"Unlike broadcast television, which is available to anyone with a TV and an antenna, people subscribe to and pay for cable/satellite.'"
And so if I don't want it don't buy it! Nice theory. Problem for me is I do want it, 90% of it anyhow, but I don't want the 10% that is complete smut. As it stands now I've either got to take the bad with the good or do without all of it entirely. The OPTION to buy and view descent programming without penalty of bringing smut into home sure sounds reasonable to me. You want your smut, by all means, buy it, jerk off to it, enjoy yourself, but I shouldn't have to subsidize it.
Sheesh, if there was ever a patent granted on the obvious this it it.
As for prior art, I recall a good decade or so ago, certainly before portable mp3 players, try before you buy kiosk machines in the local record stores. You would navigate menus on a touch screen browsing by genre or artist and then listen to samples of your selected music via a pair of headphones.
It's different because in the 70s there was no way to immediately, without cost, without any loss of quality, mass duplicate and distribute a VHS recording you made of last nights episode of Laverne and Shirley to a few thousand of your closest friends.
I've transferred my entire CD collection to mp3 with Exact Audio Copy. Approximately 200 CDs nearly all of which are collecting dust in my basement, the rest are in my car. I don't even have a CD player connected to my stereo, well actually I do - the CD drive in the computer thats connected to the stereo. Anyhow, this Velvet Revolver CD is one I've been thinking about buying but if I can't turn it into mp3 files then I really doubt I want to bother with it. I'm guessing though that the software I use for that, Exact Audio Copy (and LAME), probably wouldn't have a problem. Does anybody know for sure?
Last week when this topic was on slashdot somebody posted that its possible to run these benchmarks rendering them through a software driver that conforms 100% to the DX9 spec. Slow as hell but you end up with EXACTLY what you should get.
Maybe the 3DMark authors could render all this stuff in software so they'll know exactly what SHOULD be rendered by a video card and then have a new section in their benchmarks that compares what should have been rendered to what actually was.
So, you run the benchmark and you end up with something like this:
Nvidia FX: frames per second: 187,
accuracy of rendered image: 62%
ATI Radeon: frames per second: 177,
accuracy of rendered image: 94%
Page 1 of 7 Futuremark Corporation May 23rd, 2003 To the Media, Futuremark's customers and business partners: Audit Report: Alleged NVIDIA Driver Cheating on 3DMark03 After the launch of 3DMark03 Build 320 Futuremark has received reports from the members of its BETA Program concerning certain anomalies with 3DMark03 and Nvidia drivers. ExtremeTech (www.extremetech.com) has published an article1 on suspecting NVIDIA drivers to improperly boost scores on Futuremark's 3DMark®03. Some of these anomalies have also been reported by Beyond3D2. Alarmed by all these reports Futuremark has conducted a thorough internal audit regarding this matter and has verified that certain NVIDIA drivers indeed seem to have detection mechanisms, which are triggered by components of the 3DMark03 program. We have identified eight such mechanisms. In our testing, all identified detection mechanisms stopped working when we altered the benchmark code just trivially and without changing any of the actual benchmark workload. With this altered benchmark, NVIDIA's certain products had a performance drop of as much as 24.1% while competition's products performance drop stayed within the margin of error of 3%. To our knowledge, all drivers with these detection mechanisms were published only after the launch of 3DMark03. According to industry's terminology, this type of driver design is defined as 'driver cheats'. We are publishing this document to report to our customers in detail about our findings. Main reason behind publishing this document is to answer the criticism presented against synthetic benchmarks and their reliability when testing hardware performance. The document follows a question/answer format. How Were These Driver Cheats Found? Members of Futuremark's BETA program3 first noticed how parts of the tests in 3DMark03 were rendered differently on different hardware. When testing NVIDIA hardware on 3DMark03 with socalled developer's version's free camera enabled, they noticed how some parts of tests were rendered strangely, and informed Futuremark of their findings. Futuremark investigated further and our findings show that certain NVIDIA drivers seem to detect when 3DMark03 is running and then replace the 3DMark03's rendering requests with manually implemented alternative rendering operations. These alternative rendering operations reduce the amount of rendering work and thereby increase the obtained benchmark result. 1 Extremetech: http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,1086025,00.asp 2 Beyond3D: http://www.beyond3d.com/#news5856 3 Futuremark's BETA program is an open, fee based cooperation program between Futuremark and the PC industry at large. BETA program members have access to pre-release builds of upcoming benchmarks and to a so-called developer build. The developer build is exactly the same as the public version of the benchmark, but with additional functionality. Amongst other things, the developer build has a 'free camera' mode, where the user can manually move the camera around while the test is running. Page 2 of 7 Why Does This Matter - It Is Just a Synthetic Benchmark? We acknowledge with great pride how big a role 3DMark has in the PC industry. 3DMark score has become perhaps the most influential metric of PC performance. Enthusiasts, professional hardware reviewers and OEMs all depend on 3DMark results to a great extent. We have a tremendous responsibility towards our users, who count on us and on our products when making important decisions. Thus, it matters a great deal that no one is able to take advantage of 3DMark - or any other significant benchmark - with unfair means. Well designed synthetic benchmarks are excellent tools to objectively compare performance and to reveal different architectures' strengths and weaknesses. Some commentators have argued for only using benchmarks based exclusively on games; however there are se
I bought a hard drive recently from CompUSA. The mail in rebate is $60 IIRC. Of course CompUSA charged me sales tax on the price before rebate, about 7% which is $4.20 on $60. So who gets that $4.20? The government, I doubt it, certainly not me. This seems like an obvious scam and pisses me off. After rebate the hard drive costs me $70 but I've paid sales tax not as a percentage of $70 but as a percantage of $130. I've paid nearly double the sales tax I should have been charged in my mind. It wasn't a manufacturers rebate, I mailed in the rebate form directly to CompUSA. I bet they keep the $4.20 and my $60 rebate really only puts them back $55.80.
Amen to that. The whole Active X, statistics gathering Spyware, IE viruses installing with no user intervention required, cesspool that the World Wide Web has become is the continous thorn in my side when it comes to Tech support for the family. You can't turn off javascript, or install pop killers or give them a different browser. They'll be calling you constantly when every 10th web site doesn't load properly. All I know to do is let them surf their PC into a state of non-functionality, then I come over and flush out all the crud as best I can and we just repeat this process every several months.
I'm sure you've all seen Microsoft's "Business at the speed of life" commercials or whatever they're called. You know, where the couple buying a car picks a color, the salesman clicks something on his Windows CE device and a second later a car is being painted that color in the factory, and other commercials expressing that same theme.
Well, recently I got an invitation from MS to attend they're latest propaganda fest in my area. Look at the last paragraph describing how to remove myself from the list, particularly the last sentence. I've cut and paste this verbatim except for changing my e-mail address. Not exactly "business at the speed of life".:
From: Microsoft
To: mot@umsl.edu
Reply-to: midamericaopencampus@email.microsoft.com
Subject: Microsoft Open Campus Event in Nashville and St. Louis on February 10th
Date: Tue, 28 Jan 2003 10:21:57 -0800 (PST)
Dear Thomas,
We are excited to invite you to an Open Campus event at Microsoft's
Nashville and St. Louis offices on February 10, 2003. This event is
designed to give you a look inside the Microsoft Operations and
Technology Group. You'll learn how we use and manage our own
technology to run our business and operations, and you'll hear
about our experiences as customers of our own products. You'll
come away with proven strategies to strengthen your organization's
IT capabilities, and ideas for implementing them to gain
competitive advantage.
Hear from Senior Microsoft technology experts and learn how we:
Operate a world class Operations and Information Technology
group while maintaining business agility - Rick Devenuti, Chief
Information Officer, Corporate Vice President
Deliver trustworthy IT services utilizing Microsoft's own
technology and IT facilities - Mike Carlson, Director of
Enterprise Operations
Develop and implement internal IT security strategies and
initiatives that cover people, processes and technologies -
Peter R. Boden, Group Program Manager, Corporate Security
Maintain a global Exchange and Active Directory messaging
infrastructure, and rollout product evolutions across the
network - Derek Ingalls, Group Manager Messaging and
Collaboration for Exchange and AD
You'll also hear from Microsoft executives Rich Kaplan, Corporate VP,
Content Development and Delivery Group, and Kevin Johnson, Senior VP,
Microsoft Americas Sales and Marketing.
Speakers will broadcast live to you from Microsoft headquarters
in Redmond via closed circuit television. You'll get valuable
insights from leaders within Microsoft to help you train, plan,
deploy and maintain your IT environment, and improve the operations
of your IT organization.
We're looking forward to seeing you on February 10th
at 11:30 to 4pm , and hope you'll find our presentations
informative and valuable to the future of your business.
Visit http://email.microsoft.com/m/s.asp?HB8090263535X17 62462X155624X
or call 1-877-MSEVENT to register and reference event ID
1032226817 for Nashville and
1032226815 for St. Louis.
If you prefer not to receive future promotional e-mails of this type,
please click below to unsubscribe. Please note that it can take up to
eight weeks to update customer information in our database;
therefore, you may receive e-mail from us within that time period.
http://email.microsoft.com/m/s.asp?HB8090263535X17 62463X155624Xmot%40umsl.edu
Realplayer, Apple Quicktime, Flash
For the past couple years or so, I've just quit using all that stuff completely. I decided the aggravation of seemingly ALWAYS needing a newer version than what I had, the annoying system tray crap thats near impossible to get rid of, dialogue boxes presenting me with two options - Register? OK and Register Later
It just all go so annoying I simply don't use any of it anymore and I can't even say that I've missed any of it.
My guess is an 11 year old boy a couple houses away launching rocks into the air with a "wrist rocket" slingshot.
Its quite fun actually, the heights you can obtain with those things are fantastic. Particularly if you use the red tapered bands that are designed for extra distance, they really work.
If an extra 3" was a 20% increase - damn dude - I guess you've got to make a concious effort not to put a shoe on it in the morning.
Re:Doesn't matter if they count them or not...
on
MIT vs. Las Vegas
·
· Score: 1
You just reminded me of some absurdity here in my home state of Missouri. A number of years back riverboat casino gambling came into being around here. The opening of riverboat casinos was first put up to the voters and voters voted it down. Well of course there had been a ton of money already invested so the politicians said ok casino interests, you can have your riverboat casinos, but only games of skill will be allowed. Of, course that wasn't good enough for them because the real money is in the slot machines. If they couldn't have slot machines they wheren't going to bother opening up at all. And then, here is the absurd part - somehow, the casino's took it to court and got a legal ruling that slot machines are "a game of skill". I shi7 you not. And so, since in Missouri slot machines are legally considered a game of skill we have a bunch of riverboat casinos now, despite the fact that the voters said no.
Its only got worse and worse from there. The definition of a riverboat casino has been stretched to where the latest incarnation is a HUGE multi-story building about 1.5 miles from the Missouri river to which they've dug a little drainage ditch from the river and surrounded the casino with a little moat.
The point a lot of you all are missing here is that this isn't really about a throw away OS for those who will install Linux. The true impact here on MS is that now companies who use imaging tools such as Norton Ghost and the like, will no longer have to pay for Windows twice for every single PC. You see, MS license agreements state that the original OEM copy that comes with the Dell is only licensed for that machine. If you are going to wipe it and reimage it with Windows, which is what probably the vast majority of companies do, then you have to pay for another Windows license. The OEM license that came with the PC doesn't count. Screwed up I know, but thats truely the way it is. From now on, companies that order from Dell won't have to buy Windows twice. They order with free dos and reimage with Windows and pay for that Windows license only. They no longer have to eat the cost of the OEM license that they never use. (Of course my whole point here is predicated on the assumption that Dell will drop the price of a PC with free dos to the price of an equivalent PC minus the cost of an OEM Windows license)
Maybe I'm breaking some kind of ground rules by replying to my own post, but I had a further thought:
I can actually see many people hooking the cable up to a TV just to see and finding out "oh cool, I get TV too, I didn't know that was part of the deal", just figuring since they're getting it their supposed to be getting it and expected to watch it if they wish.
They head over to the nearest Radio Shack for a coax splitter and happily have their choice of three dozen late night infommercials not even aware that they're "pirating" it and not entitled to it.
Is this REALLY piracy?
on
What Free Cable?
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
I counted that article using the word pirate or piracy 11 times.
I think calling this piracy is really stretching the definition.
The so called pirates aren't asking for free cable TV. Yet, the cable company insists on delivering cable televison into their homes anyway.
These people are really supposed to not watch it just because the cable company is to lazy/inept to provide them with only the specifice service they are requesting?
The article has the tone like a $4.95 coax splitter is some kind of illegal underground L337 H@CK0RZ technical wizardry type gadget. Come on.
I'd venture to guess most anybody who orders a cable modem without cable TV would at some point plug the cable into their TV just to see what they get. And when they find they get cable TV, there's not going to be many people so as dumb as not to know/figure out that all they need is a $4.95 splitter to watch it.
What the f**k is an LSB??
It seems like more and more lately when I read Slashdot I feel like I'm swimming in a giant bowl of Campbell's Alphabet Soup.
I think some of you all are just pathetically lazy typists and the rest of you all are trying to sound elite. Guess what. I'm not impressed and I really really doubt many other slash dotters are impressed either.
If you want to use abbreviations for everything under the sun, fine. But if you want anybody to bother reading your post and grasping your point, at least spell it out the first time.
I have to agree. This whole story somehow just has a feel of disinformation about it to me.
Particularly now that I've seen postings by several fellow slash dotters saying this CD was in fact available legitimately in record stores days before the "official" release.
Also, if this was really due to internet piracy - thats pretty much alwasys done in.mp3 format. Supposing it is true that lots of people have 'traded" all the tracks on this CD over the internet in.mp3 format, how many of those people would have subsequently and already converted all those tracks into.wav files and burned them onto a CD. I'd speculate, not very many.
Everyone knows that huh? In my experience exactly the opposite is true. From what I've seen pretty much ANY commercial or shareware software you want is freely accessible in a matter of minutes from google by searching on
"name_of_software warez" or "name_of_software crack" or "name_of_software serial" or
"name_of_software keygen"
Now when I learned about this, I found it pretty amazing that all this piracy takes place right out in the open. But the fact is, it does.
The nice thing about internet radio is the ability to use something like StreamRipper and save every song, properly named and tagged, as a.mp3 file.
I've been doing a lot of this recently as it appeared internet radio was perhaps about to end and I wanted to snatch up a bunch of the music while I still had the chance.
I'm on a high speed connection, so last week for a couple days I was actually running 5 instances of StreamRipper at once, each connected to a different "radio station". Within just a couple work days I had snagged multiple gigabytes of 128kbit mp3 files.
I think what I've just described is why the RIAA and such are making such a fuss.
Slashdot Mirror
I've always heard "you can't polish a turd" but you're right Vista disproves that saying, a polished turd describes Vista perfectly.
"Unlike broadcast television, which is available to anyone with a TV and an antenna, people subscribe to and pay for cable/satellite.'"
And so if I don't want it don't buy it! Nice theory. Problem for me is I do want it, 90% of it anyhow, but I don't want the 10% that is complete smut. As it stands now I've either got to take the bad with the good or do without all of it entirely. The OPTION to buy and view descent programming without penalty of bringing smut into home sure sounds reasonable to me. You want your smut, by all means, buy it, jerk off to it, enjoy yourself, but I shouldn't have to subsidize it.
Interesting idea about copyrighting config files, however I'd think any config files would would have to be considered a "derivative work".
Sheesh, if there was ever a patent granted on the obvious this it it. As for prior art, I recall a good decade or so ago, certainly before portable mp3 players, try before you buy kiosk machines in the local record stores. You would navigate menus on a touch screen browsing by genre or artist and then listen to samples of your selected music via a pair of headphones.
I've transferred my entire CD collection to mp3 with Exact Audio Copy. Approximately 200 CDs nearly all of which are collecting dust in my basement, the rest are in my car. I don't even have a CD player connected to my stereo, well actually I do - the CD drive in the computer thats connected to the stereo. Anyhow, this Velvet Revolver CD is one I've been thinking about buying but if I can't turn it into mp3 files then I really doubt I want to bother with it. I'm guessing though that the software I use for that, Exact Audio Copy (and LAME), probably wouldn't have a problem. Does anybody know for sure?
KVM
Last week when this topic was on slashdot somebody posted that its possible to run these benchmarks rendering them through a software driver that conforms 100% to the DX9 spec. Slow as hell but you end up with EXACTLY what you should get. Maybe the 3DMark authors could render all this stuff in software so they'll know exactly what SHOULD be rendered by a video card and then have a new section in their benchmarks that compares what should have been rendered to what actually was. So, you run the benchmark and you end up with something like this: Nvidia FX: frames per second: 187, accuracy of rendered image: 62% ATI Radeon: frames per second: 177, accuracy of rendered image: 94%
Page 1 of 7 ,00.asp
Futuremark Corporation
May 23rd, 2003
To the Media, Futuremark's customers and business partners:
Audit Report: Alleged NVIDIA Driver Cheating on 3DMark03
After the launch of 3DMark03 Build 320 Futuremark has received reports from the members of its
BETA Program concerning certain anomalies with 3DMark03 and Nvidia drivers. ExtremeTech
(www.extremetech.com) has published an article1 on suspecting NVIDIA drivers to improperly
boost scores on Futuremark's 3DMark®03. Some of these anomalies have also been reported by
Beyond3D2. Alarmed by all these reports Futuremark has conducted a thorough internal audit
regarding this matter and has verified that certain NVIDIA drivers indeed seem to have detection
mechanisms, which are triggered by components of the 3DMark03 program. We have identified
eight such mechanisms.
In our testing, all identified detection mechanisms stopped working when we altered the
benchmark code just trivially and without changing any of the actual benchmark workload. With
this altered benchmark, NVIDIA's certain products had a performance drop of as much as
24.1% while competition's products performance drop stayed within the margin of error of 3%. To
our knowledge, all drivers with these detection mechanisms were published only after the launch
of 3DMark03. According to industry's terminology, this type of driver design is defined as 'driver
cheats'.
We are publishing this document to report to our customers in detail about our findings. Main
reason behind publishing this document is to answer the criticism presented against synthetic
benchmarks and their reliability when testing hardware performance. The document follows a
question/answer format.
How Were These Driver Cheats Found?
Members of Futuremark's BETA program3 first noticed how parts of the tests in 3DMark03 were
rendered differently on different hardware. When testing NVIDIA hardware on 3DMark03 with socalled
developer's version's free camera enabled, they noticed how some parts of tests were
rendered strangely, and informed Futuremark of their findings. Futuremark investigated further
and our findings show that certain NVIDIA drivers seem to detect when 3DMark03 is running and
then replace the 3DMark03's rendering requests with manually implemented alternative rendering
operations. These alternative rendering operations reduce the amount of rendering work and
thereby increase the obtained benchmark result.
1 Extremetech: http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,1086025
2 Beyond3D: http://www.beyond3d.com/#news5856
3 Futuremark's BETA program is an open, fee based cooperation program between Futuremark
and the PC industry at large. BETA program members have access to pre-release builds of
upcoming benchmarks and to a so-called developer build. The developer build is exactly the
same as the public version of the benchmark, but with additional functionality. Amongst other
things, the developer build has a 'free camera' mode, where the user can manually move the
camera around while the test is running.
Page 2 of 7
Why Does This Matter - It Is Just a Synthetic Benchmark?
We acknowledge with great pride how big a role 3DMark has in the PC industry. 3DMark score
has become perhaps the most influential metric of PC performance. Enthusiasts, professional
hardware reviewers and OEMs all depend on 3DMark results to a great extent.
We have a tremendous responsibility towards our users, who count on us and on our products
when making important decisions. Thus, it matters a great deal that no one is able to take
advantage of 3DMark - or any other significant benchmark - with unfair means.
Well designed synthetic benchmarks are excellent tools to objectively compare performance and
to reveal different architectures' strengths and weaknesses. Some commentators have argued for
only using benchmarks based exclusively on games; however there are se
I bought a hard drive recently from CompUSA. The mail in rebate is $60 IIRC. Of course CompUSA charged me sales tax on the price before rebate, about 7% which is $4.20 on $60. So who gets that $4.20? The government, I doubt it, certainly not me. This seems like an obvious scam and pisses me off. After rebate the hard drive costs me $70 but I've paid sales tax not as a percentage of $70 but as a percantage of $130. I've paid nearly double the sales tax I should have been charged in my mind. It wasn't a manufacturers rebate, I mailed in the rebate form directly to CompUSA. I bet they keep the $4.20 and my $60 rebate really only puts them back $55.80.
Amen to that. The whole Active X, statistics gathering Spyware, IE viruses installing with no user intervention required, cesspool that the World Wide Web has become is the continous thorn in my side when it comes to Tech support for the family. You can't turn off javascript, or install pop killers or give them a different browser. They'll be calling you constantly when every 10th web site doesn't load properly. All I know to do is let them surf their PC into a state of non-functionality, then I come over and flush out all the crud as best I can and we just repeat this process every several months.
I'm sure you've all seen Microsoft's "Business at the speed of life" commercials or whatever they're called. You know, where the couple buying a car picks a color, the salesman clicks something on his Windows CE device and a second later a car is being painted that color in the factory, and other commercials expressing that same theme. Well, recently I got an invitation from MS to attend they're latest propaganda fest in my area. Look at the last paragraph describing how to remove myself from the list, particularly the last sentence. I've cut and paste this verbatim except for changing my e-mail address. Not exactly "business at the speed of life".: From: Microsoft To: mot@umsl.edu Reply-to: midamericaopencampus@email.microsoft.com Subject: Microsoft Open Campus Event in Nashville and St. Louis on February 10th Date: Tue, 28 Jan 2003 10:21:57 -0800 (PST) Dear Thomas, We are excited to invite you to an Open Campus event at Microsoft's Nashville and St. Louis offices on February 10, 2003. This event is designed to give you a look inside the Microsoft Operations and Technology Group. You'll learn how we use and manage our own technology to run our business and operations, and you'll hear about our experiences as customers of our own products. You'll come away with proven strategies to strengthen your organization's IT capabilities, and ideas for implementing them to gain competitive advantage. Hear from Senior Microsoft technology experts and learn how we: Operate a world class Operations and Information Technology group while maintaining business agility - Rick Devenuti, Chief Information Officer, Corporate Vice President Deliver trustworthy IT services utilizing Microsoft's own technology and IT facilities - Mike Carlson, Director of Enterprise Operations Develop and implement internal IT security strategies and initiatives that cover people, processes and technologies - Peter R. Boden, Group Program Manager, Corporate Security Maintain a global Exchange and Active Directory messaging infrastructure, and rollout product evolutions across the network - Derek Ingalls, Group Manager Messaging and Collaboration for Exchange and AD You'll also hear from Microsoft executives Rich Kaplan, Corporate VP, Content Development and Delivery Group, and Kevin Johnson, Senior VP, Microsoft Americas Sales and Marketing. Speakers will broadcast live to you from Microsoft headquarters in Redmond via closed circuit television. You'll get valuable insights from leaders within Microsoft to help you train, plan, deploy and maintain your IT environment, and improve the operations of your IT organization. We're looking forward to seeing you on February 10th at 11:30 to 4pm , and hope you'll find our presentations informative and valuable to the future of your business. Visit http://email.microsoft.com/m/s.asp?HB8090263535X17 62462X155624X
or call 1-877-MSEVENT to register and reference event ID
1032226817 for Nashville and
1032226815 for St. Louis.
If you prefer not to receive future promotional e-mails of this type,
please click below to unsubscribe. Please note that it can take up to
eight weeks to update customer information in our database;
therefore, you may receive e-mail from us within that time period.
http://email.microsoft.com/m/s.asp?HB8090263535X17 62463X155624Xmot%40umsl.edu
Realplayer, Apple Quicktime, Flash For the past couple years or so, I've just quit using all that stuff completely. I decided the aggravation of seemingly ALWAYS needing a newer version than what I had, the annoying system tray crap thats near impossible to get rid of, dialogue boxes presenting me with two options - Register? OK and Register Later It just all go so annoying I simply don't use any of it anymore and I can't even say that I've missed any of it.
My guess is an 11 year old boy a couple houses away launching rocks into the air with a "wrist rocket" slingshot. Its quite fun actually, the heights you can obtain with those things are fantastic. Particularly if you use the red tapered bands that are designed for extra distance, they really work.
If an extra 3" was a 20% increase - damn dude - I guess you've got to make a concious effort not to put a shoe on it in the morning.
You just reminded me of some absurdity here in my home state of Missouri. A number of years back riverboat casino gambling came into being around here. The opening of riverboat casinos was first put up to the voters and voters voted it down. Well of course there had been a ton of money already invested so the politicians said ok casino interests, you can have your riverboat casinos, but only games of skill will be allowed. Of, course that wasn't good enough for them because the real money is in the slot machines. If they couldn't have slot machines they wheren't going to bother opening up at all. And then, here is the absurd part - somehow, the casino's took it to court and got a legal ruling that slot machines are "a game of skill". I shi7 you not. And so, since in Missouri slot machines are legally considered a game of skill we have a bunch of riverboat casinos now, despite the fact that the voters said no. Its only got worse and worse from there. The definition of a riverboat casino has been stretched to where the latest incarnation is a HUGE multi-story building about 1.5 miles from the Missouri river to which they've dug a little drainage ditch from the river and surrounded the casino with a little moat.
The point a lot of you all are missing here is that this isn't really about a throw away OS for those who will install Linux. The true impact here on MS is that now companies who use imaging tools such as Norton Ghost and the like, will no longer have to pay for Windows twice for every single PC. You see, MS license agreements state that the original OEM copy that comes with the Dell is only licensed for that machine. If you are going to wipe it and reimage it with Windows, which is what probably the vast majority of companies do, then you have to pay for another Windows license. The OEM license that came with the PC doesn't count. Screwed up I know, but thats truely the way it is. From now on, companies that order from Dell won't have to buy Windows twice. They order with free dos and reimage with Windows and pay for that Windows license only. They no longer have to eat the cost of the OEM license that they never use. (Of course my whole point here is predicated on the assumption that Dell will drop the price of a PC with free dos to the price of an equivalent PC minus the cost of an OEM Windows license)
Maybe I'm breaking some kind of ground rules by replying to my own post, but I had a further thought: I can actually see many people hooking the cable up to a TV just to see and finding out "oh cool, I get TV too, I didn't know that was part of the deal", just figuring since they're getting it their supposed to be getting it and expected to watch it if they wish. They head over to the nearest Radio Shack for a coax splitter and happily have their choice of three dozen late night infommercials not even aware that they're "pirating" it and not entitled to it.
I counted that article using the word pirate or piracy 11 times. I think calling this piracy is really stretching the definition. The so called pirates aren't asking for free cable TV. Yet, the cable company insists on delivering cable televison into their homes anyway. These people are really supposed to not watch it just because the cable company is to lazy/inept to provide them with only the specifice service they are requesting? The article has the tone like a $4.95 coax splitter is some kind of illegal underground L337 H@CK0RZ technical wizardry type gadget. Come on. I'd venture to guess most anybody who orders a cable modem without cable TV would at some point plug the cable into their TV just to see what they get. And when they find they get cable TV, there's not going to be many people so as dumb as not to know/figure out that all they need is a $4.95 splitter to watch it.
What the f**k is an LSB?? It seems like more and more lately when I read Slashdot I feel like I'm swimming in a giant bowl of Campbell's Alphabet Soup. I think some of you all are just pathetically lazy typists and the rest of you all are trying to sound elite. Guess what. I'm not impressed and I really really doubt many other slash dotters are impressed either. If you want to use abbreviations for everything under the sun, fine. But if you want anybody to bother reading your post and grasping your point, at least spell it out the first time.
I have to agree. This whole story somehow just has a feel of disinformation about it to me. Particularly now that I've seen postings by several fellow slash dotters saying this CD was in fact available legitimately in record stores days before the "official" release. Also, if this was really due to internet piracy - thats pretty much alwasys done in .mp3 format. Supposing it is true that lots of people have 'traded" all the tracks on this CD over the internet in .mp3 format, how many of those people would have subsequently and already converted all those tracks into .wav files and burned them onto a CD. I'd speculate, not very many.
Everyone knows that huh? In my experience exactly the opposite is true. From what I've seen pretty much ANY commercial or shareware software you want is freely accessible in a matter of minutes from google by searching on "name_of_software warez" or "name_of_software crack" or "name_of_software serial" or "name_of_software keygen" Now when I learned about this, I found it pretty amazing that all this piracy takes place right out in the open. But the fact is, it does.
The nice thing about internet radio is the ability to use something like StreamRipper and save every song, properly named and tagged, as a .mp3 file.
I've been doing a lot of this recently as it appeared internet radio was perhaps about to end and I wanted to snatch up a bunch of the music while I still had the chance.
I'm on a high speed connection, so last week for a couple days I was actually running 5 instances of StreamRipper at once, each connected to a different "radio station". Within just a couple work days I had snagged multiple gigabytes of 128kbit mp3 files.
I think what I've just described is why the RIAA and such are making such a fuss.