If you're just looking for cheap prints and don't care about quality, why didn't you mention dot matrix printers as well?
Laserjets are built to be fast and cheap to operate! What are you trying to prove? Comparing a used monochrome garage sale laserjet with a refurbed cardtridge to a retail color inkjet with retail cardtridges is silly on it's own. Comparing them for photo output is asinine. The best color laserjet's can't touch even the mid range inkjets for quality. Period.
Nice that you left the cost of powering the laserjet versus the inkjet out of the equation as well!
Phantom missed the title of first on demand service by at least 20 odd years.
Here comes the hertz gang again :\
on
Where's My 10 Ghz PC?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Which processor outperforms which:
1a)486-25SX 1b)486-25DX
2a)PIII - 450 2b)G4 - 450
3a)G3 - 300 3b)Playstation 2 - 300
Moral of the story : there are far, far more important performance measurements than clock frequency. If you think otherwise, you might as well slap a VTEC sticker on your case.
P.S. As other's have pointed out, Moors law has nothing to do cpu frequency.
Oh please, that is so lame. What next, because people J-walk, even though they know it's illegal, you'll call it civil disobedience? How about : they don't think it's a big deal, and doubt they'll get caught.
People "pirate" music because they don't think it's a big deal, and they don't think they'll get caught, not because they are protesting high CD prices and copyright law. Why do you have to pretend that they belong to some big cause? Most people don't give a crap about copyright law. Maybe you do it as a form of civil disobedience, but don't make your gang look bigger than it really is.
Modern units can do better than the 25ms refresh time of yesterday's screens. Besides, that adds up to 40fps, which exceeds TV's ~30fps.
60 fields a second for interlaced display. So while it's not 60 full frames, it is refreshing 60 times per second. Besides, an HDTV CRT would be displaying in 480p, which is 60 full frames/second.
Now how can a CRT have better picture quality than plasma, but plasma have a better resolution making it better for HDTV?
When did resolution come to equal picture quality? What about color accuracy for example? Besides, by definition, the set has to display both 720p and 1080i to be an HDTV (or hd ready). HD CRTs do. Have you ever seen an HD broadcast on an HD Tube?
The fact is that this article is all hype.
No, they make a fair assertion. The last half of the article is crap, but CRT still offers better quality than Plasma or LCD.
It "was altered"? By who? The cavemen? Or was it the vast civilization of the woolly mammoth
You point out what you think is bad wording in the submission, yet ask if cavemen or mammoths altered the environment, 5200 years ago?!
5,200 years ago would be just slightly before 1st dynasty egypt, not pre-historic cave men in giant mammoth land. Actually it would be intersting if this climate change was the catalyst to lower and upper egypt uniting, after all, there would have been only roughly 100 years between the climate changes and the beginning of Menes' reign.
I don't think the the wording is bad at all ; a volcano can alter the climate suddenly, a tidal wave can as well. If you associate alteration of the climate with human or mammoth intervention that's your interpretation and not the author's fault.
"What about if you throw in KDE or GNOME, Mozilla, etc, everything that you'd have to add to really equal the features of Windows XP...."
Why do you assume that a system even needs a GUI or Browser? Not all systems are desktops. GUIs and Browser are not server "features", heck, they have NO place on a production server at all. Period.
Why don't we throw KDE and Mozilla into the mix... because we don't HAVE to. Microsoft made the ill conceived decision to integrate a poorly designed browser into their operating system. Other's should not have to suffer as a result. Likewise, they decided that the OS should be dependant on the GUI. They made the choice to NOT be able to remove these items. They can lie in that bed now.
So, your comment has shown, that apart from being well coded, Linux (and BSD etc.) also soundly designed. Unlike what our simian friends at MS dish out.
I suppose you say GNU/Linux, even in idle converstaion? And you never omit Microsoft when referring to Windows?
I have never heard anyone refer to LEGO bricks as such, until now. Nor have I failed to understand what was being referred to when someone says Lego. Maybe LEGO needs to get over itself.
Maybe the poster doesn't speak english as a first language? I doubt that you would pick on a lifetime C developer if he mangled FORTRAN, especially if he'd only had a few hours exposure to it.
Personally, I'm glad that *most* people aren't as picky as a compiler.
It could be. Windows in theory could be as secure as OpenVMS. The NT security model is very powerful (thanks to ex-digital employees!) but the stuff around it makes the system a joke. Two major problems:
1) Microsoft : Their blind persuit of dominance leads to stupid design, such as integrating a browser.
2) Unknowledgable Users: Users running with admin privlidges. Micorosft does nothing to prevent this misguided practice. They often instigate or even require running with those privlidges. A big step they could have taken with SP2 would have been to audit and warn user about admin accounts. Many problems would be solved. But they chose ease of use over security and implemented it very poorly. What good is a wicked ACL when your primary user has all permissions!?
" If all windows systems were taken offline then almost all viruses and the like would disappear almost immediately along with spambots and other unpleasent creations of the black hat fraternity. "
Take the Windows systems offline, and the users will still be ignorant of proper system administration practices. It wouldn't be any better world with millions of users running as root on $DISTRO. They are after all half the problem.
Let say we're in suburbia. 3 Meters (~9feet) in front of you a two year old child and an English sheep dog run into the street. You cannot avoid hitting one. Do you want a car choosing for you? Would it assume a larger target is the worst one to hit? Would it choose to hit another vehicle to avoid a person?
Automation is not the way to prevent accidents. Punish idiotic and ignorant driver behaviour if you want safer roads. The article talks about how each car signals the others as to it's intention. We already have a way to let other cars know are intentions, they are called signal lights. Enforce people using them if you want to make the roads safe.
Do not allow someone who has been caught DUI to ever operate a motor vehicle again. Do not allow drivers to perform tasks that remove their attention from the task at hand, especially non-handfree cellphones. There are so many things that could be done.
There are alot of drivers on the road who should not be allowed to drive. This doesn't mean that we should build a vehicle for them to have as their own. Take the licenses away from them, and let them use alternative means of travel. Treat a driver's license like a professional license for a change. It should identify a person's competence, not only their permission to operate a vehicle. It's not a right to have one after all, it's a privilege.
That's great unless you're the car the legally entered the intersection to perform a left turn, and are still in the intersection when the opposite lights turn green.
Besides, there is a lot of potential for crosswalk fodder : unless these cars know how to identify pedestrian intentions, or we hook everyone up with some means of automated identification. Maybe RFID?!:)
Keep track of the troublemakers. If a student gets suspended for skipping, violence or something similar, tag em. Make it clear that students who break the rules x number of times will be tagged. Give them room to make mistakes, but make it understood that if they make too many, part of the punishment is intrusive observation.
Likewise, I'd love to see convicted criminals tagged in someway. Wouldn't it be nice if store owners could identify convicted shoplifters when they enter the store? Sell a consumer scanner that will tell you if a convicted murderer or rapist is nearby when you go for your jog. Or if they are on your property! If your car alarm could sound when a car thief tag is nearby for too long.
I know, there is too much potential for abuse. A man can dream though. And it would sure beat "that guy looks shady" as a method of identifying potential criminals:)
Altavista had won that war one upon a time, Yahoo had one that war too at one point. Altavista and Yahoo also eventually lost their wars : right about the point they thought no one else could keep up and they stopped innovating.
If MS trying to get back into the search business only serves to push Goggle to continue to innovate, we should thank them for that. Or if they come out with a better product, hey, shouldn't we thank them for that too? If all of these company shared your "Who needs another search engine" philosophy, there never would have been a google to be content with.
First off, impressive statistics, although maybe a little off...
the odds that you'll create a valid cube combination by moving stickers is slim.
Let me get this straight : you remove all of the stickers from the cube. Then take all of the red ones, stick them on one side of the cube, each on one square. Then take the white stickers, and put them on another side. Repeat with the remaining colors, placing them on unoccupied sides. You're saying the odds of doing this sucessfully is slim?
Dude, you may have serious hand-eye problems, such a blindness.
Even if you make all faces solid color
Unless the glue dries out, you poke yourself to death with the implement that you removed the stickers with or you're utterly incompetent, the odds of success are pretty high.
the chances that the internals of the cube correctly representing the face colors is slim.
That's not the point of Rubik's cube. The point is to get the same colors on the same side. Without using the above process.
Moral of the story : Math does not apply to cheaters.
Toys represent everything that's wrong with modern western civilization. They enforce the notion that there is a difference between "work" and "play".
Welcome back Mr. Katz, glad to see you're well, and that you've moved on from Columbine and 9/11. One question, are toys are ok for eastern civilization? I hear they have toys there too.
Toys are an artificial construct popularized by the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations in the late 1800's. The inherent psychological principle is that if you mentally dissociate your job from the context of your normal life, then you are willing to put up with a constant low level of dissatisfaction in exchange for a reward of "play time" or "toys".
Toys have been around for centuries, we've found them buried in ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, Germany, England etc. Rockefeler and Carnegie may be attributed with many things, but not the invention of Toys.
The two specific toys mentioned in the writeup were Rubik's Cube and a gyroscope. Rubik's cube help children to develop many analytical and mechanical skills . Gyroscopes hopefully at least impart some scientific curiosity. Which certainly outweigh any of the nefarious plots that you imply.
Thus, by encouraging your children to "play", you are psychologically destroying them and reducing their future potential to that of an assembly line worker.
Repeat that to yourself three times, then open your eyes and look where you posted this. Hint : News for nerds, stuff that matters? Geeks live here? Dreamers. Peolpe who think outside the box. We've likely all had lots of toys in our lives. Lot of rocket scientists and starship captains, not too damn many assebly line workers though. Christ, this place is chock full of people who work for FREE, where the only reward is a job well done! You might want to either rethink your theory or put it somewhere that is not self defeating.
People endure 40-60 hours of pure crap every week of their lives with the dubious reward of "vacation", or a nice car, or time to watch TV as their only reward. Toys simply lay the groundwork for this type of pathological motivation.
People "endure" pure crap for 40-60 hours a week so that they can enjoy the dubious rewards of food, shelter and clothing.
What's the solution for this madness? Teach your children to enjoy working hard to accomplish their independent goals. Learning and discovery and adventure are rewarding without the need for false constructs...
Absolutely important lessons to teach your children. This has nothing to do with toys. Toys can and have been valuable learning tools for children. Toys help and encourage childern to learn and discover. Allow them to "live" adventures they otherwise could not. Same with adults too.
I must say that I feel sorry for your (maybe furture) children if this is truely your attitude. I don't know who shaved your GI Joe's head, but you might want to rethink your philosophy before robbing them of an important learning and development tool.
... but I do agree that a major part of it is that IE is still so common so it's an easier target.
The other school of thought is that IE is such an easy target that it's common to exploit it. That's the one I subscribe to. Easy because it's poorly designed, easy because it's integrated, easy because just about every damned Windows user has their account in the Administrator group, if it's not the administator account iteslf and easy because the end user generally does not realise how much maintenance a computer needs, or even how to perform it. Regardless of how many people use IE, it's an easy target. Widely used is a bonus.
This is another point. There aren't a great deal of features that customers "want" that would attract them to switch. Firefox's real strength (in my opinion) is that it has features you that you never thought about, but that keep you from switching back
Up until recently not many non-geeks had probably heard of it, except maybe mentioned by a geek-type. But it's starting to be mentioned more and more in the media, so MS are understandably wanting to stop people making the initial switch.
Great Point. People would realise that these features existed if they had to find a browser on their own, rather than having one included with the OS. Geeks aren't necessarily aware of these features because they are geeks : all of the Linux/BSD/VMS/BeOS etc. geeks drove innovation in the other browsers because they had to choose anything but IE. All of the other browsers have to compete with each other, since, not only do the end user have a choice, they HAVE to choose.
Besides, many Windows users simply equate "The Internet" with "Internet Explorer" - or, more likely, with "The Blue e Icon". They're not looking for anything different because they don't even know that there are alternatives.
For each one of those there are 2 people who don't switch because IE is already there. This was ceratinly more the case before broadband internet access from home : integrated browser or download Netscape at 2.2Kbps. Yummy. Bandwidth aside, even today, if you start with a fresh install of Windows 98/ME/2000/XP, and have no other software on hand, you still NEED IE to get Firefox, Opera or any other browser. Unless you are aware of command line ftp, or you're very savy with Telnet which the vast majority of end users are not.
That would be the case if we'd have stopped at ASCII text files for documentation. But as storage and processing power increase, we step up to the plate to fill it. From simple text, to PDFs and images and embedded video. From simple hypertext pages, to Flash and Embedded MIDI and VRML.
Multimedia grows significantly : NTSC PVR requirements now are nothing compared to HDTV requirements, forget whatever we dream up in the next 20 years.
Games take as much storage as a couple of hours of motion video.
Microsoft Products balloon out of control.
Look at the rate of growth of the Linux kernel source in the past 10 years!
The only thing that's changed : people get rid of less to make room.
And this was despite the fact that the PS2 didn't have a single decent launch game.
You mean besides SSX, Madden and Time Splitters? It didn't have many launch titles, but most were good. We're talking about, at the time, a next generation console with a few decent launch titles, that blows away previous consoles, that you can play PS1 games on AND use as a DVD player with optical out. That at the time would cost as much as an old console + a DVD player. Why on earth would anyone want that in time for Christmas?
I personally maintain several Linux/*BSD boxes internally, there are quite a few employees running some flavor of linux on their desktop, usually Mandrake, SuSE or RedHat/Fedora (there are even corporate images of a couple of distros) and there is a fairly large open source team here. While on some level what your wife says might have some truth, you shouldn't paint the whole company with the same brush.
Essentially, the objection to this is, as with the RIAA suits, that they are attempting to solve a problem of massive civil disobediance by going after a few peple and making examples of them with disproportional punishments.
Oh good lord, movie piracy has nothing to do with civil disobedience. It's a large mix of a) People who don't even know it's wrong. b) People who know it's illegal, but much like j-walking don't care, or don't think they'll get caught, so it's worth the risk. c) Minors who don't realise that the law applies to them too or d)The people who are either b or c, and want an excuse. What the MPAA is doing is applying the law to those who are breaking it. Bravo for them.
millions of people are breaking the law, and we can solve this by taking a couple of hundred of them and fucking them over in a way they nowhere near deserve, in order to scare everybody else.
The penalties for copyright infringement have been well know for a long time and the MPAA has always been good at letting the consumer know what the penalties are. Just because the digital age has made it much easier to violate copyrights does not make it more legal. People don't do it because they are making a point, they do it because they don't think they'll get caught and don't want to pay for the product.
Retail DVD movie prices have dropped steadily since I purchased my first player in 1998. I can now buy a movie for less than it would cost to buy two tickets and a bag of popcorn at the theater, they even come with tons of extra content. Or I can rent it for next to nothing. These people are too cheap to buy the movie, AND too CHEAP AND LAZY to rent it and return it. So I say, sue away MPAA, that's what the law is there for!
If you have a complaint, complain about the methods the MPAA and RIAA use to discover the accused infringers. But don't whine about them having a law enforced.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're just looking for cheap prints and don't care about quality, why didn't you mention dot matrix printers as well?
Laserjets are built to be fast and cheap to operate! What are you trying to prove? Comparing a used monochrome garage sale laserjet with a refurbed cardtridge to a retail color inkjet with retail cardtridges is silly on it's own. Comparing them for photo output is asinine. The best color laserjet's can't touch even the mid range inkjets for quality. Period.
Nice that you left the cost of powering the laserjet versus the inkjet out of the equation as well!
Maybe that's why they say "IE6 running on XP SP2?" There's nothing to say MS didn't introduce a ton of new eploits with a service pack.
Phantom missed the title of first on demand service by at least 20 odd years.
Which processor outperforms which:
1a)486-25SX
1b)486-25DX
2a)PIII - 450
2b)G4 - 450
3a)G3 - 300
3b)Playstation 2 - 300
Moral of the story : there are far, far more important performance measurements than clock frequency. If you think otherwise, you might as well slap a VTEC sticker on your case.
P.S. As other's have pointed out, Moors law has nothing to do cpu frequency.
"Yeah, that's called civil disobedience."
Oh please, that is so lame. What next, because people J-walk, even though they know it's illegal, you'll call it civil disobedience? How about : they don't think it's a big deal, and doubt they'll get caught.
People "pirate" music because they don't think it's a big deal, and they don't think they'll get caught, not because they are protesting high CD prices and copyright law. Why do you have to pretend that they belong to some big cause? Most people don't give a crap about copyright law. Maybe you do it as a form of civil disobedience, but don't make your gang look bigger than it really is.
60 fields a second for interlaced display. So while it's not 60 full frames, it is refreshing 60 times per second. Besides, an HDTV CRT would be displaying in 480p, which is 60 full frames/second.
Now how can a CRT have better picture quality than plasma, but plasma have a better resolution making it better for HDTV?When did resolution come to equal picture quality? What about color accuracy for example? Besides, by definition, the set has to display both 720p and 1080i to be an HDTV (or hd ready). HD CRTs do. Have you ever seen an HD broadcast on an HD Tube?
The fact is that this article is all hype.No, they make a fair assertion. The last half of the article is crap, but CRT still offers better quality than Plasma or LCD.
Interplay's site has been down for a couple of months at least, well before we got a hold of them.
I'm hoping Volition Inc. can get the rights back to Freespace. Maybe we'll see a #3 after all!
I hear the Stargate and slavery on Abydos were far worse though.
You point out what you think is bad wording in the submission, yet ask if cavemen or mammoths altered the environment, 5200 years ago?!
5,200 years ago would be just slightly before 1st dynasty egypt, not pre-historic cave men in giant mammoth land. Actually it would be intersting if this climate change was the catalyst to lower and upper egypt uniting, after all, there would have been only roughly 100 years between the climate changes and the beginning of Menes' reign.
I don't think the the wording is bad at all ; a volcano can alter the climate suddenly, a tidal wave can as well. If you associate alteration of the climate with human or mammoth intervention that's your interpretation and not the author's fault.
You can cut your power bill in HALF, just by shutting off your workstation. Christ, what are you running, a PDP11?
"What about if you throw in KDE or GNOME, Mozilla, etc, everything that you'd have to add to really equal the features of Windows XP...."
Why do you assume that a system even needs a GUI or Browser? Not all systems are desktops. GUIs and Browser are not server "features", heck, they have NO place on a production server at all. Period.
Why don't we throw KDE and Mozilla into the mix... because we don't HAVE to. Microsoft made the ill conceived decision to integrate a poorly designed browser into their operating system. Other's should not have to suffer as a result. Likewise, they decided that the OS should be dependant on the GUI. They made the choice to NOT be able to remove these items. They can lie in that bed now.
So, your comment has shown, that apart from being well coded, Linux (and BSD etc.) also soundly designed. Unlike what our simian friends at MS dish out.
I suppose you say GNU/Linux, even in idle converstaion? And you never omit Microsoft when referring to Windows?
I have never heard anyone refer to LEGO bricks as such, until now. Nor have I failed to understand what was being referred to when someone says Lego. Maybe LEGO needs to get over itself.
Maybe the poster doesn't speak english as a first language? I doubt that you would pick on a lifetime C developer if he mangled FORTRAN, especially if he'd only had a few hours exposure to it.
Personally, I'm glad that *most* people aren't as picky as a compiler.
It could be. Windows in theory could be as secure as OpenVMS. The NT security model is very powerful (thanks to ex-digital employees!) but the stuff around it makes the system a joke. Two major problems:
1) Microsoft : Their blind persuit of dominance leads to stupid design, such as integrating a browser.
2) Unknowledgable Users: Users running with admin privlidges. Micorosft does nothing to prevent this misguided practice. They often instigate or even require running with those privlidges. A big step they could have taken with SP2 would have been to audit and warn user about admin accounts. Many problems would be solved. But they chose ease of use over security and implemented it very poorly. What good is a wicked ACL when your primary user has all permissions!?
" If all windows systems were taken offline then almost all viruses and the like would disappear almost immediately along with spambots and other unpleasent creations of the black hat fraternity. "
Take the Windows systems offline, and the users will still be ignorant of proper system administration practices. It wouldn't be any better world with millions of users running as root on $DISTRO. They are after all half the problem.
Let say we're in suburbia. 3 Meters (~9feet) in front of you a two year old child and an English sheep dog run into the street. You cannot avoid hitting one. Do you want a car choosing for you? Would it assume a larger target is the worst one to hit? Would it choose to hit another vehicle to avoid a person?
Automation is not the way to prevent accidents. Punish idiotic and ignorant driver behaviour if you want safer roads. The article talks about how each car signals the others as to it's intention. We already have a way to let other cars know are intentions, they are called signal lights. Enforce people using them if you want to make the roads safe.
Do not allow someone who has been caught DUI to ever operate a motor vehicle again. Do not allow drivers to perform tasks that remove their attention from the task at hand, especially non-handfree cellphones. There are so many things that could be done.
There are alot of drivers on the road who should not be allowed to drive. This doesn't mean that we should build a vehicle for them to have as their own. Take the licenses away from them, and let them use alternative means of travel. Treat a driver's license like a professional license for a change. It should identify a person's competence, not only their permission to operate a vehicle. It's not a right to have one after all, it's a privilege.
That's great unless you're the car the legally entered the intersection to perform a left turn, and are still in the intersection when the opposite lights turn green.
:)
Besides, there is a lot of potential for crosswalk fodder : unless these cars know how to identify pedestrian intentions, or we hook everyone up with some means of automated identification. Maybe RFID?!
OK I'll RTFA now.
Keep track of the troublemakers. If a student gets suspended for skipping, violence or something similar, tag em. Make it clear that students who break the rules x number of times will be tagged. Give them room to make mistakes, but make it understood that if they make too many, part of the punishment is intrusive observation.
:)
Likewise, I'd love to see convicted criminals tagged in someway. Wouldn't it be nice if store owners could identify convicted shoplifters when they enter the store? Sell a consumer scanner that will tell you if a convicted murderer or rapist is nearby when you go for your jog. Or if they are on your property! If your car alarm could sound when a car thief tag is nearby for too long.
I know, there is too much potential for abuse. A man can dream though. And it would sure beat "that guy looks shady" as a method of identifying potential criminals
Altavista had won that war one upon a time, Yahoo had one that war too at one point. Altavista and Yahoo also eventually lost their wars : right about the point they thought no one else could keep up and they stopped innovating.
If MS trying to get back into the search business only serves to push Goggle to continue to innovate, we should thank them for that. Or if they come out with a better product, hey, shouldn't we thank them for that too? If all of these company shared your "Who needs another search engine" philosophy, there never would have been a google to be content with.
First off, impressive statistics, although maybe a little off...
the odds that you'll create a valid cube combination by moving stickers is slim.Let me get this straight : you remove all of the stickers from the cube. Then take all of the red ones, stick them on one side of the cube, each on one square. Then take the white stickers, and put them on another side. Repeat with the remaining colors, placing them on unoccupied sides. You're saying the odds of doing this sucessfully is slim?
Dude, you may have serious hand-eye problems, such a blindness.
Even if you make all faces solid colorUnless the glue dries out, you poke yourself to death with the implement that you removed the stickers with or you're utterly incompetent, the odds of success are pretty high.
the chances that the internals of the cube correctly representing the face colors is slim.That's not the point of Rubik's cube. The point is to get the same colors on the same side. Without using the above process.
Moral of the story : Math does not apply to cheaters.
Toys represent everything that's wrong with modern western civilization. They enforce the notion that there is a difference between "work" and "play".
Welcome back Mr. Katz, glad to see you're well, and that you've moved on from Columbine and 9/11. One question, are toys are ok for eastern civilization? I hear they have toys there too.
Toys are an artificial construct popularized by the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations in the late 1800's. The inherent psychological principle is that if you mentally dissociate your job from the context of your normal life, then you are willing to put up with a constant low level of dissatisfaction in exchange for a reward of "play time" or "toys".
Toys have been around for centuries, we've found them buried in ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, Germany, England etc. Rockefeler and Carnegie may be attributed with many things, but not the invention of Toys.
The two specific toys mentioned in the writeup were Rubik's Cube and a gyroscope. Rubik's cube help children to develop many analytical and mechanical skills . Gyroscopes hopefully at least impart some scientific curiosity. Which certainly outweigh any of the nefarious plots that you imply.
Thus, by encouraging your children to "play", you are psychologically destroying them and reducing their future potential to that of an assembly line worker.
Repeat that to yourself three times, then open your eyes and look where you posted this. Hint : News for nerds, stuff that matters? Geeks live here? Dreamers. Peolpe who think outside the box. We've likely all had lots of toys in our lives. Lot of rocket scientists and starship captains, not too damn many assebly line workers though. Christ, this place is chock full of people who work for FREE, where the only reward is a job well done! You might want to either rethink your theory or put it somewhere that is not self defeating.
People endure 40-60 hours of pure crap every week of their lives with the dubious reward of "vacation", or a nice car, or time to watch TV as their only reward. Toys simply lay the groundwork for this type of pathological motivation.
People "endure" pure crap for 40-60 hours a week so that they can enjoy the dubious rewards of food, shelter and clothing.
What's the solution for this madness? Teach your children to enjoy working hard to accomplish their independent goals. Learning and discovery and adventure are rewarding without the need for false constructs...
Absolutely important lessons to teach your children. This has nothing to do with toys. Toys can and have been valuable learning tools for children. Toys help and encourage childern to learn and discover. Allow them to "live" adventures they otherwise could not. Same with adults too.
I must say that I feel sorry for your (maybe furture) children if this is truely your attitude. I don't know who shaved your GI Joe's head, but you might want to rethink your philosophy before robbing them of an important learning and development tool.
The other school of thought is that IE is such an easy target that it's common to exploit it. That's the one I subscribe to. Easy because it's poorly designed, easy because it's integrated, easy because just about every damned Windows user has their account in the Administrator group, if it's not the administator account iteslf and easy because the end user generally does not realise how much maintenance a computer needs, or even how to perform it. Regardless of how many people use IE, it's an easy target. Widely used is a bonus.
This is another point. There aren't a great deal of features that customers "want" that would attract them to switch. Firefox's real strength (in my opinion) is that it has features you that you never thought about, but that keep you from switching back Up until recently not many non-geeks had probably heard of it, except maybe mentioned by a geek-type. But it's starting to be mentioned more and more in the media, so MS are understandably wanting to stop people making the initial switch.Great Point. People would realise that these features existed if they had to find a browser on their own, rather than having one included with the OS. Geeks aren't necessarily aware of these features because they are geeks : all of the Linux/BSD/VMS/BeOS etc. geeks drove innovation in the other browsers because they had to choose anything but IE. All of the other browsers have to compete with each other, since, not only do the end user have a choice, they HAVE to choose.
Besides, many Windows users simply equate "The Internet" with "Internet Explorer" - or, more likely, with "The Blue e Icon". They're not looking for anything different because they don't even know that there are alternatives.For each one of those there are 2 people who don't switch because IE is already there. This was ceratinly more the case before broadband internet access from home : integrated browser or download Netscape at 2.2Kbps. Yummy. Bandwidth aside, even today, if you start with a fresh install of Windows 98/ME/2000/XP, and have no other software on hand, you still NEED IE to get Firefox, Opera or any other browser. Unless you are aware of command line ftp, or you're very savy with Telnet which the vast majority of end users are not.
That would be the case if we'd have stopped at ASCII text files for documentation. But as storage and processing power increase, we step up to the plate to fill it. From simple text, to PDFs and images and embedded video. From simple hypertext pages, to Flash and Embedded MIDI and VRML.
Multimedia grows significantly : NTSC PVR requirements now are nothing compared to HDTV requirements, forget whatever we dream up in the next 20 years.
Games take as much storage as a couple of hours of motion video.
Microsoft Products balloon out of control.
Look at the rate of growth of the Linux kernel source in the past 10 years!
The only thing that's changed : people get rid of less to make room.
No, we'll never have enough storage.
You mean besides SSX, Madden and Time Splitters? It didn't have many launch titles, but most were good. We're talking about, at the time, a next generation console with a few decent launch titles, that blows away previous consoles, that you can play PS1 games on AND use as a DVD player with optical out. That at the time would cost as much as an old console + a DVD player. Why on earth would anyone want that in time for Christmas?
I personally maintain several Linux/*BSD boxes internally, there are quite a few employees running some flavor of linux on their desktop, usually Mandrake, SuSE or RedHat/Fedora (there are even corporate images of a couple of distros) and there is a fairly large open source team here. While on some level what your wife says might have some truth, you shouldn't paint the whole company with the same brush.
Oh good lord, movie piracy has nothing to do with civil disobedience. It's a large mix of a) People who don't even know it's wrong. b) People who know it's illegal, but much like j-walking don't care, or don't think they'll get caught, so it's worth the risk. c) Minors who don't realise that the law applies to them too or d)The people who are either b or c, and want an excuse. What the MPAA is doing is applying the law to those who are breaking it. Bravo for them.
millions of people are breaking the law, and we can solve this by taking a couple of hundred of them and fucking them over in a way they nowhere near deserve, in order to scare everybody else.
The penalties for copyright infringement have been well know for a long time and the MPAA has always been good at letting the consumer know what the penalties are. Just because the digital age has made it much easier to violate copyrights does not make it more legal. People don't do it because they are making a point, they do it because they don't think they'll get caught and don't want to pay for the product.
Retail DVD movie prices have dropped steadily since I purchased my first player in 1998. I can now buy a movie for less than it would cost to buy two tickets and a bag of popcorn at the theater, they even come with tons of extra content. Or I can rent it for next to nothing. These people are too cheap to buy the movie, AND too CHEAP AND LAZY to rent it and return it. So I say, sue away MPAA, that's what the law is there for!
If you have a complaint, complain about the methods the MPAA and RIAA use to discover the accused infringers. But don't whine about them having a law enforced.