Reading the posts that have been made so far, and in previous articles you get some very common arguments being made such as:
RIAA (or whoever) are greedy bastards
they are stupid for even trying to copy protect
we've been able to do it for years with analogue - what's the big deal
I have a 'right' to evaluate music even if I don't own it
it's about the bottom line
they feel threatened
etc etc
Now don't get me wrong, I would love to pay nothing for my music and video/DVD etc. And I don't claim to be an angel when it comes to never ever pirating *ahem* backing up stuff, but let's get a reality check!
Someone out there has spent time and effort and probably their own money creating some product be it music, a movie, whatever.
If you make a copy, that is theft - pure and simple - you have taken something which is not yours. You can try and hide your actions by cloaking it in phrases like 'making a backup', or it 'they won't notice' or whatever, but there can be no argument that it is theft.
So the big deal is all about protecting what is the legal property of someone. To base a society on the principle that it is okay to steal from others is socially destructive.
All the other excuses (they feel threatened, bottom line etc) are not the main issue. The main issue is protection of what is legally theirs.
To feel that the big organisations of the ilk of the RIAA are making a big deal out of nothing, shows the attitude of entitlement that seems to foster amongst many people who whine about the actions of the RIAA.
Complain about high CD prices - that is fair enough. Complain about someone trying to protect what is theirs, and you sound like someone who has no connection with the values that every society is based on.
When will people grow up and stop trying to pretend that theft is okay - try taking responsibility for your actions. Why do you think people have this opinion of young computer people being pirates? Could it possible be because they hear comments from pirates trying to defend the undefensible?
With credit going to whoever wrote this originally.
Upgrade GirlFriend 1.0 to Wife 1.0
Last year a friend of mine upgraded from GirlFriend 1.0 to Wife 1.0 and found that it's a memory hog leaving very little system resources available for other applications.
He is only now noticing that Wife 1.0 is also spawning Child Processes which are further consuming valuable resources. No mention of this particular phenomenon was included in the product brochure or the documentation, though other users have informed him that this is to be expected due to the nature of the application. Not only that, Wife 1.0 installs itself such that it is always launched at system initialization, where it can monitor all other system activity. He's finding that some applications such as PokerNight 10.3, BeerBash 2.5, and PubNight 7.0 are no longer able to run in the system at all, crashing the system when selected (even though they always worked fine before). During installation, Wife 1.0 provides no option as to the installation of undesired Plug-ins such as MotherInLaw 55.8 and SisterInLaw Beta release. Also, system performance seems to diminish with each passing day.
Some features he'd like to see in the upcoming Wife 2.0:
A "Don't remind me again" button
Minimize button
An install shield feature that allows Wife 2.0 to be installed with the option to uninstall at any time without the loss of cache and other system resources.
An option to run the network driver in promiscuous mode which would allow the system's hardware probe feature to be much more useful.
I myself decided to avoid the headaches associated with Wife 1.0 by sticking with Girlfriend 2.0. Even here, however, I found many problems. Apparently you cannot install Girlfriend 2.0 on top of Girlfriend 1.0. You must uninstall Girlfriend 1.0 first. Other users say this is a long standing bug that I should have known about. Apparently the versions of Girlfriend have conflicts over shared use of the I/O port. You would think they would have fixed such a stupid bug by now. To make matters worse, the uninstall program for Girlfriend 1.0 doesn't work very well leaving undesirable traces of the application in the system.
Another thing -- all versions of Girlfriend continually popup little annoying messages about the advantages of upgrading to Wife 1.0
*** BUG WARNING ****
Wife 1.0 has an undocumented bug. If you try to install Mistress 1.1 before uninstalling Wife 1.0, Wife 1.0 will delete MSMoney files before doing the uninstall itself. Then Mistress 1.1 will refuse to install; claiming insufficient resources.
Just read the Linux for Gameboy post. What if the GB games file could be loaded on to your Palm Pilot and your Palm could be connected to your GB.
That way, if you were working a long shift on New Years Eve:), and you got bored with the games you have you could connect a modem to your palm pilot, download new freeware GB games, and then power up your GB and away you go...
Okay, I'm getting carried away this idea... back to work.
Without trying to sound like I'm jumping on the Open Source bandwagon, I was just thinking that Nintendo should release a game cartridge that would let you load a game from your PC and then release the game development toolkit as freeware.
Imagine the type of games that would be released if people who could write their own GB games... I'm sure people could come up with better games that what is currently on the market for GB.
who were complaining but because of the karma thing, it bumped my post up to the top.
And I was refering to IT people not the Army people. And you reinforced my point - I was saying that IT people shouldn't complain that they have to work on New Year's Eve since they have so many more opportunities and are much better paid than most people (such as the military).
I probably didn't make my point very clearly the first time.
First off, I had to work 15 hours on New Years Eve and then be on call for the Saturday, Sunday and Monday. I have also worked throughout the year getting systems Y2k ready which included many many weekends and after hours work. So I have done it just as 'tough' as anyone else.
I may not like the amount of compensation that I received for working New Year and I have grumbled a bit, but overall, I won't complain too much.
Why?
Because there will always be a trade off of good things and bad things for a job. How often do you hear people in your workplace gloat at how good the job market is, how easy it is too change jobs, how much money they get paid etc etc? IT people are living in a golden era at the moment where we are in demand. Go out to the real world and see how the rest of the population lives!
In Australia (where I live), only 20% of the population earns above $50k - be thankful that you have a job (probably one that puts you in well into that top 20% group), and not only just a job, but one which has opportunity, most likely pays reasonably well and one which has a future.
Focus on that, and not on the small inconveniences like working one night a year which will be forgotten soon anyway.
With the web applicance running Linux/Mozilla, I assume that eventually some smart cookie will write mods/skins/plug-ins for it.
Image the possibilities of being able to adjust/add/complement the features of appliances around your home!
Don't like the phone ring tone? Want to disguise your voice? Want to sound like you have company in the background? Want the phone to perform stress analysis on the caller (lie detector)? Add and change the features on your phone to your hearts content in the future with Open Source Applicances!
The very existence of Microsoft, its software, and its tactics continues to provide the drive and energy for Open Source gurus to continue churning out the superior software.
It also drives the many passionate fans of Open Source to keep promoting the virtues of Open Source.
Without the Evil Empire, the whole Open Source movement would be without a focal point and without direction!
All hail Microsoft for creating the environment where a whole new culture could develop and thrive!!
Someone should submit the RIAA and the DVDCA for the Darwin Awards for shooting themselves in the foot and inadvertently promoting the software and formats that they want to restrict!
ESR has made an accurate and consise summary of the issues involved with this case and it is something that should be spread far and wide for the general populace to read.
The more the mainstream media gets a copy of this article, the more they will understand the real issues.
What better story for the media than "big corporation spreads lies to smash little man" - the more that slant on the story comes across to the public, the less the DVDCA will want to throw their weight around.
So spread copies of that article to all media outlets far and wide!
I'm making this reason up off the top of my head so I don't guarantee its accuracy:)
Say the software is only expecting dates from 1980 onwards. Then the Y2k bug hits and gives it a date of 1900. This figure is way out of the ballpark.
If the software is well written, it should see that this is the case and raise an error and maybe stop working. However, this is not always the case and maybe the software performs no check for a valid date - it simply takes whatever is passed to it - in this case, the year 1900.
Now because the date is so wrong to what the software is expecting, it may cause the software to act unpredictably - maybe it might write data to the wrong memory area, cause a stack overflow etc.
Bingo - the whole system malfunctions.
So the Y2k problem is not so much that the system uses dates, but that it also might cause a system with minimal error checking to behave unpredictably.
Sorry to add a 'me-too' post, but I feel exactly the same way.
I was so sick of people saying the definitely nothing would go wrong and everything would be fine. Sure in the end that was the case - but that is with hindsight and after all the effort that was put in beforehand.
Looking at the posts about various systems still up and running, many of them seem to be of the sort: "Hey, Windows/Linux/whatever is still running on my desktop - bah, I knew that the Y2k bug was all hype."
Having worked in both the engineering and enterprise IT industries, I have worked with many many large systems, and you are right redtoade, many systems are old and archaic... and also essential in the day to day operation of the business.
Collegues who have worked with me in the past year on the Y2k problem anticipated that the transition would be a fizzer (ie quiet) after all the work that they had done, but no-one would be so naive to claim that Y2k was all hype.
These comments come from guys on the front line. Most people don't have this experience and extrapolate their limited experience to the rest of the world - ie. it was easy to check my system, the rest of the world will be fine.
As redtoade pointed out, many systems failed during testing and it is only through all the preventative efforts that there were no problems on the night.
How anyone could certain that nothing would go wrong is beyond me. Sure, one could be quietly confident (especially after all the effort that was put in), but to be absolutely certain?!? I still shake my head at the number of people who think that the Y2k bug was all scam and groundless hype.
All systems (Optus, Telstra, Vodafone etc) have been up all night. The only reason you wouldn't have been able to get through is congested cell servers - which is why somepeople could get through and some couldn't. It is also why if you are in a non-popular area, your mobile phone will still work but if you are in the CBD, it won't.
Fross, you have wonderfully summed up what I was trying to say!
the question that crops up most commonly, for a newbie, once the lot is installed, is not "How do I do xxx" but rather "Ok, so what do I do now?"
That is exactly it - there is no guiding doco for beginners. After the installation, the documents perhaps could then give examples of what the user could do next with links to the relevant HOW-TO docos.
This would at least then put the HOW-TO docos in context and provide a framework which would show the users where everything fits together.
My first real foray into Unix (ie install OS, help users etc) was with FreeBSD. I learnt about Unix in general as well as the specific FreeBSD issues as I went along.
Two years later I delved into Linux and have been using it for a year and a half.
Although Linux has an extensive set of documentation and I wasn't a novice to Unix by then, I still found FreeBSD easier to learn even though I was virtually new to Unix.
I found that the documentation for FreeBSD was organised very much like a manual which was great to start with as I could work through it as I installed a system. The topics were also general such as 'disks', 'backups', 'serial communications' and it was easy to quickly find what you needed.
The Linux docs are organised by a specific 'need' and while it is great when you are after a solution to a specific problem, it is too unstructured for a newbie.
A newbie needs to be lead through the topics in a general fashion so that they can gain an overall picture - Linux docs don't really give a good overview.
It's 5am so I'm not very coherent at the moment - so i apologise if my opinion isn't very clear. I can't really give specifics (at least I can't think of specifics at the moment), but that is my general feeling about what makes Linux that little bit more difficult for newbies.
No you're not the only one - I can't stand Jim Carrey in movies like Cable Guy, Ace Venturer, Dumb and Dumber - just stupid obvious humour.
Funny is obviously in the eye of the beholder, but the kind of humour that is in those movies is the obvious predictable kind. If you want to make a 'stupid' humourous movie, at least make the jokes subtle or non-predictable. Having said that, I thought that some of Jim Carrey's other movies were pretty good - especially The Trueman Show which I thought was excellent.
Could someone please explain the difference between region encoding and DVD encryption. I'm realise that they have different purposes, but I'm hazy as to exactly what the differences are. My understanding is:
Region encoding - allow the DVD to be only viewed in the appropriate geographical location. The region code is stored on the DVD and is checked by either the DVD drive, decoder card or the software player.
DVD Encryptipon - encrypts (duh) the DVD data so that it can't be copied.
Okay so here are my questions (in no particular order):
On certain DVDs I can copy the contents to my hard drive and play them. On other DVDs I can't copy it to my hard drive - is the DVD encryption stopping me?
If I do copy a DVD to disk using DeCSS, does this remove the region encoding as well?
I don't understand the purpose of DVD encryption since I can already copy some DVDs straight to disk with DeCSS and even then, I can just copy a disc to VHS tape from my TV-out. Am I missing something?
The beauty of this book (from the authors point of view) is that he can release a new edition each week and each time it will be with totally new and totally cool products.
It's got the potential to equal the mighty Micro$oft upgrade treadmill, but without the bugs:)
Besides the all the errors with thinking the web is the internet...
Oh yeah, oops... my terminology starts getting loose after a day at the office - be grateful I didn't start referring to it as 'the thingy', or 'you know, that thing';)
Besides the all the errors with thinking the web is the internet, you also forgot that someone who is blind or uses some kind of audio "reader" to browse web pages needs a certin amount of text in the page.
I never said that all text should be removed from a web page - I was merely commenting that the argument that web pages should be just as accessible for text browsers is bunk.
A balance is needed in everything and a site purely composed of "Macromedia crap" as you put would indeed be just that... crap.
But just like a blind person may listen to the TV and glean some information from the shows, they still miss the whole experience. Yet no-one complains that all TV shows should be fully 'backward' compatible so that blind people don't miss out.
And you are wrong on the point about FOX catering to the needs of their customers. Appearently they recieved enough complaints that they decided to change the accessibility of their site so that everyone can view it.
If you read the article, Fox.com always intended to make their site accessible by any browser on any platform. It was simply that they had time constraints and so released the site initially with only IE and Netscape support. So fox.com changed nothing as a result of the complaints.
Poopie, once upon a time I used to agree with your sentiments and I too used to throw my hands up in despair at the web programmers who just graduated from a Macromedia course....
That was before I realised I was trapped in the past. In the past, the HTML was just a markup language and the Internet merely a big library of text documents... sorry, documents with hyperlinks.
Most things evolve over time and that is what has happened with the Internet. Sure, non-graphical browser compatible pages have a place, but for entertainment sites (that is the business fox is in), plain non-graphic sites are about as entertaining as... well... as plain text documents.
So if a site doesn't render properly in a text browser - who cares?!? Times have moved on - the Internet isn't about text anymore, it is about entertainment, aesthetics, convenience and ease of use. To the common person, text is (for the most part) the exact opposite of these values.
I also disagree with your point about WAP on PDA's. They will be no less flash or flair when WAP takes off (and it will take off). I predict that most sites will optimise certain sections of their sites for WAP and leave the rest with all the gee-wiz graphic/Javascript stuff.
For example, a movie site will have a sections which contains the movie sessions times and is optimised for WAP. The rest of the site with movie trailers, reviews etc. will be the same as it is now.
Let's take a reality check: If I wanted to watch Seinfeld, I wouldn't choose to watch it on a small portable handheld TV if I could watch it on a 20" TV. Similary, most people would prefer to surf the Net on a computer/TV screen rather than a 3" by 4" Palm V screen - people will choose the most appropriate tool for the application.
Anyway, to get to the end of my long-winded spiel, my point is that to design a purely 'flash and flair' site is no crime. It is simply catering to what the markets wants and making use of the technology in it's current evolved state.
Those that complain that sites should be viewable in a text browser all the time simply show that they haven't understood the transformation that the Internet has undergone since it first went 'public' (and I mean that in the nicest possible way:)!
Mathboy, it's great to see that you obviously love linux, but have a read of the article and then what you wrote.
No longer can people who obviously dont know a thing about linux or have ignored it because it seemed unimportant at the time (fox webdesigners, ahem) continue to IGNORE linux.
Fox.com never ignored Linux - right from the start they wanted to make their site accessible by every browser and every platform - they simply needed time to get to that stage (at least that's what it says in the article).
This is just one of many signals that linux is being accepted into the mainstream, EVEN if its by force.
No it isn't - as Fox said, they wanted accessibility by everyone. Linux supporters had zero impact on fox's decision since they were already going to support Linux in the first place. Nobody forced anyone to do anything.
The reason I'm having a go at you (in a friendly way;) is that while it is great that you are an avid Linux supporter, you sound like one with a big inferiority complex.
Relax, Linux is destined to take it's place amongst the big guns of the OS marketplace - you don't do the Linux camp any favours by sounding fanatical.
Cheers.
Puts new meaning to the term 'throw-away comment'!
on
Disposable Cell Phones
·
· Score: 1
Think what a benefit this will be as a stress relief tool.
After that aggravating conversation with your significant other or that one-sided angry monologue from your boss, you could beat the living daylights out of your phone on the nearest tree. You would feel much better after that!
Slashdot Mirror
- RIAA (or whoever) are greedy bastards
- they are stupid for even trying to copy protect
- we've been able to do it for years with analogue - what's the big deal
- I have a 'right' to evaluate music even if I don't own it
- it's about the bottom line
- they feel threatened
- etc etc
Now don't get me wrong, I would love to pay nothing for my music and video/DVD etc. And I don't claim to be an angel when it comes to never ever pirating *ahem* backing up stuff, but let's get a reality check!Someone out there has spent time and effort and probably their own money creating some product be it music, a movie, whatever.
If you make a copy, that is theft - pure and simple - you have taken something which is not yours. You can try and hide your actions by cloaking it in phrases like 'making a backup', or it 'they won't notice' or whatever, but there can be no argument that it is theft.
So the big deal is all about protecting what is the legal property of someone. To base a society on the principle that it is okay to steal from others is socially destructive.
All the other excuses (they feel threatened, bottom line etc) are not the main issue. The main issue is protection of what is legally theirs.
To feel that the big organisations of the ilk of the RIAA are making a big deal out of nothing, shows the attitude of entitlement that seems to foster amongst many people who whine about the actions of the RIAA.
Complain about high CD prices - that is fair enough. Complain about someone trying to protect what is theirs, and you sound like someone who has no connection with the values that every society is based on.
When will people grow up and stop trying to pretend that theft is okay - try taking responsibility for your actions. Why do you think people have this opinion of young computer people being pirates? Could it possible be because they hear comments from pirates trying to defend the undefensible?
Upgrade GirlFriend 1.0 to Wife 1.0
Last year a friend of mine upgraded from GirlFriend 1.0 to Wife 1.0 and found that it's a memory hog leaving very little system resources available for other applications.
He is only now noticing that Wife 1.0 is also spawning Child Processes which are further consuming valuable resources. No mention of this particular phenomenon was included in the product brochure or the documentation, though other users have informed him that this is to be expected due to the nature of the application. Not only that, Wife 1.0 installs itself such that it is always launched at system initialization, where it can monitor all other system activity. He's finding that some applications such as PokerNight 10.3, BeerBash 2.5, and PubNight 7.0 are no longer able to run in the system at all, crashing the system when selected (even though they always worked fine before). During installation, Wife 1.0 provides no option as to the installation of undesired Plug-ins such as MotherInLaw 55.8 and SisterInLaw Beta release. Also, system performance seems to diminish with each passing day.
Some features he'd like to see in the upcoming Wife 2.0:
I myself decided to avoid the headaches associated with Wife 1.0 by sticking with Girlfriend 2.0. Even here, however, I found many problems. Apparently you cannot install Girlfriend 2.0 on top of Girlfriend 1.0. You must uninstall Girlfriend 1.0 first. Other users say this is a long standing bug that I should have known about. Apparently the versions of Girlfriend have conflicts over shared use of the I/O port. You would think they would have fixed such a stupid bug by now. To make matters worse, the uninstall program for Girlfriend 1.0 doesn't work very well leaving undesirable traces of the application in the system.
Another thing -- all versions of Girlfriend continually popup little annoying messages about the advantages of upgrading to Wife 1.0
*** BUG WARNING ****
Wife 1.0 has an undocumented bug. If you try to install Mistress 1.1 before uninstalling Wife 1.0, Wife 1.0 will delete MSMoney files before doing the uninstall itself. Then Mistress 1.1 will refuse to install; claiming insufficient resources.
That way, if you were working a long shift on New Years Eve :), and you got bored with the games you have you could connect a modem to your palm pilot, download new freeware GB games, and then power up your GB and away you go ...
Okay, I'm getting carried away this idea ... back to work.
Imagine the type of games that would be released if people who could write their own GB games ... I'm sure people could come up with better games that what is currently on the market for GB.
And I was refering to IT people not the Army people. And you reinforced my point - I was saying that IT people shouldn't complain that they have to work on New Year's Eve since they have so many more opportunities and are much better paid than most people (such as the military).
I probably didn't make my point very clearly the first time.
I may not like the amount of compensation that I received for working New Year and I have grumbled a bit, but overall, I won't complain too much.
Why?
Because there will always be a trade off of good things and bad things for a job. How often do you hear people in your workplace gloat at how good the job market is, how easy it is too change jobs, how much money they get paid etc etc? IT people are living in a golden era at the moment where we are in demand. Go out to the real world and see how the rest of the population lives!
In Australia (where I live), only 20% of the population earns above $50k - be thankful that you have a job (probably one that puts you in well into that top 20% group), and not only just a job, but one which has opportunity, most likely pays reasonably well and one which has a future.
Focus on that, and not on the small inconveniences like working one night a year which will be forgotten soon anyway.
Image the possibilities of being able to adjust/add/complement the features of appliances around your home!
Don't like the phone ring tone? Want to disguise your voice? Want to sound like you have company in the background? Want the phone to perform stress analysis on the caller (lie detector)? Add and change the features on your phone to your hearts content in the future with Open Source Applicances!
I can't wait!
It also drives the many passionate fans of Open Source to keep promoting the virtues of Open Source.
Without the Evil Empire, the whole Open Source movement would be without a focal point and without direction!
All hail Microsoft for creating the environment where a whole new culture could develop and thrive!!
The more the mainstream media gets a copy of this article, the more they will understand the real issues.
What better story for the media than "big corporation spreads lies to smash little man" - the more that slant on the story comes across to the public, the less the DVDCA will want to throw their weight around.
So spread copies of that article to all media outlets far and wide!
Say the software is only expecting dates from 1980 onwards. Then the Y2k bug hits and gives it a date of 1900. This figure is way out of the ballpark.
If the software is well written, it should see that this is the case and raise an error and maybe stop working. However, this is not always the case and maybe the software performs no check for a valid date - it simply takes whatever is passed to it - in this case, the year 1900.
Now because the date is so wrong to what the software is expecting, it may cause the software to act unpredictably - maybe it might write data to the wrong memory area, cause a stack overflow etc.
Bingo - the whole system malfunctions.
So the Y2k problem is not so much that the system uses dates, but that it also might cause a system with minimal error checking to behave unpredictably.
I was so sick of people saying the definitely nothing would go wrong and everything would be fine. Sure in the end that was the case - but that is with hindsight and after all the effort that was put in beforehand.
Looking at the posts about various systems still up and running, many of them seem to be of the sort: "Hey, Windows/Linux/whatever is still running on my desktop - bah, I knew that the Y2k bug was all hype."
Having worked in both the engineering and enterprise IT industries, I have worked with many many large systems, and you are right redtoade, many systems are old and archaic ... and also essential in the day to day operation of the business.
Collegues who have worked with me in the past year on the Y2k problem anticipated that the transition would be a fizzer (ie quiet) after all the work that they had done, but no-one would be so naive to claim that Y2k was all hype.
These comments come from guys on the front line. Most people don't have this experience and extrapolate their limited experience to the rest of the world - ie. it was easy to check my system, the rest of the world will be fine.
As redtoade pointed out, many systems failed during testing and it is only through all the preventative efforts that there were no problems on the night.
How anyone could certain that nothing would go wrong is beyond me. Sure, one could be quietly confident (especially after all the effort that was put in), but to be absolutely certain?!? I still shake my head at the number of people who think that the Y2k bug was all scam and groundless hype.
All systems (Optus, Telstra, Vodafone etc) have been up all night. The only reason you wouldn't have been able to get through is congested cell servers - which is why somepeople could get through and some couldn't. It is also why if you are in a non-popular area, your mobile phone will still work but if you are in the CBD, it won't.
the question that crops up most commonly, for a newbie, once the lot is installed, is not "How do I do xxx" but rather "Ok, so what do I do now?"
That is exactly it - there is no guiding doco for beginners. After the installation, the documents perhaps could then give examples of what the user could do next with links to the relevant HOW-TO docos.
This would at least then put the HOW-TO docos in context and provide a framework which would show the users where everything fits together.
Two years later I delved into Linux and have been using it for a year and a half.
Although Linux has an extensive set of documentation and I wasn't a novice to Unix by then, I still found FreeBSD easier to learn even though I was virtually new to Unix.
I found that the documentation for FreeBSD was organised very much like a manual which was great to start with as I could work through it as I installed a system. The topics were also general such as 'disks', 'backups', 'serial communications' and it was easy to quickly find what you needed.
The Linux docs are organised by a specific 'need' and while it is great when you are after a solution to a specific problem, it is too unstructured for a newbie.
A newbie needs to be lead through the topics in a general fashion so that they can gain an overall picture - Linux docs don't really give a good overview.
It's 5am so I'm not very coherent at the moment - so i apologise if my opinion isn't very clear. I can't really give specifics (at least I can't think of specifics at the moment), but that is my general feeling about what makes Linux that little bit more difficult for newbies.
"Trust the computer industry to shorten "Year 2000" to Y2K. It was this kind of thinking that caused the problem in the first place."
Thought I'd share that quote with the community - quite amusing I thought.
Funny is obviously in the eye of the beholder, but the kind of humour that is in those movies is the obvious predictable kind. If you want to make a 'stupid' humourous movie, at least make the jokes subtle or non-predictable. Having said that, I thought that some of Jim Carrey's other movies were pretty good - especially The Trueman Show which I thought was excellent.
Region encoding - allow the DVD to be only viewed in the appropriate geographical location. The region code is stored on the DVD and is checked by either the DVD drive, decoder card or the software player.
DVD Encryptipon - encrypts (duh) the DVD data so that it can't be copied.
Okay so here are my questions (in no particular order):
Thanks for any assistance.
Ben
It's got the potential to equal the mighty Micro$oft upgrade treadmill, but without the bugs :)
Oh yeah, oops ... my terminology starts getting loose after a day at the office - be grateful I didn't start referring to it as 'the thingy', or 'you know, that thing' ;)
I never said that all text should be removed from a web page - I was merely commenting that the argument that web pages should be just as accessible for text browsers is bunk.
A balance is needed in everything and a site purely composed of "Macromedia crap" as you put would indeed be just that ... crap.
But just like a blind person may listen to the TV and glean some information from the shows, they still miss the whole experience. Yet no-one complains that all TV shows should be fully 'backward' compatible so that blind people don't miss out.
And you are wrong on the point about FOX catering to the needs of their customers. Appearently they recieved enough complaints that they decided to change the accessibility of their site so that everyone can view it.
If you read the article, Fox.com always intended to make their site accessible by any browser on any platform. It was simply that they had time constraints and so released the site initially with only IE and Netscape support. So fox.com changed nothing as a result of the complaints.
Cheers.
That was before I realised I was trapped in the past. In the past, the HTML was just a markup language and the Internet merely a big library of text documents ... sorry, documents with hyperlinks.
Most things evolve over time and that is what has happened with the Internet. Sure, non-graphical browser compatible pages have a place, but for entertainment sites (that is the business fox is in), plain non-graphic sites are about as entertaining as ... well ... as plain text documents.
So if a site doesn't render properly in a text browser - who cares?!? Times have moved on - the Internet isn't about text anymore, it is about entertainment, aesthetics, convenience and ease of use. To the common person, text is (for the most part) the exact opposite of these values.
I also disagree with your point about WAP on PDA's. They will be no less flash or flair when WAP takes off (and it will take off). I predict that most sites will optimise certain sections of their sites for WAP and leave the rest with all the gee-wiz graphic/Javascript stuff.
For example, a movie site will have a sections which contains the movie sessions times and is optimised for WAP. The rest of the site with movie trailers, reviews etc. will be the same as it is now.
Let's take a reality check: If I wanted to watch Seinfeld, I wouldn't choose to watch it on a small portable handheld TV if I could watch it on a 20" TV. Similary, most people would prefer to surf the Net on a computer/TV screen rather than a 3" by 4" Palm V screen - people will choose the most appropriate tool for the application.
Anyway, to get to the end of my long-winded spiel, my point is that to design a purely 'flash and flair' site is no crime. It is simply catering to what the markets wants and making use of the technology in it's current evolved state.
Those that complain that sites should be viewable in a text browser all the time simply show that they haven't understood the transformation that the Internet has undergone since it first went 'public' (and I mean that in the nicest possible way :)!
Cheers.
No longer can people who obviously dont know a thing about linux or have ignored it because it seemed unimportant at the time (fox webdesigners, ahem) continue to IGNORE linux.
Fox.com never ignored Linux - right from the start they wanted to make their site accessible by every browser and every platform - they simply needed time to get to that stage (at least that's what it says in the article).
This is just one of many signals that linux is being accepted into the mainstream, EVEN if its by force.
No it isn't - as Fox said, they wanted accessibility by everyone. Linux supporters had zero impact on fox's decision since they were already going to support Linux in the first place. Nobody forced anyone to do anything.
The reason I'm having a go at you (in a friendly way ;) is that while it is great that you are an avid Linux supporter, you sound like one with a big inferiority complex.
Relax, Linux is destined to take it's place amongst the big guns of the OS marketplace - you don't do the Linux camp any favours by sounding fanatical.
Cheers.
After that aggravating conversation with your significant other or that one-sided angry monologue from your boss, you could beat the living daylights out of your phone on the nearest tree. You would feel much better after that!