This has been a bug bear of mine for some time. It upsets me the most when you have a PURCHASED DVD and it forces you to sit through piracy information.. for gods sake, i'm watching a movie that I bought - stop RAMMING IT DOWN MY NECK! If I was watching a pirated DVD, that crap would have been trimmed out anyway so whats the point in making us watch it?
The thing that I find to be the biggest irony is that the more they force previews/trailers/anti piracy crap onto us, I consider copying DVD's more than ever before. I've been a good guy and bought over 130 DVD's but the more of this crap that they add on, the more inclined I am to start getting my movies elsewhere.
Is that not all of us are earning $200,000 a year to come up with claptrap like this like some of the morons at the RIAA are. Most normal people earn modest salaries, don't have expense accounts, and do have mortgages, bills, loans and children to look after and other interests to pursue.
I consider CD's to be a fairly expensive item - certainly not expensive enough to prevent me from buying the albums I really want but expensive enough to stop me from just spotting a CD by an artist i've heard of and buying it outright unless it is reduced / in the sales.
The greed of corporations seems to know no bounds and I just can't believe that things have been allowed to progress so far into a situation where consumer rights are just being trampled into tiny little pieces and no-one does anything about it.
Reading that article made such a refreshing change compared to the Microsoft 'propaganda' stories we usually get linked to. eWeek gave Linux vendors the chance to answer and explain all of the figures which seemed to side with Microsoft - and invairiably once dissected, the usual Microsoft massaging of figures clearly comes to light.
One great example was this:
Interestingly, Microsoft's Hilf has a personal Red Hat workstation in his office that he uses on a daily basis. He selected a random week in October to provide a snapshot of the updates made to his Red Hat Enterprise Linux workstation over that period. He found that, between Oct. 6, 2005, and Oct. 11, 2005, his workstation was updated 66 times.
"I chose those dates randomly," he said. "I use this system daily, so it was literally a snapshot of a given workweek. All this illustrates is that patching and updating are part of any 'living' software system. It is part of the nature of modern software: Things change, bugs happen, features get added, and software needs to get updated."
But Red Hat's Cox pointed out that the second update release for RHEL4 was issued Oct. 5, resulting in a very large number of updated packages over the period of a day or two, "which is what Hilf saw. We only issued two Update releases for RHEL4 in 2005, so he was quite unlucky in his choice of a random snapshot," he said, tongue in cheek.
Unlucky indeed. Nice to see some unbiased reporting and not just verbatim duplication of Microsoft comments and 'press releases' for a change.
Reminds me of this story I read about a month or two back - Mercedes took three shiny new S-Class's with this automatic braking system to a facility to demonstrate how well it worked for a german auto magazine. So they filled this facility with fake fog, sent a test driver down into the fog and lo and behold he ploughed into the back of one of the other S classes.
It was a bit of an embarassment and for some reason the test driver ended up losing his job despite it being nothing to do with him. Still shows that sometimes these pieces of technology do have a way to go before they work properly.
Sorry but have I missed something? If you'd watched the Steve Jobs keynote (don't remeber which though so I must apologise) he basically said exactly what is being 'reported' in these blogs.. iTunes watches what music you buy the most, and then lists things it feels might interest you! SO WHAT!
For gods sake - its not like its some kind of secret! And its not like Apple are the only company doing this? Amazon has done it for as long as I remeber?
And who cares, honestly? Embarassed that your work collegues or friends will see all the Hentai videos and Weird Al albums you've been buying?!
The article covers everything from the hideous installer and it's lack of partitioning/formatting capabilities to the utter wasteland that is the Windows desktop, devoid of useful applications and everything in between.
Someone has already mentioned the fact that you CAN partition and format drives in the installer, so thats wrong for a start.
And what is Microsoft supposed to do about applications? If it bundled Microsoft Office in with Windows, the anti-competition people would be on their backs the day it hit the shelves. They have no choice but keep the OS relatively free of apps - too many partners they don't want to piss off and the anti-competition people just waiting with multi-million dollar fines! Look at the shit they are having to go through here in Europe with Windows Media Player for example!
Personally i'd rather they were concentrating on putting some of the features people actually WANT back into Vista, like WinFS, rather than twatting around recording nice guitar riffs for system events! I still feel that Microsoft will never learn to get its priorities right.
Google and Apple are going to put their heads together.
Apple are also rumoured to be doing some sort of PVR - and Apple, as we've seen in recent months, don't seem to be so afraid of working with other companies. With Mac World due on the 9th of Jan, it'd be quite a big / heavy duty step to announce something around then and those two companies working together would be quite something... surely they are desperate to give Microsoft a good thrashing between them!
Just random speculation - i'm probably quite, quite wrong!
Thats exactly the kind of people I was referring to in my parent post. Thanks for clearing that up!
Like the asshole up the road who is a builder by trade but seriously injured himself and is unable to work so lives off the government. So if he's so seriously injured, why is he regularly undertaking building work on his own house, carrying heavy loads of bricks and tools around? Whats to stop him getting retrained and getting into a desk job..?
That'll save you a billion or two in your nation's insurance costs if it ever gets started.
Believe me, i'm all for seeing my car insurance costs fall and seeing those who own / operate cars illegally with no tax/mot/insurance get nailed. My problem is that even when the system like this is put in place and when the overheads for the car insurance companies start to fall, we still won't see a reduction in premiums. We'll still be paying the same amount.
And in the mean time, road tax and fuel duty will go up even more to help maintain this system.
I know i'm enormously sceptical but I things just keep going up and up - theres never any good news any more, never any rebates, etc - just corporate greed and government stupidity. As soon as we start to see some money in our pockets and a reduction in crime then i'll be keen on the system.
Fed up with Labour. I already voted against them in this election, but seeing as my constituency is full of out of work 'scrounging from the government' layabouts who don't get off their fat asses because the government gives them armfulls of cash every month, it was hardly likely that the vote would go any other way.
What pisses me off the most is the usual 'this is being done to try and catch terrorists' - ffs, we've had ONE single Al Qaeda related attack happen in this country so far and THAT was from people that the government never suspected as they were British Muslims. How exactly would license plate tracking catch legal residents of the united kingdom if they so desire to blow themselves up in a public area?!
Why can't they spend the countless billions this service is going to cost to implment where we bloody well WANT and NEED it - in the schools, in the hospitals, on pensions for our old people.
Fucking fuckers. It really makes me mad. The priorities are fucked - this terrorism 'excuse' for taking away our rights is just really starting to piss me off.
Depends. I priced up the Dell equivilant and found that it was just as cheap to build my own. Ironically I ended up using in the build a 19" Dell TFT which I was able to pick up cheap from a reseller with 3 years on site warranty still included.
As both myself and my girlfriend work for a university covered under a certain Microsoft licensing scheme, we're entitled to install the universities copy of Windows XP & Office 2003 on our home PC's so that saved a few $$$'s on the cost of a store bought PC.
In fact, just pricing up a similar spec PC from Dell's website comes in at around £250 MORE than the cost of the machine I built up! I'll stick with my homebrew thanks.
I had to download the full software suite from HP recently for one of our Laserjet 1200 printers because of some HP Toolbox utility that would actually enable me to run a 'clean' command on the printer - evidently the regular drivers don't allow you to do that.
The full download was not only a different, out of date set of drivers, but was also a full blown java based WEB SERVER install that bound itself to a local port and then fired up a web browser to access it. I'm at a loss to explain why this has to be done in such a way, and why that functionality can't just be built into the driver suite for Windows. The Java app was a huge download and it made the machine run like crap!
Another award winning piece of software design there!
I don't know why it is that vendors insist on preloading so much crap on their machines when they ship them but it drives me crazy.
We buy Toshiba laptops at my place of work and whenever we get a new one in, its preloaded with the Toshiba default build.. and its pretty awful! When you first fire it up you have to run the gauntlet of about 5-10 pop up windows from apps all letting you know that they are there and running. Cast a glance down to the system tray and there are about 11 or 12 memory resident apps all sitting there taking their cut of the memory and CPU time - one was a Toshiba app that basically takes over the Microsoft power management suite with a far more complex and convoluted piece of software!
I don't understand it personally. Windows might grind the gears of plenty of people but these days its quite a sleek, easy to us OS - why must they insist on bundling all this crap on the machine which must surely confuse users, and give them so much more overhead in places that they don't even need it! Not to mention the quite obvious performance impact on the machine.
I still prefer to make my own PC's - most recent build was for my girlfriend - a really nice Biostar IDEQ barebones box based on an AMD Sempron/NForce3 250 combo! It goes like a rocket, and there is no clutter and crapola on it! Other than Windows:P
So what if its not available to me? I can still champion the cause. It is inevitable that they will be available here eventually.
Its nothing to do with a cult mentality - I don't even own an Apple machine and the only iPod I own is a Shuffle. I just feel that its a good product and a good model, therefore it gets my support and maybe one day my business.
Let me just get out my handy-dandy little red pen, and use it to illustrate a few points which you seem to have otherwise overlooked.
I think the most important one is this - we all know that bittorrent is out there and that whatever solution that the movie & television studios and their affiliates come up with will never give us the freedom / choice that we currently have. But right now its a LEGAL WAY OF DOING THINGS, and maybe you should accept that there will never be a legal system that just gives you every TV show, ever aired, whenever you want it.
You're a fool - Apple are at least making the effort to get something off the ground that could potentially bloom.. yeah, right now its a bit lousy that its only in low res and you can only play it on your iPod but its step one - and only complete ignorami like yourself would completely overlook the bigger picture in this case, and sing about the same old song about not being able to play it on your Linux PVR or being able to burn it to DVD.
This, like it or not IS the 21st century. Get over it.
Its an amazing coincidence.. the high pitch noises irritate and drive away teens, and low frequency resonating bass noises irritate and drive away old people too;)
So.. this super hyped version of the next generation of Windows has gradually had all of its most attractive features stripped out of it just for the sake of getting it out of the door quickly. So this means that its going to be yet another interim OS, and the NEXT version of Windows is going to be the one that you really want.
We're just going to be left with a shadow of the OS we were all hoping for - and purely so that Microsoft can say that they have an OS that looks just as pretty as MacOS X. Other than that, there have been absolutely no stand out or interesting additions that I can see.
lol.. so is my girlfriend but whilst she might know lots about her chosen field, I don't think she knows an awful lot about the ins and outs of RAM timings and AGP apertures;)
Slashdot Mirror
Try the new Audi LeMans car.. thats a diesel and boy is it fast ;)
Well said.
This has been a bug bear of mine for some time. It upsets me the most when you have a PURCHASED DVD and it forces you to sit through piracy information.. for gods sake, i'm watching a movie that I bought - stop RAMMING IT DOWN MY NECK! If I was watching a pirated DVD, that crap would have been trimmed out anyway so whats the point in making us watch it?
The thing that I find to be the biggest irony is that the more they force previews/trailers/anti piracy crap onto us, I consider copying DVD's more than ever before. I've been a good guy and bought over 130 DVD's but the more of this crap that they add on, the more inclined I am to start getting my movies elsewhere.
Is that not all of us are earning $200,000 a year to come up with claptrap like this like some of the morons at the RIAA are. Most normal people earn modest salaries, don't have expense accounts, and do have mortgages, bills, loans and children to look after and other interests to pursue.
I consider CD's to be a fairly expensive item - certainly not expensive enough to prevent me from buying the albums I really want but expensive enough to stop me from just spotting a CD by an artist i've heard of and buying it outright unless it is reduced / in the sales.
The greed of corporations seems to know no bounds and I just can't believe that things have been allowed to progress so far into a situation where consumer rights are just being trampled into tiny little pieces and no-one does anything about it.
Here here! Nothing but respect for him. A truely great guy!
Reading that article made such a refreshing change compared to the Microsoft 'propaganda' stories we usually get linked to. eWeek gave Linux vendors the chance to answer and explain all of the figures which seemed to side with Microsoft - and invairiably once dissected, the usual Microsoft massaging of figures clearly comes to light.
One great example was this:
Interestingly, Microsoft's Hilf has a personal Red Hat workstation in his office that he uses on a daily basis. He selected a random week in October to provide a snapshot of the updates made to his Red Hat Enterprise Linux workstation over that period. He found that, between Oct. 6, 2005, and Oct. 11, 2005, his workstation was updated 66 times.
"I chose those dates randomly," he said. "I use this system daily, so it was literally a snapshot of a given workweek. All this illustrates is that patching and updating are part of any 'living' software system. It is part of the nature of modern software: Things change, bugs happen, features get added, and software needs to get updated."
But Red Hat's Cox pointed out that the second update release for RHEL4 was issued Oct. 5, resulting in a very large number of updated packages over the period of a day or two, "which is what Hilf saw. We only issued two Update releases for RHEL4 in 2005, so he was quite unlucky in his choice of a random snapshot," he said, tongue in cheek.
Unlucky indeed. Nice to see some unbiased reporting and not just verbatim duplication of Microsoft comments and 'press releases' for a change.
Crikey. I'd never heard any more after the firing of the journalist.. didn't realise that all of this had been uncovered.
Thanks for the link!
Reminds me of this story I read about a month or two back - Mercedes took three shiny new S-Class's with this automatic braking system to a facility to demonstrate how well it worked for a german auto magazine. So they filled this facility with fake fog, sent a test driver down into the fog and lo and behold he ploughed into the back of one of the other S classes.
It was a bit of an embarassment and for some reason the test driver ended up losing his job despite it being nothing to do with him. Still shows that sometimes these pieces of technology do have a way to go before they work properly.
Sorry but have I missed something? If you'd watched the Steve Jobs keynote (don't remeber which though so I must apologise) he basically said exactly what is being 'reported' in these blogs.. iTunes watches what music you buy the most, and then lists things it feels might interest you! SO WHAT!
For gods sake - its not like its some kind of secret! And its not like Apple are the only company doing this? Amazon has done it for as long as I remeber?
And who cares, honestly? Embarassed that your work collegues or friends will see all the Hentai videos and Weird Al albums you've been buying?!
The article covers everything from the hideous installer and it's lack of partitioning/formatting capabilities to the utter wasteland that is the Windows desktop, devoid of useful applications and everything in between.
Someone has already mentioned the fact that you CAN partition and format drives in the installer, so thats wrong for a start.
And what is Microsoft supposed to do about applications? If it bundled Microsoft Office in with Windows, the anti-competition people would be on their backs the day it hit the shelves. They have no choice but keep the OS relatively free of apps - too many partners they don't want to piss off and the anti-competition people just waiting with multi-million dollar fines! Look at the shit they are having to go through here in Europe with Windows Media Player for example!
Personally i'd rather they were concentrating on putting some of the features people actually WANT back into Vista, like WinFS, rather than twatting around recording nice guitar riffs for system events! I still feel that Microsoft will never learn to get its priorities right.
Google and Apple are going to put their heads together.
Apple are also rumoured to be doing some sort of PVR - and Apple, as we've seen in recent months, don't seem to be so afraid of working with other companies. With Mac World due on the 9th of Jan, it'd be quite a big / heavy duty step to announce something around then and those two companies working together would be quite something... surely they are desperate to give Microsoft a good thrashing between them!
Just random speculation - i'm probably quite, quite wrong!
Sweet. Time to hook myself up with an Apple if Microsoft are physically unable to trade in this country ;)
Thats exactly the kind of people I was referring to in my parent post. Thanks for clearing that up!
Like the asshole up the road who is a builder by trade but seriously injured himself and is unable to work so lives off the government. So if he's so seriously injured, why is he regularly undertaking building work on his own house, carrying heavy loads of bricks and tools around? Whats to stop him getting retrained and getting into a desk job..?
That'll save you a billion or two in your nation's insurance costs if it ever gets started.
Believe me, i'm all for seeing my car insurance costs fall and seeing those who own / operate cars illegally with no tax/mot/insurance get nailed. My problem is that even when the system like this is put in place and when the overheads for the car insurance companies start to fall, we still won't see a reduction in premiums. We'll still be paying the same amount.
And in the mean time, road tax and fuel duty will go up even more to help maintain this system.
I know i'm enormously sceptical but I things just keep going up and up - theres never any good news any more, never any rebates, etc - just corporate greed and government stupidity. As soon as we start to see some money in our pockets and a reduction in crime then i'll be keen on the system.
Fed up with Labour. I already voted against them in this election, but seeing as my constituency is full of out of work 'scrounging from the government' layabouts who don't get off their fat asses because the government gives them armfulls of cash every month, it was hardly likely that the vote would go any other way.
What pisses me off the most is the usual 'this is being done to try and catch terrorists' - ffs, we've had ONE single Al Qaeda related attack happen in this country so far and THAT was from people that the government never suspected as they were British Muslims. How exactly would license plate tracking catch legal residents of the united kingdom if they so desire to blow themselves up in a public area?!
Why can't they spend the countless billions this service is going to cost to implment where we bloody well WANT and NEED it - in the schools, in the hospitals, on pensions for our old people.
Fucking fuckers. It really makes me mad. The priorities are fucked - this terrorism 'excuse' for taking away our rights is just really starting to piss me off.
Depends. I priced up the Dell equivilant and found that it was just as cheap to build my own. Ironically I ended up using in the build a 19" Dell TFT which I was able to pick up cheap from a reseller with 3 years on site warranty still included.
As both myself and my girlfriend work for a university covered under a certain Microsoft licensing scheme, we're entitled to install the universities copy of Windows XP & Office 2003 on our home PC's so that saved a few $$$'s on the cost of a store bought PC.
In fact, just pricing up a similar spec PC from Dell's website comes in at around £250 MORE than the cost of the machine I built up! I'll stick with my homebrew thanks.
I had to download the full software suite from HP recently for one of our Laserjet 1200 printers because of some HP Toolbox utility that would actually enable me to run a 'clean' command on the printer - evidently the regular drivers don't allow you to do that.
The full download was not only a different, out of date set of drivers, but was also a full blown java based WEB SERVER install that bound itself to a local port and then fired up a web browser to access it. I'm at a loss to explain why this has to be done in such a way, and why that functionality can't just be built into the driver suite for Windows. The Java app was a huge download and it made the machine run like crap!
Another award winning piece of software design there!
It is a self-assembling peptide nanofiber cake.. with pro-survival factor frosting!
I don't know why it is that vendors insist on preloading so much crap on their machines when they ship them but it drives me crazy.
:P
We buy Toshiba laptops at my place of work and whenever we get a new one in, its preloaded with the Toshiba default build.. and its pretty awful! When you first fire it up you have to run the gauntlet of about 5-10 pop up windows from apps all letting you know that they are there and running. Cast a glance down to the system tray and there are about 11 or 12 memory resident apps all sitting there taking their cut of the memory and CPU time - one was a Toshiba app that basically takes over the Microsoft power management suite with a far more complex and convoluted piece of software!
I don't understand it personally. Windows might grind the gears of plenty of people but these days its quite a sleek, easy to us OS - why must they insist on bundling all this crap on the machine which must surely confuse users, and give them so much more overhead in places that they don't even need it! Not to mention the quite obvious performance impact on the machine.
I still prefer to make my own PC's - most recent build was for my girlfriend - a really nice Biostar IDEQ barebones box based on an AMD Sempron/NForce3 250 combo! It goes like a rocket, and there is no clutter and crapola on it! Other than Windows
So what if its not available to me? I can still champion the cause. It is inevitable that they will be available here eventually.
Its nothing to do with a cult mentality - I don't even own an Apple machine and the only iPod I own is a Shuffle. I just feel that its a good product and a good model, therefore it gets my support and maybe one day my business.
Let me just get out my handy-dandy little red pen, and use it to illustrate a few points which you seem to have otherwise overlooked.
I think the most important one is this - we all know that bittorrent is out there and that whatever solution that the movie & television studios and their affiliates come up with will never give us the freedom / choice that we currently have. But right now its a LEGAL WAY OF DOING THINGS, and maybe you should accept that there will never be a legal system that just gives you every TV show, ever aired, whenever you want it.
You're a fool - Apple are at least making the effort to get something off the ground that could potentially bloom.. yeah, right now its a bit lousy that its only in low res and you can only play it on your iPod but its step one - and only complete ignorami like yourself would completely overlook the bigger picture in this case, and sing about the same old song about not being able to play it on your Linux PVR or being able to burn it to DVD.
This, like it or not IS the 21st century. Get over it.
Its an amazing coincidence.. the high pitch noises irritate and drive away teens, and low frequency resonating bass noises irritate and drive away old people too ;)
If its a missile defence system, surely the point is to SAVE lives, not take them? ;)
So.. this super hyped version of the next generation of Windows has gradually had all of its most attractive features stripped out of it just for the sake of getting it out of the door quickly. So this means that its going to be yet another interim OS, and the NEXT version of Windows is going to be the one that you really want.
We're just going to be left with a shadow of the OS we were all hoping for - and purely so that Microsoft can say that they have an OS that looks just as pretty as MacOS X. Other than that, there have been absolutely no stand out or interesting additions that I can see.
note that its author is a doctor
;)
lol.. so is my girlfriend but whilst she might know lots about her chosen field, I don't think she knows an awful lot about the ins and outs of RAM timings and AGP apertures