I don't think they'll recover more than 10k USD worth in material sold on e-bay. IOW that was the hole point of my comment. The cost of the operation compared to the effects obtained is huge. Even if you include the "we enforce the law" media effect, this operation is still a major failure.
I have a solution to your free games problem, however it won't be free as in speech, just free as in beer. Make all game clients opened and freely available. Keep all servers closed, charge monthly for online gaming. This way you get the necessary funds for maintenance and bandwith and could perhaps pay for 1-2 sysadmins, a couple devs, couple artists. You don't really have to be big to make games.
The problem with making a free game is the time you need to spend in order to conceive it. I don't know about you, but my small developer salary and very low employement security cannot garanty the steady and somewhat fast developement of a good free game. Add that you cannot compensate this effect by sarying: "we'll put our millions and millions of OSS devs on it", simply because 2 heads isn't necessarily better than 1 when programming / designing. So IMHO you really need to make some cash somewhere in order to justify developement, otherwise you just end up like Loki. By making some cash, you can also devote all your time on making games, which couldn't be true if you were working for some company and developing the game as a side project.
These are the usual questions / answers used by the companies in order to trigger such operations. The message sent by the media is indeed that they are enforcing the law. I do think that the law should be enforced, but if enforcing means spending more money than what you truly recover, it means some lobbyist is lying. BTW this is not the beginning, these busts occur every 2-3 years with very little long term effects.
Their rights? Where in hell did you get that it is the software writers' which are being infringed upon? You are dead wrong, most copyrights on games are owned by corporation, NOT software writers. WE own nothing down the line. I AM a software writer and my rights have not been enforced by this ridiculous operation, thank you.
My salary is being protected you say? BULLSHIT it is. Gaming companies are so accustomed to lose a fraction of sales to warez that you can bet they usually plan their finances with this in mind. You think that my salary will suddenly go up because of operation like this?
Consider the costs of pulling an international operation like this compared to the amount of funds gaming companies will be able to recover if and only if the warez market really slows down. Do you still think it was a good and/or a necessary effort? I don't. I think the operation is a total failure if only 3 people get arrested, and a couple of comps and burners get seized.
I see some tax dollars getting wasted on ridiculous crusades.
Do you seriously believe that using a bridge chip will hamper performance? Can you give any real reason for this?
No, you are right i can't. But it's still one more point of failure in a system and gives me a small impression that it won't work as well as a native solution. Like i said, early comparisons or theories about this or that aren't quite significative until we actually see both cards run in the next gen bus.
External bridge chip is a GOOD thing for NVidia.
I'm not questionning this. It may be a good marketing or business decision for them. But, you can't really weight production and demand arguments when you are talking about the king of the hill in graphic cards. King of the Hill title == Best card available on the market whatever the price. It's too early to give this title away.
The card performances sound promising, however comparing a next gen card with it's competitors out-dated models isn't too significative. I've always prefered Nvidia cards for their respectable performances and their annoyances-free install under linux, but they announced not so long ago that their first PCI Express cards would use a PCI Express to AGP bridge and this is where i think Nvidia is going to shoot themselves in the foot and come tumbling down that hill.
ATI OTHO will be using a native PCI Express solution for their RV423 chipset, the pci express version of the RV420. Until we see ATI's X800 card and also both companies' PCI Express solutions perform, no one owns that hill. An early fanatical reaction towards any graphic card at this point is a foolish reaction and an uneducated one IMHO.
In Canada downloading music from the net is legal. Owning music on your hard drive for which you do not have the original CD is also legal.
What is illegal is uploading (sharing) songs which you do not have distribution permission from the copyright holder to the general public. For example, if i open a private FTP site and i prove that only my friends have access to it, then it falls neatly under 'fair use' clause. More concretly if i go to my friends house and rip all my music on his computer, this falls under 'fair use' also.
The Canadian copyright act is also a reason why the CRIA gets a levy on blank medias and hard drives and can't sue file swappers as efficiently as the RIAA. Hence the 29(!). lol.
Don't take this as a legal advice though i could be wrong, or it could cost you a lot to defend this position.;-)
Forgive my ignorance, but i'd like to get some things clear here. If you sell on the iTunes store, why do you need another distributor at all ? For selling CDs perhaps, but is he getting a cut on a song that is exclusively sold on iTunes ? Are the songs exclusively sold on iTunes ?
If your "distributor" as you call him is a known label, then there's a good chance the parent post was right on the money. I don't see how exactly you can dismiss this by claiming that your distributor only gets a small cut. I'm pretty sure lots of people have lots of question about the content of your contract with your "distributor" and "iTunes", but i don't think you'll do us the honor of explaining in more details how is it that the RIAA doesn't get a cut off your sales because your "distributor" only gets a small cut. ( Makes no mofo... sense to me. )
So until then, i'll interpret your post as... not very informative.
P4 1.7Ghz with 2 year old NVidia graphics cards, so Quake and the likes are out of the question...
This is funny, very funny. You know i used to play the quake demo in college at lan parties with a P166 & Diamond Viper card ( minimal settings of course ). You are a very funny person;-). Why don't you tell everyone that you're tired of Quake and the likes. Simple, clean and most probably the bare truth. Otherwise, you can always try Tribes for linux, if making games work is your kinda thing. Also, make sure you had a good look at what WineX can offer you.
I think you have a lot to learn about politics young man. The government in a political system like ours is comparable to the lawyers of a company. In this case, the company is us, the public. I don't see exactly how you feel bullied, if you ask someone to represent you and vote laws for you. Lobbying isn't an issue up here, our elections are not rigged and if we don't like the laws being passed, we start bitchin in massive numbers. Of course, i don't think you follow foreign politics very much and i don't think you know that there's a major union strike coming up in Quebec because of government law projects.
The levy they plan on taking is voted by us to compensate for any lost the artists might get from us copying their songs instead of buying their albums. It's like a voluntary tax, like our lottery, the cigaret tax and so many other things. What i don't get is how exactly are they going to measure those lost and translate this into a concrete tax ( amount ). This is also the weak point of their argumentation, there is no way they can estimate accurately how much they lose to copying. None or whatsoever and this can be exploited by the said record labels.
Which is why i think passing this legislation is going to be hard. Add to this that we already pay the artist tax on blank medias, which according to some illuminated fools out there isn't enough. Of course, anyone knows that in a capitalist system it's never enough.
Peter Jackson.. gimme a break.. the only problems with the LOTR movies is the director who did a very average job compared to the novels. The amount of cheese he added to get the attention of the lame public makes me sick. Did i mention if i hear that stupid romantic score again i'm gonna go berzerk right in the cinema? No. Good, cause i'm still unsure if i'm going to pay to see the last installement of the trilogy.
In fact, if he's any as good as many people seem to think he is, let me tell you that LOTR doesn't give him any justice or whatsoever. Sure I could go on about what I hated about the 2 movies i saw, but what would be the use anyways, most of you have already modded me down to Troll.
IMHO, any other director would have done as good as him. Get some new blood, see what others can do. Nothing Jackson made ( brain dead, army of.. ) impresses me. Quite frankly i dono wtf you people see in this director. He's quite a plane joe. ( A hyped plane joe even, that's worst )
Well i might be pulling a tad too much conspiracy theories out of my hat but this looks like it.;-)
1. Funded on a project to send a spacecraft to the poles to make sure there is ice. 2. Participating in an investigation to know if there's possibly some ice. 3. Contradicting all other studies, and therefor bring more incentive towards afore mentionned project. 4. Profit!!!
Well anyways, in the scientific world they usually never give funding only based on one investigation, so i guess we'll have to wait for another investigation to back this one up. Can you say SMART-1...
Beyond that, Campbell believes that the only way to settle the debate is to land a spacecraft. He is part of a team designing such a mission, called Polar Night.
I think this is called a conflict of interest mister. This study just lost a lot of credibility.
If you examine the 21st top500 list at http://www.top500.org/, you'll see that the first AMD cluster is #80 with a Rmax score of 825 GFlops, which isn't a contender to anything really. The first AthlonMP cluster is #84 with 794 GFlops. IOW, AMD isn't in the race.
AMD has the most price effective clusters bar none
Before anyone can advance anything like this we will need to see something bigger than what's on this list, which does not exists or is simply too slow to reach top50. We're talking big boys here, not children toys. I don't think an AMD cluster with the potential of reaching higher ranks than the ones on the list could go unseen. Unless you want to put some $ on the table, build one and prove what you're claiming, or simply provide us with some references, i don't see any sense in your claim.
Do a little research before you start flapping about the Mac guys
A little research!? Did you do yours ? I don't think so. Nice troll. (NB. I'm an AMD user myself, but i don't have senseless opinions like this.)
Why build a more expensive and slower cluster on the G5 when you can have it faster, cheaper, and far more scalable with Opteron Zealot-like (vendor) statement...;-)
I bought a new PowerBook when they came out, and had around 3 weeks of testing with both Jaguar & Panther, which i got last monday (dev version). I thought some feedback from a Windows to Linux to MacOS X switcher could interrest some of you folks. I haven't 'officially' switched to MacOS X yet for several reasons. Most of which are minor details concerning habits and my way of working, I'm mostly a Perl dev. The only good reason why i am not switching and won't probably switch in the future is an obvious lack of any kind of basic customization.
Most Mac users have a very strong argumentation in favor of their way of working and the gains they get from it, however should that be a reason to force this way of working on all users? This where i do not agree. This ain't a freakin Jihad! Although some of you obviously think it is, my expectations for anything claiming excellency are reliability, performance and flexibility. Flexibility isn't met if i can't change the behavior of my interface to my likings, no matter the advantages and disadvantages of my choices. Your way might be better, just like catholism might be better than islam, there are simply no good reasons to enforce it!
Some of the details: Keep in mind that i only have a few weeks of training ( ordinary everyday usage ) with Jaguar and even less with Panther. If you see something on my list that can be fixed ( easily or not ), please give me some feedback, i might switch the less annoyances i see. I'm not listing all, some will just generate flames;-), others are very very minor and not very annoying.
1. I would like to be able to configure the behavior of the 'X', '-' & '+' buttons of a window.
I can understand why some folks say the 'X' behavior is far more logical than the traditionnal behavior. Suppose you start a deamon. The program window pops up, you configure it and close the interface ( window ), not the program. That makes a lot of sense, however, how often do you think a dev like myself configures deamons? Almost never, therefor that behavior becomes useless and very annoying to me. Yeah, yeah now i have to change my habits to 'cmd'-Q, which is annoying and doesn't provide much more efficiency. For me it just becomes another '-'.
I define 'Maximizing' as taking the maximum amount of space a window can. The '+' is not a maximize button for it only maximizes to what the application think is the maximum. I find this simply illogical. Usually, you first resize a maximized window to what you'd want it to be, so the app remembers it and you finally have something that looks like a maximize. In my mind, this is doing too much for something that should require only one setting in system preferences. I don't like setting maximums on all my windows all the time, it's simply annoying as hell.
2. I would like to be able to resize any window from any border.
I don't like dragging before resizing or resizing and then dragging, it's painful and a waste. Yes i do want my windows placed carefully and strategically on my desktop, so i can read from several of them at the same time without touching any controls. With the resize border only in the lower right corner, this becomes extremelly annoying.
3. Moving things around.
Lots of ppl like the dock-style interface MacOS has. I do not hate it, it's just incredibly unconfigurable. You can only move it left, right & bottom and can't even "uncenter" the biatch! True some folks like zooming, genie and whatever fx you can code for it. But you know what ? The most important thing is missing, and that's flexibility. What if i don't want the trash in there, because my dock is tiny ? What if i want the clock on the dock ? What if i want the dock to take the maximum amount of horizontal space ? Etc... I'm not mentionning that weird app bar at the top, with which you can do just about nothing.
Some thoughts about why i would like the clock to be on the dock in the lower right corner. The lower right corner is sim
Could distribution companies make money at a few bucks a CD? I don't see why not.
I see why. Because they wouldn't be able to pay all the useless middle managers and bureaucrats they employ. We will have to face the real problem someday, and that problem is the employement of a large incompetent work force who brings nothing to society, but their over-zealous consumption. The cost of producing a single CD, might be low, but when you consider all the intermediate non-technical people who work for the industry, this cost gets somewhat bigger than what most people would think. Granted, the industry needs some kind of management, but, IMHO, currently this is the sector where abuses are made which cause relatively high prices. It's sad, really, but some folks will have to go back to school and update their skills. Or, more drastically replace them by more useful skills for the future markets.
He's talking family computer here, as in software for newbies who want to start producing in less than 10 minutes of learning curve. Emacs is a crazy suggestion imo! Might as well suggest Vi. Don't get me wrong i think emacs is a very complete production software, it's just not every day joe's tool ( I admit i might be wrong). Think KDE, kmail, konqueror, etc.. those are simpler to use and offer very similar, if not better, functionalities than Windows for free.
Now suppose that,... the computer which monitors the core of the plant runs on Microsoft software and that somehow a crash happens, worm, virus, vulnerability, you name it we have it, and that you live in a 2-5 miles radius from the power plant. Trust me, you WILL be injured.;-)
You're wrong. ATI offers drivers exactly like NVidia does.
I believe you are wrong. ATI drivers use the freakin DRI of X, not the Nvidia drivers. ( Correct me if i'm wrong. ) Last time i tried to enable 3D hardware acceleration on Linux with an ATI card, it took 4 fuckin days to crawl all the gentoo forums and guess what ? It never worked properly and finally when i found out what the problem was, it seemed the ATI drivers were not supported with the lastest Xfree release. ( 4.3 att i believe. )
So you know what i did ? I said FUCK IT! Too bad for Enemy Territory! I'm not the kind of geek who is going to waste time playing with garbage to make it work, sorry ain't my type. Some things i just don't have the patience for...
I haven't tried to make them work again since then. I dono, they might work, although i heard the dev responsible for the linux drivers at ATI left the company a couple months ago. You can't just throw some Open garbage to the OSS community and then claim you support Linux. It just doesn't feel right at all.
More, in support of the parent message, i'm not buying a vid card for only 1 game, that's just incredibly stupid IMHO, and it's even more stupid of ATI thinking it will make any difference.
Oh and, to all, who gives a flyin fuck about half-life anways? Stop living in the past, the engine looks great,but the game feels like some old FPS where you only get your kicks from the cool lookin weaps and cool lookin graphics. If i can't ram it, bomb it or nuke it, i ain't interrested!
GET TRIBES VENGEANCE! ( Don't take the last few lines too seriously, i'm on a recruitement drive;-P )
I own a 30 gig one, and i had to scout my friends' collections to fill it to around 1/3 of it's capacity. IMHO the size of a collection doesn't really matter. It's the quality that is of the upmost importance. My collection is encoded strictly at 192kbps, some people will even go up to 256kbps, others do not even care. Whenever I backup (hum hum) some songs i always rip the entire album, some will only download ( or rip ) all the singles they like, others recklessly download everything they can get their hands on, hence the rather large size of their collection.
Personnaly i don't feel like i'm lacking lots of music, i have plenty, some 70+ albums. Is 30 gigs or 40 gigs overkill ? I don't know. Depends on your use. Would i want to upgrade to 40 gigs? Nope, not enough difference to throw another 500$. Will i upgrade to 80 gigs in 2-3 years. Most probably no. I prefer keeping my collection in a safe spot. The iPod is a player not a file server.
Some of my friends have so many songs on their iPods, they can't even remember what they have on it. I find that a bit.. wack!;-)
I was just looking at the 'who to boycott' list to see if i was helping or not. =) Thanks for the link, very useful indeed. If anyone else know some good progressive rock labels not on that list, please let me know. I'm pretty ashamed to see Elektra in there, specially since Dream Theater signed with those bastards!
Slashdot Mirror
I have a solution to your free games problem, however it won't be free as in speech, just free as in beer. Make all game clients opened and freely available. Keep all servers closed, charge monthly for online gaming. This way you get the necessary funds for maintenance and bandwith and could perhaps pay for 1-2 sysadmins, a couple devs, couple artists. You don't really have to be big to make games.
The problem with making a free game is the time you need to spend in order to conceive it. I don't know about you, but my small developer salary and very low employement security cannot garanty the steady and somewhat fast developement of a good free game. Add that you cannot compensate this effect by sarying: "we'll put our millions and millions of OSS devs on it", simply because 2 heads isn't necessarily better than 1 when programming / designing. So IMHO you really need to make some cash somewhere in order to justify developement, otherwise you just end up like Loki. By making some cash, you can also devote all your time on making games, which couldn't be true if you were working for some company and developing the game as a side project.
Their rights? Where in hell did you get that it is the software writers' which are being infringed upon? You are dead wrong, most copyrights on games are owned by corporation, NOT software writers. WE own nothing down the line. I AM a software writer and my rights have not been enforced by this ridiculous operation, thank you.
My salary is being protected you say? BULLSHIT it is. Gaming companies are so accustomed to lose a fraction of sales to warez that you can bet they usually plan their finances with this in mind. You think that my salary will suddenly go up because of operation like this?
In which world do you live in?
Consider the costs of pulling an international operation like this compared to the amount of funds gaming companies will be able to recover if and only if the warez market really slows down. Do you still think it was a good and/or a necessary effort? I don't. I think the operation is a total failure if only 3 people get arrested, and a couple of comps and burners get seized.
I see some tax dollars getting wasted on ridiculous crusades.
Do you seriously believe that using a bridge chip will hamper performance? Can you give any real reason for this?
No, you are right i can't. But it's still one more point of failure in a system and gives me a small impression that it won't work as well as a native solution. Like i said, early comparisons or theories about this or that aren't quite significative until we actually see both cards run in the next gen bus.
External bridge chip is a GOOD thing for NVidia.
I'm not questionning this. It may be a good marketing or business decision for them. But, you can't really weight production and demand arguments when you are talking about the king of the hill in graphic cards. King of the Hill title == Best card available on the market whatever the price. It's too early to give this title away.
The card performances sound promising, however comparing a next gen card with it's competitors out-dated models isn't too significative. I've always prefered Nvidia cards for their respectable performances and their annoyances-free install under linux, but they announced not so long ago that their first PCI Express cards would use a PCI Express to AGP bridge and this is where i think Nvidia is going to shoot themselves in the foot and come tumbling down that hill.
ATI OTHO will be using a native PCI Express solution for their RV423 chipset, the pci express version of the RV420. Until we see ATI's X800 card and also both companies' PCI Express solutions perform, no one owns that hill. An early fanatical reaction towards any graphic card at this point is a foolish reaction and an uneducated one IMHO.
Some dumb Utah senator proposed this kind of 'law' enforcement last year and this was also covered here
Here's the BBC blurb
In Canada downloading music from the net is legal. Owning music on your hard drive for which you do not have the original CD is also legal.
;-)
What is illegal is uploading (sharing) songs which you do not have distribution permission from the copyright holder to the general public. For example, if i open a private FTP site and i prove that only my friends have access to it, then it falls neatly under 'fair use' clause. More concretly if i go to my friends house and rip all my music on his computer, this falls under 'fair use' also.
The Canadian copyright act is also a reason why the CRIA gets a levy on blank medias and hard drives and can't sue file swappers as efficiently as the RIAA. Hence the 29(!). lol.
Don't take this as a legal advice though i could be wrong, or it could cost you a lot to defend this position.
That pretty much answers everything i needed to get a clear picture. So the right reply from Dwarfgoat should have been:
;-)
"I sell song on the iTunes store and my distributor isn't a member of the RIAA and therefor i do not indirectly pay those bastards."
Thanks
Forgive my ignorance, but i'd like to get some things clear here. If you sell on the iTunes store, why do you need another distributor at all ? For selling CDs perhaps, but is he getting a cut on a song that is exclusively sold on iTunes ? Are the songs exclusively sold on iTunes ?
... not very informative.
If your "distributor" as you call him is a known label, then there's a good chance the parent post was right on the money. I don't see how exactly you can dismiss this by claiming that your distributor only gets a small cut. I'm pretty sure lots of people have lots of question about the content of your contract with your "distributor" and "iTunes", but i don't think you'll do us the honor of explaining in more details how is it that the RIAA doesn't get a cut off your sales because your "distributor" only gets a small cut. ( Makes no mofo... sense to me. )
So until then, i'll interpret your post as
Mars Needs Women ;-)
P4 1.7Ghz with 2 year old NVidia graphics cards, so Quake and the likes are out of the question...
;-). Why don't you tell everyone that you're tired of Quake and the likes. Simple, clean and most probably the bare truth. Otherwise, you can always try Tribes for linux, if making games work is your kinda thing. Also, make sure you had a good look at what WineX can offer you.
This is funny, very funny. You know i used to play the quake demo in college at lan parties with a P166 & Diamond Viper card ( minimal settings of course ). You are a very funny person
lol ;-)
I think you have a lot to learn about politics young man. The government in a political system like ours is comparable to the lawyers of a company. In this case, the company is us, the public. I don't see exactly how you feel bullied, if you ask someone to represent you and vote laws for you. Lobbying isn't an issue up here, our elections are not rigged and if we don't like the laws being passed, we start bitchin in massive numbers. Of course, i don't think you follow foreign politics very much and i don't think you know that there's a major union strike coming up in Quebec because of government law projects.
The levy they plan on taking is voted by us to compensate for any lost the artists might get from us copying their songs instead of buying their albums. It's like a voluntary tax, like our lottery, the cigaret tax and so many other things. What i don't get is how exactly are they going to measure those lost and translate this into a concrete tax ( amount ). This is also the weak point of their argumentation, there is no way they can estimate accurately how much they lose to copying. None or whatsoever and this can be exploited by the said record labels.
Which is why i think passing this legislation is going to be hard. Add to this that we already pay the artist tax on blank medias, which according to some illuminated fools out there isn't enough. Of course, anyone knows that in a capitalist system it's never enough.
Peter Jackson.. gimme a break.. the only problems with the LOTR movies is the director who did a very average job compared to the novels. The amount of cheese he added to get the attention of the lame public makes me sick. Did i mention if i hear that stupid romantic score again i'm gonna go berzerk right in the cinema? No. Good, cause i'm still unsure if i'm going to pay to see the last installement of the trilogy.
.. ) impresses me. Quite frankly i dono wtf you people see in this director. He's quite a plane joe. ( A hyped plane joe even, that's worst )
In fact, if he's any as good as many people seem to think he is, let me tell you that LOTR doesn't give him any justice or whatsoever. Sure I could go on about what I hated about the 2 movies i saw, but what would be the use anyways, most of you have already modded me down to Troll.
IMHO, any other director would have done as good as him. Get some new blood, see what others can do. Nothing Jackson made ( brain dead, army of
Well i might be pulling a tad too much conspiracy theories out of my hat but this looks like it. ;-)
...
1. Funded on a project to send a spacecraft to the poles to make sure there is ice.
2. Participating in an investigation to know if there's possibly some ice.
3. Contradicting all other studies, and therefor bring more incentive towards afore mentionned project.
4. Profit!!!
Well anyways, in the scientific world they usually never give funding only based on one investigation, so i guess we'll have to wait for another investigation to back this one up. Can you say SMART-1
You are right.
Beyond that, Campbell believes that the only way to settle the debate is to land a spacecraft. He is part of a team designing such a mission, called Polar Night.
I think this is called a conflict of interest mister. This study just lost a lot of credibility.
If you examine the 21st top500 list at http://www.top500.org/, you'll see that the first AMD cluster is #80 with a Rmax score of 825 GFlops, which isn't a contender to anything really. The first AthlonMP cluster is #84 with 794 GFlops. IOW, AMD isn't in the race.
;-)
AMD has the most price effective clusters bar none
Before anyone can advance anything like this we will need to see something bigger than what's on this list, which does not exists or is simply too slow to reach top50. We're talking big boys here, not children toys. I don't think an AMD cluster with the potential of reaching higher ranks than the ones on the list could go unseen. Unless you want to put some $ on the table, build one and prove what you're claiming, or simply provide us with some references, i don't see any sense in your claim.
Do a little research before you start flapping about the Mac guys
A little research!? Did you do yours ? I don't think so. Nice troll.
(NB. I'm an AMD user myself, but i don't have senseless opinions like this.)
Why build a more expensive and slower cluster on the G5 when you can have it faster, cheaper, and far more scalable with Opteron
Zealot-like (vendor) statement...
I bought a new PowerBook when they came out, and had around 3 weeks of testing with both Jaguar & Panther, which i got last monday (dev version). I thought some feedback from a Windows to Linux to MacOS X switcher could interrest some of you folks. I haven't 'officially' switched to MacOS X yet for several reasons. Most of which are minor details concerning habits and my way of working, I'm mostly a Perl dev. The only good reason why i am not switching and won't probably switch in the future is an obvious lack of any kind of basic customization.
;-), others are very very minor and not very annoying.
Most Mac users have a very strong argumentation in favor of their way of working and the gains they get from it, however should that be a reason to force this way of working on all users? This where i do not agree. This ain't a freakin Jihad! Although some of you obviously think it is, my expectations for anything claiming excellency are reliability, performance and flexibility. Flexibility isn't met if i can't change the behavior of my interface to my likings, no matter the advantages and disadvantages of my choices. Your way might be better, just like catholism might be better than islam, there are simply no good reasons to enforce it!
Some of the details: Keep in mind that i only have a few weeks of training ( ordinary everyday usage ) with Jaguar and even less with Panther. If you see something on my list that can be fixed ( easily or not ), please give me some feedback, i might switch the less annoyances i see. I'm not listing all, some will just generate flames
1. I would like to be able to configure the behavior of the 'X', '-' & '+' buttons of a window.
I can understand why some folks say the 'X' behavior is far more logical than the traditionnal behavior. Suppose you start a deamon. The program window pops up, you configure it and close the interface ( window ), not the program. That makes a lot of sense, however, how often do you think a dev like myself configures deamons? Almost never, therefor that behavior becomes useless and very annoying to me. Yeah, yeah now i have to change my habits to 'cmd'-Q, which is annoying and doesn't provide much more efficiency. For me it just becomes another '-'.
I define 'Maximizing' as taking the maximum amount of space a window can. The '+' is not a maximize button for it only maximizes to what the application think is the maximum. I find this simply illogical. Usually, you first resize a maximized window to what you'd want it to be, so the app remembers it and you finally have something that looks like a maximize. In my mind, this is doing too much for something that should require only one setting in system preferences. I don't like setting maximums on all my windows all the time, it's simply annoying as hell.
2. I would like to be able to resize any window from any border.
I don't like dragging before resizing or resizing and then dragging, it's painful and a waste. Yes i do want my windows placed carefully and strategically on my desktop, so i can read from several of them at the same time without touching any controls. With the resize border only in the lower right corner, this becomes extremelly annoying.
3. Moving things around.
Lots of ppl like the dock-style interface MacOS has. I do not hate it, it's just incredibly unconfigurable. You can only move it left, right & bottom and can't even "uncenter" the biatch! True some folks like zooming, genie and whatever fx you can code for it. But you know what ? The most important thing is missing, and that's flexibility. What if i don't want the trash in there, because my dock is tiny ? What if i want the clock on the dock ? What if i want the dock to take the maximum amount of horizontal space ? Etc... I'm not mentionning that weird app bar at the top, with which you can do just about nothing.
Some thoughts about why i would like the clock to be on the dock in the lower right corner. The lower right corner is sim
Could distribution companies make money at a few bucks a CD? I don't see why not.
I see why. Because they wouldn't be able to pay all the useless middle managers and bureaucrats they employ. We will have to face the real problem someday, and that problem is the employement of a large incompetent work force who brings nothing to society, but their over-zealous consumption. The cost of producing a single CD, might be low, but when you consider all the intermediate non-technical people who work for the industry, this cost gets somewhat bigger than what most people would think. Granted, the industry needs some kind of management, but, IMHO, currently this is the sector where abuses are made which cause relatively high prices. It's sad, really, but some folks will have to go back to school and update their skills. Or, more drastically replace them by more useful skills for the future markets.
He's talking family computer here, as in software for newbies who want to start producing in less than 10 minutes of learning curve. Emacs is a crazy suggestion imo! Might as well suggest Vi. Don't get me wrong i think emacs is a very complete production software, it's just not every day joe's tool ( I admit i might be wrong). Think KDE, kmail, konqueror, etc.. those are simpler to use and offer very similar, if not better, functionalities than Windows for free.
Okay you are typically thinking only of the direct effects which are you, using your machine. But consider the following /. coverage:
... the computer which monitors the core of the plant runs on Microsoft software and that somehow a crash happens, worm, virus, vulnerability, you name it we have it, and that you live in a 2-5 miles radius from the power plant. Trust me, you WILL be injured. ;-)
Microsoft Worms Crash Ohio Nuke Plant, MD Trains
Now suppose that,
You're wrong. ATI offers drivers exactly like NVidia does.
;-P )
I believe you are wrong. ATI drivers use the freakin DRI of X, not the Nvidia drivers. ( Correct me if i'm wrong. ) Last time i tried to enable 3D hardware acceleration on Linux with an ATI card, it took 4 fuckin days to crawl all the gentoo forums and guess what ? It never worked properly and finally when i found out what the problem was, it seemed the ATI drivers were not supported with the lastest Xfree release. ( 4.3 att i believe. )
So you know what i did ? I said FUCK IT! Too bad for Enemy Territory! I'm not the kind of geek who is going to waste time playing with garbage to make it work, sorry ain't my type. Some things i just don't have the patience for...
I haven't tried to make them work again since then. I dono, they might work, although i heard the dev responsible for the linux drivers at ATI left the company a couple months ago. You can't just throw some Open garbage to the OSS community and then claim you support Linux. It just doesn't feel right at all.
More, in support of the parent message, i'm not buying a vid card for only 1 game, that's just incredibly stupid IMHO, and it's even more stupid of ATI thinking it will make any difference.
Oh and, to all, who gives a flyin fuck about half-life anways? Stop living in the past, the engine looks great,but the game feels like some old FPS where you only get your kicks from the cool lookin weaps and cool lookin graphics. If i can't ram it, bomb it or nuke it, i ain't interrested!
GET TRIBES VENGEANCE!
( Don't take the last few lines too seriously, i'm on a recruitement drive
-- Wyre.
I own a 30 gig one, and i had to scout my friends' collections to fill it to around 1/3 of it's capacity. IMHO the size of a collection doesn't really matter. It's the quality that is of the upmost importance. My collection is encoded strictly at 192kbps, some people will even go up to 256kbps, others do not even care. Whenever I backup (hum hum) some songs i always rip the entire album, some will only download ( or rip ) all the singles they like, others recklessly download everything they can get their hands on, hence the rather large size of their collection.
.. wack! ;-)
Personnaly i don't feel like i'm lacking lots of music, i have plenty, some 70+ albums. Is 30 gigs or 40 gigs overkill ? I don't know. Depends on your use. Would i want to upgrade to 40 gigs? Nope, not enough difference to throw another 500$. Will i upgrade to 80 gigs in 2-3 years. Most probably no. I prefer keeping my collection in a safe spot. The iPod is a player not a file server.
Some of my friends have so many songs on their iPods, they can't even remember what they have on it. I find that a bit
Smithers, release the AIBO dolls.
Magna Carta, Delirium are not on the list! Woohoo! I'm happy!
I was just looking at the 'who to boycott' list to see if i was helping or not. =) Thanks for the link, very useful indeed. If anyone else know some good progressive rock labels not on that list, please let me know. I'm pretty ashamed to see Elektra in there, specially since Dream Theater signed with those bastards!