Re:Will anyone gain anything from this? Not Linux
on
The End is Nigh for XP
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· Score: 1
You can work around that, and do a "force quit" on the software update program. That works, and gets it out of the way and is good when something like quicktime got updated and wants to reboot your whole system... Also, if you kill the warning message like this it won't come back to annoy you again like the windows one does. Similarly if your switching between multiple users on the system, it won't irritate any of the others.
On the other hand, OSX doesnt force you to update, you can delay the updates until your ready to reboot. Also, after installing some of the more major updates the system can sometimes end up a little screwy until it's rebooted.
Re:Will anyone gain anything from this? Not Linux
on
The End is Nigh for XP
·
· Score: 1
Also, if your logged in as an unprivileged user who cannot reboot, it will still ask you... Sometimes both buttons will be ghosted, so you can't get rid of the dialog!
See, a proper multiuser OS would be able to figure out that you can't reboot, and therefore not bug you with the dialogs.
There is already a standard - Jabber... The only major IM provider to support it is Google tho... However, there is no reason that other vendors couldn't write jabber support into their backend servers, so they could interoperate with other jabber servers while keeping the client and connection between it and server proprietary. I long for the day when i can have a single IM address, and intercommunicate with every other IM user in the same way using the same address and same client.
That may be your personal choice, but many other people would choose to have absolutely nothing to do with MS... Unfortunately, due to proprietary formats and protocols etc, it's often hard or impossible to exercise that choice. This is how they restrict people's freedom of choice, by locking people in to proprietary formats rather than using open standards and allowing people to choose.
I still have a transmeta based laptop... It would be good fun to reprogram it, or even just work out how to compile code to run directly on the core without the emulation layer.
Some people dont have, or want, computers... It will be even more hassle for them to get the updates just to watch a shitty movie, and will completely ruin their evening.
DRM is not for preventing piracy. DRM can never prevent piracy, sufficiently knowledgeable people will always be able to crack any DRM scheme. It's not like normal encryption where the key is unknown, your player needs to have the key in order to play the media, so it's simply a matter of extracting the key from whatever obfuscation scheme is being used to hide it, rather than having to crack the encryption itself.
DRM is to prevent fair use, the people who buy legitimate media and exercise their fair use rights to make copies to play in their car, copies for the kids to ruin, rip to ipods etc, don't have the necessary knowledge to extract the keys so they will be forced to buy multiple copies instead of exercising their fair use rights, thus making the media companies more money.
Serious cracking groups will go on cracking every copy protection scheme thrown at them. And the people who obtain pirate copies will continue to do so, and they will benefit from having the freedom to use their pirated copies anywhere. If you prevent piracy (and this is never gonna happen) most of these people will simply do without rather than start paying, many people simply cannot afford to pay full price.
Which also means that, sooner or later people will be forced to upgrade other components if they want to continue playing media... I have an old P2 laptop that can still play current DVDs... How long before all the non revoked HD-DVD players require vista, a 64bit machine and all kinds of other shit.
As has been said before... DRM is not about stopping serious copying groups... The warez scene will still rip this media and distribute it online, and dodgy street corner vendors will always have copies for sale. These people simply wouldn't watch these movies if they couldnt get free copies.
DRM is about preventing legitimate users (who are willing to pay) from doing things like format shifting. The media companies want those people who buy movies anyway, to buy additional copies to play on their ipods, portable players etc, rather than converting their existing media.
If I buy a CD, I can produce a copy for the car, i can rip it to my ipod, i can rip it onto my laptop. This is all covered by fair use in some countries. The RIAA/MPAA wants to take away our fair use rights so wring more money out of people...
If they openly admitted the purpose of DRM was to remove people's fair use rights and get more money out of legitimate buyers, there would be public outcry and they'd be taken to court. So instead, they try to claim it's to prevent organised piracy.
The constant cracking of their protection schemes just proves that it doesn't stop piracy _AT ALL_.. If preventing piracy was the true reason for DRM, they would have abandoned DRM years ago, as it's costing them a lot of money to develop while doing nothing to stop piracy.
The font should always be the same physical size regardless of resolution... The computer is able to work out, by querying the screen (although some internal laptop panels don't seem to support it) the physical size of the sceeen, and thus compute the correct DPI. Remember that font sizes are specified in "points" rather than pixels. 72 points should always equal one inch. If this is not the case on your screen, then your DPI is set wrongly. All recent versions of X11 and OSX can correctly determine the DPI if your monitor supplies the necessary information. If it does not, then at least under X11 you can use the Displaysize directive and specify the width/height of the screen in milimeters:
DisplaySize 285 204 Like so... Aparrently the ability to work out screen DPI was supposed to be a much hyped feature of vista too, but it seems to just have the old fixed options of 75 and 96 DPI, regardless of what the monitor actually supports. Also, a lot of windows apps break quite badly if you change the DPI.
Back in the days when software had to be right first time, it was often a lot better... The "release unfinished shit, fix it up later" mentality doesn't work. Not only do initial customers end up with something horrendously buggy and often unuseable, but quite often the original publishers can't be bothered to actually produce any of the patches they promised so the program just remains horrendously buggy with no hope of ever getting fixed. Besides, rushing to be first to market doesn't do you much good when all your customers think your products are unfinished half assed efforts. You need to be very big and powerful to get away with that.
If a country (China) makes it the law to "roll over" on bloggers and IM users, then google have no choice but to comply with the law or cease doing business in China. The government of China is not a pushover like the EU or US, where large companies can string things along, negotiate their own (non)punishment and get away with paying trivial fines several years late when inflation has made them all but worthless. If you don't do what the Chinese government want, they will come down on your hard. So google have a choice:
Not do business in china at all (and thus lose potential revenue which wont please their shareholders, and bring no information to the people in china) Or Do business under the law (and generate some revenue, and bring some benefits to the people of china). Or Do business outside of the law, and get the chinese operations closed down by the government, all assets siezed and staff thrown in jail, and all non chinese services firewalled in china anyway.
The Chinese people haven't lost out by google rolling over, the alternatives for the Chinese people are smaller chinese companies who are just as willing to roll over for the government, or nothing at all.
You may not like the chinese government, but if you want to do business in their country you have to play by their rules.
Also, before you go ranting on about how bad china is, look around your house and see just how many products you use day in day out which were made in china... The companies making those products had to comply with chinese laws too. If your going to complain about google for this, you really should stop using _ANY_ product made in china.
That's because their games division is actually having to compete. You can rest assured it would behave actually like the rest of the company if they had sufficient grip over the console market.
Which is why we need interoperability between networks... I don't use gtalk, i run my own jabber server, but i have lots of friends who use gtalk that i communicate with regularly.
Then good, one less competing incompatible proprietary IM server out there... The sooner IM is standardised, and works cross network like email the better.
Is there a vorbis decoder that doesn't require an FPU yet? I will quite happily take any openly published format, and avoid any proprietary one. I would quite happily accept audio files in vorbis format, and convert them if necessary to play on another device.
It's usually better all round to take the hit and go cold turkey... It may be hard, but it doesnt stay hard for all that long out of necessity, compared to a slow gradual rehab.
While i do object to microsoft's use of a proprietary format even for DRM free music... I don't object to Apple's, since AAC is a standard format, the only non standard component Apple used was the DRM, without that AAC is simply a newer and improved version of MP3. If your player doesnt support it, there's nothing to stop you converting the file, although you will suffer a slight drop in quality due to transcoding and MP3 being an inferior format. Alternatively, you can wait for more players to support AAC, or buy an ipod which already does.
Out of curiosity i just tried again: I went to add remove windows components, and found that windows media player, outlook express, internet explorer and windows messenger were already unchecked. So i went to look in the program files directory, and guess what... ALL of these programs were still installed, and sitting right there in program files. Look at this screenshot - http://www.ev4.org/stuff/shit.png
If you know a better way to remove it, do tell, although it's bad enough that the default installer lies to you anyway.
It also reminds me of when MS threatened to pull out of south korea because of all the piracy... They would never actually do this, some legit sales are still better than none... But Korea couldn't afford not to back down because of how much of their infrastructure is dependant upon MS (their proprietary ssl-type system for instance)
Them pulling out would actually benefit everyone but them. If they were to pull out, and even if they were to come back later, they would generate a lot of distrust among corporate customers. Companies are stupid enough already to buy from a single source, but were that single source to demonstrate just how stupid it is to not have a backup plan, by cutting off the only supply, companies may finally take notice.
Also, the EU would simply operate like any other country where MS doesnt do business, every user would run a warez'd copy. And gradually, companies wanting to be "legit" would have no choice but to use competing software, so you'd see a huge marketshare increase for linux, osx and solaris etc.
By pulling out, MS would massively hurt consumer confidence, and lose a LOT of money... They may also face being sued by their own shareholders.
Yes, sony really should open up their video hardware to the linux system, and provide accelerated opengl through it, thus making it more like a PC. It's not going to have much impact on games sales, just like linux on PC's has very little impact on games sales... But it will make the linux side of things generally more useful, and let people run some of the open sourced games like quake on a big HDTV.
Otherwise, sooner or later a modchip will come out which opens up full system access, all 7 SPEs plus the video hardware, and then people will create a superior unhindered linux installation.
Sometimes even internal traffic costs the ISP too... If you have to rent the physical lines from the telco, they may very well charge you for bandwidth usage on them.
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You can work around that, and do a "force quit" on the software update program. That works, and gets it out of the way and is good when something like quicktime got updated and wants to reboot your whole system...
Also, if you kill the warning message like this it won't come back to annoy you again like the windows one does. Similarly if your switching between multiple users on the system, it won't irritate any of the others.
On the other hand, OSX doesnt force you to update, you can delay the updates until your ready to reboot. Also, after installing some of the more major updates the system can sometimes end up a little screwy until it's rebooted.
Also, if your logged in as an unprivileged user who cannot reboot, it will still ask you...
Sometimes both buttons will be ghosted, so you can't get rid of the dialog!
See, a proper multiuser OS would be able to figure out that you can't reboot, and therefore not bug you with the dialogs.
There is already a standard - Jabber... The only major IM provider to support it is Google tho...
However, there is no reason that other vendors couldn't write jabber support into their backend servers, so they could interoperate with other jabber servers while keeping the client and connection between it and server proprietary.
I long for the day when i can have a single IM address, and intercommunicate with every other IM user in the same way using the same address and same client.
That may be your personal choice, but many other people would choose to have absolutely nothing to do with MS...
Unfortunately, due to proprietary formats and protocols etc, it's often hard or impossible to exercise that choice. This is how they restrict people's freedom of choice, by locking people in to proprietary formats rather than using open standards and allowing people to choose.
I still have a transmeta based laptop...
It would be good fun to reprogram it, or even just work out how to compile code to run directly on the core without the emulation layer.
Some people dont have, or want, computers... It will be even more hassle for them to get the updates just to watch a shitty movie, and will completely ruin their evening.
DRM is not for preventing piracy.
DRM can never prevent piracy, sufficiently knowledgeable people will always be able to crack any DRM scheme. It's not like normal encryption where the key is unknown, your player needs to have the key in order to play the media, so it's simply a matter of extracting the key from whatever obfuscation scheme is being used to hide it, rather than having to crack the encryption itself.
DRM is to prevent fair use, the people who buy legitimate media and exercise their fair use rights to make copies to play in their car, copies for the kids to ruin, rip to ipods etc, don't have the necessary knowledge to extract the keys so they will be forced to buy multiple copies instead of exercising their fair use rights, thus making the media companies more money.
Serious cracking groups will go on cracking every copy protection scheme thrown at them. And the people who obtain pirate copies will continue to do so, and they will benefit from having the freedom to use their pirated copies anywhere.
If you prevent piracy (and this is never gonna happen) most of these people will simply do without rather than start paying, many people simply cannot afford to pay full price.
Which also means that, sooner or later people will be forced to upgrade other components if they want to continue playing media...
I have an old P2 laptop that can still play current DVDs... How long before all the non revoked HD-DVD players require vista, a 64bit machine and all kinds of other shit.
As has been said before...
DRM is not about stopping serious copying groups... The warez scene will still rip this media and distribute it online, and dodgy street corner vendors will always have copies for sale. These people simply wouldn't watch these movies if they couldnt get free copies.
DRM is about preventing legitimate users (who are willing to pay) from doing things like format shifting. The media companies want those people who buy movies anyway, to buy additional copies to play on their ipods, portable players etc, rather than converting their existing media.
If I buy a CD, I can produce a copy for the car, i can rip it to my ipod, i can rip it onto my laptop. This is all covered by fair use in some countries. The RIAA/MPAA wants to take away our fair use rights so wring more money out of people...
If they openly admitted the purpose of DRM was to remove people's fair use rights and get more money out of legitimate buyers, there would be public outcry and they'd be taken to court. So instead, they try to claim it's to prevent organised piracy.
The constant cracking of their protection schemes just proves that it doesn't stop piracy _AT ALL_.. If preventing piracy was the true reason for DRM, they would have abandoned DRM years ago, as it's costing them a lot of money to develop while doing nothing to stop piracy.
The font should always be the same physical size regardless of resolution...
The computer is able to work out, by querying the screen (although some internal laptop panels don't seem to support it) the physical size of the sceeen, and thus compute the correct DPI.
Remember that font sizes are specified in "points" rather than pixels. 72 points should always equal one inch. If this is not the case on your screen, then your DPI is set wrongly.
All recent versions of X11 and OSX can correctly determine the DPI if your monitor supplies the necessary information. If it does not, then at least under X11 you can use the Displaysize directive and specify the width/height of the screen in milimeters:
DisplaySize 285 204
Like so...
Aparrently the ability to work out screen DPI was supposed to be a much hyped feature of vista too, but it seems to just have the old fixed options of 75 and 96 DPI, regardless of what the monitor actually supports.
Also, a lot of windows apps break quite badly if you change the DPI.
Back in the days when software had to be right first time, it was often a lot better...
The "release unfinished shit, fix it up later" mentality doesn't work. Not only do initial customers end up with something horrendously buggy and often unuseable, but quite often the original publishers can't be bothered to actually produce any of the patches they promised so the program just remains horrendously buggy with no hope of ever getting fixed.
Besides, rushing to be first to market doesn't do you much good when all your customers think your products are unfinished half assed efforts. You need to be very big and powerful to get away with that.
You mean the first microsoft product that didn't suck?
I'm sure that was a joke...
If a country (China) makes it the law to "roll over" on bloggers and IM users, then google have no choice but to comply with the law or cease doing business in China.
The government of China is not a pushover like the EU or US, where large companies can string things along, negotiate their own (non)punishment and get away with paying trivial fines several years late when inflation has made them all but worthless. If you don't do what the Chinese government want, they will come down on your hard.
So google have a choice:
Not do business in china at all (and thus lose potential revenue which wont please their shareholders, and bring no information to the people in china)
Or
Do business under the law (and generate some revenue, and bring some benefits to the people of china).
Or
Do business outside of the law, and get the chinese operations closed down by the government, all assets siezed and staff thrown in jail, and all non chinese services firewalled in china anyway.
The Chinese people haven't lost out by google rolling over, the alternatives for the Chinese people are smaller chinese companies who are just as willing to roll over for the government, or nothing at all.
You may not like the chinese government, but if you want to do business in their country you have to play by their rules.
Also, before you go ranting on about how bad china is, look around your house and see just how many products you use day in day out which were made in china... The companies making those products had to comply with chinese laws too. If your going to complain about google for this, you really should stop using _ANY_ product made in china.
That's because their games division is actually having to compete.
You can rest assured it would behave actually like the rest of the company if they had sufficient grip over the console market.
Which is why we need interoperability between networks...
I don't use gtalk, i run my own jabber server, but i have lots of friends who use gtalk that i communicate with regularly.
Then good, one less competing incompatible proprietary IM server out there...
The sooner IM is standardised, and works cross network like email the better.
Is there a vorbis decoder that doesn't require an FPU yet?
I will quite happily take any openly published format, and avoid any proprietary one. I would quite happily accept audio files in vorbis format, and convert them if necessary to play on another device.
Many people who were planning on buying new machines, waited for vista...
Similarly, people planning on buying new macs are waiting for Leopard.
It's usually better all round to take the hit and go cold turkey...
It may be hard, but it doesnt stay hard for all that long out of necessity, compared to a slow gradual rehab.
While i do object to microsoft's use of a proprietary format even for DRM free music... I don't object to Apple's, since AAC is a standard format, the only non standard component Apple used was the DRM, without that AAC is simply a newer and improved version of MP3.
If your player doesnt support it, there's nothing to stop you converting the file, although you will suffer a slight drop in quality due to transcoding and MP3 being an inferior format. Alternatively, you can wait for more players to support AAC, or buy an ipod which already does.
Out of curiosity i just tried again:
I went to add remove windows components, and found that windows media player, outlook express, internet explorer and windows messenger were already unchecked.
So i went to look in the program files directory, and guess what...
ALL of these programs were still installed, and sitting right there in program files.
Look at this screenshot - http://www.ev4.org/stuff/shit.png
If you know a better way to remove it, do tell, although it's bad enough that the default installer lies to you anyway.
It also reminds me of when MS threatened to pull out of south korea because of all the piracy...
They would never actually do this, some legit sales are still better than none... But Korea couldn't afford not to back down because of how much of their infrastructure is dependant upon MS (their proprietary ssl-type system for instance)
Them pulling out would actually benefit everyone but them.
If they were to pull out, and even if they were to come back later, they would generate a lot of distrust among corporate customers. Companies are stupid enough already to buy from a single source, but were that single source to demonstrate just how stupid it is to not have a backup plan, by cutting off the only supply, companies may finally take notice.
Also, the EU would simply operate like any other country where MS doesnt do business, every user would run a warez'd copy. And gradually, companies wanting to be "legit" would have no choice but to use competing software, so you'd see a huge marketshare increase for linux, osx and solaris etc.
By pulling out, MS would massively hurt consumer confidence, and lose a LOT of money... They may also face being sued by their own shareholders.
Yes, sony really should open up their video hardware to the linux system, and provide accelerated opengl through it, thus making it more like a PC.
It's not going to have much impact on games sales, just like linux on PC's has very little impact on games sales... But it will make the linux side of things generally more useful, and let people run some of the open sourced games like quake on a big HDTV.
Otherwise, sooner or later a modchip will come out which opens up full system access, all 7 SPEs plus the video hardware, and then people will create a superior unhindered linux installation.
Sometimes even internal traffic costs the ISP too...
If you have to rent the physical lines from the telco, they may very well charge you for bandwidth usage on them.