Did you even READ the sumitter's question? "This year I am including a bootable Live Linux CD in many of my Christmas cards.", He's giving it out in his Xmas cards which generally are just a card and a signature, perhaps a "Seasons' Greetings" or something scrawled in there as well. This is added value over and above a simple card.
Somebody's been taking too many marketing classes. "Added value"? What, exactly, is the "added value" of something that's free to begin with?
It's a legitimate question. What is this guy actually trying to do? The obvious answer seems to be to turn people on to Linux. Which you can justify on a general, global scale, but when you start talking about basically force-feeding it to individual people who are apparently your friends and family, it becomes a different issue.
It's one thing to say to someone you know and like, "hey, you know this thing Linux? Well, it does the same things as Windows, only better, and it's free, so you should download it." They probably won't, but the next step is not to basically get all up in their face and say "HEY. I TOLD YOU TO DOWNLOAD IT AND YOU DIDN'T SO NOW YOU HAVE NO EXCUSE BECAUSE HERE'S A CHRISTMAS CARD FULL OF LINUX." Honestly, even as someone who runs Linux, I'd be borderline offended by this.
I guess my concern is that this guy is doing this more for himself than for the people he's giving these cards to, out of a misguided sense of altruism. I can almost guarantee that none of these people he's going to be giving these CD's to could care less about Linux - he obviously cares a lot more than they do, if he feels it necessary to jam these Linux CD's down their throats. I mean they can download Linux the same way he can, but they haven't.
All he's doing is risking a bit of backlash by doing this. He's not "adding value" by giving people something they can get themselves just as easily. I mean unless he knows a whole bunch of people stuck on dial-up connections that asked him to do this, which I guess is possible but pretty unlikely.
Uh, am I the only one that noticed that this article only refers to color laser printers? And only from a few manufacturers at that.
Obvious solution: use an inkjet or a dye-sub. Both inkjets and dye-sub printers are better for printing in color anyway, unless what you need is top speed at the expense of color accuracy and resolution (which is not likely even for a counterfeiter).
If you're talking copiers, I don't know. Are most copiers laser these days? Still, it seems implausible that any counterfeiter would be using a consumer copying machine to commit his or her crime (simply because the results would be pretty obviously awful), so I'm not sure why this technology would even be necessary.
But the obvious solution for yourself in that case is to do what I do to make my copies - buy a flatbed scanner that has a "copy" button on it and use your inkjet printer for the output. I get much better quality that way than using any copy machine I've ever tried anyway, and it's really not much more inconvenient either. My scanner, PC, and printer all have to be on and running, but it's literally a one-button process just like it is on a regular copy machine. If my PC is off, the time it takes to boot is not really much longer (if any) than the time it takes a standard copy machine to "warm up" from a cold start anyway.
For the moment, this seems pretty easy to get around, if what the article says is really accurate. Because what it says is that certain brands of color laser printers use this technology. So, the solution is to not use those brands, or to not use a color laser printer. Seems pretty simple. May not stay that way forever, but it doesn't seem like it's time quite yet to start hoarding pro-level inkjets before they're outlawed.
Ahhhh!!!!!111oneone This is the exact same annoying thing as people thinking asians say "lice" instead of "rice"!
Well, some of them do. I should know, I'm married to one that has this problem and has worked hard to get rid of her accent.
It does depend on the Asian country, but you're also stereotyping and generalizing by lumping all "Asians" together. The Japanese language does not have either a proper "R" or a proper "L" sound - the language is just not set up that way - but all of the words that get romanized with r's in them both sound and are physically produced with an oral motion closer to what we make with an "L". When you say "arigato", for example, you pronounce it closer to a quick "ah-lee-gah-toh" than "ah-ree-gah-toh", the latter just sounding like a horrible American accent in Japanese. So yes, "rice" does sound like "lice" in English if a native Japanese person is not careful, especially considering that the modern Japanese word for "rice" is actually "raisu", which is just the English "rice" pronounced with Japanese pronunciation. Of course, most Japanese people know the deal with r's and l's, and they learn very early on that they need to be careful and have it drilled into them incessantly by their teachers - and that's probably one reason why you think the R/L thing is a misconception, because many of them do overcome it very early on. But it isn't a misconception, and not every Japanese person develops the right habits early in their English lessons.
Koreans, Chinese, probably most other Asian countries don't have this problem at all. But the Japanese do. It's not a myth.
I have no problem with people making fun of different countries' customs, but please, at least do it correctly.
Well, you could take your own advice. Asians don't all speak the same language, you know, so they don't all have the same accent. Japanese, Chinese and Korean are not even in the same language family (depending on which linguist you believe), just to use three examples. They're completely different languages that evolved from different sources (though there's also been some cross-pollenation over the years, and some, though clearly not a majority, of linguists do believe Korean and Japanese are both Altaic languages).
I have no problem with your general point and I'm sure you're right about the pronunciation of "vodka", I just think you're being a little hypocritical, calling somebody out for incorrectly over-generalizing when you're doing the exact same thing yourself.
Re:Now the real question
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Hacking Vodka
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Is it cheaper to do this than buy Finlandia?
I can't imagine it is, given the prices they quote for Vladimir Vodka, and knowing as I do how much Brita filters cost (about $7 each, or $15 or so for three). Filtering vodka is basically going to ruin your filter; filter vodka six times and you may as well just throw it out. So basically you're paying $20 for a cheap bottle of vodka that you're trying to get to taste good, whereas where I live a bottle of Finlandia, Stoli, or Absolut is around 18 bucks. No, none of those are great vodkas, but they're good enough to drink as is, and as you say, Finlandia's already pretty much like water mixed with alcohol anyway.
I suppose this whole thing falls under the label of "plausible, but impractical". I'm sure you can get rid of the aftertaste in bad vodka by filtering it, but given the total cost and the marketplace alternatives, there's just not much point to it.
The laptop at that review gets 5.5 hours in real usage. IBM and others supposedly have models that'll get 7.5-8 hours, but I haven't seen that really tested (no doubt that's really stretching things in low-power mode, but still).
But even my old-skool (by today's standards) Pentium 4-M laptop gets 3.5 hours without any real coaxing, and this is a big, heavy, widescreen laptop. I bought this thing early this year.
It ain't 1990 anymore, man. I think the point was made and the point stands - if we can get even 5.5 hours out of a laptop with a big, bright screen, a DVD drive, a hard drive, wireless, etc. then why can we only get a few hours out of the much less powerful and versatile PSP? 8-10 hours should be the minimum you should be able to expect from a handheld gaming machine these days - even the DS is right on the edge of acceptability. The PSP is over that edge, on the wrong side.
You said "RPM sucks ass", but you seem to be comparing RPM (a package format and low level package tool) with ubuntu's high level package tools (synaptic and apt, IIRC?).
Uh, I've been using Apt with Syanpatic on Fedora Core 1 for over a year. IIRC, Red Hat Linux was the second distro for which Apt was released, which made it trivial to port over to Fedora Core (it did require an updated release, but it was out about a week after FC1's launch).
I don't see the point in citing Apt as an advantage for another OS when it works just as well with Fedora. It may not be included with Fedora, but honestly, if you're so brain dead that you can't figure out how to download and install one simple application yourself, I don't know what you're even doing installing Linux to begin with. I mean I'm no advanced Linux guru - I never could manage to get a kernel to compile correctly, for example - but even I know how to download and install a simple pre-compiled application under Linux.
Yum also works with Fedora, some people prefer it to Apt, and IIRC it is included with the distro (I'm not completely sure only because I've only tried it once, and I don't remember if I downloaded it with Apt or if it was on my system already). So whatever package manager you prefer, it's supported under FC.
MythTV is good but it's far too complicated to set up for the average user. And if you want to play DVD's or Windows Media files, you've still gotta install that support separately, which is another headache under Linux.
I'm sure a lot of people will take the "I did it, therefore it's easy enough for my mom to do it" tack, but that's just not the case. Obviously MythTV has fans and I guess I'm one of them, but even I, with 20 years of experience building and maintaining computers, could not get MythTV doing everything I wanted it to do before giving up. And the way I feel is, if it takes me that long just to get something working, and if I still can't get it to do everything I want it to do, then it's not worth dealing with.
Right now I run Windows XP on a server that's hooked up to my Dolby Digital receiver through S-video (both in and out) and optical audio out. I'd use component if my TV supported component, but it doesn't so I don't worry about it. Anyway, I've got it set to login automatically, and I've also get it set up to use magic packet as well as remote desktop connections so even though I leave that PC off most of the time (for various reasons), I can activate it from anywhere and immediately start either playing through the home theater system or streaming to another PC.
Software-wise, I use Media Portal when I'm sitting in front of my TV, an OSS app for Windows that's similar to MythTV but works well "out of the box". It looks great, it runs great, and it plays pretty much every format that you've got a codec for on your machine already - which, if you're like most Windows users, is pretty much all of them anyway. The experience is not unlike running Windows Media Center. In fact, I'm not sure what I can do with Media Center that I can't do with Media Portal, and they look very, very similar. I also have this PC set up as a TiVo server, so I can use that as a front end as well (though I generally don't, but I've tried it out since they made the HMO free).
I can watch DVD's with this PC, any movie format you can name, I could watch TV if I wanted to set that up, and since I have all my music stored in MP3 format (why the originala submitter is using DRM-protected AAC is beyond me), I have no problems whatsoever playing music through Media Portal, streaming it to another PC using iTunes or whatever other app I want, or streaming it to my TiVo.
In short, I can do pretty much anything, and apart from the costs of Windows and the hardware (which is mostly comprised of second-hand parts from old PC's), I haven't spent a dime on anything. I'd peg the total cost including Windows, a new capture card, and a new hard drive at less than $200.
Could you build a functional Myth box cheaper? Maybe. Could you mod an Xbox and build a server for it cheaper? I doubt it. But my solution was much easier to set up and is easier to use than either of these other solutions anyway (my wife can use it, and she knows nothing about computers). And I have to spend zero time maintaining it or adding features or upgrades. It just works, and I can play all of my media files without problem anywhere in the house.
I will say that I make a point of completely avoiding any DRM protection at the source, which makes things a lot easier. I'd advise everybody to do this. Instead of buying Apple's AAC files, buy CD's and rip them to MP3 (or Ogg if you prefer, but MP3 has greater hardware and software support, which I think is important). If you rip a DVD, make sure to strip the Macrovision and CSS, which most DVD rippers will do (go ahead and violate the DMCA - the DMCA violates fair use laws as it is). There are lots of ways to avoid DRM and this will help you avoid headaches later.
Re:Gamers taking day off from work
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Halo 2 Released
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· Score: 1
I would LOVE to see some evidence to back that up. I am not attacking your statement here, just saying that if true, its one of the most interesting things I have heard of in a long time.
It's sort of true, he just got the company and the game wrong. It was Dragon Quest, which is far more popular in Japan than it is in the United States, and hence people here confuse them all the time, because when you say the words "Japan" and "RPG" to someone in the west, they automatically think "Final Fantasy". It's not so in Japan (though both series are popular there, DQ is just that much moreso).
He also might have confused Squaresoft with Enix because they are now the same company. When this law was passed, however, they were separate and DQ was an Enix game.
As for Halo 2, honestly, there's a whole hell of a lot of misinformation out there about the sales numbers from people who don't have a clue. Yes, it's no doubt going to sell well. For an Xbox game. All of MS's public proclamations about Halo 2 preorders "breaking records", etc. have had that caveat.
GTA: Vice City sold 4.3 million copies in the first three days, mostly to preorders. GTA: San Andreas also had close to 5 million preorders. Contrast that with Halo 2's 1.5 million and you can see that it's not really a "record" of any sort.
The original Halo sold 5 million copies total, worldwide. Gran Turismo 3 sold 14 million copies worldwide, and that's not even the record (I believe the record is held by one of the Zelda titles, though I don't know what it is). There aren't 14 million Xboxes in the world today, so it would be pretty much close to impossible for Halo 2 to break any sales records even if every single Xbox owner bought it, and a fair number of people bought a new Xbox just to play Halo 2. And no game, however good it is, has 100% market penetration - not even the original Halo (I'm an Xbox owner and I don't own it, nor do I plan on buying Halo 2).
Just trying to bring in a little perspective here, to cut through a little of the hyperbole. You'd think Microsoft themselves had sponsored the article submission here, it's so full of it.
(Hyperbole, that is... though feel free to substitute other words in hyperbole's place.)
When did they do it the first time? I mean, did any of these people even play the first Halo? Cooperative play on the XBox was pretty cool, but other than that, it as a bland and boring game with bland and boring graphics, sounds, weapons, gameplay, etc.
I normally consider posts like these trolls, but I have to agree in this case. Some of Halo was pretty nice, but it was balanced by all the backtracking, by all the bland interior levels, and by a complete lack of consistency. Overall I don't see what's all that different about it than a lot of other mediocre sci-fi shooters.
Standards for FPS's on consoles are different, and lower. I think Xbox owners were also just happy as hell to have an FPS that looked as good as Halo did (for a console FPS), and that was good for a launch game. It's definitely way, way overrated though, and if the first game had come out at this point in the system's lifespan I doubt it'd make the same sort of splash. Of course, now it's got almost this mythical quality to it, so of course you get reviewers giving it 9s and 10s because hell, it's practically the same game, so people are going to have to love it just as much, right?
Well, I own an Xbox, and Halo 2 is not at the top of my wish list. FPS's belong on PC's anyway, with proper controls and higher detail levels (required for recognizing and then sniping distant enemies). Nuts to Bungie.
1. How often do you have difficulty hearing on a mobile phone?
Never.
First day as a cell phone owner, I assume?
2. How often have you seen this portrayed on TV and in film?
Never noticed.
Maybe you should get a decent phone.
Maybe you should quit being so condescending. This is a common complaint among cell phone owners, especially in the United States, which being a UK resident is obviously not something you can understand.
I've owned around 10 different cell phones in my life, from the top of the line to the bottom. Each successive generation has gotten steadily worse in terms of reception and call quality. What's more, any particular cell phone I've owned has seemed to get worse over time - leading me to believe the networks themselves are at least part of the problem, and not much is being done to address it.
Just to poke another hole in your misguided idea that all's right in the cellular service world, Sprint in the US bases their entire advertising campaign around the fact that other companies' customers are dissatisfied with their call quality. Their slogan is "Sprint PCS - where all your calls are clear." They've recently expanded their marketing campaign to include these camera phones, which is a bad sign for them if you ask me (not that I ever thought their call quality was any better than anyone else anyway, despite their marketing).
But the point is cellular service in this country sucks. As for whether it's been portrayed in film or TV, yes, I have seen it - it's actually a pretty common theme of the Fox show "24", where the fact that people can't either hear each other or connect via their cell phones is used repeatedly as a plot device. I'm actually seeing this more and more on TV and in movies (there was that movie "Cellular" which used this as well), so it's being noticed by the media, who I'm sure have plenty of problems themselves communicating via cell phone.
That's great to hear, but your claim is simply anecdotal evidence. A few posts up you'll see several knee-jerkers you apparently don't know saying that we'll be weaned off food and water and that we have no place to put the waste.
That doesn't make them leftists, and you're generalizing just the same as the original post.
After Three Mile Island, nearly all of the residents of Middletown, PA were opposed to nuclear power (as was much of the country). Does that automatically make all of these people "leftists"? These were gun-owning, Reagan-voting, pickup truck-driving people living in a rural community in Pennsylvania. Which doesn't automatically make them right-wing radicals either; but their anti-nuclear view sure doesn't automatically make them leftist.
TMI was the event that turned the tide against nuclear power in the United States. A good number of people here probably weren't even alive when it happened, which makes it easy for those people to pigeonhole those who were as "leftists". Add to that those with right-wing views who support nuclear power and think of anyone who disagrees with them on anything as borderline communist and you've got a hell of a lot of generalizing going on around here.
There are plenty of rational reasons to be against nuclear power that have nothing to do with whether you support gay marriage or a woman's right to choose or gun ownership rights or the death penalty. The reason why it's not popular in the US is safety, both from accidents and from sabotage. The industry has repeatedly told us it's safe - then TMI happened, then Chernobyl happened, then a series of accidents in Japan (one of which caused the evacuation of my wife's hometown). The most recent accident at a nuclear power plant was this year, so these are not problems that have been solved.
Then you've got terrorism, which is an unknown quantity but one you've now got to consider when designing and staffing nuclear plants.
Safety is not a partisan issue, and when you're talking nuclear power, even one incident can render a large swath of the country uninhabitable. This does not seem to be a reasonable risk. When you add to that the economic and political issues with building plants near populated areas (lowering property values, driving residents and businesses out of the area), you can see why you don't need to be a "leftist" in order to oppose nuclear energy.
Okay, maybe I'm just stupid, but I've tried torrents on a few different occasions, and have simply never been able to get it to work well. Just now, I tried one of the links posted elsewhere on this discussion, and maxed out at about 4 KB/s download. 138 hours to complete. And I'm on a fairly speedy connection (4MB down, 512K up), so it's not my network.
Well, it is your "network", just not in the way you mean.
Bittorrent is a peer-to-peer application. So you're a) not going to be able to download anything faster than other people who have the file can upload it, and b) it's going to take a while for your upload speeds to max out, based on your ability to establish connections with others who have the file fragments you need.
Typically bittorrent downloads start slow but then zoom up very quickly once you're 1% or so into the download. That's assuming there are enough seeds and peers, of course - on older or less popular files there may only be a few and your download will be slow all the way through. BT is much better to use for newer files than older files for this reason - though that's true to an extent for all P2P apps.
The first file I ever downloaded as a torrent was one of the Red Hat Linux distros - I remember getting about 2k/sec for about the first hour, then around 220k/sec consistently after that (which was my maximum bandwidth at the time).
I'm currently getting around 100k/sec each on the three Star Wars torrents. Which again, is around my max bandwidth. But it's fluctuating, because there aren't many seeds or peers for these files (they're big, and hosting a file requires you to leave your BT client open, which a lot of people don't do after their downloads are done).
Am I missing something stupid? Do I need to punch holes in my firewall? If so, how does one do that while still remaining secure (that is, what do I need to open, and how dangeroud is it)?
You need to open ports 6881-6889 at least. I'm no expert on network security but I do know that simply having open ports is not in itself a security risk. It's also what ports you have open that determine the level of risk. There's nothing that typically uses these ports other than bittorrent so if you don't have bittorrent running you can either a) close the ports again, or b) just not worry about it.
What I do is leave the ports open on my router to this specific PC on my network (using port forwarding) - they're open all the time - but then I also have the Windows Firewall set to keep the ports closed but make an exception for Azureus (my BT client). So, basically, the ports are closed to all my PC's but this one through my router, and they're only really open on this PC when I'm using Azureus.
His review should be the first place people go to when deciding whether to buy the 2004 release.
Well, the annoying thing to me is that even as a die-hard Star Wars fan who saw all of these movies in the theater when they were first released, the real improvements to the DVD's still make them no-brainers to pick up, even with the awful changes that come along with them. I mean are you really going to give up that obvious and drastic improvement in image quality (apparent in every single screenshot posted in these comparisons) because one or two questionable choices were made for each DVD?
Lucas is an idiot for butchering his own films but he's also a shrewd businessman, apparently. He didn't only make changes he knew nobody would like. He made changes he knew would be controversial but then he more than balanced them out with changes he knew most people wouldn't want to live without. Technically, these DVD's are the best Star Wars has ever looked, without question, and even most of the creative changes, though unnecessary, could be called improvements. The extra establishing shots of Bespin in Empire, for example - I mean that doesn't hurt the film at all, it gives it a better sense of scale. That's the kind of thing that I can believe Lucas did probably want to do originally but didn't have the budget for (unlike the changes to the ghosts at the end of Jedi, or Greedo shooting first).
But that's what makes these DVD's so frustrating. Because it's not a question of "do I buy them or not?" If you really like Star Wars you basically have to buy them; I mean it's almost stupid not to. But you've gotta be force-fed the bad with the good.
I'd have no real problem with these releases if only Lucas made the theatrical ones available also. I think a lot of people feel the same way. That's what Spielberg did with ET and while a lot of people made fun of his changes for the DVD release, there weren't the same howls as with Star Wars because you could just buy the set with the original version included if you wanted it. Lucas wouldn't have even need to make the same restorations as he did for what's on the DVDs as they are now - just dump the LD versions onto DVD as an "extra" and call it a day. We'd have been happy. I don't understand what his beef is with actually giving his fans what they want and that's mostly what pisses off so many people.
I suspect that "legal and management concerns" is shorthand for "legal was concerned that management was full of idiots".
And legal isn't?
I think you're giving them entirely too much credit. I think Darl probably just couldn't figure out how to get FrontPage to put the site up for him, and finally gave up.
Matt Drudge said he will run exit-polilng data through the day. He did during the 2002 election. The major networks agreed to stop doing this after the 2000 problems.
Matt Drudge is not running any exit polling. Matt Drudge is one guy; he doesn't have the power to do anything at all himself, and he has no organization. He's one guy (actually with another guy who helps him out) with a web site. That's it.
Drudge relies on polling data that he "obtains" from various sources, some of whom he names, some of whom he doesn't. Sometimes his exit polling data bears a resemblance to reality; usually, it's not even close. He had Bush up in Florida by something like 24 points in 2000 originally, and we all know how that turned out. In any case, it's not as if you can go to his site and expect to get nationwide exit polling - you'll see results for two counties in Ohio, three in Florida, one in Nebraska... that kind of thing. And he'll pick and choose to post only the polls he wants to post, either because he wants to turn out more pro-Bush voters in those areas or because he wants to show how far ahead Bush is and make the outcome seem inevitable. Some people who seem to think he's an unbiased source of news apparently don't realize he does these things, but he does. And he doesn't see anything wrong with it; he thinks he's just being an "editor".
There is no such thing as a reliable source of exit polling data in this country, and IMO there shouldn't be. There was a small controversy about this after the last election - a few people (like Drudge) questioning why they shouldn't post exit poll data in advance - but these people are mostly idiots who don't understand how an election actually works (again, like Drudge).
So you will not be able to get a "live tally" of the vote from overseas or anywhere else, because no such thing exists. The vote tallies are counted after the polls close, and are only then reported by each polling district. So you will not see any official numbers at all until the first polls close on the east coast - not sure exactly when that is, but probably around 7 PM EST.
If you do find anything on the net that claims to have election results or polling data prior to the polls closing, don't believe the results. Anyone can make up numbers and guys like Drudge are only too eager to post them without any verification at all (I half-believe he makes up some of his un-sourced numbers himself). If, at the end of the night, they don't match the official totals, they'll just say "oh well, samples don't always match the totals, etc. etc." when they could have just as easily just been pulling those numbers out of their asses.
People don't always answer truthfully in exit polls anyway. Our votes are supposed to be private and honestly, if somebody I didn't know asked me who I voted for outside a polling place, I probably would lie. It's none of their business who I voted for and how do I know who they say they are anyway? They could be working for the guy I voted against. They could be a group of drunken supporters of the other guy pretending to be pollsters and out to beat up people who voted for my candidate. I'd probably say I wrote somebody in.
Point is, exit polls are not reliable - they're not reliable even if they're real exit polls, and half of what you see on the net is made up anyway. This is why the major nets agreed not to rely on them so heavily anymore. Wait for the official results, which will come after the polls close.
Also, the article you mention is from someone that does NOT want to be recogonized by their iPod.. I would guess that's the minority.
I think the point is that fashion accessory or not, they're already passe in a lot of areas.
I live in NYC too and I agree with the OP; iPods are a dime a dozen around here. You end up looking more like a conformist walking around with one than anything else.
Which doesn't say anything about the quality of the device. It just says that this argument that people buy them to be "cool" doesn't really wash anymore, at least not in areas of the country where "cool" seems to even mean anything. (I'd imagine iPods are as ubiquitous in pretty much every large, cosmopolitan city these days.)
It's the same phenomenon as the cel phone. For the first few years they were expensive and exotic; if you had one, you showed it off. But at first, it was mainly a product for the elite. Eventually the prices came down to where at least the upper middle class could finally afford them, and Motorola's Startac both gave the cool kids a phone they could show off while simultaneously making cel phones a commodity. Nowadays, are you at all impressed whenever anybody whips out their shiny new clamshell phone? I'm not, and I doubt most people are - if anything you're probably annoyed at being bothered by the ringer or by the yapping going on next to you.
Apple's doing the same thing with the iPod. We've progressed past the point where iPods are considered "cool"; we're now to the point where they're almost boring, and are well on our way to the point where just seeing that white earbud cord looks pretentious and stupid.
I don't know if the whole mp3 player thing will play out exactly the way the cel phone thing did, but it's a pretty common pattern in technology - a product is invented, one company comes in and popularizes it with the kids, inadvertantly commoditizes it at the same time, and eventually loses market share as the whole category becomes passe and competitors take advantage.
This is obviously what Sony's counting on, and honestly, now that Sony's supporting mp3 natively (or said they're going to, at least), I'd probably rather have one of their somewhat more anonymous-looking Network Walkmans than an iPod. I don't think this stranglehold Apple has on the market is going to continue forever; somebody's just got to design a better product first. I don't think the iPod "brand" is as strong as Apple thinks it is, especially now that it's no longer as hip as it once was - their success right now is based on the fact that they've still got the product with the best combination of size, shape, and ease of use (though others may excel in one particular area, such as battery life, Apple's at least "pretty good" in all of them).
This U2 iPod's going to be a big dud. Pre-load it with all of their music for $350, then you've got something. But $50 off a $150 purchase, and it's $50 more expensive? Am I understanding that right? So in the end, you're basically just paying for a 20GB iPod, and the "box set" is another $100. How is this a good deal?
Photo iPod, also a dud. If you want to transport your photos around, you can do it just on your regular iPod (for like half the price). Who really wants to pay extra so they can look at photos on that tiny little screen? I may as well just carry my digital camera around and leave them all on that.
The regular iPods will continue being the bread and butter for the iPod line.
But virtual memory, multitasking, and protected memory ultimately have quite a lot to do with the user interface. Virtual memory allows a user to run a great many programs at once, without having to worry too much about cleaning up-- no need to close the web browser before writing a letter; no need to worry about memory fragmentation.
Protected memory ensures that if a misbehaving program crashes, the entire system isn't brought to a screaming halt....
As for multitasking-- the macs used to feature cooperative multitasking-- wherein each program would voluntarily give up control of the system.
You're missing the point. Not one of these things has anything to do with the user interface. User experience, yes, but the user interface is a subset of the overall user experience that these technical matters have nothing to do with.
The user interface is simply the method with which humans interact with a device. Whether the multitasking is done cooperatively or not makes no difference to the user interface - to the user, they click an icon and a new application runs in either case.
Mac OS X is a far more advanced OS than Mac OS 9. But what does that really mean as far as the user interface? I know people who use Macs that complain that things they've done a certain way for years were just arbitrarily changed in OS X. I know designers at my place of work who refuse to install OS X because it forces them to waste time re-learning the system. I don't honestly know how valid those concerns are, but the fact that they are concerns at all suggests something about the UI in OS X. (Or maybe it suggests something about people who use Macs.)
Can someone elaborate on how shot noise applies to optical systems, specifically, cinematography? Since the original source material is conventional 'analog' film, at what point is the noise introduced? How is it introduced?
Well, it's all explained in the article. And you've got half the answer yourself. But I'll try to explain further...
(Yes I realize that film is not a pure analog format; the resolution being limited by the grain size of the emulsion - but at the same time, it's not what we consider digital.)
Film grain itself is a noise component. Film grains are nothing more than crystals sensitive to a particular light wavelength. In commonly used 35mm film stocks, there are three layers of emulsion - one red, one green, one blue. Think of the grains as "pixels", although they're somewhat randomly distributed, they're not all of a uniform size, and they're not all uniformly sensitive to light. The end result is that the minute differences between adjacent grains makes them easily discernible on a theatrical-size screen, and somewhat visible on a large TV set. They appear as noise.
Optical effects also involve compositing several layers of film on top of each other. According to the article, the light saber scenes were the worst. I'd imagine at that time, shooting a light saber duel probably involved three layers of film; the master shot and one optical shot for each light saber. Obviously this triples your noise and also softens the image. It can also introduce color casts because the light is being altered through each layer of film.
As films age, chemical reactions also cause color shifts in the grains. This can lead to even more noise.
Films also get just plain dirty over time. The Star Wars negatives have been handled a lot, so they're probably dirtier than most. 35mm not being very big, when you blow it up onto a theater screen or even a TV set, a small layer of dust or tiny particles of dirt will add a lot of crud to the image.
The software they used to clean up these films apparently works by comparing each frame of film to the frame before and the frame after, to see what's picture information and what's noise (random noise will be easy for a computer to pick out, because it will not match at all from one frame to the next). It should have no problem removing both film grain and dirt, as well as other types of noise.
I'd imagine they must have manually isolated each individual edit in the film to reduce errors, but this wouldn't have been that big a deal in the grand scheme of things. There's probably only maybe a couple thousand cuts per film (assuming a high average of 5-10 cuts per minute), so it wouldn't take more than a couple days for one person to do this.
They need to figure out how to better keep intact the lines of communication, but also how to operate more effictively in a disconnected mode
If you'd read page 5 of the article, you'd know that they fought pretty damn well in "disconnected mode". The battle mentioned as being a "bloody hell" in the original post was a bloody hell for the Iraqis, not the Americans. The Americans only had 8 wounded, and none seriously. This despite being almost totally isolated and without real-time information.
There is no substitute for good training and good equipment, and that's what won the battle that day. The danger, and this is how the article concludes, is that the plan is a total change of the structure and equipment of the army in order to take advantage of this new technology, and if the technology then fails, watch out. The Americans succeeded in the battle on that bridge because they had their M-1 tanks that were able to take out vehicle after vehicle while absorbing Iraqi fire - in the new networked army, heavy tanks will play little or no role and the army will really be little more than roving bands of lightly armed and lightly armored guys carrying PDA's.
The idea is if everybody knows where everybody is all the time, there's no need to travel in these long armored columns, there's no need for heavy armor to spearhead a major battle and there's no need for lengthy and vulnerable supply lines. When massive numbers are needed to counteract an enemy force, these smaller units can quickly swarm from all directions to surprise, surround and kill that force, coordinated with air support that's got the same info as the ground units. The problem is, if everybody in such an army doesn't know where everybody else is, then you're back to simply being completely outnumbered by an enemy who's no worse off for real-time info than you are.
This new, networked army is one of those ideas that sounds good on paper (and it's the idea the Republicans have latched onto), but will probably never really work in practice - every war is different, and every layer of technology you add is simply one more thing with the potential to break. Technology will continue to play a major role in the future, and new weapons will continue to be developed - time marches forward, not backward. But in the end, when you're talking killing somebody or destroying a vehicle in a straight fight, the guy with the bigger gun, the thicker armor and the better training is the guy who's going to win. And the advantages of networking are really limited when you're talking about insurgencies, when you've got basically civilians just leaving explosive devices on the side of the road to get run over by the next passing Humvee, or guys who open fire from an otherwise nondescript house or building.
I think the Iraq war will temper some of the rush in transforming the army, because the only thing that saved us in Iraq was the fact that we were fighting such a poorly trained and poorly equipped force. If we start downgrading our reliable weapons and armor in favor of unreliable technology, we're going to be in a heap of trouble. I think the way things are going now with the insurgency basically prove that we need more guys than we have at the moment, not less, and this article basically proves that we won the war initially despite the technology, not because of it.
Where did you get NDS has 11 hours of battery life? Last I see some info it was 6-8 or somewhere.
From Nintendo's web site:
"Battery & Power Management: Lithium ion battery delivering 6 to 10 hours of play on a four-hour charge, depending on use. The battery is rechargeable and the unit features a low-energy-consumption design. The DS also has Power Management functions of Sleep mode and Standby mode. In Sleep mode, players can stop and resume game play whenever they like. AC adapter."
So low end is six, high end is ten, both a far cry from the two that Sony's shooting for (and I have a feeling it'll be more like "up to two hours").
Sorry, but two hours is not long enough for a handheld gaming machine. It just isn't. A lot of people's commutes are longer than that, let alone airplane flights, day trips with the kids, or whatever. Imagine taking this thing with you to use on your trip to school or work and having to recharge it every day.
No handheld has ever succeeded with that level of battery life, and lots of them have failed as a direct result of it.
I haven't encoded to mp3 for years. All my CDs are ripped to high-bitrate Ogg Vorbis format, it sounds better than mp3 and Ogg has no silly patent issues.
Eh, I took one of those double-blind listening tests and I couldn't tell the difference. All the codecs sounded good to me and I usually consider myself pretty anal about these things. Almost half the time I couldn't even pick out which was the original and which was the compressed version, in any format (sometimes it was obvious, but sometimes not).
I don't think Vorbis' tiny advantage in sound quality (which would be easily overcome just by using a higher bit rate) outweighs MP3's standardization. I mean argue all you want about open-source, about patents or whatever, I'm talking about practical usage here. I can buy any device out there - even Sony, soon - and know that it plays MP3 files. I don't know why you'd use anything else given how close most of these codecs are to each other.
There are some serious flaws in these results showing a drop on mp3 use, many of which have already been pointed out. The biggest one to me, though, is that mp3's are just far more portable. Download a wma file and what the heck are most people going to do with it? Pretty much your only choice is to keep it on the one machine you've downloaded it onto, unless you strip the DRM or unless you've got one of the six portable players that supports it.
I have four PC's in my house and I have all of my music on two of them and a lot of my music on a third. That's using mp3. So sure, at some point if I want my disk space back I may delete a few off one of my hard drives. That doesn't mean I'm using mp3 less, that just means the format has given me the freedom to choose where I want to have my music and when I want to have it on a particular device.
If there's any decline in the total number of mp3's on hard drives, it's probably people like me who have ripped their entire collection from CD, thrown the resulting files on pretty much every PC and portable device they own and are now consolidating. There was that initial rush to rip everything once mp3 became popular, and now that's pretty much done. It's a natural process. But there's no way anybody's using mp3 any less than they were, and that in no way suggests that mp3's are more disposable. I'll take my pristine and clean 320kbps VBR mp3 files over Apple's ridiculous DRM-encrusted 128k AAC files any day of the week!
It's not dramatically buggier than Fatigue Madden.
It is in franchise mode, which is full of game-stopping bugs. It's really a disaster of a game if you plan to play on franchise, because you never know when you're going to get stuck without being able to pass the draft, or when your game's going to freeze because of a corrupted playbook, or during SportsCenter, or whatever. I've personally experienced several of these bugs and in fact I can no longer use my own franchise's playbook. Reverting to an older save doesn't work, and there's no way to recover a corrupted playbook, nor can you re-import the messed up plays. All you can do is just use a generic playbook or one from another team.
Luckily I have not yet experienced the draft bug, which from what I understand means your franchise is basically over (or at least that you can never use the draft again; apparently the game will freeze at the same point from then on, no matter what). But franchise mode really is a big mess. A word to the wise: never, ever substitute anybody using the substitution feature in a game during franchise mode. This is what corrupts your playbooks. Use the depth chart instead. Of course, this means you can only do global subs; the actual sub feature is totally broken.
Online play could be a different matter. But the bugs in franchise mode are substantially worse than anything found in Madden. The fatigue bug is nothing compared to a bug that wipes out years worth of franchise play.
you want a solution? hell, i'm having trouble understanding your question!
He basically wants a music server, and he apparently wants it to be as complicated as possible, and he wants to run it on an 8088.
This isn't the first time the music server question has come up here, and the questioners always seem to want to make it as hard on themselves as possible. They want a text-based interface, they want to be able to rip and burn, they want Linux, and they want to do it all on a hacked HP calculator or something.
I've got a media server that I cobbled together out of old spare parts, combined with a new hard drive and a new case. Whole thing cost me about $200 for the new parts and I've got a reasonably nice machine that hosts my music, movies, and photos. I have it set to auto-logon to Windows XP (with a username and password) and then launch iTunes and Media Portal (an OSS media center clone) with a girder plugin for my remote control. Then I've got a bunch of options. I can access that PC directly through my TV using Media Portal and play music with my remote control. I can carry my laptop anywhere in the house and control that PC through Windows' own remote desktop connection. Or I can use it as a real music server and stream music through iTunes over my wireless LAN, playing it on my laptop or whatever else I'm using.
iTunes will also rip and burn, which was another listed requirement.
My advice to anyone who wants to do this - build or buy a cheap, mostly second-hand PC. Along with whatever new hardware you buy, pick up an OEM copy of Windows XP for cheap at a site like Newegg.com. Install iTunes, install Media Portal, put them both in your startup folder. Import all your music into both apps and enjoy.
Very simple and very powerful. Not expensive either.
Washington Post has an article about former TIA personnel moving their data mining operations offshore (Bahamas) to escape U.S. privacy rules, and to make a buck. I'm waiting for somebody to publish the private data (financial, medical, legal) of federal officials and their families on an open internet web server out of the Bahamas. Is this what it will take for the US to enact stringent privacy rules?
Does this make any sense to anyone?
These companies are moving offshore to escape US privacy laws. So the solution is for the US to enact tougher privacy laws? Wouldn't that just encourage even more companies to move offshore?
I would think the solution would be one of those worldwide initiatives that people around here seem so fond of. (That's sarcasm, if you couldn't detect it.) If a company's moving offshore to escape one country's laws, the only real solution is for that other country and all the other countries around it to enact the same laws. Right?
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Did you even READ the sumitter's question? "This year I am including a bootable Live Linux CD in many of my Christmas cards.",
He's giving it out in his Xmas cards which generally are just a card and a signature, perhaps a "Seasons' Greetings" or something scrawled in there as well. This is added value over and above a simple card.
Somebody's been taking too many marketing classes. "Added value"? What, exactly, is the "added value" of something that's free to begin with?
It's a legitimate question. What is this guy actually trying to do? The obvious answer seems to be to turn people on to Linux. Which you can justify on a general, global scale, but when you start talking about basically force-feeding it to individual people who are apparently your friends and family, it becomes a different issue.
It's one thing to say to someone you know and like, "hey, you know this thing Linux? Well, it does the same things as Windows, only better, and it's free, so you should download it." They probably won't, but the next step is not to basically get all up in their face and say "HEY. I TOLD YOU TO DOWNLOAD IT AND YOU DIDN'T SO NOW YOU HAVE NO EXCUSE BECAUSE HERE'S A CHRISTMAS CARD FULL OF LINUX." Honestly, even as someone who runs Linux, I'd be borderline offended by this.
I guess my concern is that this guy is doing this more for himself than for the people he's giving these cards to, out of a misguided sense of altruism. I can almost guarantee that none of these people he's going to be giving these CD's to could care less about Linux - he obviously cares a lot more than they do, if he feels it necessary to jam these Linux CD's down their throats. I mean they can download Linux the same way he can, but they haven't.
All he's doing is risking a bit of backlash by doing this. He's not "adding value" by giving people something they can get themselves just as easily. I mean unless he knows a whole bunch of people stuck on dial-up connections that asked him to do this, which I guess is possible but pretty unlikely.
Uh, am I the only one that noticed that this article only refers to color laser printers? And only from a few manufacturers at that.
Obvious solution: use an inkjet or a dye-sub. Both inkjets and dye-sub printers are better for printing in color anyway, unless what you need is top speed at the expense of color accuracy and resolution (which is not likely even for a counterfeiter).
If you're talking copiers, I don't know. Are most copiers laser these days? Still, it seems implausible that any counterfeiter would be using a consumer copying machine to commit his or her crime (simply because the results would be pretty obviously awful), so I'm not sure why this technology would even be necessary.
But the obvious solution for yourself in that case is to do what I do to make my copies - buy a flatbed scanner that has a "copy" button on it and use your inkjet printer for the output. I get much better quality that way than using any copy machine I've ever tried anyway, and it's really not much more inconvenient either. My scanner, PC, and printer all have to be on and running, but it's literally a one-button process just like it is on a regular copy machine. If my PC is off, the time it takes to boot is not really much longer (if any) than the time it takes a standard copy machine to "warm up" from a cold start anyway.
For the moment, this seems pretty easy to get around, if what the article says is really accurate. Because what it says is that certain brands of color laser printers use this technology. So, the solution is to not use those brands, or to not use a color laser printer. Seems pretty simple. May not stay that way forever, but it doesn't seem like it's time quite yet to start hoarding pro-level inkjets before they're outlawed.
Ahhhh!!!!!111oneone This is the exact same annoying thing as people thinking asians say "lice" instead of "rice"!
Well, some of them do. I should know, I'm married to one that has this problem and has worked hard to get rid of her accent.
It does depend on the Asian country, but you're also stereotyping and generalizing by lumping all "Asians" together. The Japanese language does not have either a proper "R" or a proper "L" sound - the language is just not set up that way - but all of the words that get romanized with r's in them both sound and are physically produced with an oral motion closer to what we make with an "L". When you say "arigato", for example, you pronounce it closer to a quick "ah-lee-gah-toh" than "ah-ree-gah-toh", the latter just sounding like a horrible American accent in Japanese. So yes, "rice" does sound like "lice" in English if a native Japanese person is not careful, especially considering that the modern Japanese word for "rice" is actually "raisu", which is just the English "rice" pronounced with Japanese pronunciation. Of course, most Japanese people know the deal with r's and l's, and they learn very early on that they need to be careful and have it drilled into them incessantly by their teachers - and that's probably one reason why you think the R/L thing is a misconception, because many of them do overcome it very early on. But it isn't a misconception, and not every Japanese person develops the right habits early in their English lessons.
Koreans, Chinese, probably most other Asian countries don't have this problem at all. But the Japanese do. It's not a myth.
I have no problem with people making fun of different countries' customs, but please, at least do it correctly.
Well, you could take your own advice. Asians don't all speak the same language, you know, so they don't all have the same accent. Japanese, Chinese and Korean are not even in the same language family (depending on which linguist you believe), just to use three examples. They're completely different languages that evolved from different sources (though there's also been some cross-pollenation over the years, and some, though clearly not a majority, of linguists do believe Korean and Japanese are both Altaic languages).
I have no problem with your general point and I'm sure you're right about the pronunciation of "vodka", I just think you're being a little hypocritical, calling somebody out for incorrectly over-generalizing when you're doing the exact same thing yourself.
Is it cheaper to do this than buy Finlandia?
I can't imagine it is, given the prices they quote for Vladimir Vodka, and knowing as I do how much Brita filters cost (about $7 each, or $15 or so for three). Filtering vodka is basically going to ruin your filter; filter vodka six times and you may as well just throw it out. So basically you're paying $20 for a cheap bottle of vodka that you're trying to get to taste good, whereas where I live a bottle of Finlandia, Stoli, or Absolut is around 18 bucks. No, none of those are great vodkas, but they're good enough to drink as is, and as you say, Finlandia's already pretty much like water mixed with alcohol anyway.
I suppose this whole thing falls under the label of "plausible, but impractical". I'm sure you can get rid of the aftertaste in bad vodka by filtering it, but given the total cost and the marketplace alternatives, there's just not much point to it.
Please let me know what laptop you are using that gets 5 hours of battery life.
It's called the Pentium M, dude. Look into it.
The laptop at that review gets 5.5 hours in real usage. IBM and others supposedly have models that'll get 7.5-8 hours, but I haven't seen that really tested (no doubt that's really stretching things in low-power mode, but still).
But even my old-skool (by today's standards) Pentium 4-M laptop gets 3.5 hours without any real coaxing, and this is a big, heavy, widescreen laptop. I bought this thing early this year.
It ain't 1990 anymore, man. I think the point was made and the point stands - if we can get even 5.5 hours out of a laptop with a big, bright screen, a DVD drive, a hard drive, wireless, etc. then why can we only get a few hours out of the much less powerful and versatile PSP? 8-10 hours should be the minimum you should be able to expect from a handheld gaming machine these days - even the DS is right on the edge of acceptability. The PSP is over that edge, on the wrong side.
You said "RPM sucks ass", but you seem to be comparing RPM (a package format and low level package tool) with ubuntu's high level package tools (synaptic and apt, IIRC?).
Uh, I've been using Apt with Syanpatic on Fedora Core 1 for over a year. IIRC, Red Hat Linux was the second distro for which Apt was released, which made it trivial to port over to Fedora Core (it did require an updated release, but it was out about a week after FC1's launch).
I don't see the point in citing Apt as an advantage for another OS when it works just as well with Fedora. It may not be included with Fedora, but honestly, if you're so brain dead that you can't figure out how to download and install one simple application yourself, I don't know what you're even doing installing Linux to begin with. I mean I'm no advanced Linux guru - I never could manage to get a kernel to compile correctly, for example - but even I know how to download and install a simple pre-compiled application under Linux.
Yum also works with Fedora, some people prefer it to Apt, and IIRC it is included with the distro (I'm not completely sure only because I've only tried it once, and I don't remember if I downloaded it with Apt or if it was on my system already). So whatever package manager you prefer, it's supported under FC.
MythTV is good but it's far too complicated to set up for the average user. And if you want to play DVD's or Windows Media files, you've still gotta install that support separately, which is another headache under Linux.
I'm sure a lot of people will take the "I did it, therefore it's easy enough for my mom to do it" tack, but that's just not the case. Obviously MythTV has fans and I guess I'm one of them, but even I, with 20 years of experience building and maintaining computers, could not get MythTV doing everything I wanted it to do before giving up. And the way I feel is, if it takes me that long just to get something working, and if I still can't get it to do everything I want it to do, then it's not worth dealing with.
Right now I run Windows XP on a server that's hooked up to my Dolby Digital receiver through S-video (both in and out) and optical audio out. I'd use component if my TV supported component, but it doesn't so I don't worry about it. Anyway, I've got it set to login automatically, and I've also get it set up to use magic packet as well as remote desktop connections so even though I leave that PC off most of the time (for various reasons), I can activate it from anywhere and immediately start either playing through the home theater system or streaming to another PC.
Software-wise, I use Media Portal when I'm sitting in front of my TV, an OSS app for Windows that's similar to MythTV but works well "out of the box". It looks great, it runs great, and it plays pretty much every format that you've got a codec for on your machine already - which, if you're like most Windows users, is pretty much all of them anyway. The experience is not unlike running Windows Media Center. In fact, I'm not sure what I can do with Media Center that I can't do with Media Portal, and they look very, very similar. I also have this PC set up as a TiVo server, so I can use that as a front end as well (though I generally don't, but I've tried it out since they made the HMO free).
I can watch DVD's with this PC, any movie format you can name, I could watch TV if I wanted to set that up, and since I have all my music stored in MP3 format (why the originala submitter is using DRM-protected AAC is beyond me), I have no problems whatsoever playing music through Media Portal, streaming it to another PC using iTunes or whatever other app I want, or streaming it to my TiVo.
In short, I can do pretty much anything, and apart from the costs of Windows and the hardware (which is mostly comprised of second-hand parts from old PC's), I haven't spent a dime on anything. I'd peg the total cost including Windows, a new capture card, and a new hard drive at less than $200.
Could you build a functional Myth box cheaper? Maybe. Could you mod an Xbox and build a server for it cheaper? I doubt it. But my solution was much easier to set up and is easier to use than either of these other solutions anyway (my wife can use it, and she knows nothing about computers). And I have to spend zero time maintaining it or adding features or upgrades. It just works, and I can play all of my media files without problem anywhere in the house.
I will say that I make a point of completely avoiding any DRM protection at the source, which makes things a lot easier. I'd advise everybody to do this. Instead of buying Apple's AAC files, buy CD's and rip them to MP3 (or Ogg if you prefer, but MP3 has greater hardware and software support, which I think is important). If you rip a DVD, make sure to strip the Macrovision and CSS, which most DVD rippers will do (go ahead and violate the DMCA - the DMCA violates fair use laws as it is). There are lots of ways to avoid DRM and this will help you avoid headaches later.
I would LOVE to see some evidence to back that up. I am not attacking your statement here, just saying that if true, its one of the most interesting things I have heard of in a long time.
It's sort of true, he just got the company and the game wrong. It was Dragon Quest, which is far more popular in Japan than it is in the United States, and hence people here confuse them all the time, because when you say the words "Japan" and "RPG" to someone in the west, they automatically think "Final Fantasy". It's not so in Japan (though both series are popular there, DQ is just that much moreso).
He also might have confused Squaresoft with Enix because they are now the same company. When this law was passed, however, they were separate and DQ was an Enix game.
As for Halo 2, honestly, there's a whole hell of a lot of misinformation out there about the sales numbers from people who don't have a clue. Yes, it's no doubt going to sell well. For an Xbox game. All of MS's public proclamations about Halo 2 preorders "breaking records", etc. have had that caveat.
GTA: Vice City sold 4.3 million copies in the first three days, mostly to preorders. GTA: San Andreas also had close to 5 million preorders. Contrast that with Halo 2's 1.5 million and you can see that it's not really a "record" of any sort.
The original Halo sold 5 million copies total, worldwide. Gran Turismo 3 sold 14 million copies worldwide, and that's not even the record (I believe the record is held by one of the Zelda titles, though I don't know what it is). There aren't 14 million Xboxes in the world today, so it would be pretty much close to impossible for Halo 2 to break any sales records even if every single Xbox owner bought it, and a fair number of people bought a new Xbox just to play Halo 2. And no game, however good it is, has 100% market penetration - not even the original Halo (I'm an Xbox owner and I don't own it, nor do I plan on buying Halo 2).
Just trying to bring in a little perspective here, to cut through a little of the hyperbole. You'd think Microsoft themselves had sponsored the article submission here, it's so full of it.
(Hyperbole, that is... though feel free to substitute other words in hyperbole's place.)
When did they do it the first time? I mean, did any of these people even play the first Halo? Cooperative play on the XBox was pretty cool, but other than that, it as a bland and boring game with bland and boring graphics, sounds, weapons, gameplay, etc.
I normally consider posts like these trolls, but I have to agree in this case. Some of Halo was pretty nice, but it was balanced by all the backtracking, by all the bland interior levels, and by a complete lack of consistency. Overall I don't see what's all that different about it than a lot of other mediocre sci-fi shooters.
Standards for FPS's on consoles are different, and lower. I think Xbox owners were also just happy as hell to have an FPS that looked as good as Halo did (for a console FPS), and that was good for a launch game. It's definitely way, way overrated though, and if the first game had come out at this point in the system's lifespan I doubt it'd make the same sort of splash. Of course, now it's got almost this mythical quality to it, so of course you get reviewers giving it 9s and 10s because hell, it's practically the same game, so people are going to have to love it just as much, right?
Well, I own an Xbox, and Halo 2 is not at the top of my wish list. FPS's belong on PC's anyway, with proper controls and higher detail levels (required for recognizing and then sniping distant enemies). Nuts to Bungie.
1. How often do you have difficulty hearing on a mobile phone?
Never.
First day as a cell phone owner, I assume?
2. How often have you seen this portrayed on TV and in film?
Never noticed.
Maybe you should get a decent phone.
Maybe you should quit being so condescending. This is a common complaint among cell phone owners, especially in the United States, which being a UK resident is obviously not something you can understand.
I've owned around 10 different cell phones in my life, from the top of the line to the bottom. Each successive generation has gotten steadily worse in terms of reception and call quality. What's more, any particular cell phone I've owned has seemed to get worse over time - leading me to believe the networks themselves are at least part of the problem, and not much is being done to address it.
Just to poke another hole in your misguided idea that all's right in the cellular service world, Sprint in the US bases their entire advertising campaign around the fact that other companies' customers are dissatisfied with their call quality. Their slogan is "Sprint PCS - where all your calls are clear." They've recently expanded their marketing campaign to include these camera phones, which is a bad sign for them if you ask me (not that I ever thought their call quality was any better than anyone else anyway, despite their marketing).
But the point is cellular service in this country sucks. As for whether it's been portrayed in film or TV, yes, I have seen it - it's actually a pretty common theme of the Fox show "24", where the fact that people can't either hear each other or connect via their cell phones is used repeatedly as a plot device. I'm actually seeing this more and more on TV and in movies (there was that movie "Cellular" which used this as well), so it's being noticed by the media, who I'm sure have plenty of problems themselves communicating via cell phone.
That's great to hear, but your claim is simply anecdotal evidence. A few posts up you'll see several knee-jerkers you apparently don't know saying that we'll be weaned off food and water and that we have no place to put the waste.
That doesn't make them leftists, and you're generalizing just the same as the original post.
After Three Mile Island, nearly all of the residents of Middletown, PA were opposed to nuclear power (as was much of the country). Does that automatically make all of these people "leftists"? These were gun-owning, Reagan-voting, pickup truck-driving people living in a rural community in Pennsylvania. Which doesn't automatically make them right-wing radicals either; but their anti-nuclear view sure doesn't automatically make them leftist.
TMI was the event that turned the tide against nuclear power in the United States. A good number of people here probably weren't even alive when it happened, which makes it easy for those people to pigeonhole those who were as "leftists". Add to that those with right-wing views who support nuclear power and think of anyone who disagrees with them on anything as borderline communist and you've got a hell of a lot of generalizing going on around here.
There are plenty of rational reasons to be against nuclear power that have nothing to do with whether you support gay marriage or a woman's right to choose or gun ownership rights or the death penalty. The reason why it's not popular in the US is safety, both from accidents and from sabotage. The industry has repeatedly told us it's safe - then TMI happened, then Chernobyl happened, then a series of accidents in Japan (one of which caused the evacuation of my wife's hometown). The most recent accident at a nuclear power plant was this year, so these are not problems that have been solved.
Then you've got terrorism, which is an unknown quantity but one you've now got to consider when designing and staffing nuclear plants.
Safety is not a partisan issue, and when you're talking nuclear power, even one incident can render a large swath of the country uninhabitable. This does not seem to be a reasonable risk. When you add to that the economic and political issues with building plants near populated areas (lowering property values, driving residents and businesses out of the area), you can see why you don't need to be a "leftist" in order to oppose nuclear energy.
b) it's going to take a while for your upload speeds to max out,
Er, I meant download speeds, obviously. And I even used the preview button!
Okay, maybe I'm just stupid, but I've tried torrents on a few different occasions, and have simply never been able to get it to work well. Just now, I tried one of the links posted elsewhere on this discussion, and maxed out at about 4 KB/s download. 138 hours to complete. And I'm on a fairly speedy connection (4MB down, 512K up), so it's not my network.
Well, it is your "network", just not in the way you mean.
Bittorrent is a peer-to-peer application. So you're a) not going to be able to download anything faster than other people who have the file can upload it, and b) it's going to take a while for your upload speeds to max out, based on your ability to establish connections with others who have the file fragments you need.
Typically bittorrent downloads start slow but then zoom up very quickly once you're 1% or so into the download. That's assuming there are enough seeds and peers, of course - on older or less popular files there may only be a few and your download will be slow all the way through. BT is much better to use for newer files than older files for this reason - though that's true to an extent for all P2P apps.
The first file I ever downloaded as a torrent was one of the Red Hat Linux distros - I remember getting about 2k/sec for about the first hour, then around 220k/sec consistently after that (which was my maximum bandwidth at the time).
I'm currently getting around 100k/sec each on the three Star Wars torrents. Which again, is around my max bandwidth. But it's fluctuating, because there aren't many seeds or peers for these files (they're big, and hosting a file requires you to leave your BT client open, which a lot of people don't do after their downloads are done).
Am I missing something stupid? Do I need to punch holes in my firewall? If so, how does one do that while still remaining secure (that is, what do I need to open, and how dangeroud is it)?
You need to open ports 6881-6889 at least. I'm no expert on network security but I do know that simply having open ports is not in itself a security risk. It's also what ports you have open that determine the level of risk. There's nothing that typically uses these ports other than bittorrent so if you don't have bittorrent running you can either a) close the ports again, or b) just not worry about it.
What I do is leave the ports open on my router to this specific PC on my network (using port forwarding) - they're open all the time - but then I also have the Windows Firewall set to keep the ports closed but make an exception for Azureus (my BT client). So, basically, the ports are closed to all my PC's but this one through my router, and they're only really open on this PC when I'm using Azureus.
His review should be the first place people go to when deciding whether to buy the 2004 release.
Well, the annoying thing to me is that even as a die-hard Star Wars fan who saw all of these movies in the theater when they were first released, the real improvements to the DVD's still make them no-brainers to pick up, even with the awful changes that come along with them. I mean are you really going to give up that obvious and drastic improvement in image quality (apparent in every single screenshot posted in these comparisons) because one or two questionable choices were made for each DVD?
Lucas is an idiot for butchering his own films but he's also a shrewd businessman, apparently. He didn't only make changes he knew nobody would like. He made changes he knew would be controversial but then he more than balanced them out with changes he knew most people wouldn't want to live without. Technically, these DVD's are the best Star Wars has ever looked, without question, and even most of the creative changes, though unnecessary, could be called improvements. The extra establishing shots of Bespin in Empire, for example - I mean that doesn't hurt the film at all, it gives it a better sense of scale. That's the kind of thing that I can believe Lucas did probably want to do originally but didn't have the budget for (unlike the changes to the ghosts at the end of Jedi, or Greedo shooting first).
But that's what makes these DVD's so frustrating. Because it's not a question of "do I buy them or not?" If you really like Star Wars you basically have to buy them; I mean it's almost stupid not to. But you've gotta be force-fed the bad with the good.
I'd have no real problem with these releases if only Lucas made the theatrical ones available also. I think a lot of people feel the same way. That's what Spielberg did with ET and while a lot of people made fun of his changes for the DVD release, there weren't the same howls as with Star Wars because you could just buy the set with the original version included if you wanted it. Lucas wouldn't have even need to make the same restorations as he did for what's on the DVDs as they are now - just dump the LD versions onto DVD as an "extra" and call it a day. We'd have been happy. I don't understand what his beef is with actually giving his fans what they want and that's mostly what pisses off so many people.
I suspect that "legal and management concerns" is shorthand for "legal was concerned that management was full of idiots".
And legal isn't?
I think you're giving them entirely too much credit. I think Darl probably just couldn't figure out how to get FrontPage to put the site up for him, and finally gave up.
Matt Drudge said he will run exit-polilng data through the day. He did during the 2002 election. The major networks agreed to stop doing this after the 2000 problems.
Matt Drudge is not running any exit polling. Matt Drudge is one guy; he doesn't have the power to do anything at all himself, and he has no organization. He's one guy (actually with another guy who helps him out) with a web site. That's it.
Drudge relies on polling data that he "obtains" from various sources, some of whom he names, some of whom he doesn't. Sometimes his exit polling data bears a resemblance to reality; usually, it's not even close. He had Bush up in Florida by something like 24 points in 2000 originally, and we all know how that turned out. In any case, it's not as if you can go to his site and expect to get nationwide exit polling - you'll see results for two counties in Ohio, three in Florida, one in Nebraska... that kind of thing. And he'll pick and choose to post only the polls he wants to post, either because he wants to turn out more pro-Bush voters in those areas or because he wants to show how far ahead Bush is and make the outcome seem inevitable. Some people who seem to think he's an unbiased source of news apparently don't realize he does these things, but he does. And he doesn't see anything wrong with it; he thinks he's just being an "editor".
There is no such thing as a reliable source of exit polling data in this country, and IMO there shouldn't be. There was a small controversy about this after the last election - a few people (like Drudge) questioning why they shouldn't post exit poll data in advance - but these people are mostly idiots who don't understand how an election actually works (again, like Drudge).
So you will not be able to get a "live tally" of the vote from overseas or anywhere else, because no such thing exists. The vote tallies are counted after the polls close, and are only then reported by each polling district. So you will not see any official numbers at all until the first polls close on the east coast - not sure exactly when that is, but probably around 7 PM EST.
If you do find anything on the net that claims to have election results or polling data prior to the polls closing, don't believe the results. Anyone can make up numbers and guys like Drudge are only too eager to post them without any verification at all (I half-believe he makes up some of his un-sourced numbers himself). If, at the end of the night, they don't match the official totals, they'll just say "oh well, samples don't always match the totals, etc. etc." when they could have just as easily just been pulling those numbers out of their asses.
People don't always answer truthfully in exit polls anyway. Our votes are supposed to be private and honestly, if somebody I didn't know asked me who I voted for outside a polling place, I probably would lie. It's none of their business who I voted for and how do I know who they say they are anyway? They could be working for the guy I voted against. They could be a group of drunken supporters of the other guy pretending to be pollsters and out to beat up people who voted for my candidate. I'd probably say I wrote somebody in.
Point is, exit polls are not reliable - they're not reliable even if they're real exit polls, and half of what you see on the net is made up anyway. This is why the major nets agreed not to rely on them so heavily anymore. Wait for the official results, which will come after the polls close.
Also, the article you mention is from someone that does NOT want to be recogonized by their iPod.. I would guess that's the minority.
I think the point is that fashion accessory or not, they're already passe in a lot of areas.
I live in NYC too and I agree with the OP; iPods are a dime a dozen around here. You end up looking more like a conformist walking around with one than anything else.
Which doesn't say anything about the quality of the device. It just says that this argument that people buy them to be "cool" doesn't really wash anymore, at least not in areas of the country where "cool" seems to even mean anything. (I'd imagine iPods are as ubiquitous in pretty much every large, cosmopolitan city these days.)
It's the same phenomenon as the cel phone. For the first few years they were expensive and exotic; if you had one, you showed it off. But at first, it was mainly a product for the elite. Eventually the prices came down to where at least the upper middle class could finally afford them, and Motorola's Startac both gave the cool kids a phone they could show off while simultaneously making cel phones a commodity. Nowadays, are you at all impressed whenever anybody whips out their shiny new clamshell phone? I'm not, and I doubt most people are - if anything you're probably annoyed at being bothered by the ringer or by the yapping going on next to you.
Apple's doing the same thing with the iPod. We've progressed past the point where iPods are considered "cool"; we're now to the point where they're almost boring, and are well on our way to the point where just seeing that white earbud cord looks pretentious and stupid.
I don't know if the whole mp3 player thing will play out exactly the way the cel phone thing did, but it's a pretty common pattern in technology - a product is invented, one company comes in and popularizes it with the kids, inadvertantly commoditizes it at the same time, and eventually loses market share as the whole category becomes passe and competitors take advantage.
This is obviously what Sony's counting on, and honestly, now that Sony's supporting mp3 natively (or said they're going to, at least), I'd probably rather have one of their somewhat more anonymous-looking Network Walkmans than an iPod. I don't think this stranglehold Apple has on the market is going to continue forever; somebody's just got to design a better product first. I don't think the iPod "brand" is as strong as Apple thinks it is, especially now that it's no longer as hip as it once was - their success right now is based on the fact that they've still got the product with the best combination of size, shape, and ease of use (though others may excel in one particular area, such as battery life, Apple's at least "pretty good" in all of them).
This U2 iPod's going to be a big dud. Pre-load it with all of their music for $350, then you've got something. But $50 off a $150 purchase, and it's $50 more expensive? Am I understanding that right? So in the end, you're basically just paying for a 20GB iPod, and the "box set" is another $100. How is this a good deal?
Photo iPod, also a dud. If you want to transport your photos around, you can do it just on your regular iPod (for like half the price). Who really wants to pay extra so they can look at photos on that tiny little screen? I may as well just carry my digital camera around and leave them all on that.
The regular iPods will continue being the bread and butter for the iPod line.
But virtual memory, multitasking, and protected memory ultimately have quite a lot to do with the user interface. Virtual memory allows a user to run a great many programs at once, without having to worry too much about cleaning up-- no need to close the web browser before writing a letter; no need to worry about memory fragmentation.
...
Protected memory ensures that if a misbehaving program crashes, the entire system isn't brought to a screaming halt.
As for multitasking-- the macs used to feature cooperative multitasking-- wherein each program would voluntarily give up control of the system.
You're missing the point. Not one of these things has anything to do with the user interface. User experience, yes, but the user interface is a subset of the overall user experience that these technical matters have nothing to do with.
The user interface is simply the method with which humans interact with a device. Whether the multitasking is done cooperatively or not makes no difference to the user interface - to the user, they click an icon and a new application runs in either case.
Mac OS X is a far more advanced OS than Mac OS 9. But what does that really mean as far as the user interface? I know people who use Macs that complain that things they've done a certain way for years were just arbitrarily changed in OS X. I know designers at my place of work who refuse to install OS X because it forces them to waste time re-learning the system. I don't honestly know how valid those concerns are, but the fact that they are concerns at all suggests something about the UI in OS X. (Or maybe it suggests something about people who use Macs.)
Can someone elaborate on how shot noise applies to optical systems, specifically, cinematography? Since the original source material is conventional 'analog' film, at what point is the noise introduced? How is it introduced?
Well, it's all explained in the article. And you've got half the answer yourself. But I'll try to explain further...
(Yes I realize that film is not a pure analog format; the resolution being limited by the grain size of the emulsion - but at the same time, it's not what we consider digital.)
Film grain itself is a noise component. Film grains are nothing more than crystals sensitive to a particular light wavelength. In commonly used 35mm film stocks, there are three layers of emulsion - one red, one green, one blue. Think of the grains as "pixels", although they're somewhat randomly distributed, they're not all of a uniform size, and they're not all uniformly sensitive to light. The end result is that the minute differences between adjacent grains makes them easily discernible on a theatrical-size screen, and somewhat visible on a large TV set. They appear as noise.
Optical effects also involve compositing several layers of film on top of each other. According to the article, the light saber scenes were the worst. I'd imagine at that time, shooting a light saber duel probably involved three layers of film; the master shot and one optical shot for each light saber. Obviously this triples your noise and also softens the image. It can also introduce color casts because the light is being altered through each layer of film.
As films age, chemical reactions also cause color shifts in the grains. This can lead to even more noise.
Films also get just plain dirty over time. The Star Wars negatives have been handled a lot, so they're probably dirtier than most. 35mm not being very big, when you blow it up onto a theater screen or even a TV set, a small layer of dust or tiny particles of dirt will add a lot of crud to the image.
The software they used to clean up these films apparently works by comparing each frame of film to the frame before and the frame after, to see what's picture information and what's noise (random noise will be easy for a computer to pick out, because it will not match at all from one frame to the next). It should have no problem removing both film grain and dirt, as well as other types of noise.
I'd imagine they must have manually isolated each individual edit in the film to reduce errors, but this wouldn't have been that big a deal in the grand scheme of things. There's probably only maybe a couple thousand cuts per film (assuming a high average of 5-10 cuts per minute), so it wouldn't take more than a couple days for one person to do this.
They need to figure out how to better keep intact the lines of communication, but also how to operate more effictively in a disconnected mode
If you'd read page 5 of the article, you'd know that they fought pretty damn well in "disconnected mode". The battle mentioned as being a "bloody hell" in the original post was a bloody hell for the Iraqis, not the Americans. The Americans only had 8 wounded, and none seriously. This despite being almost totally isolated and without real-time information.
There is no substitute for good training and good equipment, and that's what won the battle that day. The danger, and this is how the article concludes, is that the plan is a total change of the structure and equipment of the army in order to take advantage of this new technology, and if the technology then fails, watch out. The Americans succeeded in the battle on that bridge because they had their M-1 tanks that were able to take out vehicle after vehicle while absorbing Iraqi fire - in the new networked army, heavy tanks will play little or no role and the army will really be little more than roving bands of lightly armed and lightly armored guys carrying PDA's.
The idea is if everybody knows where everybody is all the time, there's no need to travel in these long armored columns, there's no need for heavy armor to spearhead a major battle and there's no need for lengthy and vulnerable supply lines. When massive numbers are needed to counteract an enemy force, these smaller units can quickly swarm from all directions to surprise, surround and kill that force, coordinated with air support that's got the same info as the ground units. The problem is, if everybody in such an army doesn't know where everybody else is, then you're back to simply being completely outnumbered by an enemy who's no worse off for real-time info than you are.
This new, networked army is one of those ideas that sounds good on paper (and it's the idea the Republicans have latched onto), but will probably never really work in practice - every war is different, and every layer of technology you add is simply one more thing with the potential to break. Technology will continue to play a major role in the future, and new weapons will continue to be developed - time marches forward, not backward. But in the end, when you're talking killing somebody or destroying a vehicle in a straight fight, the guy with the bigger gun, the thicker armor and the better training is the guy who's going to win. And the advantages of networking are really limited when you're talking about insurgencies, when you've got basically civilians just leaving explosive devices on the side of the road to get run over by the next passing Humvee, or guys who open fire from an otherwise nondescript house or building.
I think the Iraq war will temper some of the rush in transforming the army, because the only thing that saved us in Iraq was the fact that we were fighting such a poorly trained and poorly equipped force. If we start downgrading our reliable weapons and armor in favor of unreliable technology, we're going to be in a heap of trouble. I think the way things are going now with the insurgency basically prove that we need more guys than we have at the moment, not less, and this article basically proves that we won the war initially despite the technology, not because of it.
Where did you get NDS has 11 hours of battery life? Last I see some info it was 6-8 or somewhere.
From Nintendo's web site:
"Battery & Power Management: Lithium ion battery delivering 6 to 10 hours of play on a four-hour charge, depending on use. The battery is rechargeable and the unit features a low-energy-consumption design. The DS also has Power Management functions of Sleep mode and Standby mode. In Sleep mode, players can stop and resume game play whenever they like. AC adapter."
So low end is six, high end is ten, both a far cry from the two that Sony's shooting for (and I have a feeling it'll be more like "up to two hours").
Sorry, but two hours is not long enough for a handheld gaming machine. It just isn't. A lot of people's commutes are longer than that, let alone airplane flights, day trips with the kids, or whatever. Imagine taking this thing with you to use on your trip to school or work and having to recharge it every day.
No handheld has ever succeeded with that level of battery life, and lots of them have failed as a direct result of it.
I haven't encoded to mp3 for years. All my CDs are ripped to high-bitrate Ogg Vorbis format, it sounds better than mp3 and Ogg has no silly patent issues.
Eh, I took one of those double-blind listening tests and I couldn't tell the difference. All the codecs sounded good to me and I usually consider myself pretty anal about these things. Almost half the time I couldn't even pick out which was the original and which was the compressed version, in any format (sometimes it was obvious, but sometimes not).
I don't think Vorbis' tiny advantage in sound quality (which would be easily overcome just by using a higher bit rate) outweighs MP3's standardization. I mean argue all you want about open-source, about patents or whatever, I'm talking about practical usage here. I can buy any device out there - even Sony, soon - and know that it plays MP3 files. I don't know why you'd use anything else given how close most of these codecs are to each other.
There are some serious flaws in these results showing a drop on mp3 use, many of which have already been pointed out. The biggest one to me, though, is that mp3's are just far more portable. Download a wma file and what the heck are most people going to do with it? Pretty much your only choice is to keep it on the one machine you've downloaded it onto, unless you strip the DRM or unless you've got one of the six portable players that supports it.
I have four PC's in my house and I have all of my music on two of them and a lot of my music on a third. That's using mp3. So sure, at some point if I want my disk space back I may delete a few off one of my hard drives. That doesn't mean I'm using mp3 less, that just means the format has given me the freedom to choose where I want to have my music and when I want to have it on a particular device.
If there's any decline in the total number of mp3's on hard drives, it's probably people like me who have ripped their entire collection from CD, thrown the resulting files on pretty much every PC and portable device they own and are now consolidating. There was that initial rush to rip everything once mp3 became popular, and now that's pretty much done. It's a natural process. But there's no way anybody's using mp3 any less than they were, and that in no way suggests that mp3's are more disposable. I'll take my pristine and clean 320kbps VBR mp3 files over Apple's ridiculous DRM-encrusted 128k AAC files any day of the week!
It's not dramatically buggier than Fatigue Madden.
It is in franchise mode, which is full of game-stopping bugs. It's really a disaster of a game if you plan to play on franchise, because you never know when you're going to get stuck without being able to pass the draft, or when your game's going to freeze because of a corrupted playbook, or during SportsCenter, or whatever. I've personally experienced several of these bugs and in fact I can no longer use my own franchise's playbook. Reverting to an older save doesn't work, and there's no way to recover a corrupted playbook, nor can you re-import the messed up plays. All you can do is just use a generic playbook or one from another team.
Luckily I have not yet experienced the draft bug, which from what I understand means your franchise is basically over (or at least that you can never use the draft again; apparently the game will freeze at the same point from then on, no matter what). But franchise mode really is a big mess. A word to the wise: never, ever substitute anybody using the substitution feature in a game during franchise mode. This is what corrupts your playbooks. Use the depth chart instead. Of course, this means you can only do global subs; the actual sub feature is totally broken.
Online play could be a different matter. But the bugs in franchise mode are substantially worse than anything found in Madden. The fatigue bug is nothing compared to a bug that wipes out years worth of franchise play.
you want a solution? hell, i'm having trouble understanding your question!
He basically wants a music server, and he apparently wants it to be as complicated as possible, and he wants to run it on an 8088.
This isn't the first time the music server question has come up here, and the questioners always seem to want to make it as hard on themselves as possible. They want a text-based interface, they want to be able to rip and burn, they want Linux, and they want to do it all on a hacked HP calculator or something.
I've got a media server that I cobbled together out of old spare parts, combined with a new hard drive and a new case. Whole thing cost me about $200 for the new parts and I've got a reasonably nice machine that hosts my music, movies, and photos. I have it set to auto-logon to Windows XP (with a username and password) and then launch iTunes and Media Portal (an OSS media center clone) with a girder plugin for my remote control. Then I've got a bunch of options. I can access that PC directly through my TV using Media Portal and play music with my remote control. I can carry my laptop anywhere in the house and control that PC through Windows' own remote desktop connection. Or I can use it as a real music server and stream music through iTunes over my wireless LAN, playing it on my laptop or whatever else I'm using.
iTunes will also rip and burn, which was another listed requirement.
My advice to anyone who wants to do this - build or buy a cheap, mostly second-hand PC. Along with whatever new hardware you buy, pick up an OEM copy of Windows XP for cheap at a site like Newegg.com. Install iTunes, install Media Portal, put them both in your startup folder. Import all your music into both apps and enjoy.
Very simple and very powerful. Not expensive either.
Washington Post has an article about former TIA personnel moving their data mining operations offshore (Bahamas) to escape U.S. privacy rules, and to make a buck. I'm waiting for somebody to publish the private data (financial, medical, legal) of federal officials and their families on an open internet web server out of the Bahamas. Is this what it will take for the US to enact stringent privacy rules?
Does this make any sense to anyone?
These companies are moving offshore to escape US privacy laws. So the solution is for the US to enact tougher privacy laws? Wouldn't that just encourage even more companies to move offshore?
I would think the solution would be one of those worldwide initiatives that people around here seem so fond of. (That's sarcasm, if you couldn't detect it.) If a company's moving offshore to escape one country's laws, the only real solution is for that other country and all the other countries around it to enact the same laws. Right?