Just looking at that
on
Photosynth Demo
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
rather fabulous demo, I realize that that would tie in beautifully with the surface computing MS showed last week (which was lovely as a tech demo with little immediate use).
Vista is 'nice' but it's just a progression of what we already know - these tech demos give me a big warm fuzzy futuristic feeling inside:)
If nothing else it shows that MS is innovating again (at last) - Ball's back with Apple and Google now - "Make me more impressed!"
The way I'd differentiate a Smartphone from a 'normal' phones is that I can load (or it comes with) apps that are in advance of those offered by a regular phone.
My last SE phone had a nice little opera browser that ran over Java and a basic IMAP client. Not very exciting, but nice enough. Upgraded to an HTC TyTn and I get Outlook (which whilst you may bitch, it actually useful) and could install stuff like VPN clients, TomTom, Monkey Island etc.
I think the hardware of the iPhone is lovely from a UI and visual point of view, but this first version is NOT a smartphone.
For a start I can't install my own apps on it yet (so please release that dev kit and open it up) - the single reason to get a smartphone is that you can load up interesting stuff you can't get on a regular phone.
2nd bitch is the lack of 3G. Now I've no interest in making video calls, but the lack of a decent net connection on the phone cripples so many of the apps you may want to run on it. I cannot believe the decision to drop a decent data connection was a desired one (loads of small, cheap, battery frugal phones can) so it bemuses me as to why it's missing. Phone clearly hasn't been rushed to market, the reference designs exist, carrier would be more than happy to bill you for the data.. I now realize I haven't got a point to finish of on, I genuinely cannot think of a reason 3G is missing.. (apart from allowing Apple to charge me for a second phone in 6 months, but even I have trouble being that cynical)... maybe it will be supported after all - allow us all to bitch about the obvious omision on this pricey handset, then announce it does feature it and crush majority of opposition on the eve of the launch...
as somebody mentioned below, there's a system in the UK called traffic master, that monitors traffic speeds on major roads. Initially you had to have a separate device that just told you about upcoming traffic (I think triggered by beacons over roads, rather than GPS).
For the last couple of years most high-end TomTom products have offered a service that integrates TrafficMaster into their software. I use a Tytn PocketPC connected to a Bluetooth GPS unit to plan my route. Every x minutes the phone connects via GPRS/3G to a TomTom server to download the latest traffic information, it overlays any delays onto my route and as I approach congestion it determines if there's an alternative, longer, route that will get me past the delay faster than sitting through it. If there is, then it automatically replots my route for me.
System works pretty well, the only problem being where there is no traffic master information available - i.e. it sees a big motorway blockage, but doesn't know what the traffic is like on the secondary road. Secondary road would be faster if it's clear, but if the motorway's blocked, it's probably not going to be.
I think I hate these new offerings even more.
Way I see it is that a new 'standard' gets pushed upon us, crippled with DRM (DRM which is ultimately paid for by us the consumer).
People hack away at the flakey DRM to produce something that works better, whether it be for dvds, games, m4p, wma, blu-ray, hd-dvd etc.
Suddenly the media companies seem to have realized that the DRM they're forcing on us is causing problems and not working in the wonderfully transparent fashion their PR spiel banged on about. What do they do? Do they fix their DRM? Do the admit they screwed up a bit? NOooooo - they relax/remove the DRM and try to sell it for even more - First Apple with the EMI tracks and now this.
but feel one side is being under-represented here.
I can see why Brazil (and other countries) do this - the drug is available and they can't afford to pay the asking price, and I assume this 'Stealing from the rich, to give to the poor' goes down well with their electorate.
Just to take AIDS as an example though, the world has known about this for a long time and many countries know they have a huge problem with it. Surely if a few of them got together and pooled their resources, they could have developed at least one or two components of the anti-viral cocktails that are circulating?
If Brazil and Thailand had bothered to fund research into a treatment drug, then not only could they have given it free to their own people, but I'm sure some licensing agreement could have been reached with pharma companies (e.g. you let us distribute your drug to our people and we'll let you include ours in your retail cocktail).
As it stands these countries are doing nothing, apart for waiting for somebody else to make the breakthrough and then stealing it.
The common argument that 'These pharma companies just make billions out of misery' is just complete bollocks. In comparison to the amount governments spend of healthcare, military, social state etc - the amount required to create their own pharma company is miniscule. The only reason they don't is because it's even cheaper to steal.
My parent was just aimed at/. in general.
I want windows (and Vista Ultimate is quite lovely), but would do occasionally dabble with other OS.
Main problem with them is that I always seem to end up with one driver that refuses to work and I give up. Maybe the big coup here isn't that Dell give you the option of having Ubuntu over Vista for a few dollars less, it's that they guarantee that the machine you buy will be able to run Ubuntu (should you so wish).
The number of people who'll dabble with Ubuntu on a Dell machine (if Dell tell them it'll work) is far far greater than the number of people who want to buy a Dell with Ubuntu only to save a few dollars.
Bundle MS and you'll complain you don't want to pay for the OEM license.
Give you MS-free option and you then complain you're losing the cheap OEM license.
*bangs head on desk*
This seems like a fine idea.
If you're a large international you don't want to fail in public.
If you are going to fail in public, then you really don't want to do it on possibly the largest platform on the planet - especially after you've paid for the privilege of climbing onto it.
Don't think of it as sponsorship, think of it as a gigantic security deposit paid upfront.
(or would want to). I've got a flat in a listed building in the middle of a town.
Being in a town is great as I can get my Freeview reception and speedy ADSL2 - unfortunately I'm not allowed to slap a satellite dish on the outside of my building and as even the f'in pavement outside is listed, it was considered too expensive to lay cable. If I'm ever to get HDTV it's going to be using MIMO, after switchover, or IPTV.
Now I know I'm probably in a somewhat rare position, but loads of people find they can't receive stuff for all manner of reasons - more methods of getting HDTV into my house the better and competition is always nice.
you get a dialog box asking if you want to delete the file (by default) - so you have to hit enter to confirm your deletion.
The file by default gets shoved in the recycle bin as well, so easy to get back if you've realized you've made a mistake.
You have the option if you wish to remove the prompt on the delete, or skip the recycle bin by holding shift.
I think the point I'm trying to make about XP/Vista is that when you press the delete key, the OS assumes that you are actually trying to delete a file (quite sensibly) and respond to you accordingly.
but most of the efforts to crack down on the end users are to try to cut down the supply.
In the same way people wanting to see porn stars have sex means that pornstars get filmed having sex, people wanting to pay money to see children get abused means children get filmed being abused.
Now I'm not entirely convinced that the world is full of people abusing children to make money, but there's certainly a connection.
Whether that self-interest is 200 Pesos thrust into their hand as they walk into the booth, or 200 Pesos less tax paid due to new tax system voted in doesn't make much difference.
Actually the more I think about it - In the Phillippines the cash seems to be given to you by the politician if you promise to vote for them. In the 'democratic West',we get nothing for our vote apart from the promise from the politician. Personally I'd prefer to see the cash in my hand, rather than a promise.
but until stuff syncs with Outlook, it has no change of defeating it.
I'm not a huge fan of MS, but it's nice that external people can send you stuff (as they use Outlook) and it'll appear in your company outlook calendar.
Sooo if you want to defeat Outlook you've got to produce something that replicates outlook's functionality. I don't care what the other company is using, I just care it works with my outlook (or vica-versa).
Basically my point is we live in an Outlook eco-system. If you want to displace it, then you can't just ignore it and do your own thing (e.g. Mozilla+Google).
Wikipedia is blocked as it may contain inaccurate information?
But you're not blocking the rest of the internet that can contain anything, from anybody and is subject to no review at all?
Maybe in the board's concern they should extend their block to any site that's ever reported incorrect or disputed information - this would cover pretty much every site in existence - religion, politics, history blah blah.
Whilst Wikipedia shouldn't be taken as gospel (well actually they gospels shouldn't be taken as gospel either, but I digress), if you dip beneath the front page and examine the edits it actually allows you to see most sides of the debate on most topics.
that they need the amount of space Blu-Ray provides.
To my knowledge there aren't any 2 disk 360 games (or even any DVD based games that immediately spring to mind). Two reasons spring to mind, 9gig is enough for a game and/or publishers don't want you to be able to give a disk to your mate when you've gone passed half way. Oh and whilst on the subject, I was under the impression that PS3 cached to the HD as the transfer speed on Blu-Ray wasn't quite up to it (I seem to remember reading somewhere that you could get data off a 360 DVD faster with X gen DVD drive faster than you could on PS3s 1st gen Blu-Ray).
Secondly, in this age of increasing dev costs, does Sony can produce enough 'game data' to fill a BR disk and make a profit?
360 GH2 is the same, but with better graphics and more songs.
The downloadable content is just an extra option, to buy if you want it - that's all.
If you think it's too much, don't buy it and just enjoy the game you've already got.
Personally I did wince a little bit at the price, but it does show they're going to support the game and hopefully if they make enough cash from selling the extra songs - they might full their f'in finger out and patch the game to give online play.
I used to face the choice of upgrading the PSP for the game I bought, or breaking my homebrew/emu stuff.
Still remember fearfully clicking to run GTA, knowing my homebrew was lost until the next crack came along.
In the end I realized I had to decide between Sony UMD game, or homebrew/emu. As the amount of homebrew rose and the qaulity of the games dropped (well that's how it felt to me) I just gave up patching the firmware.
I can't be the only one, but the outcome is that Sony's forced bios updates to allow you to play the games you've bought has resulted in my just stopping buying the games.
One final annoyance related to the bios. When I was about to get on a longhaul flight, I realized I had no new books/games. Picked up a copy of Burnout in the airport and took my seat on the plane.
After we were in the air, popped my game in the PSP up it started. Firstly it demanded I upgrade my bios, so I clicked yes. Then it demanded I plugged the PSP in to flash the bios.... I had a very boring flight.
I may have done something similar, although on a much smaller scale - it may even have been where my name came from.
Never really made any money, but came out the other end of two degrees with only a modest amount of debt (not that I'm defending it) and am now a good tax paying little legit drone.
I was never part of the scene, so all my stuff used to come in as trades and I still remember the joy of opening jiffy bags with foreign stamps to see what weird and wonderful contents they would contain. I'm sure part of it was an aspergers like desire to try to collect everything there possibly was available - whether or not I or anybody else actually wanted/needed it.
Had a fun time and it's left me with all manner of fond memories - playing a pre-release version of MGS throughout the night as we couldn't work out how to save the game, or what was actually going on (I've still not quite grasped Japanese), realizing ThrillKill wasn't released as it 'wasn't actually any good' to nervously opening my door to a car-load of scarey looking people in the small hours and them asking very sweetly if I could chip their PS.
I stopped (assuming I'd started) all this many years before the guy in the article threw in the towel (I never made it onto DVDs). The premise of the article that P2P killed physical piracy is probably right. I doubt it's that everybody has know learnt how to download whatever they want and make their own copy - it's more that pretty much everybody knows a friend or colleague that can. Towards the end I used to temp in offices over the holidays - and every single one of them would have the guy who'd come in with a pile of disks in the morning for people (and get a pint if anything returned to him at lunch).
Death of LikSang reminded me of their initial incarnation as supplier of DrV64s (I could never afford a Z64) and the fun I'd had resoldering the guts of what they delivered into a working machine and trying to track down a CD drive that didn't gulp enough power to max out the piss-poor PSU it came with. Dug out my old folders of disks and had a nostalgic trip down memory lane. Most of them were dead, cheap ones had flaked and I'd managed to eat through a load using a big solventy magic marker.
All in the bottom of a landfill now.
If it costs the system builder less to non-include windows - and therefore be more likely to sell you a PC - they'd do it.
It's cheaper for them to include windows. Now this doesn't mean MS give them cash with each OEM copy. It means that a builder that shoves Vista on every PC they produce and doesn't sell naked machines, is favoured by MS. This favour enables them to get a discount on the OEM license they bundle with the vast majority of their machines, this saving outweighing the gain of selling a few naked.
I.e. if a system builder in MS good books say gets a $10 a license deduction for not selling naked machines - say taking it from $50 to $40.
Generously punters would want naked to Vista machines in a 10:1 ratio - for every 10 vista boxes they shift, they shift one naked box. They might be able to sell one machine for $40 less if they 'crossed MS', but they'd pay an extra $100 for the licenses on the Vista machines.
Now I'm aware this isn't precisely how it works, but you get the idea.
Secondly system building is harder than people think - I've had all manner of bugs with chipsets not liking random components. Dell chuck a load of time/effort into ensuring that the hardware configurations they sell work nicely with Windows. If they sell naked machines, then they'll get complaints from people when some obscure Linux version throws problems up - and the user will bitch to Dell. Margins are so low, it doesn't take that much hassle for any profit made on a machine to be wiped out on a few phone calls.
The more they sell configured at PoS, the less problems come back to them.
Doing it in style and lugging/securing a laptop isn't a problem, then I'd take the laptop.
Backpacking and similar, then I'd try to travel as light as possible - and just rely on itnernet cafes. Just to avoid the problem with eternally full camera memory cards, buy twice what you need before you leave, or get an ipod adapter or similar, to empty them out every so often (and take along whatever you need to get them off your ipod) - I can think of few things worse than getting your ipod/powerbook nabbed and losing all your photos.
Something you could consider is one of those U3 memory sticks, never quite found a use for mine (nuked it to a normal one) - but can see how if you're eternally tramping between internet cafes instantly getting your own thunderbird/whatever might be quite nice.
Half-way house between the two might be a smart phone - I've got a HTC Tytn/Hermes/whatever it's badged as - BT, Wifi, 3G, keyboard and (big) pocket sized. With TomTom on it and a cheapie GPS module (solar powered is available - I've got one, but forget who makes it).
What else.. Oh yes - pay for a decent universal plug converter and get a switching USB PSU - and leads you need for all your kit. I used to f'in loathe the number of charging cables/PSUs I dragged around.
is ideally suited to developing and introducing new stuff to the real world.
If it causes problems, then shift it to it's own box, but if it works fine virtually - then just leave it be.
Slashdot Mirror
rather fabulous demo, I realize that that would tie in beautifully with the surface computing MS showed last week (which was lovely as a tech demo with little immediate use). :)
Vista is 'nice' but it's just a progression of what we already know - these tech demos give me a big warm fuzzy futuristic feeling inside
If nothing else it shows that MS is innovating again (at last) - Ball's back with Apple and Google now - "Make me more impressed!"
The way I'd differentiate a Smartphone from a 'normal' phones is that I can load (or it comes with) apps that are in advance of those offered by a regular phone.
My last SE phone had a nice little opera browser that ran over Java and a basic IMAP client. Not very exciting, but nice enough. Upgraded to an HTC TyTn and I get Outlook (which whilst you may bitch, it actually useful) and could install stuff like VPN clients, TomTom, Monkey Island etc.
I think the hardware of the iPhone is lovely from a UI and visual point of view, but this first version is NOT a smartphone.
For a start I can't install my own apps on it yet (so please release that dev kit and open it up) - the single reason to get a smartphone is that you can load up interesting stuff you can't get on a regular phone.
2nd bitch is the lack of 3G. Now I've no interest in making video calls, but the lack of a decent net connection on the phone cripples so many of the apps you may want to run on it. I cannot believe the decision to drop a decent data connection was a desired one (loads of small, cheap, battery frugal phones can) so it bemuses me as to why it's missing. Phone clearly hasn't been rushed to market, the reference designs exist, carrier would be more than happy to bill you for the data.. I now realize I haven't got a point to finish of on, I genuinely cannot think of a reason 3G is missing.. (apart from allowing Apple to charge me for a second phone in 6 months, but even I have trouble being that cynical)... maybe it will be supported after all - allow us all to bitch about the obvious omision on this pricey handset, then announce it does feature it and crush majority of opposition on the eve of the launch...
as somebody mentioned below, there's a system in the UK called traffic master, that monitors traffic speeds on major roads. Initially you had to have a separate device that just told you about upcoming traffic (I think triggered by beacons over roads, rather than GPS).
For the last couple of years most high-end TomTom products have offered a service that integrates TrafficMaster into their software. I use a Tytn PocketPC connected to a Bluetooth GPS unit to plan my route. Every x minutes the phone connects via GPRS/3G to a TomTom server to download the latest traffic information, it overlays any delays onto my route and as I approach congestion it determines if there's an alternative, longer, route that will get me past the delay faster than sitting through it. If there is, then it automatically replots my route for me.
System works pretty well, the only problem being where there is no traffic master information available - i.e. it sees a big motorway blockage, but doesn't know what the traffic is like on the secondary road. Secondary road would be faster if it's clear, but if the motorway's blocked, it's probably not going to be.
I think I hate these new offerings even more.
Way I see it is that a new 'standard' gets pushed upon us, crippled with DRM (DRM which is ultimately paid for by us the consumer).
People hack away at the flakey DRM to produce something that works better, whether it be for dvds, games, m4p, wma, blu-ray, hd-dvd etc.
Suddenly the media companies seem to have realized that the DRM they're forcing on us is causing problems and not working in the wonderfully transparent fashion their PR spiel banged on about. What do they do? Do they fix their DRM? Do the admit they screwed up a bit? NOooooo - they relax/remove the DRM and try to sell it for even more - First Apple with the EMI tracks and now this.
Nintendo designers are arguing with Xbox designers like children in a playground :)
And Slashdot manages to brings Macs into it
but feel one side is being under-represented here.
I can see why Brazil (and other countries) do this - the drug is available and they can't afford to pay the asking price, and I assume this 'Stealing from the rich, to give to the poor' goes down well with their electorate.
Just to take AIDS as an example though, the world has known about this for a long time and many countries know they have a huge problem with it. Surely if a few of them got together and pooled their resources, they could have developed at least one or two components of the anti-viral cocktails that are circulating?
If Brazil and Thailand had bothered to fund research into a treatment drug, then not only could they have given it free to their own people, but I'm sure some licensing agreement could have been reached with pharma companies (e.g. you let us distribute your drug to our people and we'll let you include ours in your retail cocktail).
As it stands these countries are doing nothing, apart for waiting for somebody else to make the breakthrough and then stealing it.
The common argument that 'These pharma companies just make billions out of misery' is just complete bollocks. In comparison to the amount governments spend of healthcare, military, social state etc - the amount required to create their own pharma company is miniscule. The only reason they don't is because it's even cheaper to steal.
My parent was just aimed at /. in general.
I want windows (and Vista Ultimate is quite lovely), but would do occasionally dabble with other OS.
Main problem with them is that I always seem to end up with one driver that refuses to work and I give up. Maybe the big coup here isn't that Dell give you the option of having Ubuntu over Vista for a few dollars less, it's that they guarantee that the machine you buy will be able to run Ubuntu (should you so wish).
The number of people who'll dabble with Ubuntu on a Dell machine (if Dell tell them it'll work) is far far greater than the number of people who want to buy a Dell with Ubuntu only to save a few dollars.
Bundle MS and you'll complain you don't want to pay for the OEM license.
Give you MS-free option and you then complain you're losing the cheap OEM license.
*bangs head on desk*
This seems like a fine idea.
If you're a large international you don't want to fail in public.
If you are going to fail in public, then you really don't want to do it on possibly the largest platform on the planet - especially after you've paid for the privilege of climbing onto it.
Don't think of it as sponsorship, think of it as a gigantic security deposit paid upfront.
(or would want to). I've got a flat in a listed building in the middle of a town.
Being in a town is great as I can get my Freeview reception and speedy ADSL2 - unfortunately I'm not allowed to slap a satellite dish on the outside of my building and as even the f'in pavement outside is listed, it was considered too expensive to lay cable. If I'm ever to get HDTV it's going to be using MIMO, after switchover, or IPTV.
Now I know I'm probably in a somewhat rare position, but loads of people find they can't receive stuff for all manner of reasons - more methods of getting HDTV into my house the better and competition is always nice.
that there's an OS that has a more intuitive use for the 'DELETE' key than DELETING?
you get a dialog box asking if you want to delete the file (by default) - so you have to hit enter to confirm your deletion.
The file by default gets shoved in the recycle bin as well, so easy to get back if you've realized you've made a mistake.
You have the option if you wish to remove the prompt on the delete, or skip the recycle bin by holding shift.
I think the point I'm trying to make about XP/Vista is that when you press the delete key, the OS assumes that you are actually trying to delete a file (quite sensibly) and respond to you accordingly.
they'd just launch a cut-down version of Vista that ran on the cheapie hardware.
*MEEEP*
You think Bill reads Slashdot?
but I can't help think that missing definitions 1->3 may indicate a slightly more godly directed and commonly used usage.
but most of the efforts to crack down on the end users are to try to cut down the supply.
In the same way people wanting to see porn stars have sex means that pornstars get filmed having sex, people wanting to pay money to see children get abused means children get filmed being abused.
Now I'm not entirely convinced that the world is full of people abusing children to make money, but there's certainly a connection.
as people vote in their own self-interest.
Whether that self-interest is 200 Pesos thrust into their hand as they walk into the booth, or 200 Pesos less tax paid due to new tax system voted in doesn't make much difference.
Actually the more I think about it - In the Phillippines the cash seems to be given to you by the politician if you promise to vote for them. In the 'democratic West',we get nothing for our vote apart from the promise from the politician. Personally I'd prefer to see the cash in my hand, rather than a promise.
but until stuff syncs with Outlook, it has no change of defeating it.
I'm not a huge fan of MS, but it's nice that external people can send you stuff (as they use Outlook) and it'll appear in your company outlook calendar.
Sooo if you want to defeat Outlook you've got to produce something that replicates outlook's functionality. I don't care what the other company is using, I just care it works with my outlook (or vica-versa).
Basically my point is we live in an Outlook eco-system. If you want to displace it, then you can't just ignore it and do your own thing (e.g. Mozilla+Google).
Wikipedia is blocked as it may contain inaccurate information?
But you're not blocking the rest of the internet that can contain anything, from anybody and is subject to no review at all?
Maybe in the board's concern they should extend their block to any site that's ever reported incorrect or disputed information - this would cover pretty much every site in existence - religion, politics, history blah blah.
Whilst Wikipedia shouldn't be taken as gospel (well actually they gospels shouldn't be taken as gospel either, but I digress), if you dip beneath the front page and examine the edits it actually allows you to see most sides of the debate on most topics.
that they need the amount of space Blu-Ray provides.
To my knowledge there aren't any 2 disk 360 games (or even any DVD based games that immediately spring to mind). Two reasons spring to mind, 9gig is enough for a game and/or publishers don't want you to be able to give a disk to your mate when you've gone passed half way. Oh and whilst on the subject, I was under the impression that PS3 cached to the HD as the transfer speed on Blu-Ray wasn't quite up to it (I seem to remember reading somewhere that you could get data off a 360 DVD faster with X gen DVD drive faster than you could on PS3s 1st gen Blu-Ray). Secondly, in this age of increasing dev costs, does Sony can produce enough 'game data' to fill a BR disk and make a profit?
Everybody loved PS2 GH2.
360 GH2 is the same, but with better graphics and more songs.
The downloadable content is just an extra option, to buy if you want it - that's all.
If you think it's too much, don't buy it and just enjoy the game you've already got.
Personally I did wince a little bit at the price, but it does show they're going to support the game and hopefully if they make enough cash from selling the extra songs - they might full their f'in finger out and patch the game to give online play.
I used to face the choice of upgrading the PSP for the game I bought, or breaking my homebrew/emu stuff.
Still remember fearfully clicking to run GTA, knowing my homebrew was lost until the next crack came along.
In the end I realized I had to decide between Sony UMD game, or homebrew/emu. As the amount of homebrew rose and the qaulity of the games dropped (well that's how it felt to me) I just gave up patching the firmware.
I can't be the only one, but the outcome is that Sony's forced bios updates to allow you to play the games you've bought has resulted in my just stopping buying the games.
One final annoyance related to the bios. When I was about to get on a longhaul flight, I realized I had no new books/games. Picked up a copy of Burnout in the airport and took my seat on the plane.
After we were in the air, popped my game in the PSP up it started. Firstly it demanded I upgrade my bios, so I clicked yes. Then it demanded I plugged the PSP in to flash the bios.... I had a very boring flight.
I may have done something similar, although on a much smaller scale - it may even have been where my name came from.
Never really made any money, but came out the other end of two degrees with only a modest amount of debt (not that I'm defending it) and am now a good tax paying little legit drone.
I was never part of the scene, so all my stuff used to come in as trades and I still remember the joy of opening jiffy bags with foreign stamps to see what weird and wonderful contents they would contain. I'm sure part of it was an aspergers like desire to try to collect everything there possibly was available - whether or not I or anybody else actually wanted/needed it.
Had a fun time and it's left me with all manner of fond memories - playing a pre-release version of MGS throughout the night as we couldn't work out how to save the game, or what was actually going on (I've still not quite grasped Japanese), realizing ThrillKill wasn't released as it 'wasn't actually any good' to nervously opening my door to a car-load of scarey looking people in the small hours and them asking very sweetly if I could chip their PS.
I stopped (assuming I'd started) all this many years before the guy in the article threw in the towel (I never made it onto DVDs). The premise of the article that P2P killed physical piracy is probably right. I doubt it's that everybody has know learnt how to download whatever they want and make their own copy - it's more that pretty much everybody knows a friend or colleague that can. Towards the end I used to temp in offices over the holidays - and every single one of them would have the guy who'd come in with a pile of disks in the morning for people (and get a pint if anything returned to him at lunch).
Death of LikSang reminded me of their initial incarnation as supplier of DrV64s (I could never afford a Z64) and the fun I'd had resoldering the guts of what they delivered into a working machine and trying to track down a CD drive that didn't gulp enough power to max out the piss-poor PSU it came with. Dug out my old folders of disks and had a nostalgic trip down memory lane. Most of them were dead, cheap ones had flaked and I'd managed to eat through a load using a big solventy magic marker.
All in the bottom of a landfill now.
If it costs the system builder less to non-include windows - and therefore be more likely to sell you a PC - they'd do it.
It's cheaper for them to include windows. Now this doesn't mean MS give them cash with each OEM copy. It means that a builder that shoves Vista on every PC they produce and doesn't sell naked machines, is favoured by MS. This favour enables them to get a discount on the OEM license they bundle with the vast majority of their machines, this saving outweighing the gain of selling a few naked.
I.e. if a system builder in MS good books say gets a $10 a license deduction for not selling naked machines - say taking it from $50 to $40.
Generously punters would want naked to Vista machines in a 10:1 ratio - for every 10 vista boxes they shift, they shift one naked box. They might be able to sell one machine for $40 less if they 'crossed MS', but they'd pay an extra $100 for the licenses on the Vista machines.
Now I'm aware this isn't precisely how it works, but you get the idea.
Secondly system building is harder than people think - I've had all manner of bugs with chipsets not liking random components. Dell chuck a load of time/effort into ensuring that the hardware configurations they sell work nicely with Windows. If they sell naked machines, then they'll get complaints from people when some obscure Linux version throws problems up - and the user will bitch to Dell. Margins are so low, it doesn't take that much hassle for any profit made on a machine to be wiped out on a few phone calls.
The more they sell configured at PoS, the less problems come back to them.
depends entirely on how you're travelling.
Doing it in style and lugging/securing a laptop isn't a problem, then I'd take the laptop.
Backpacking and similar, then I'd try to travel as light as possible - and just rely on itnernet cafes. Just to avoid the problem with eternally full camera memory cards, buy twice what you need before you leave, or get an ipod adapter or similar, to empty them out every so often (and take along whatever you need to get them off your ipod) - I can think of few things worse than getting your ipod/powerbook nabbed and losing all your photos.
Something you could consider is one of those U3 memory sticks, never quite found a use for mine (nuked it to a normal one) - but can see how if you're eternally tramping between internet cafes instantly getting your own thunderbird/whatever might be quite nice.
Half-way house between the two might be a smart phone - I've got a HTC Tytn/Hermes/whatever it's badged as - BT, Wifi, 3G, keyboard and (big) pocket sized. With TomTom on it and a cheapie GPS module (solar powered is available - I've got one, but forget who makes it).
What else.. Oh yes - pay for a decent universal plug converter and get a switching USB PSU - and leads you need for all your kit. I used to f'in loathe the number of charging cables/PSUs I dragged around.
is ideally suited to developing and introducing new stuff to the real world.
If it causes problems, then shift it to it's own box, but if it works fine virtually - then just leave it be.