Most people near 65 years old have managed to put away at least $100k. This could be equity in their home or just their retirement savings. These people keep sending money until they can't possibly send anything more, and then realize they have been conned. These are likely the same people who spend 10% of their earnings on lottery tickets as their retirement plan.
Clear Channel owns around 80% of the radio stations in the USA. Through middlemen, the RIAA pays them to play only a certain set of songs of their choice. No independent songs are allowed to be played. So if you don't sign with a RIAA company, you guarantee that you will never be played on more than 20% of the stations in the USA, aside from the likelyhood that less than 20% of the 20% minority (4% aggregate) would even play the style of music that you perform.
This is all assuming that the group had the time and money to record a professional sounding album on their own. Most groups barely have the money for enough equipment to do a gig at their friend's frat party. Pressing a few thousand copies of their debut CD can easily break them before they even get noticed in their home town.
The problem with windows crashes and general bugs is that microsoft mostly just tests their products in a microsoft environment. MS programmers are far more familiar with how to avoid interfering with other programs that are running. They use their own versions of the.DLLs. If they want something added to the.DLL, it becomes the standard. But your average user has 15 apps in their startup file that haven't been programmed very skillfully. Unlike with Linux, windows doesn't have a strong mechanism to prevent all of those apps from interfering with each other, and the system stability starts going downhill from bootup time.
I have a system that I use as a gateway to the net for my other machines. It has winME (for ICS), two NICs, a 3d card (no 3d drivers installed), 400mhz processor, 48MB ram, cable modem connected, MS internet connection software, zone alarm and an FTP server. It runs for months at a time without crashing (and at very low CPU utilization). I also never touch it.
My other system has filesharing apps, two non-MS web browsers, IM, CDrecording software, TV tuner, games, winamp, firewall, macro software, system monitoring software, and some actual productivity stuff. I have to reboot it an average of twice a day. It's usually a combination of non-MS products that bring down windows.
Are there many specific bugs in windows? Not really. There's just a bad overall design that makes it easy for one buggy application to wreck the rest of the system. It doesn't help much that your average user can't recognize an impending crash without a BSoD to announce the loss of an hour's work.
I would think they could compete with regular CPU's in floating point.
IIRC, CPUs use 80bit floats in their computations. GPUs use 128 bits, but they are split up four ways (RGB,alpha), so they are really only accurate to 32bits. Makes for very pretty pictures, but wholly inadequate for scientific application.
BTW, any $460 computer would make an ass gaming machine. A low to mid level gaming rig will run you about $1000. Then add about $500 per year in upgrades to keep it current.
Doom 3 'requires' graphical processing power far ahead of the current average users graphics card
Um, that should be 'will require'. Assuming they keep on track, the game is not set for release until the end of the year (IIRC). Why would you not wait until the game at least has a firm release date less than 2 months away before buying a video card just for it?
Radeon 9700 Pro: $300 (now)
Doom3: $50 + Radeon 10500-Shiznit $450 (later)
Tossing your Radeon 9700 into the same heap with your Geforce ti4600: Priceless.
i read somewhere that transferring images back to the system via the AGP bus is REAL slow, about 8fps max
i want a standard AGP card with a little cable or something that connects to a PCI slot that enables me to download from the card at high speeds. i'd do animation and stuff. i'td be cool. Can someone tell me why you would want to record a high resolution video to your hard drive of something that you can normally run on you machine at 30+fps? Recording frames for playback is really only useful if you are rendering a scene that is too complex to be run in real time. i.e. Hollywood shite that takes an hour or more to render a frame, and hence you don't give a damn if it takes you an eighth of a second to get it from the video memory to the hard drive. If you just want to make a movie of you playing UT3k, just record the scene geometry for later playback through the graphics engine.
You are wholly uninformed if you think that 3d gaming at 1600x1200 involves transferring every image at 60fps over the agp bus to the AGP card. Texture and bump maps are loaded in advance and updated regularly, model geometry is loaded, and then the camera position and position of the various models is updated for every frame. The scene is wholly rendered within the video card itself, stored in the memory of the video card, and sent out to the display without ever going back to the CPU or main memory. In fact, the main reason that AGP is helpful is to speed the loading of new objects into the card's memory from the system memory as you move through a scene or prevent a horrible bottleneck if you run short of memory on the card and have to actively use the main system memory (time to get a new card if this happens regularly).
Modern video cards get very little use of the CPU other than being told what to draw. It's quite easy to setup a scene that will bring the video card to it's knees, while leaving the CPU and AGP bus at less than 5% utilization. In newer games, the CPU is running AI, physics, user input and loading new models to memory.
I believe the article you are thinking about referred to the problem of rendering 3d scenes in real time at high resolution and recording the final stream to disk. The article stated that the rate AGP transfers data back to system memory is horrible relative to it's ability to take data in, and thus made gaming cards a poor solution for hollywood production needs.
No matter how much effort you put into being the most popular person in your high school, after the four years are up, you wind up back at square one.
Think about it. No matter how popular the jock/cheerleader might be, they are living the highpoint of their life. Driving a used/parent's car, living with parents, making minimum wage, curfew. For most of them, their best achievement in life is to be the most popular kid in their school. When they graduate, the winners of the popularity contest are announced, they wear a crown for a night, and then are promptly forgotten.
A geek realizes that high school is a very minor part of his/her life. Throwing away a chance at future six figure income just to please a bunch of kids that you will never see after you finish high school is moronic.
I'd be surprised to see any profession (other than waiter/waitress) accurately portrayed in a hollywood film. What kind of experience do you think writers have to draw on that they would have a clue what programmers really do?
Besides, movies that accurately portray jobs would be pretty boring. I'm sure that even George Bush's job isn't as exciting as most movies and TV shows make it look. Can you imagine people paying $7.50 to go see a movie that showed 2 hours of firefighters sitting around the station house playing cards, lifting weights, watching TV and reading pr0n?
The only time I expect a movie to come close to being 'real' is when they are recreating something that really happened. Pearl Harbor, Apollo 13, etc... These are movies where the writers send scripts to the real people. The real people then send notes back about what kind of morons the writers are and tell them what changes to make. Hopefully the movie comes out and hardly resembles what the writer imagined.
Actually, I bought the CDs, so ripping them to MP3 format on my computer is fair use. So is playing them on my other computers, burning a custom CD or extra copy for each of my cars (where they have a 6 month lifespan before getting trashed).
Those divx copies of lord of the rings aren't fair use either.
I bought not only the theatrical version of LotR, but the extended version as well. Despite the DMCA preventing you from decrypting the DVD to watch it later instead of now, it's absolutely fair use to have copies of my movies on my computer or laptop to watch. The RIAA and MPAA has spend forever trying to tell us how we don't purchase the movie or music, but just 'buy a licence to view/listen to the work'. This absolutely supports allowing me to format shift my legally purchased CDs and DVDs into any format convienent for me.
Looking for new side scrollers?
on
NES PC
·
· Score: 1
Try Duke Nukem: Manhattan Project. As side scrollers go, it rules. It takes full advantage of the 3D accelerators available and has the action move around buildings, curved objects, etc. You are still set into a left-right track that you progress through, but it twists around. The graphics are pretty nice and it's got the Duke Nukem humor.
If you never liked side scrollers, don't bother. It has the stereotypical end level bosses that can only be killed if you hit the secret weak spot X times. It has a constant stream of unintelligent mobs attacking you. The only innovation is the newer prettier graphics.
Star Trek makes good money in the box office when there is a major lack of new SciFi/Fantasy movies coming out. But lately the situation is exactly the oposite. S.T. was going directly up against The Two Towers and Harry Potter in the theaters. There are (b>two Matrix movies, Xmen2, Hulk, Daredevil and Terminator 3 expected out in 2003. Fellowship of the Rings had recently been released in the extended version. If I'm not mistaken, MiB2, Spider-Man and Star Wars: AotC had recently came out on DVD as well. 2002 and 2003 (will) have no room whatsoever for modiocre SciFi/Fantasy filmmaking.
Which brings us to the plot. I've seen every Star Trek movie, most of them on the day they came out in the theaters. The trailers did not make me want to see the movie any more than if you said 'New Star Trek movie coming out in December'. I'm tired of movies where a person is cloned from their DNA and the clone is supposed to have some sort of supernatural understanding of the original. Maybe they should have just cloned Worf so they would have a better excuse for his sudden return from DS9 to the Enterprise. I'm tired of bad lighting as a replacement for set design. What's up with dune buggies jumping off a cliff into a shuttlecraft? The trailer made it look like the movie would have the required cool special effects, but there are lots of other choices now that would give me a good story to go with them.
Of course, there is also the problem of tying it into the existing TV series. The only new shows are Enterprise, which is set a good 150(+?) years before TNG (and 3 spinoffs later). Enterprise is not consistently carried in many markets. Locally I receive 2 Fox stations that carry it, but they move it around so much that I never know when it will be on. One tends to put it after Third Rock re-runs late on Wednesday night. These two Fox stations both have 9pm slots for Voyager re-runs. I can't find the main slot for the other station. They ocasionally re-run it late Saturday night if they have room after sports. Berman should have worked on getting better market penetration for Enterprise.
I still like all things Trek, so I'll buy it when it comes out on DVD. I've just lost any urgency to go see it right away.
"Cell, which is expected to come out in late 2004 or early 2005"..."will have the ability to do north of 1 trillion mathematical calculations per second, roughly 100 times more than a single Pentium 4 chip running at 2.5GHz."
I guess it's a damn good thing my video card doesn't use a pentium 4 as the GPU. Quite frankly, with greater than a 2 year lead time, I'm amazed that their GPU can only muster a 100x computing advantage over a CPU. I thought that Nvidia and ATI's current high end already did greater than 100x the computations of a P4.
Of course, there is no comparison between a GPU running highly parallelized floating operations vs. a CPU running general order dependent machine code.
Only $200000? They probably paid far more than that to develop the encryption software. It would be worth that much easily to make sure that any cracks are brought to their attention.
This is being recorded off the soundboard, which is where the gigawatt speakers get their audio feed from so the crowd can hear it. There should be almost no crowd noise that isn't intentionally added. The audio quality should be just as high as a studio recording. You can bet it will sound great. Except for the Phish part, that is.
$10 for a.mp3 concert download of a group I actually like sounds like a great deal though. Here in central Iowa, all we ever seem to get is washed up 80s lipstick rock bands.
Now where's the network that who/rusers provides?
Back in 1993, I was a student at University of Illinois. Every student got a dial-up unix shell account that included such services as finger, who, ytalk, mail, etc. Finger or who would automatically query the school's master server (or some other server if you specify) to check the login status of the other person. Anyone with a modicum of scripting knowledge could make a batch file to check the status of all their friends when they execute it. Then type 'ytalk {friend}' and you're off. The most absurd part of AOL's patent is that back in '93, the most useful part of the internet for my friends and I was e-mail (not that AOL users could receive internet e-mail back then), IRC and ytalk.
The 'network' consisted of any unix server on the internet running those (free) basic services and protocols. As opposed to AOL's IM that pigeonholes you into using their server and client (hopefully they make one for their OS).
I suppose the next patent AOL will be getting is:
A universal identification system such that a user can send messages or other data via servers to any other user so that they may download it immediately if they are connected to the internet. The servers will also be designed in such a way to hold the data until the recipient is prepared to receive it at a later date.
Early DVD players were built by people who had to make it work and work well. They were intended for people who had expensive A/V setups and the quality showed. My first DVD player was $250, two years ago (well after the uber expensive phase).
The $50 DVD players on the market today are built with the sole mandate to cut the cost as much as possible. 10 chips are redesigned into one. Thinner boards are used. Signal output specs are ignored. Lowest cost resistors and capacitors. Motors that barely meet spec. Plastic gears.
A relative of mine recently bought a top end projection HDTV. The model he wanted had been replaced with a new version, but he wanted the old one because the CRTs in the previous version were larger (thus sharper and brigher) and it had clearer lenses. The new replacement model had a few new features and debuted at a price that was half ($7k)of what the previous one started at. Nice for people who couldn't afford the old version. Bad for people who want the best picture possible.
If you want a piece of electronics that lasts as long as the one you bought 5 years ago, don't expect to pick it up for 20% of the cost of the older sturdy model. It's like bitching about how a Whopper tastes so bad next to a burger from TGIFriday's.
Screw trying to get a refund for Windows. It's alot of work and the money is most likely to come from the vendor, not Microsoft.
If you want to make a point, there is a long list of PC makers who cozy up to MS for the full discount by refusing to sell PCs without Windows pre-installed. Call one up and place a nice fat order for the PC you've been wanting. Negotiate a good price. Then demand that they not include Windows and take off their cost for it (should be around $40-50). Tell them you would happily pay $10 $20 for your favorite) for a recent Linux CDrom install package and install it yourself if they have a problem selling naked PCs (fair price for something you can legally download for free). Demand to talk to their supervisor when they tell you they can't do that.
Everyone is doing build-to-order now. I can pick my HD, RAM, CPU, sound, video, DVD/CD/recordable, monitor from a wide variety of choices. Why only two OSes from a the same company?
Jan. 23 is my birthday and the last thing I want to coincide with it some very, very lame geek protest against Microsoft.
Yeah, jeeze. What kind of dumbass would schedule Windows Refund Day 2 to coincide with TOUPSIE DAY?!?! This is incredibly poor planning on the part of the Linux community.
Notice the link to a commercial site to buy the tablet? The.com site just didn't have the foresight to tell the maker that they would be sending the slashdot crowd to DDoS them. Not a very bright way to sell tablets.
If you want to stick it to them, ONLY buy items that have been marked down to door-buster prices. i.e. free-after-rebate or items that are marked down 50% or more. Don't even accessorize with cables or service plans. Don't buy regularly priced DVDs to go with your new DVD player.
Slashdot Mirror
Holy crap, you must have single handedly paid for a suicide bomber in Tel-Aviv.
Most people near 65 years old have managed to put away at least $100k. This could be equity in their home or just their retirement savings. These people keep sending money until they can't possibly send anything more, and then realize they have been conned. These are likely the same people who spend 10% of their earnings on lottery tickets as their retirement plan.
As if they can afford to maintain their intenet access anymore...
Clear Channel owns around 80% of the radio stations in the USA. Through middlemen, the RIAA pays them to play only a certain set of songs of their choice. No independent songs are allowed to be played. So if you don't sign with a RIAA company, you guarantee that you will never be played on more than 20% of the stations in the USA, aside from the likelyhood that less than 20% of the 20% minority (4% aggregate) would even play the style of music that you perform.
This is all assuming that the group had the time and money to record a professional sounding album on their own. Most groups barely have the money for enough equipment to do a gig at their friend's frat party. Pressing a few thousand copies of their debut CD can easily break them before they even get noticed in their home town.
The problem with windows crashes and general bugs is that microsoft mostly just tests their products in a microsoft environment. MS programmers are far more familiar with how to avoid interfering with other programs that are running. They use their own versions of the .DLLs. If they want something added to the .DLL, it becomes the standard. But your average user has 15 apps in their startup file that haven't been programmed very skillfully. Unlike with Linux, windows doesn't have a strong mechanism to prevent all of those apps from interfering with each other, and the system stability starts going downhill from bootup time.
I have a system that I use as a gateway to the net for my other machines. It has winME (for ICS), two NICs, a 3d card (no 3d drivers installed), 400mhz processor, 48MB ram, cable modem connected, MS internet connection software, zone alarm and an FTP server. It runs for months at a time without crashing (and at very low CPU utilization). I also never touch it.
My other system has filesharing apps, two non-MS web browsers, IM, CDrecording software, TV tuner, games, winamp, firewall, macro software, system monitoring software, and some actual productivity stuff. I have to reboot it an average of twice a day. It's usually a combination of non-MS products that bring down windows.
Are there many specific bugs in windows? Not really. There's just a bad overall design that makes it easy for one buggy application to wreck the rest of the system. It doesn't help much that your average user can't recognize an impending crash without a BSoD to announce the loss of an hour's work.
I would think they could compete with regular CPU's in floating point.
IIRC, CPUs use 80bit floats in their computations. GPUs use 128 bits, but they are split up four ways (RGB,alpha), so they are really only accurate to 32bits. Makes for very pretty pictures, but wholly inadequate for scientific application.
BTW, any $460 computer would make an ass gaming machine. A low to mid level gaming rig will run you about $1000. Then add about $500 per year in upgrades to keep it current.
a 350-watt power supply
You can still get PSUs rated lower than this? Do you have E-machines in your office or something?
Doom 3 'requires' graphical processing power far ahead of the current average users graphics card
Um, that should be 'will require'. Assuming they keep on track, the game is not set for release until the end of the year (IIRC). Why would you not wait until the game at least has a firm release date less than 2 months away before buying a video card just for it?
Radeon 9700 Pro: $300 (now)
Doom3: $50 + Radeon 10500-Shiznit $450 (later)
Tossing your Radeon 9700 into the same heap with your Geforce ti4600: Priceless.
i read somewhere that transferring images back to the system via the AGP bus is REAL slow, about 8fps max i want a standard AGP card with a little cable or something that connects to a PCI slot that enables me to download from the card at high speeds. i'd do animation and stuff. i'td be cool.
Can someone tell me why you would want to record a high resolution video to your hard drive of something that you can normally run on you machine at 30+fps? Recording frames for playback is really only useful if you are rendering a scene that is too complex to be run in real time. i.e. Hollywood shite that takes an hour or more to render a frame, and hence you don't give a damn if it takes you an eighth of a second to get it from the video memory to the hard drive. If you just want to make a movie of you playing UT3k, just record the scene geometry for later playback through the graphics engine.
You are wholly uninformed if you think that 3d gaming at 1600x1200 involves transferring every image at 60fps over the agp bus to the AGP card. Texture and bump maps are loaded in advance and updated regularly, model geometry is loaded, and then the camera position and position of the various models is updated for every frame. The scene is wholly rendered within the video card itself, stored in the memory of the video card, and sent out to the display without ever going back to the CPU or main memory. In fact, the main reason that AGP is helpful is to speed the loading of new objects into the card's memory from the system memory as you move through a scene or prevent a horrible bottleneck if you run short of memory on the card and have to actively use the main system memory (time to get a new card if this happens regularly).
Modern video cards get very little use of the CPU other than being told what to draw. It's quite easy to setup a scene that will bring the video card to it's knees, while leaving the CPU and AGP bus at less than 5% utilization. In newer games, the CPU is running AI, physics, user input and loading new models to memory.
I believe the article you are thinking about referred to the problem of rendering 3d scenes in real time at high resolution and recording the final stream to disk. The article stated that the rate AGP transfers data back to system memory is horrible relative to it's ability to take data in, and thus made gaming cards a poor solution for hollywood production needs.
No matter how much effort you put into being the most popular person in your high school, after the four years are up, you wind up back at square one.
Think about it. No matter how popular the jock/cheerleader might be, they are living the highpoint of their life. Driving a used/parent's car, living with parents, making minimum wage, curfew. For most of them, their best achievement in life is to be the most popular kid in their school. When they graduate, the winners of the popularity contest are announced, they wear a crown for a night, and then are promptly forgotten.
A geek realizes that high school is a very minor part of his/her life. Throwing away a chance at future six figure income just to please a bunch of kids that you will never see after you finish high school is moronic.
I'd be surprised to see any profession (other than waiter/waitress) accurately portrayed in a hollywood film. What kind of experience do you think writers have to draw on that they would have a clue what programmers really do?
Besides, movies that accurately portray jobs would be pretty boring. I'm sure that even George Bush's job isn't as exciting as most movies and TV shows make it look. Can you imagine people paying $7.50 to go see a movie that showed 2 hours of firefighters sitting around the station house playing cards, lifting weights, watching TV and reading pr0n?
The only time I expect a movie to come close to being 'real' is when they are recreating something that really happened. Pearl Harbor, Apollo 13, etc... These are movies where the writers send scripts to the real people. The real people then send notes back about what kind of morons the writers are and tell them what changes to make. Hopefully the movie comes out and hardly resembles what the writer imagined.
Those mp3s on your hard drive aren't fair use.
Actually, I bought the CDs, so ripping them to MP3 format on my computer is fair use. So is playing them on my other computers, burning a custom CD or extra copy for each of my cars (where they have a 6 month lifespan before getting trashed).
Those divx copies of lord of the rings aren't fair use either.
I bought not only the theatrical version of LotR, but the extended version as well. Despite the DMCA preventing you from decrypting the DVD to watch it later instead of now, it's absolutely fair use to have copies of my movies on my computer or laptop to watch. The RIAA and MPAA has spend forever trying to tell us how we don't purchase the movie or music, but just 'buy a licence to view/listen to the work'. This absolutely supports allowing me to format shift my legally purchased CDs and DVDs into any format convienent for me.
Try Duke Nukem: Manhattan Project. As side scrollers go, it rules. It takes full advantage of the 3D accelerators available and has the action move around buildings, curved objects, etc. You are still set into a left-right track that you progress through, but it twists around. The graphics are pretty nice and it's got the Duke Nukem humor.
If you never liked side scrollers, don't bother. It has the stereotypical end level bosses that can only be killed if you hit the secret weak spot X times. It has a constant stream of unintelligent mobs attacking you. The only innovation is the newer prettier graphics.
Star Trek makes good money in the box office when there is a major lack of new SciFi/Fantasy movies coming out. But lately the situation is exactly the oposite. S.T. was going directly up against The Two Towers and Harry Potter in the theaters. There are (b>two Matrix movies, Xmen2, Hulk, Daredevil and Terminator 3 expected out in 2003. Fellowship of the Rings had recently been released in the extended version. If I'm not mistaken, MiB2, Spider-Man and Star Wars: AotC had recently came out on DVD as well. 2002 and 2003 (will) have no room whatsoever for modiocre SciFi/Fantasy filmmaking.
Which brings us to the plot. I've seen every Star Trek movie, most of them on the day they came out in the theaters. The trailers did not make me want to see the movie any more than if you said 'New Star Trek movie coming out in December'. I'm tired of movies where a person is cloned from their DNA and the clone is supposed to have some sort of supernatural understanding of the original. Maybe they should have just cloned Worf so they would have a better excuse for his sudden return from DS9 to the Enterprise. I'm tired of bad lighting as a replacement for set design. What's up with dune buggies jumping off a cliff into a shuttlecraft? The trailer made it look like the movie would have the required cool special effects, but there are lots of other choices now that would give me a good story to go with them.
Of course, there is also the problem of tying it into the existing TV series. The only new shows are Enterprise, which is set a good 150(+?) years before TNG (and 3 spinoffs later). Enterprise is not consistently carried in many markets. Locally I receive 2 Fox stations that carry it, but they move it around so much that I never know when it will be on. One tends to put it after Third Rock re-runs late on Wednesday night. These two Fox stations both have 9pm slots for Voyager re-runs. I can't find the main slot for the other station. They ocasionally re-run it late Saturday night if they have room after sports. Berman should have worked on getting better market penetration for Enterprise.
I still like all things Trek, so I'll buy it when it comes out on DVD. I've just lost any urgency to go see it right away.
Moore's Law.
If you can't beat the competitors with horsepower, smack 'em with low power consumption.
"Cell, which is expected to come out in late 2004 or early 2005"..."will have the ability to do north of 1 trillion mathematical calculations per second, roughly 100 times more than a single Pentium 4 chip running at 2.5GHz."
I guess it's a damn good thing my video card doesn't use a pentium 4 as the GPU. Quite frankly, with greater than a 2 year lead time, I'm amazed that their GPU can only muster a 100x computing advantage over a CPU. I thought that Nvidia and ATI's current high end already did greater than 100x the computations of a P4.
Of course, there is no comparison between a GPU running highly parallelized floating operations vs. a CPU running general order dependent machine code.
Only $200000? They probably paid far more than that to develop the encryption software. It would be worth that much easily to make sure that any cracks are brought to their attention.
This is being recorded off the soundboard, which is where the gigawatt speakers get their audio feed from so the crowd can hear it. There should be almost no crowd noise that isn't intentionally added. The audio quality should be just as high as a studio recording. You can bet it will sound great. Except for the Phish part, that is.
.mp3 concert download of a group I actually like sounds like a great deal though. Here in central Iowa, all we ever seem to get is washed up 80s lipstick rock bands.
$10 for a
Now where's the network that who/rusers provides?
Back in 1993, I was a student at University of Illinois. Every student got a dial-up unix shell account that included such services as finger, who, ytalk, mail, etc. Finger or who would automatically query the school's master server (or some other server if you specify) to check the login status of the other person. Anyone with a modicum of scripting knowledge could make a batch file to check the status of all their friends when they execute it. Then type 'ytalk {friend}' and you're off. The most absurd part of AOL's patent is that back in '93, the most useful part of the internet for my friends and I was e-mail (not that AOL users could receive internet e-mail back then), IRC and ytalk.
The 'network' consisted of any unix server on the internet running those (free) basic services and protocols. As opposed to AOL's IM that pigeonholes you into using their server and client (hopefully they make one for their OS).
I suppose the next patent AOL will be getting is:
A universal identification system such that a user can send messages or other data via servers to any other user so that they may download it immediately if they are connected to the internet. The servers will also be designed in such a way to hold the data until the recipient is prepared to receive it at a later date.
Of course, I'm referring to e-mail.
You Get What You Pay For.
Early DVD players were built by people who had to make it work and work well. They were intended for people who had expensive A/V setups and the quality showed. My first DVD player was $250, two years ago (well after the uber expensive phase).
The $50 DVD players on the market today are built with the sole mandate to cut the cost as much as possible. 10 chips are redesigned into one. Thinner boards are used. Signal output specs are ignored. Lowest cost resistors and capacitors. Motors that barely meet spec. Plastic gears.
A relative of mine recently bought a top end projection HDTV. The model he wanted had been replaced with a new version, but he wanted the old one because the CRTs in the previous version were larger (thus sharper and brigher) and it had clearer lenses. The new replacement model had a few new features and debuted at a price that was half ($7k)of what the previous one started at. Nice for people who couldn't afford the old version. Bad for people who want the best picture possible.
If you want a piece of electronics that lasts as long as the one you bought 5 years ago, don't expect to pick it up for 20% of the cost of the older sturdy model. It's like bitching about how a Whopper tastes so bad next to a burger from TGIFriday's.
Screw trying to get a refund for Windows. It's alot of work and the money is most likely to come from the vendor, not Microsoft.
If you want to make a point, there is a long list of PC makers who cozy up to MS for the full discount by refusing to sell PCs without Windows pre-installed. Call one up and place a nice fat order for the PC you've been wanting. Negotiate a good price. Then demand that they not include Windows and take off their cost for it (should be around $40-50). Tell them you would happily pay $10 $20 for your favorite) for a recent Linux CDrom install package and install it yourself if they have a problem selling naked PCs (fair price for something you can legally download for free). Demand to talk to their supervisor when they tell you they can't do that.
Everyone is doing build-to-order now. I can pick my HD, RAM, CPU, sound, video, DVD/CD/recordable, monitor from a wide variety of choices. Why only two OSes from a the same company?
Jan. 23 is my birthday and the last thing I want to coincide with it some very, very lame geek protest against Microsoft.
Yeah, jeeze. What kind of dumbass would schedule Windows Refund Day 2 to coincide with TOUPSIE DAY?!?! This is incredibly poor planning on the part of the Linux community.
Notice the link to a commercial site to buy the tablet? The .com site just didn't have the foresight to tell the maker that they would be sending the slashdot crowd to DDoS them. Not a very bright way to sell tablets.
If you want to stick it to them, ONLY buy items that have been marked down to door-buster prices. i.e. free-after-rebate or items that are marked down 50% or more. Don't even accessorize with cables or service plans. Don't buy regularly priced DVDs to go with your new DVD player.