Note: THIS is the new machine killer. Having cleaned a disturbingly increasing number of affected machines lately (including to a smaller degree, my own!), I think that this should be Microsoft's New Frontier. "Stealth" installations of crapware need to be stopped... Somehow.
After all, what good is your computer if it takes you 15 minutes to boot it up and crashes every 5 mins. thereafter?
...that is, before Activation took place. How many copies of Office and Windows from work ended up in the user's homes? And once that bait had been taken, the hook got applied.
HD-DVD IS the standard as proclaimed by the DVD Forum anyway. When HD-DVD is sold in the U.S. and Europe it will be HD-DVD you see in the stores - nothing else. This is what the movie manufacturers agreed on through the DVD Forum.
My prediction is that Blu-Ray will find its niche in backup applications and video production houses. This is due to it's greater production expense (dual head for compatibility as opposed to HD's single lensing) and better media longevity (sealed discs).
Remember Betacam Vs. VHS? It's the same thing all over again. Betacam is STILL the standard in production houses all over the world but it was VHS that ruled the home front.
As for China's weird-ass format, guess what? No one really cares but the Asian markets and media/players/recorders will be made specifically for those markets as needed. Shocking, I know, I know. Proof? The Asian markets have been ignored by Americans before now. Take a look at the popularity of VCD players over there and you'll see what I mean. How many dedicated VCD players have you seen sold/marketed here?
No, the point is that BOTH sides are in the wrong to some degree and you prove how biased you are to somehow justify the actions of your 'most favored nations'.
It's ok to have that bias - but don't try and convince everyone that you are somehow neutral.
Yeah, those terrorists sure showed restraint on 9/11 didn't they? Thank God for that.
"One other thing seperates us..."
Us? Oh, I'm sorry I was talking about terrorists here. Is that you? So what you're saying is that you are with 'them'?
There is NO explanation for attacks like WTC that is acceptable. Attacks like these do nothing but hurt the cause of your 'people' - if that's what we can call those who would rain fire and death upon thousands.
I always hear the same rhetoric from your side about how you never 'justify the attacks', and yet.. Who the fuck are you siding with here if you don't outright condemn them, and why are we debating the fact that you DO support the attacks most wholeheartedly?!
And uh, last time I checked, the WTC had nothing to do with your assumed 'command and control' theory. It was simply a place of business with civilians in it. A lot of them. A lot to kill all at once - THAT was the aim. It wasn't the purpose of the target (commerce) as much as it was the amount of total death that could gotten from it.
Please stop trying to explain terrorist actions. I don't care - and neither does anyone else at the other end of your barrel.
I think the bottom line is, anytime an entire people are singled out as a 'problem', it's a problem.
Amongst the people in charge there are no innocents, but among the poor everyday commoner who has no beef with anybody, it's a different story. As is always the case in situations like these - guess who suffers more?
You know I've seen your spew here enough to know that you're not trolling - you really believe this stuff.
Your comment about the WTC was enough to push even me over the edge. Two words: Fuck and You. Put them in any order you want.
'Unfortunate result' my ass! You know what truly separates us? The fact that we don't unleash total nuclear annihilation on those who attacked us EVEN THOUGH WE COULD. Do you honestly believe that, given the chance, your terrorist pals wouldn't? I could go to any of these zealots websites and prove to you - BY THEIR OWN WORDS what their aims are.
Hint: They're not peaceful.
There is a major difference between the true terrorists of the world and those that fight them. If you are too blind to see that difference, then you do much to help explain the mindset of those who kill in the first place.
...for reelection aside, people will buy new computers with or without OOo. In fact, some would argue the point that more will upgrade their computers BECAUSE of OOo's less than stellar performance relative to M$ Office.
Free software doesn't have to mean 'broken economy'.
- A more technologically advanced format (and more expensive). I deem this to be Blu-Ray since the discs need casing and it needs a dual head assembly for compatability.
Versus
- A less technologically advanced standard (but less expensive). This would probably be HD-DVD.
You've seen this movie before haven't you? I know I have. Guess who usually wins? I would bet on HD-DVD at this point. Blu-Ray might find a niche in data backups and the like however.
At any rate, you Slashdotters out there, for one reason or another, will probably champion one of these formats. It's kind of like that +R/-R DVD argument (tastes great/less filling), except that there are far less differences between those formats than these new HD DVDs.
Because they become major contributors they end up all but hijacking a project for their own exclusive usage. Ever see a project start out in one direction and then all of a sudden end up being something completely different? Sometimes that's a good thing, but I'd rather have it by general consensus of the community rather than muscled into place by a company with money to burn.
Paranoia taken to extremes here but couldn't Microsoft themselves build on a few projects out there to help steer them away from being truly competitive?
Sorry... I guess my point (besides being humorous) is that there is no true environmental friendly vehicle - at least according to the granola-snarfing crowd.
Examples: As fast as you can say 'Hydrogen' some tree hugging nut starts talking about increased HEAT emissions!! Windfarms can also be hazardous to rare species of bird! Hydro power destroys river climates, etc. Forget the fact that the alternatives are often far, far worse.
The truth is, if you live, if you breathe the air, you can't avoid damaging the environment somehow. True, newer Diesel engines and hybrid cars will help, but it will never be enough for some that can't regognize a middle ground.
The article struck me funny simply because of its major enviro slant and almost small print mention of the fact that it still uses a diesel power plant. That said, I applaud the makers of the vehicle for doing it certainly; in fact, I LIKE biodiesel!:)
My buddy got one of these back in 1984 and paid handsomely for it too! It used an Intel 80186 - a rarity in and of itself. Few PC's were made with the 186 - most of these ended up in drive controllers. The 186 had some compatibility issues with the x86's previous and most PC vendors opted to use speeded up versions of the 8086 or wait for the 286.
However, the 186 was a true 16-bit chip and the Mindset went one further - it included an FM synthesizer for sound and two graphics co-processors (one of which included a sprite blitter!). It also had standard video out so you could do presentations with it and could be fitted with a Genlock for superimposing.
You could do weird stuff like have sprites bouncing around on the screen while typing in a program in GWbasic. It also came with a game, Vyper, specifically designed for the Mindset, programmed by Synapse that was simply astounding. It was a 3-D fly/shooter and it had everything else out there beat - bigtime. I suspect very few people ever got to see/play this thing, but it gave gamers goosebumps anytime it was shown.
It was a strange hybrid of Amiga-like capabilities with PC 'sensibility' - and it totally failed. It was pretty pricey, but this was back before the term 'multimedia' had been coined. Until that word happened, it seemed socially unacceptable to have good graphics and sound on 'business PC' back then (at least in the US).
OMFG the funniest thing about Star Raiders was how long it stayed on the favorites list of almost every gaming mag back then until they all collapsed in 1984.
That game deserved it though. Amazing graphics, sound, and gameplay. I spent many hours trying to improve my rating. What was even a bigger accomplishment was SR on the 2600 game console! It came with a special controller to call up shields, command consoles, etc. That was a feat I never thought I'd see done, or done well, and it was!
It was games like SR and Rescue on Fractalus that raised the bar. And when you saw 'Rescue' on the C64 you began to realize that the Atari's potential for greatness was largely untapped. It may seem trivial now, but true graphics co-processing and.79 more MHz (3/4 faster than the C64) made a real difference back then.
It took years for the PC to equal those kinds of games. In fact, I would say that it took Elite (on various platforms) and Wing Commander on the PC to really knock them off their pedistals.
Where does it stop? It it really necessary for EVERY country in the world to continue to 'test' these things?
Give me a break. We all know they work - big whoop. Delivery and control systems are the real issues. Building a bigger bomb only means a deeper crater at this point.
The next time France wants to test their bomb, why not do it someplace in France? The U.S. certainly did a great deal of testing on it's own shores.
I never said KDE wasn't better - I'm not going there one way or the other. My point was that since all of this is open source, what the hell does it really matter?
This is Bruce's pet project. There is absolutely nothing stopping anyone from using it as a base and providing KDE libs. Paraphrasing what someone else said here; make GNOME the desktop and provide the KDE libs for the apps through something like freedesktop.
In fact, I'll bet that were an organization be willing to work with Bruce on a parallel fork - he'd be all for it.
Yeah, I remember that! Lucasfilm used it to animate a mothership in 'Rescue on Fractalus' (itself a marvel of tech for the Atari) while the game loaded. The were cool (de)compression routines that harnessed this as well.
I also seem to recall certain music pieces that could play extra parts by blanking the screen. There was also a really cool 9 second sample of 'You really got me' - the Van Halen version - and it blanked the screen to play it.
If someone wants to recomplile their own version of UserLinux, can't they? Why not start a spinoff project - call it UserLinux - K Edition or whatever? This was done with Knoppix (Gnoppix).
Seriously, what's the big dealio? It's all open source!
...show backbone when we say, "Uh.. Ok, but then don't come back with your hand out later." Which is of course what they've done.
Let's not forget our good friends the French who, AGAINST WORLD OPINION decided to do a bit of above ground nuclear testing off of New Zealand back in '95-'96. They essentially told everyone else to fuck off and mind their own business when they did what they pleased. In the process, they ended up spewing even more radioactive waste across the planet. Yes, what peace lovers the French are, yes?
Thanks to that thoughtless move, Pakistan and India thought the time was ripe, after all, if one of the primary signatories of the test ban treaty can break it, why shouldn't they?
So let's cut the hypocrisy here. It wasn't even that France decided that THEY didn't want to go to Iraq. That would have been acceptable to the U.S. No, they went one step further, going around the world and trying and convince OTHER nations to bury the U.S. in the U.N. as well. All for their oil contracts in Iraq. That's not simplistic neutrality - that's fucking HOSTILITY!
France pissed the U.S. off - perfectly within their rights - but they shouldn't reasonably expect everything to be business as usual afterwards.
And as to minimizing our contributions in WWII, I have to just say, Fuck You. There are members on my Dad's side I never got to meet because of that war. You might be confusing WWI with WWII - which is understandable - both wars were created first in Europe and our contributions were not as great in WWI (not to minimize our role there either).
As with Bosnia, the U.S. was there to clean up the mess in Europe's own backyard.
Go ahead, mod me down for being an American about this, but I think many forget the price of blood and sacrifice and put it all down to numbers.
At least I'm not being an Anonymous pussy in my reply. My karma and your self respect is at your mercy...
Ah yes! Procurement. I know something of this process. I also know what it was like before those $120 toilet seats came up in the press.
Our lovely government gets into bed with corporations who do nothing but rape them on contracts. Let me ask you something: If you need a wing for an F-15e, who do you get it from? Why, the manufacturer.
And if that manufacturer has a inflationary allotment of 15%/year, do you think they'll take advantage of it? You bet your ass they will. So when a friend of mine (in Naval procurement, nonetheless) questioned his superiors on some of these expenditures he was told to rubber stamp it all and was told, "We'll get 'em on the BIG ones..."
The big ones... Some of the items on that list were over 500% original cost and a few were well over several million dollars.
I could easily see where this same kind of thing could happen to a project like this - especially if it runs overtime. Personally, I think caps should be put on contracts beforehand and dates should be kept if they expect to get paid on time.
Here in Lancaster County, PA (yeah, where the Amish live), we had a similar incident on Rt. 30. Several years past the delivery date, the contractors were forced to finish their work and get the hell out. They were barred from bidding on any further projects in PA for five years. It should have been done sooner, but it goes to show that there is recourse if your spineless legislators decide to actually do something.
Slashdot Mirror
Note: THIS is the new machine killer. Having cleaned a disturbingly increasing number of affected machines lately (including to a smaller degree, my own!), I think that this should be Microsoft's New Frontier. "Stealth" installations of crapware need to be stopped... Somehow.
After all, what good is your computer if it takes you 15 minutes to boot it up and crashes every 5 mins. thereafter?
...that is, before Activation took place. How many copies of Office and Windows from work ended up in the user's homes? And once that bait had been taken, the hook got applied.
HD-DVD IS the standard as proclaimed by the DVD Forum anyway. When HD-DVD is sold in the U.S. and Europe it will be HD-DVD you see in the stores - nothing else. This is what the movie manufacturers agreed on through the DVD Forum.
My prediction is that Blu-Ray will find its niche in backup applications and video production houses. This is due to it's greater production expense (dual head for compatibility as opposed to HD's single lensing) and better media longevity (sealed discs).
Remember Betacam Vs. VHS? It's the same thing all over again. Betacam is STILL the standard in production houses all over the world but it was VHS that ruled the home front.
As for China's weird-ass format, guess what? No one really cares but the Asian markets and media/players/recorders will be made specifically for those markets as needed. Shocking, I know, I know. Proof? The Asian markets have been ignored by Americans before now. Take a look at the popularity of VCD players over there and you'll see what I mean. How many dedicated VCD players have you seen sold/marketed here?
This may be the first new CD I've bought in YEARS!
Right or wrong, you just gotta luv Shatner!
No, the point is that BOTH sides are in the wrong to some degree and you prove how biased you are to somehow justify the actions of your 'most favored nations'.
It's ok to have that bias - but don't try and convince everyone that you are somehow neutral.
Yeah, those terrorists sure showed restraint on 9/11 didn't they? Thank God for that.
"One other thing seperates us..."
Us? Oh, I'm sorry I was talking about terrorists here. Is that you? So what you're saying is that you are with 'them'?
There is NO explanation for attacks like WTC that is acceptable. Attacks like these do nothing but hurt the cause of your 'people' - if that's what we can call those who would rain fire and death upon thousands.
I always hear the same rhetoric from your side about how you never 'justify the attacks', and yet.. Who the fuck are you siding with here if you don't outright condemn them, and why are we debating the fact that you DO support the attacks most wholeheartedly?!
And uh, last time I checked, the WTC had nothing to do with your assumed 'command and control' theory. It was simply a place of business with civilians in it. A lot of them. A lot to kill all at once - THAT was the aim. It wasn't the purpose of the target (commerce) as much as it was the amount of total death that could gotten from it.
Please stop trying to explain terrorist actions. I don't care - and neither does anyone else at the other end of your barrel.
I think the bottom line is, anytime an entire people are singled out as a 'problem', it's a problem.
Amongst the people in charge there are no innocents, but among the poor everyday commoner who has no beef with anybody, it's a different story. As is always the case in situations like these - guess who suffers more?
You know I've seen your spew here enough to know that you're not trolling - you really believe this stuff.
Your comment about the WTC was enough to push even me over the edge. Two words: Fuck and You. Put them in any order you want.
'Unfortunate result' my ass! You know what truly separates us? The fact that we don't unleash total nuclear annihilation on those who attacked us EVEN THOUGH WE COULD. Do you honestly believe that, given the chance, your terrorist pals wouldn't? I could go to any of these zealots websites and prove to you - BY THEIR OWN WORDS what their aims are.
Hint: They're not peaceful.
There is a major difference between the true terrorists of the world and those that fight them. If you are too blind to see that difference, then you do much to help explain the mindset of those who kill in the first place.
...for reelection aside, people will buy new computers with or without OOo. In fact, some would argue the point that more will upgrade their computers BECAUSE of OOo's less than stellar performance relative to M$ Office.
Free software doesn't have to mean 'broken economy'.
Well, the Gamecube has had a proprietary format for it's games, but it hasn't taken hold elsewhere.
;)
I still think that Blu-Ray, for all it's superiority will end up in niche markets, yay, even the PS3.
Will be something like this:
- A more technologically advanced format (and more expensive). I deem this to be Blu-Ray since the discs need casing and it needs a dual head assembly for compatability.
Versus
- A less technologically advanced standard (but less expensive). This would probably be HD-DVD.
You've seen this movie before haven't you? I know I have. Guess who usually wins? I would bet on HD-DVD at this point. Blu-Ray might find a niche in data backups and the like however.
At any rate, you Slashdotters out there, for one reason or another, will probably champion one of these formats. It's kind of like that +R/-R DVD argument (tastes great/less filling), except that there are far less differences between those formats than these new HD DVDs.
Yes, but the point of this is - will they fit the extended *HDTV* versions?
Because they become major contributors they end up all but hijacking a project for their own exclusive usage. Ever see a project start out in one direction and then all of a sudden end up being something completely different? Sometimes that's a good thing, but I'd rather have it by general consensus of the community rather than muscled into place by a company with money to burn.
Paranoia taken to extremes here but couldn't Microsoft themselves build on a few projects out there to help steer them away from being truly competitive?
Sorry... I guess my point (besides being humorous) is that there is no true environmental friendly vehicle - at least according to the granola-snarfing crowd.
:)
Examples: As fast as you can say 'Hydrogen' some tree hugging nut starts talking about increased HEAT emissions!! Windfarms can also be hazardous to rare species of bird! Hydro power destroys river climates, etc. Forget the fact that the alternatives are often far, far worse.
The truth is, if you live, if you breathe the air, you can't avoid damaging the environment somehow. True, newer Diesel engines and hybrid cars will help, but it will never be enough for some that can't regognize a middle ground.
The article struck me funny simply because of its major enviro slant and almost small print mention of the fact that it still uses a diesel power plant. That said, I applaud the makers of the vehicle for doing it certainly; in fact, I LIKE biodiesel!
I love how new tech is always claimed to be so environment friendly. Reading the article went like this for me:
:)
- Electric motors in the wheels. Environment friendly... Cool!
- Ok... Battery packs... Yeah. Enviro PC. Bitchin'...
- DIESEL ENGINE to power the whole thing...
AH!
They're full of shit!
Just mod him down for his sicko sig link. Son of a BITCH!
Anyone here remember this computer?
. ht ml?theKey=mindsetpc&byCompany=0
http://www.trailingedge.com/~dlw/comp/htemplate
My buddy got one of these back in 1984 and paid handsomely for it too! It used an Intel 80186 - a rarity in and of itself. Few PC's were made with the 186 - most of these ended up in drive controllers. The 186 had some compatibility issues with the x86's previous and most PC vendors opted to use speeded up versions of the 8086 or wait for the 286.
However, the 186 was a true 16-bit chip and the Mindset went one further - it included an FM synthesizer for sound and two graphics co-processors (one of which included a sprite blitter!). It also had standard video out so you could do presentations with it and could be fitted with a Genlock for superimposing.
You could do weird stuff like have sprites bouncing around on the screen while typing in a program in GWbasic. It also came with a game, Vyper, specifically designed for the Mindset, programmed by Synapse that was simply astounding. It was a 3-D fly/shooter and it had everything else out there beat - bigtime. I suspect very few people ever got to see/play this thing, but it gave gamers goosebumps anytime it was shown.
It was a strange hybrid of Amiga-like capabilities with PC 'sensibility' - and it totally failed. It was pretty pricey, but this was back before the term 'multimedia' had been coined. Until that word happened, it seemed socially unacceptable to have good graphics and sound on 'business PC' back then (at least in the US).
Star Raiders: The Best Game On The Atari.
.79 more MHz (3/4 faster than the C64) made a real difference back then.
OMFG the funniest thing about Star Raiders was how long it stayed on the favorites list of almost every gaming mag back then until they all collapsed in 1984.
That game deserved it though. Amazing graphics, sound, and gameplay. I spent many hours trying to improve my rating. What was even a bigger accomplishment was SR on the 2600 game console! It came with a special controller to call up shields, command consoles, etc. That was a feat I never thought I'd see done, or done well, and it was!
It was games like SR and Rescue on Fractalus that raised the bar. And when you saw 'Rescue' on the C64 you began to realize that the Atari's potential for greatness was largely untapped. It may seem trivial now, but true graphics co-processing and
It took years for the PC to equal those kinds of games. In fact, I would say that it took Elite (on various platforms) and Wing Commander on the PC to really knock them off their pedistals.
Where does it stop? It it really necessary for EVERY country in the world to continue to 'test' these things?
Give me a break. We all know they work - big whoop. Delivery and control systems are the real issues. Building a bigger bomb only means a deeper crater at this point.
The next time France wants to test their bomb, why not do it someplace in France? The U.S. certainly did a great deal of testing on it's own shores.
In my crystal ball I see Darl and his bro on a beach someplace warm and tropical... Not that I want to you understand.
Hey, it's like that 'water mirror' in FOTR - I can't control what it shows!
I never said KDE wasn't better - I'm not going there one way or the other. My point was that since all of this is open source, what the hell does it really matter?
This is Bruce's pet project. There is absolutely nothing stopping anyone from using it as a base and providing KDE libs. Paraphrasing what someone else said here; make GNOME the desktop and provide the KDE libs for the apps through something like freedesktop.
In fact, I'll bet that were an organization be willing to work with Bruce on a parallel fork - he'd be all for it.
Yeah, I remember that! Lucasfilm used it to animate a mothership in 'Rescue on Fractalus' (itself a marvel of tech for the Atari) while the game loaded. The were cool (de)compression routines that harnessed this as well.
I also seem to recall certain music pieces that could play extra parts by blanking the screen. There was also a really cool 9 second sample of 'You really got me' - the Van Halen version - and it blanked the screen to play it.
Wow! Them were the salad days!
If someone wants to recomplile their own version of UserLinux, can't they? Why not start a spinoff project - call it UserLinux - K Edition or whatever? This was done with Knoppix (Gnoppix).
Seriously, what's the big dealio? It's all open source!
...show backbone when we say, "Uh.. Ok, but then don't come back with your hand out later." Which is of course what they've done.
Let's not forget our good friends the French who, AGAINST WORLD OPINION decided to do a bit of above ground nuclear testing off of New Zealand back in '95-'96. They essentially told everyone else to fuck off and mind their own business when they did what they pleased. In the process, they ended up spewing even more radioactive waste across the planet. Yes, what peace lovers the French are, yes?
Thanks to that thoughtless move, Pakistan and India thought the time was ripe, after all, if one of the primary signatories of the test ban treaty can break it, why shouldn't they?
So let's cut the hypocrisy here. It wasn't even that France decided that THEY didn't want to go to Iraq. That would have been acceptable to the U.S. No, they went one step further, going around the world and trying and convince OTHER nations to bury the U.S. in the U.N. as well. All for their oil contracts in Iraq. That's not simplistic neutrality - that's fucking HOSTILITY!
France pissed the U.S. off - perfectly within their rights - but they shouldn't reasonably expect everything to be business as usual afterwards.
And as to minimizing our contributions in WWII, I have to just say, Fuck You. There are members on my Dad's side I never got to meet because of that war. You might be confusing WWI with WWII - which is understandable - both wars were created first in Europe and our contributions were not as great in WWI (not to minimize our role there either).
As with Bosnia, the U.S. was there to clean up the mess in Europe's own backyard.
Go ahead, mod me down for being an American about this, but I think many forget the price of blood and sacrifice and put it all down to numbers.
At least I'm not being an Anonymous pussy in my reply. My karma and your self respect is at your mercy...
Ah yes! Procurement. I know something of this process. I also know what it was like before those $120 toilet seats came up in the press.
Our lovely government gets into bed with corporations who do nothing but rape them on contracts. Let me ask you something: If you need a wing for an F-15e, who do you get it from? Why, the manufacturer.
And if that manufacturer has a inflationary allotment of 15%/year, do you think they'll take advantage of it? You bet your ass they will. So when a friend of mine (in Naval procurement, nonetheless) questioned his superiors on some of these expenditures he was told to rubber stamp it all and was told, "We'll get 'em on the BIG ones..."
The big ones... Some of the items on that list were over 500% original cost and a few were well over several million dollars.
I could easily see where this same kind of thing could happen to a project like this - especially if it runs overtime. Personally, I think caps should be put on contracts beforehand and dates should be kept if they expect to get paid on time.
Here in Lancaster County, PA (yeah, where the Amish live), we had a similar incident on Rt. 30. Several years past the delivery date, the contractors were forced to finish their work and get the hell out. They were barred from bidding on any further projects in PA for five years. It should have been done sooner, but it goes to show that there is recourse if your spineless legislators decide to actually do something.