there playback is unlimited, and the price is not insane, I'd be willing to buy movies this way.
If it's data you care about someone else getting a hold of, I would recommend using Thermite. It's a wonderful, all purpose, cleanser of just about everything.
My parents, on the other hand (both in their 60's), managed to get a Wii held for them at CircuitCity by buying a big screen TV and a DirectTV subscription. Actually, they were buying those anyway, and asked about a Wii, and the salesman offered to hold one; I guess a good commission is a good way to get a salesman to go the extra mile. Now, if I want to play with a Wii I have to go back to my parents home. Yes, they were buying it for themselves, neither are really gamers but when my brother brought his over for Thanksgiving all of us got hooked on WiiSports Golf and Bowling. My father will probably be getting Tiger Woods golf for his birthday. Nintendo really has a hit system on their hands, all they have to do is make and let others make a lot of good games for it and they might just bury Sony this time around.
As it is Sony has once again proved it's proficency for sighting and and shooting the hell out of it's own foot.
- Betamax - Bang!
- MiniDisc - Bang!
- UMD - Bang!
- PS3 - Got it in my sights, sir!
The only thing they have going for them at the moment is that several movie studios are actually selling BluRay versions of movies. Problem is they are usually stacked up against the DVD version, leading people to ask, "why would I want to buy the Betamax^W BluRay version when I already have a VHS^W DVD player?" Once again, I think Sony has got their own foot just about lined up.It just depends on what your definition if 'is' is.
I'm wondering how vigorously the claims are checked. If it's mostly just a matter of filling in the applicable paperwork and waiting for it, I can see people just deciding to get free money and filing a claim, regardless of actual damage. Heck, it might be fun to figure out how/where to get the form, what needs to appear on it and get as many people as possible to send one in. Sort of 'slashdot' the system.
Having played with a Wii, I think that the Wii-mote is a better choice than a glove. Golfing without something in my hand would be awkward, at the very least I can hold the Wii-mote in one hand similarly to how I would hold a club, especially considering you have to hold the 'A' button to hit, it puts your hand in a similar position.
Also, I would recommend everyone get get a Wiimote condom. They improve your grip on it and just generally look good.
Don't let him get to you, either he is trolling or he is one of the dumbfucks that are working to turn out a generation of irresponsible children who have no ability to deal with life. Kids, even as young as 5, should have enough sense to watch where they are going, and when they don't they will often get reminded of it via a bump or scrape. These things happen and are a useful part of growing up. It's one of the reasons humans have evolved to be more durable during their early years, so that these lessons don't kill them outright, as they may later in life.
As long as the child isn't seriously injured it becomes a good lesson in life and everyone moves on. Yup, adults need to keep their eyes open and watch out for kids making mistakes, but shit happens.
Yup, they work great. Both my brother and my father have bought Wiis (I've just been unlucky and not gotten one yet) and all 4 of the Wii-motes (2 for each system) have the condoms. The grip on them is great, we've played numerous hours of the Golf and Bowling games and never once had a Wii-mote slip out of hand. Of course, we are all rather sane in the amount of force we use, so this has not really been tested in extreme conditions. Also, they make Wii-mote identification easier. You get one in a color you like, and you can be fairly certain of which Wii-mote to use; sure they have the blue LED to tell them apart, but color coding is quicker (just ask any D&D player about dragons).
Might be, though both systems I have run it on have been bogged down a bit by it. Mobility Radeon X700 and NVidia 6600GS, neither of which is a top end card, but neither is exactly ancient hardware either. Then again, how much of that is the interface and how much of that is drivers is hard to tell.
I would just about kill for this sort of data density at the moment. I run a 4.5TB SAN at my office, and we're doing everything we can to free up space. A large part of the problem is that we have some very large datasets which are not needed regularly, but they are needed occasionally. Our current answer is tapes (we're getting a tape library which uses LTO-3 tapes soon) which work quite well, but they do degrade with time and don't handle being dropped well. Also, at $50 a tape, they can get expensive, and they are slow. Lastly, if you ever switch backup software you might have to deal with converting tapes to a new format.
We have actually used stacks of DVDs to backup some of the less used data, but at 8.5GB per dual layer DVD backing up a 100GB folder takes a lot of them, and is slow. Bring on the 1TB discs, I'll put them to use, and probably start complaining about how small they are soon.
As much as I am going to sound like a MS apologist: Go actually take a look at it before spouting off. ;)
Vista has some nice features built into it. For starters they finally stole the way OSX has been keeping users from using full administrator access to run every program. Kernel mode drivers are now severely limited. And both the system folders and the registry now get virtualized when a stupid programmer decides that he really has to make changes that he shouldn't be. It's overall handling of networking is much better (my system doesn't hang while I'm connecting to a network share). And, most importantly, they added a great chess game to it.
On the down side, Microsoft has once again decided to bloat the hell out of their OS. While Aero Glass is nice to look at, it really does seem to cause performance problems. So, set you system to run "Windows Vista Basic", problem solved. Also, some of the keyboard shortcuts I am used to are gone. In XP <Windows Key> - U - <Enter> shuts down my computer, this is no longer true in Vista. Drivers are still hit and miss, My Creative Live! sound card does not have a Vista driver, though the XP one is working at the moment. I still can't get both displays functioning at the same time on my laptop while docked. Also, the various laptop function keys are not working.
Given that I run a Windows only environment, due to our primary application not having any sort of replacement, Vista is looking like a good upgrade. The additions to the group policies and the user handling alone are enough to convince me to want to switch.
I agree with khallow, the legislation would be hacked quick. The only thing business understands is money; therefore, the best way to curb a business activity is to make the risk/reward ratio so far out of whack that no one in their right mind would do it. Tell me, if you realized that your business was doomed, and you would personally be facing a year in jail, if a laptop with a 100,000 or so people's data was stolen, would you ever let that data be on a laptop? Would it make you take securing your database more seriously? Would you even consider keeping the data unless it was actually critical to your business?
Most businesses don't need all of the data they collect, they want it because they can use it to advertise at you and perform customer profiling. While there is probably some savings due to decreased marketing costs, it really isn't worth it to the people who get their data stolen and end up having to go about the joys of changing their social security number, credit cards, bank information, et al.
Legislating away this problem is indeed a simple idea, and like most simple ideas it's not a very effective one.
Stalin called, he wants his wet dream back.
Seriously, the idea that you you can be tracked any place any time and all of your thoughts and beliefs are open and exposed for scrutiny is a horrible idea. All its going to take is a few nutcases to pick out a group and persecute the hell out of them. Think the religious-right folks are tough on gays now, wait until they know how to find every single one. Might as well line 'em up and tattoo them for easy identification and "treatment".
I have a better idea, how about we make any company which collects personal information financially and criminally responsible for protecting that data. Say, if for every person's data you lose, misplace, have stolen or sell (no pre-canned allow it to be shared contracts, you can only get it for internal use), your company must pay 1% of the previous year's reported gross profits; and, all of the board members get a year in jail (no time off for good behavior). I'll bet you that after the first two or three occurrences every company will either put a huge amount of protection around that data, or just stop keeping it. A win either way.
Privacy is an important component to the Right to Liberty. In order to be able to have unpopular ideas it is sometimes necessary to be able to hide those ideas from general scrutiny. Without privacy everyone will either accept the popular opinion (popular being defined by the people with the guns) or they will simply disappear.
Be careful what you ask for. As it is this guy seems to want a naked picture of you, he might just "download" some "DNA" on it for you.
Frontpage, no wonder the page looks like shit.
Ok, so you can make a nice looking page using Frontpage, but for some reason it seems to be the source of many bad pages. And, while it would be nice to think that Frontpage is dying a much deserved death, its mostly just getting a name change. Office 2007 has Microsoft Office Sharepoint Designer 2007, which is the successor to Frontpage. One can only hope that no one notices it, and the few who do are scared off by the whole "Sharepoint" bit in the name.
I swear, if I have to work on one more Frontpage generated page, I'm going to kill someone. The code that it spits out is a mess, and trying to work with CSS in Frontpage is akin to having your testicles in a vice.
Only the ones who haven't seen recent history:
Betamax
Mini-Disc
UMD
Next up: Blu Ray
I want to see the maps that the politicans use when they are gerrymandering the districts.
Hey, tag is a dangerous game. Just think, CHILDREN ARE TOUCHING EACH OTHER!!11ONE1one1! The next thing you know they will be screwing each other like rabbits in the playgrounds!
Ok, kidding aside, I actually did manage to end up with stitches in my eyebrow from a game of tag when I was young. I went for one of those high speed turns where you grab a pole and whip around, and another pole ran right out in front of me. The last thing I recall was seeing the school upside down, sometime after that I woke up on a couch in the office. I ended up with several stitches in my left eyebrow. (Is it just me or does the needle they use to do that look awfully similar to a fishhook?)
So, would I stop kids from playing tag because they might hurt themselves? HELL NO. It's a ton of fun, it gets kids out and running. Which, when you consider all of the health risks of kids being obese, I'll take the trade off of one or two of them getting knocked cold now and again. Also, any parent who sues over this sort of thing should be taken out and shot. Kids are going to run around and play, they are going to fall and get cuts, bruises, they will require stitches and they will break the occasional bone. This is why you have health insurance, to keep those occurances from breaking the bank. Use it as a teaching opportunity to explain why you need to be careful and GET OVER IT!
If you're looking for old games take a look at The Home of the Underdogs
They have just about all of the information on old games you could want, and are also useful when you have a dead disk. While 5.25" disks hold up ok, I have had more than one original disk die.
And while I'm pushing ideas DOSBox is invaluable for nostolgic gaming.
While you would probably not see cracks for games come out before the product was released, anything with this "protection" would have a 0-day crack. It wouldn't take too long to compile a list of possible questions and solutions. Put that into a convenient XML file, create a pretty front end to search it and post to your favorite copy protection removal site.
Remember, Google is your friend.
A while back I decided to pull out my old copy of Starflight I. This game had one of those wheels that you had to align and read out some silly code. While I probably do have the wheel somewhere around here still, it was faster to poke around the internet and find a utility which let me type in the two settings on the wheel and then gave me back the possible codes. I have a feeling that if you spent a few minutes with Google, you could have the codes to get the game working.
On my system, Task Manager reports that the two executables for IE7 (iexplore.exe and iuser.exe) are taking up about 10MB of memory total. By contrast FireFox is taking about 20MB. Both are freash instances of the browser sitting at the main google page. Of course, I have a bunch of extensions installed for FF along with all of my bookmarks, so it is probably a bit high.
Of course, this is running on Vista RC1 so, YMMV.
In all, if the security of IE7 is even half as good as MS is claiming, I'll be happy. I'm tired of cleaning spyware off my user's systems.
I will admit that the ability to use my cell phone as a watch is nice. My current phone (Samsung SGH-c417) has the front screen, which I do use to check the time. And size was an important factor in my choice.
The problem is, one good bump and I expect that I am going to lose that screen. In order to keep that from happening I now use a belt holster for my phone, and I always make sure to put the phone into it with the screen facing my hip. I figure that my body will have more give than a table or chair that I might accidentally bump against.
Am I the only person that hates the little screens put on the outside of the shells of flip cell phones?
The reason I buy a flip phone is because I want to protect the screen when it is in my pocket. Now, insted of a nice protective plastic cover, I have another LCD screen which can get broken. Now they want to do this to my laptop? No! The last thing my laptop needs is a screen that will get destroyed the firt time I accidentally hit a table with my laptop bag.
The clamshell top has a purpose, to protect the screen, it is not just wasted space which could use another fragile part.
Unfortunatly, I do not have any involvement in this, so I'm not familiar with how it was done (My position is directly linked to a research institute inside the University, I'm sort of the red-headed step child of the IT department). I'm just the unlucky sap who has to inform people about it when they hit it.