Which will be hacked to allow unlimited playtime in... 3...2...1...
(Excuse me for a second while I climb on my anti-palladium soapbox... there.)
And when it does get hacked, the studios will be crying for Palladium more than ever. I realize the current protection is being offered by Microsoft, but would it be too much to ask for this to NOT be hacked? Isn't this finally what everyone has been asking for, to be able to pay for entertainment on demand legitimately?
Yes, I realize it's still in a protected format, but this is NOT DIVX (the late Circuit City format, not the codec). Divx represented the potential for DVDs to be replaced with movies that were ALWAYS pay-per-view locked and could never be licenced for unlimited personal use playback. Let's face it, the studios UNDERSTAND that not everyone owns a computer and they would NEVER stop selling DVDs. Supporting this format is NOT a threat to DVD, and respecting their rights by NOT hacking the format is a mature attitude to have, and it gives them less of a reason to force a "secure computing platform" down our throats.
"Holy flammable gas Batman, did they just say methane on Slashdot?" "Yes they did Robin, you know what that means." "Links to goatse! Oh the horror!" "Yes, and we haven't much time to lose. To the Batmobile!"
Waaaay back when Tivo was first introduced on the market, a friend and I were talking about the fact that it had a subscription fee. My take on this was...
I wouldn't mind anonymous statistics being collected about my viewing habits. If the company running the service didn't require any form of registration other than maybe some basic demographic info like my age, income, gender and geographic region. Once a company has my name/address/credit card number/phone number, etc, I don't want them collecting ANY information about what I watch or what kind of products I'm interested in, sorry. Since the Tivo was subscription-based, it didn't meet my criteria in this department.
An intelligent time-shifting capable set-top box COULD record commercials based upon your interests and play them during the "commercial break" of a show instead of the original non-targeted ads. This is something I'd actually like. I build my own computers, I don't need to see any Dell commercials. I am not female, I don't need to see commercials for home pregnacy tests. I don't drink beer. Etc, etc. There's a new show coming out that's like Junkyard Wars? Albertsons (it's a grocery store here in the south) is having a sale on Snapple? Those are commercials I want to see.
Even the Tivo's concept of "thumbs up/thumbs down" could be used on commercials... If it's a product or service I'm interested in, I can let the box know that's the type of commercials I'd rather see more of. While I know most people would rather have NO commercials, I consider ones that are at least relevent to what I'm interested in to be a reasonable compromise, especially if it gets me a TV timeshifting box subscription-free. And hey, it even benefits the advertisers since I'd be more likely to buy things that interest me... Everybody wins.
But I'm curious (and not running XP)... Is there any truth to the rumor that Windows XP with a hacked/unauthorized serial number won't allow you to install the service pack?
(From the post on the linked page) Currently Linux will only work well with Nvidia cards - apparently ATI's OpenGL Linux and Mac drivers don't support texture compression. Hopefully this is something they will soon fix.
ATI fix bugs in their drivers??? I'm running OLDER drivers as it is because the latest Radeon 8500 drivers are unstable, overlay doesn't work with my Divx movies and VB hangs while compiling (okay, building an.EXE, I know, I know). I e-mailed ATI's tech support and they sent me back a form letter. If this is the way ATI treats their main market (Windows users), I feel REALLY bad for Linux users. Isn't The Weather Channel developing an open source Radeon 8500 driver?
I believe CBR is not the best way to encode music. For instance, why would you encode a 2-second silence gap with 192kbps if you don't have actually any discernible sound on it ?
I wholeheartedly agree. Unfortunately, my poor MP3 CD player shits itself on VBR files, so it's out of the question.
Anyone who has their computer linked to a less than cheesy hifi knew this already...
Funny you should bring this up... It's amazing how much more quality you can squeeze out of your EXISTING MP3 collection just by getting some better audio hardware. Before anyone starts taking my advice too far and goes to their local "overpriced audiophile extreme" store, here's how you can get GOOD sound INEXPENSIVELY:
* Get a good sound card. As a general rule, onboard audio stinks. The Audigy is popular - I personally don't like the way it sounds, so YMMV. Try the
Turtle Beach Santa Cruz.
* Good speakers can be expensive. Good headphones aren't. Next time RadioShack has the Pro 35's on sale, pick up a pair for $19.
* Try a few different MP3 players - quality varies. If you're a Windows user, don't waste your time with players that are basically just DirectShow front-ends, they'll ALL sound the same.
I've found 192kbit CBR MP3 to be more than adequate for my music copy-ahem- archival needs. The resulting quality is largely the result of using a good encoder. I can't read German and the fish is of little help, so I don't know if they used a good encoder like LAME or Fraunhofer, or some garbage like Xing when doing their MP3 comparison.
MP3 player quality also seems to vary considerably. The best player I've heard on Win32 is one called Nad (seriously, that's the name). From what I understand, the author sold the rights to some company and that was the end of it... Winamp's quality has varied over the years as the decoding engine was changed several times over the course of its life. Sonique seems to be pretty good as well. While Fraunhofer's encoder is very good, the free playback-only codec bundled with Media Player seems to have lackluster high frequency response, giving the audio a less "defined" sound.
Despite all my rambling, my point is simply that it is hard to do an objective comparison of MP3 to other formats since there are so many variations of the encoding and decoding software. I've done my own listening comparisons with OGG and found it to be comparable to MP3, but since my portable MP3 CD player only plays MP3s and redbook audio CDs, my use of OGG has been quite limited.
While I applaud the open source community for producing such a high-quality competitor to MP3 as OGG, the real issue of getting people to switch still lies in hardware support and easy-to-use, CDDB compatible OGG CD-rip utilities.
My parents bought me one of those Radio Shack project kits that already had all the components with little springs attached to them. You'd simply hook up wires between things and let the magic smoke out. I'm sure if I had the paitence back in the day, I'd probably have actually made the AM radio transmitter and blinkenlights things like the manual said.
It's a good thing I didn't have the Internet back then, a potato cannon or a tesla coil would have been a lot more dangerous than just a little bit of Radio Shack brand magic smoke.
The Xbox is really just the pilot program for palladium. Once all the security holes are patched, Microsoft will then use what they've learned (after patenting it, of course) to create the most difficult-to-hack DRM PC standard.
Let's just hope sellout hackers aren't as good as not-for-profit hackers.
This is the same hideous gut wrenching feeling I get watching a car crash test commercial on TV.
At least destroying a brand new automobile helps provide information that may save lives. This is just a sad waste of computer equipment. Karma be damned, I just think the people running this "experiment" need to grow up.
We have a finite amount of resources on this planet and this just sends a message to the entire Internet that they're willing to webcast their own wastefulness.
Someone help me with this. If I have an icon that's 128x128, how can it contain millions of colors when it only has 16384 pixels? Does it have color cycling or something?
It's a palette thing. Think about graph paper and a box of crayons. More crayons to choose from means you can make a more colorful picture.
Want a better example? Run a 3D game that supports both 16 and 32 bit color at 640x480 (307,200 pixels) and compare 16 bit vs 32 bit color. Notice the difference now?
I always think of it as the dialog from Spaceballs.
"Driver, prepare to move out." "What are you preparing for? You're always preparing, just go!" "Just go. Sir, shouldn't you sit down?" (Said just as darth helmet falls into the seat)
So "prepare for shutdown" makes sense... Now having a "Stop" button exclusively for shutdown would just be a waste of screen real estate. Not that it matters anyway, a properly configured PC will start the shutdown process when you press the ATX power button on your case.:)
This reminds me of back on AOL around '96 when everyone used stupid VB programs to turn everything they wrote into 1337-speak automatically. Most of the programs could also reverse or AlT CaP as well. Yuck. Bad memories.
Unless, of course they do it in such a way that a great majority are happy with it.
Get ready to mod me up, because I've got a great example of how Palladium can and will be introduced.;)
Palladium-like products already exist outside of the PC. Digital cable box/satellite systems, Xboxs (Xboxen?), DVD players and digital cell phones are all products that employ DRM in one shape or another.
If you want a peak into the future and your DeLorean's flux capacitor is on the fritz, just head on over to your local Sprint store and take a look at the new phones with the color displays. They're so neat looking, aren't they? They're also rights restricted out the ass. Want to use them with a different cellular provider? Sorry, service provider holds the service program code and you can't have it. Want to download a game? Sure, if the content provider allows it - most have to be played online, with an associated fee of course. Go on over to Sprint's site and check out the fine print for the phones. Now imagine that was a PC. That's pretty much Palladium in a nutshell.
You may have heard the analogy about the frog on the hotplate... You turn the heat up slowly and he frog will cook without ever realizing what happened. The industry and Microsoft will use the same approach - only it's called slipstreaming. The next Windows version will come with it, possibly even with Microsoft being honest about it being opt-in. Hardware vendors will start incorperating Palladium support into their products, again, without much fanfare. But as time presses on, just as you could get by without DirectX (If you didn't play games, you didn't need it... Most video drivers REQUIRE it now.), Internet Explorer (It's amazing how many applications die when IE is missing) and for the fact of the matter most MS technologies in general, something comes along and makes you need it. Whether it be needing the latest version of Windows to run the same software you're using at work, or to run the latest hot game, or some new hardware that no longer supports the older version of Windows, eventually you end up having to upgrade. It certainly doesn't appear that Microsoft and the rest of the industry has any intention of this happening overnight. They clearly want it to happen slow so it's a gradule process. Just like Windows XP ended the era of DOS compatibility and no one seemed to notice, had product activation and people still bought it, Palladium could be in our computing future with no more thought than a collective shrug.
How many people are actively boycotting the MPAA/RIAA because of this shit?
Taken a step further, how many people actually feel good starting up the ol' P2P client and ripping the media companies a new one?
I'm not advocating piracy, what I'm merely pointing out is that maybe the increase in piracy is due to the fact that all this digital rights stuff is making people feel a little bit better about not paying for music and movies. Instead of decreasing piracy, all they (the media companies) might really cause is MORE rampant piracy and the rise of prices of "open" hardware on eBay.
Devs used to care about a good storyline, exciting game play etc. Now it's all about who gets the best framerates, what game has the prettiest textures. I don't care what the game looks like anymore, thats all window dressing.
Should I post this as anon to avoid burning karma? Nah.
The reason developers now make games that are all about framerates and pretty textures? It sells. The gamers that open their wallets and fork over the green decide where game development is heading.
Maybe it was cheaper to develop a game back in the hayday of "adventure games that actually had a plot", maybe all these "give me a good plot not fancy graphics" whiners aren't putting their money where their mouth is, maybe there's just a much better return on FPS/eyecandy games. Whatever the reason, every once in awhile you still see a game comes out that tries to revitalize the adventure game genre and it experiences lackluster sales.
Usually the most common excuse I've seen is that the new adventure game doesn't live up to the legacy of the older games everyone remembers from when the genre was still alive and kicking. The reason is there was a lot more competion to make a good game back then... Now, adventure games are almost a lost art and it will probably take a few tries before some competion builds back up. It means people will have to fork over some money for some lousy games in order to convince more developers that adventure is still a viable genre.
Course, open source changes the rules a bit. Seems though that most open source games are limited to emulators, software versions of board/card games and Tux racer. If the open source community picks up the adventure game genre, it would sure be an interesting thing to see.
From 10-28-92 until it was taken offline sometime in '97. I still have the entire system backed up to CD-Rs and my friends that remember the system want me to put it back online with a telnet/virtual serial port software setup.
The system was a lot of fun in its time, but bringing back old software wouldn't bring back the experience. People called local BBSes because they were the "open source" of the online world. I contributed my time and hardware so people wouldn't have to spend money on an expensive online service to particpate in message boards or download files. I was also a LOT younger at the time and working on the BBS was a great excuse to avoid homework.
At any rate, the first time I got on the actual Internet (through AOL, no less), I was in denial about the whole death of the BBS thing. I actually took the time to create a web page that had a virtual tour of my BBS. For the sake of preserving history, MOST of the site now exists on snotwad.com. Someday I'll get around to restoring the actual backups and put a more complete "virtual museum" of my BBS online.
It was called Plug-N-Power (I think, it was a long time ago). They even had software for the Deskmate GUI that their Tandy computers came with that could plug into this big "master remote" that could program things to turn on and off at certain times.
I'm not sure if RadioShack even still sells it, but it's not really a new idea.
Do I care that ATI optimized the drivers for Quake? No - and I didn't buy it to play Quake.
I bought the card because I wanted a card with good 2D image quality (something lacking in most nvidia-based cards, as I read in most reviews), good TV-out with all the tweaks (a friend of mine has an Asus Geforce3 and its TV-out looks like a joke compared to ATI's), and decent 3D performence is just the icing on the cake. Since I spend more time looking at web pages, text and Divx movies than I do "gaming", this was my card of choice.
Do I regret the decision? Nope. The card performs respectably in every game I do play and even looks good in 3D Mark 2001... Would a hardcore gamer buy this card? I think not - but again, I'm not a hardcore gamer...
Back in '92 (I believe - not sure), most new air conditioners started being manufactured with CFC-free refrigerants. The "new" coolant requires different tolerances in the compressor and evaporator systems. What this means (as anyone who has tried to retrofit an older car air conditioner with CFC-free coolant can tell you) is that the new coolant doesn't work as well in older systems. This has actually created a black market for the older coolant (freon, as I recall) from countries where it is still manufactured.
If this research is correct, the coolant switchover and strict rules regarding the recovery of waste freon have probably played a part in the improvement. Even if this is an inconvience for auto A/C mechanics, it's a small price to pay to preserve our valuable ecosystem.
So if you're driving an older car and your recharged air conditioner doesn't seem as cold as you remember it, you're right. But you're helping save the enviorment.
Slashdot Mirror
Which will be hacked to allow unlimited playtime in... 3...2...1...
(Excuse me for a second while I climb on my anti-palladium soapbox... there.)
And when it does get hacked, the studios will be crying for Palladium more than ever. I realize the current protection is being offered by Microsoft, but would it be too much to ask for this to NOT be hacked? Isn't this finally what everyone has been asking for, to be able to pay for entertainment on demand legitimately?
Yes, I realize it's still in a protected format, but this is NOT DIVX (the late Circuit City format, not the codec). Divx represented the potential for DVDs to be replaced with movies that were ALWAYS pay-per-view locked and could never be licenced for unlimited personal use playback. Let's face it, the studios UNDERSTAND that not everyone owns a computer and they would NEVER stop selling DVDs. Supporting this format is NOT a threat to DVD, and respecting their rights by NOT hacking the format is a mature attitude to have, and it gives them less of a reason to force a "secure computing platform" down our throats.
"Holy flammable gas Batman, did they just say methane on Slashdot?"
"Yes they did Robin, you know what that means."
"Links to goatse! Oh the horror!"
"Yes, and we haven't much time to lose. To the Batmobile!"
Waaaay back when Tivo was first introduced on the market, a friend and I were talking about the fact that it had a subscription fee. My take on this was...
I wouldn't mind anonymous statistics being collected about my viewing habits. If the company running the service didn't require any form of registration other than maybe some basic demographic info like my age, income, gender and geographic region. Once a company has my name/address/credit card number/phone number, etc, I don't want them collecting ANY information about what I watch or what kind of products I'm interested in, sorry. Since the Tivo was subscription-based, it didn't meet my criteria in this department.
An intelligent time-shifting capable set-top box COULD record commercials based upon your interests and play them during the "commercial break" of a show instead of the original non-targeted ads. This is something I'd actually like. I build my own computers, I don't need to see any Dell commercials. I am not female, I don't need to see commercials for home pregnacy tests. I don't drink beer. Etc, etc. There's a new show coming out that's like Junkyard Wars? Albertsons (it's a grocery store here in the south) is having a sale on Snapple? Those are commercials I want to see.
Even the Tivo's concept of "thumbs up/thumbs down" could be used on commercials... If it's a product or service I'm interested in, I can let the box know that's the type of commercials I'd rather see more of. While I know most people would rather have NO commercials, I consider ones that are at least relevent to what I'm interested in to be a reasonable compromise, especially if it gets me a TV timeshifting box subscription-free. And hey, it even benefits the advertisers since I'd be more likely to buy things that interest me... Everybody wins.
But I'm curious (and not running XP)... Is there any truth to the rumor that Windows XP with a hacked/unauthorized serial number won't allow you to install the service pack?
(From the post on the linked page)
.EXE, I know, I know). I e-mailed ATI's tech support and they sent me back a form letter. If this is the way ATI treats their main market (Windows users), I feel REALLY bad for Linux users. Isn't The Weather Channel developing an open source Radeon 8500 driver?
Currently Linux will only work well with Nvidia cards - apparently ATI's OpenGL Linux and Mac drivers don't support texture compression. Hopefully this is something they will soon fix.
ATI fix bugs in their drivers??? I'm running OLDER drivers as it is because the latest Radeon 8500 drivers are unstable, overlay doesn't work with my Divx movies and VB hangs while compiling (okay, building an
Does their homepage have a picture of a dead kitty's tombstone, drawn in MS-Paint?
If not, they're not officially dead yet.
I believe CBR is not the best way to encode music. For instance, why would you encode a 2-second silence gap with 192kbps if you don't have actually any discernible sound on it ?
I wholeheartedly agree. Unfortunately, my poor MP3 CD player shits itself on VBR files, so it's out of the question.
Funny you should bring this up... It's amazing how much more quality you can squeeze out of your EXISTING MP3 collection just by getting some better audio hardware. Before anyone starts taking my advice too far and goes to their local "overpriced audiophile extreme" store, here's how you can get GOOD sound INEXPENSIVELY:
I've found 192kbit CBR MP3 to be more than adequate for my music copy-ahem- archival needs. The resulting quality is largely the result of using a good encoder. I can't read German and the fish is of little help, so I don't know if they used a good encoder like LAME or Fraunhofer, or some garbage like Xing when doing their MP3 comparison.
MP3 player quality also seems to vary considerably. The best player I've heard on Win32 is one called Nad (seriously, that's the name). From what I understand, the author sold the rights to some company and that was the end of it... Winamp's quality has varied over the years as the decoding engine was changed several times over the course of its life. Sonique seems to be pretty good as well. While Fraunhofer's encoder is very good, the free playback-only codec bundled with Media Player seems to have lackluster high frequency response, giving the audio a less "defined" sound.
Despite all my rambling, my point is simply that it is hard to do an objective comparison of MP3 to other formats since there are so many variations of the encoding and decoding software. I've done my own listening comparisons with OGG and found it to be comparable to MP3, but since my portable MP3 CD player only plays MP3s and redbook audio CDs, my use of OGG has been quite limited.
While I applaud the open source community for producing such a high-quality competitor to MP3 as OGG, the real issue of getting people to switch still lies in hardware support and easy-to-use, CDDB compatible OGG CD-rip utilities.
My parents bought me one of those Radio Shack project kits that already had all the components with little springs attached to them. You'd simply hook up wires between things and let the magic smoke out. I'm sure if I had the paitence back in the day, I'd probably have actually made the AM radio transmitter and blinkenlights things like the manual said.
It's a good thing I didn't have the Internet back then, a potato cannon or a tesla coil would have been a lot more dangerous than just a little bit of Radio Shack brand magic smoke.
The Xbox is really just the pilot program for palladium. Once all the security holes are patched, Microsoft will then use what they've learned (after patenting it, of course) to create the most difficult-to-hack DRM PC standard.
Let's just hope sellout hackers aren't as good as not-for-profit hackers.
This is the same hideous gut wrenching feeling I get watching a car crash test commercial on TV.
At least destroying a brand new automobile helps provide information that may save lives. This is just a sad waste of computer equipment. Karma be damned, I just think the people running this "experiment" need to grow up.
We have a finite amount of resources on this planet and this just sends a message to the entire Internet that they're willing to webcast their own wastefulness.
Someone help me with this. If I have an icon that's 128x128, how can it contain millions of colors when it only has 16384 pixels? Does it have color cycling or something?
It's a palette thing. Think about graph paper and a box of crayons. More crayons to choose from means you can make a more colorful picture.
Want a better example? Run a 3D game that supports both 16 and 32 bit color at 640x480 (307,200 pixels) and compare 16 bit vs 32 bit color. Notice the difference now?
I always think of it as the dialog from Spaceballs.
:)
"Driver, prepare to move out."
"What are you preparing for? You're always preparing, just go!"
"Just go. Sir, shouldn't you sit down?" (Said just as darth helmet falls into the seat)
So "prepare for shutdown" makes sense... Now having a "Stop" button exclusively for shutdown would just be a waste of screen real estate. Not that it matters anyway, a properly configured PC will start the shutdown process when you press the ATX power button on your case.
This reminds me of back on AOL around '96 when everyone used stupid VB programs to turn everything they wrote into 1337-speak automatically. Most of the programs could also reverse or AlT CaP as well. Yuck. Bad memories.
Unless, of course they do it in such a way that a great majority are happy with it.
;)
Get ready to mod me up, because I've got a great example of how Palladium can and will be introduced.
Palladium-like products already exist outside of the PC. Digital cable box/satellite systems, Xboxs (Xboxen?), DVD players and digital cell phones are all products that employ DRM in one shape or another.
If you want a peak into the future and your DeLorean's flux capacitor is on the fritz, just head on over to your local Sprint store and take a look at the new phones with the color displays. They're so neat looking, aren't they? They're also rights restricted out the ass. Want to use them with a different cellular provider? Sorry, service provider holds the service program code and you can't have it. Want to download a game? Sure, if the content provider allows it - most have to be played online, with an associated fee of course. Go on over to Sprint's site and check out the fine print for the phones. Now imagine that was a PC. That's pretty much Palladium in a nutshell.
You may have heard the analogy about the frog on the hotplate... You turn the heat up slowly and he frog will cook without ever realizing what happened. The industry and Microsoft will use the same approach - only it's called slipstreaming. The next Windows version will come with it, possibly even with Microsoft being honest about it being opt-in. Hardware vendors will start incorperating Palladium support into their products, again, without much fanfare. But as time presses on, just as you could get by without DirectX (If you didn't play games, you didn't need it... Most video drivers REQUIRE it now.), Internet Explorer (It's amazing how many applications die when IE is missing) and for the fact of the matter most MS technologies in general, something comes along and makes you need it. Whether it be needing the latest version of Windows to run the same software you're using at work, or to run the latest hot game, or some new hardware that no longer supports the older version of Windows, eventually you end up having to upgrade. It certainly doesn't appear that Microsoft and the rest of the industry has any intention of this happening overnight. They clearly want it to happen slow so it's a gradule process. Just like Windows XP ended the era of DOS compatibility and no one seemed to notice, had product activation and people still bought it, Palladium could be in our computing future with no more thought than a collective shrug.
It's already begun! http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item =2051153825
How many people are actively boycotting the MPAA/RIAA because of this shit?
Taken a step further, how many people actually feel good starting up the ol' P2P client and ripping the media companies a new one?
I'm not advocating piracy, what I'm merely pointing out is that maybe the increase in piracy is due to the fact that all this digital rights stuff is making people feel a little bit better about not paying for music and movies. Instead of decreasing piracy, all they (the media companies) might really cause is MORE rampant piracy and the rise of prices of "open" hardware on eBay.
After reading the headline, I pictured the guys from Armed and Dangerous sitting at a computer trying to figure out how to set up a firewall.
Devs used to care about a good storyline, exciting game play etc. Now it's all about who gets the best framerates, what game has the prettiest textures. I don't care what the game looks like anymore, thats all window dressing.
Should I post this as anon to avoid burning karma? Nah.
The reason developers now make games that are all about framerates and pretty textures? It sells. The gamers that open their wallets and fork over the green decide where game development is heading.
Maybe it was cheaper to develop a game back in the hayday of "adventure games that actually had a plot", maybe all these "give me a good plot not fancy graphics" whiners aren't putting their money where their mouth is, maybe there's just a much better return on FPS/eyecandy games. Whatever the reason, every once in awhile you still see a game comes out that tries to revitalize the adventure game genre and it experiences lackluster sales.
Usually the most common excuse I've seen is that the new adventure game doesn't live up to the legacy of the older games everyone remembers from when the genre was still alive and kicking. The reason is there was a lot more competion to make a good game back then... Now, adventure games are almost a lost art and it will probably take a few tries before some competion builds back up. It means people will have to fork over some money for some lousy games in order to convince more developers that adventure is still a viable genre.
Course, open source changes the rules a bit. Seems though that most open source games are limited to emulators, software versions of board/card games and Tux racer. If the open source community picks up the adventure game genre, it would sure be an interesting thing to see.
The music was good
The bandwidth not so great
Napster will be missed
I got my cable modem too late
From 10-28-92 until it was taken offline sometime in '97. I still have the entire system backed up to CD-Rs and my friends that remember the system want me to put it back online with a telnet/virtual serial port software setup.
The system was a lot of fun in its time, but bringing back old software wouldn't bring back the experience. People called local BBSes because they were the "open source" of the online world. I contributed my time and hardware so people wouldn't have to spend money on an expensive online service to particpate in message boards or download files. I was also a LOT younger at the time and working on the BBS was a great excuse to avoid homework.
At any rate, the first time I got on the actual Internet (through AOL, no less), I was in denial about the whole death of the BBS thing. I actually took the time to create a web page that had a virtual tour of my BBS. For the sake of preserving history, MOST of the site now exists on snotwad.com. Someday I'll get around to restoring the actual backups and put a more complete "virtual museum" of my BBS online.
It was called Plug-N-Power (I think, it was a long time ago). They even had software for the Deskmate GUI that their Tandy computers came with that could plug into this big "master remote" that could program things to turn on and off at certain times.
I'm not sure if RadioShack even still sells it, but it's not really a new idea.
Do I care that ATI optimized the drivers for Quake? No - and I didn't buy it to play Quake.
I bought the card because I wanted a card with good 2D image quality (something lacking in most nvidia-based cards, as I read in most reviews), good TV-out with all the tweaks (a friend of mine has an Asus Geforce3 and its TV-out looks like a joke compared to ATI's), and decent 3D performence is just the icing on the cake. Since I spend more time looking at web pages, text and Divx movies than I do "gaming", this was my card of choice.
Do I regret the decision? Nope. The card performs respectably in every game I do play and even looks good in 3D Mark 2001... Would a hardcore gamer buy this card? I think not - but again, I'm not a hardcore gamer...
Back in '92 (I believe - not sure), most new air conditioners started being manufactured with CFC-free refrigerants. The "new" coolant requires different tolerances in the compressor and evaporator systems. What this means (as anyone who has tried to retrofit an older car air conditioner with CFC-free coolant can tell you) is that the new coolant doesn't work as well in older systems. This has actually created a black market for the older coolant (freon, as I recall) from countries where it is still manufactured.
If this research is correct, the coolant switchover and strict rules regarding the recovery of waste freon have probably played a part in the improvement. Even if this is an inconvience for auto A/C mechanics, it's a small price to pay to preserve our valuable ecosystem.
So if you're driving an older car and your recharged air conditioner doesn't seem as cold as you remember it, you're right. But you're helping save the enviorment.