Wish I had mod points, was about to make a very similar post. Nothing in science is absolute, it has never tried to "prove" the "truth" because that's essentially impossible. If we ever evolve (ha) to pan-dimensional beings capable of observing all points of space and time within our current universe in a single instant, we might be able to "prove" some truths about our current universe, but we have exactly the same problem of "proving" the "truths" of the new universe we would find ourselves inhabiting.
I imagine the evidence disproving evolution is the usual hand-wavy stuff about mutations not giving rise to new species (because that's the only way to cause a change in the host genome, honest), the "fact" that gaps in the fossil record mean extrapolations are flawed (many creationists take this to equal "completely made up"), "nothing as perfect as the human eye could ever have evolved naturally", the usual mumbo jumbo about the creationist creations of macro- and micro-evolution (seriously, WTF does that even mean in terms of speciation?) - there's many more tried and tested techniques. There was one in another post stating that "100million year old soft tissue and DNA" disproved evolution (not sure how, author didn't explain). And I'm unsure as to how soft tissue could have survived for 100million years, even if preserved in amber and buried under the south pole. The fact that evolution can be directly observed happening around us in organisms that have very short reproductive cycles (bacteria and insects mostly) is a fact that's usually conveniently sidestepped or, failing that, is pooh-poohed by saying "well of course some rats would survive warfarin poisoning, it's just what happens!". Sickle cell anaemia must similarly be a punishment for some sin in former lives, rather than an evolutionary precedence that made the hosts immune to malaria.
I have a friend who's an astrophysicist who's one of those strange beings that can simultaneously believe two mutually contradictory viewpoints - she believes the earth and the universe is billions of years old, that we evolved from monkeys and that E=mc^2 during the week and that the earth is 4600 years old and humans are made from divine clay at weekends. Utterly bonkers:) As another poster noted, she was brought up in rural Ireland.
I've also met a fair few people who believe god created the universe, but that his creation was what we scientists call the big bang and that natural evolution is just another part of gods plan; don't have any problem with them believing that because it doesn't contradict science (barely intersects with it in fact, since their logic is "what we see is gods work" but at least they're not trying to pervert science in the process). Young earth creationists do seem to be largely an american phenomenon but you do get the occasional nutjob who's convinced of something ridiculous. Thankfully, no-one takes them seriously. Apart from Blair, unfortunately.
Can someone more familiar with theses document formats please clarify:
Surely the only sensible place to implement a macro runtime is in the application itself, and just use a meta-object to store the code in the doc itself...? Wouldn't it make more sense for the doc to just have a standardidsed API that any macro-enabled application that supported the format could interact with?
Apologies if this is already what it does, but saying "removing support for VBA from OOXML" seems to suggest that OOXML needs to have specific support for every macro language that can be bound to it.
Thanks for that, good to finally see something that seems ideally suited to the Cell.
As an aside, isn't the work to combine your current bog-standard processors with inbuilt "graphics processors" (a la AMD Fusion and Intel Larrabee) just going to turn every consumer CPU into a Cell-ish architecture within five years or so - a number-crunching core or two plus an array of "dumb" scalar processors?
Even more interestingly, they managed to do Quake 4 using CPU's only. Since modern graphics card are no longer just a bunch of vector processors but merely a colossal stack of many scalar processing units they should be able to be much more flexibly adapted to different types of processing - at the moment their internal software is generally specialised for polygon pushing, but I don't see any reason why nVidia or whoever could start developing an OpenRT stack to sit alongside their OpenGL and DirectX stacks, other than there not being much interest in consumer level raytracing just yet (is there raytracing work being done for GPGPU projects?).
Are there any reasons why current GPU designs can't be adapted for hardware assisted raytracing?
Think of every 12V line going into every hard drive in your machine. Now think of every 12V line having to be routed through the motherboard.
It essentially won't happen because it'll make motherboards much more complicated (read: expensive). That said, power-over-SATA shoudl have been in the e-SATA spec from the beginning, glad I didn't hop on the bandwagon earlier.
I think his point is that you can't get the docs, build a decocder and then test that it interprets the document correctly in time - you can't just read the instructions and go "oh yeah, that'll work", you have to actually try it.
3rd party word decoders have been at ~90% compatibility for an age now, but it's always getting the last 10% right that's been just out of reach thanks to obfuscation and the rest of it.
Same problem here. What's especially frustrating is actually having to *click* each submenu in order to and see what programs are available - if you're just browsing about looking at apps it's unusably annoying, if you know what you're looking for it's just slower than the old kicker K-menu.
At the moment I'd like to call Plasma the most overrated piece of shit that ever made it into something masquerading as a release. At the moment it offers me nothing but took away everything I loved about KDE 3.5, to the extent that GNOME is more configurable and has a saner interface. Thanks a bunch, Siego!
Well taken in that context (and it certainly seems likely) it does seem obvious that it's a ploy to influence OOXML ISO certification and adoption. But it still seems like one hell of a sacrifice because presumably if they're not lying, with this and the OOXML docs, FOSS might be able to write a reference decoder library faster than MS will. Of course, then there's extend and extinguish as I'm prepared to bet the farm on the OOXML spec having some hidden MS-only extras.
One thing I'd like to know is if ISO certification has a "Sorry, you lied about this, standard revoked" clause in it...
Yet another thing I'd love to know is whether this includes the spec for the macro language (technically part of the apps, I know) - supposed support for the doc standard and the VBA script would make OpenOffice seem like a good option to alot of companies.
Please note that the slogan I gave was from their marketing department. Any resemblance the actual decoder work has with pure, unadulterated hellfire of the anus that makes you wish you and everyone you'd ever met was dead is purely coincidental and not covered by their "CompilesForSure!" guarantee.
Perhaps even more bizzarely, on the two occasions where I didn't look at the file extensions the EXE archive opened up in WINE and extracted without a problem...! I find that BIOS updates typically come in exe format only, but HP's definitely ran well enough to make me a bootable CD ISO.
Wait, what? Brain not comprehending this. Unless TFA is a complete pack of lies, I'm going to have to give tentative applause. Perhaps the only interesting thing I can think of is that "royalty free" != "we won't sue you into oblivion if we think you're trespassing on our patents". Sorry MS, you taught me to be cynical.
Might not be what you're looking for, but ever since I discovered Python and SQLite I've found this little tool http://sqlitebrowser.sourceforge.net/ to be brilliant.
Granted, I'm not using SQLite to do anything complicated - mostly just as dumb storage for non-huge cross-linked lists but it still seems remarkably capable, very fast and very low on resources, with the GUI providing a nice interface for a quick gander at the data structure.
Perhaps I've had a very sheltered life, but how in God's name does someone equate a corporate high flyer with someone who's capable of analysing data in a critical, rational, objective fashion?;)
I used to work for a small financial company, who saved a crapload of money by migrating much of our backend over to FOSS (file servers, mail gateways, internal webapps (Plone = rocks) - the company was only 18 months old when they joined and had invested heavily in an MS setup that was going badly wrong due to terrible third party maintenance so we were given alot of free reign with what we (temporarily) broke in order to get to a stable and maintainable platform, which we did. We were later bought out by a huuuge corporate who had a large (100+) IT dept. and were very much an MS shop. Fair few people there who've used Linux (indeed, all the DBAs are RHCE's for Oracle plus we have a couple of pSeries boxes for the big fat DB's and apps, plus we have some Linux SANs and lots of ESX boxes), but the level of ignorance about Linux and OSS in general has frequently been staggering: If we use Linux, then we have to open source all our data Open source is just used by people too scared to pirate There's no-one to support it (this made the DBA's laugh, the RH support contract must cost a fortune) You can't expect users to have to use a command line for everything?! Plone and Zope? Never heard of them, but we'll have to get rid of them since they won't run on windows
Now I'm very much a "best tool for the job" man, so obviously it'd be idiocy to attempt a conversion to Linux on any part of the org because everything's too entrenched. But if seasoned IT pros (a job, I thought, that prized rational, critical, logical thinking above pretty much everything else) can't even realise that maybe tht upstart OS has a use in some business niches I shudder to think what the (rule of thumb: generally an order of magnitude less tech acument than the contractors on the support desk) honchos at the top migh act like when presented with a problem they generally don't understand.
Yeah yeah, I must've been born yesterday to equate an IT pro with someone who's rational, critical, logical and technical...;)
Whilst I don't doubt the woeful situations you find yourselves in with the telcos over there, in my experience most people here don't give a crap about HD (everyone I've set up with a media centre has an HDTV, including two with 42" and 50" 1080p sets and they can barely tell the difference - they may be rich but they still don't see the point in spending money on something that's a highly marginal improvement on DVD/PAL DVB-T), they're just happy to get some *good* content, generally regardless of quality.
Sure, give them a choice between a lo-res and a hi-res, all other things being equal they'll go for the hi-res version. But if it's a choice between a lo-res YouTube-esque feed and a hi-res pay-per-view that's a bitch to set up and maintain (don't ask me about the problems I've had with SkyPlus boxes and HDCP) they'll go for the free version every time.
So I guess the cat might not be out of the bag in the states, and you likely have very different TV habits than I'm used to, but I still think that if your telco plutocracy makes life more and more difficult for the paying customer, more and more of those customers will seek out alternative entertainment (or the same entertainment through different/illicit channels). When Lost shifted from Channel 4 (free to everyone in the UK) to Sky (suck Murdoch's cock), most people I knew gave up on watching it. If they wanted to continue with the series, they waited for the DVD's to hit the bargain bin and went through a whole box set in a weekend or two sans adverts. The only TV shows I know of that still constitute water cooler talk (i.e. you want to have seen them in between them showing and work the next day) are Top Gear, Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe and the footie (whcih I don't care for personally).
Maybe I'm living in a utopian bubble where my immediate circle of friends and acquaintances aren't really that into "consuming" things, but I really do think your telcos will ultimately suffer in their increasingly anti-customer tirade, government granted monopoloy or not. Unless you're going to be forced to pay them extortionate amounts for compulsory cable or suchlike? I'm not disagreeing that the whole situation is farked though; it is, and I wish your country luck in getting it sorted out.
So they are sadly asking for something that dont exists.
A
grep '#' *.c
might be a good place to start though, but I'll have to assume that's outside of MS's ability when it comes to providing a service for their loyal custo... ah, I think I just answered my own question.
The cat is already out of the bag on that one though; users that have had the taste of a computer hooked up to their TV rarely want to go back to a regular plain DVD player and a TV guide. Before the HTPC, the computer was "separate" from entertainment because it didn't come with a sofa attached. Now with a decent wireless mouse and keyboard a users gets the sofa, the DVD player, YouTube, their email, wikipedia, family photos, recipes (what with most people having their TV within sight of the kitchen) and, of course, the aforementioned downloadable movies (illegal or otherwise). Modern LCD TV's are basically so indistuinguishable from computer monitors technology-wise they I've yet to see one without a VGA, DVI or HDMI port.
I've set up seven people with media centres of some sort (MythTV, mac minis + FrontRow, one Windows media box plus a couple of bog standard PC's because they wanted to be able to use the web during the adverts without having to shuffle off to the "computer room") and there's no way in hell those people would switch back - they love it. If Big Content won't offer them stuff for their HTPC's, they'll either buy a $BIG_CONTENT_APPROVED device and use their HTPC, or just not bother with Big Content at all, not when there's so much other stuff available to compete for that entertainment space. Similarly, everyone I've set up with a PVR tells me how much less TV they watch - all the stuff they know they want to watch is recorded for them to watch at their leisure so TV scheduling doesn't become a factor in relegating other forms of entertainment to the back burner. Combine that with the fact that many PVR's come with a computer attached "for free" and the above factors come into play as well.
I'm not a USian, but we have similar (though less severe) problems here in the UK WRT to bandwidth; almost all of our last mile copper is still owned by British Telecom (but rented out at a flat rate to every telco, enforced by OfCom) and recently we've had a furore from the telcos over things like the BBC streaming their TV over the net saying "the pipes cannae take it, Cap'n!" whilst the infrastructure fails to melt (of course the furore is about people actually using more of the bandwidth they've already paid for but that's besides the point for the purposes of this argument). Similar situation of massive overselling of bandwidth and a reluctance to invest in fatter backbones (though thankfully most last mile copper is capable of being able to sustain at least 1Mbps downstream which is just enough to comfortably stream video without having to wait too long, more usually 2-4Mbps and I'm not aware of any large city that doesn't have 24Mbps available, but I'm spoilt living in London - no doubt there are people in the country who will inform me they're still forced to use dialup).
What's changed is that now Big Content isn't the sole denizen of the living room - users have the option of absolutely craploads of other entertainment avenues available to them as well. If it plays its cards wrong, Big Content could soon find themselves increasingly marginalised in favour of more accessible content.
...that slashdot could make a fortune by marketing itself as a consultancy firm/consortium for everything tech related (mod system might need a '-1 Retarded Business Idea' added though); someone mentioned ages ago that if there was a scheme where you could bring in your DVD and "upgrade" to a HD-DVD/BluRay version for a nominal cost (say £5), adoption rates would skyrocket overnight. The combo DVD/HD-DVD discs were a nice thought but of little interest to people like me with extensive DVD collections (mostly ripped to my media centre).
But I guess no-one's taken up that idea because you don't get to gouge as much, plus it'd require studio backing ("why sell 1,000,000 at $5 apiece in six months when we can sell 100,000 at $30 apiece? The other 900,000 are bound to buy it at some point or other so we make more money that way!"). Still, think it would have worked out cheaper for the manufacturers in the end. If Tosh and the others had done this from the off I think the shoe would be on the other foot by now.
I'd recommend finding a friend with the Xbox 360 HD-DVD add-on and borrowing it to rip the disc, but that's exactly the sort of thing AACS was invented to stop, plus I'd be encouraging a violation of the DMCA, sooo... I think the official response is:
"Give us more money, bitch. It's your duty as a consumer to maintain our profit margins";)
Personally, I'd just return it for a standard DVD version but I'm a luddite stuckist who's sticking with DVD until the various hi-def formats can give me something better than what IMHO is a marginal difference for alot more moolah.
No, no icons on the desktop, what'd be the point in that? Icons live in the panel where they're easy and quick to get at. To me, icons on the desktop is like putting your phone underneath your typewriter.
I'm not against the implementation of widgets at all (indeed, with plasma they're pretty much a side effect), I'm aware that alot of people think they find them useful;) it's just that there's bound to be loads of useful stuff implemented as "widget only", meaning awkward people like me who like an uncluttered (unused) desktop get left out for the sake of... well, I'm not exactly sure why. Perhaps there's already a mechanism for "put this widget in the systray instead of on the desktop" or something like that but I haven't found it yet.
Why not just treat them like a typical app and give them a taskbar entry so I don't need to hold down a special shortcut? I really don't think reinventing the "every interactive GUI program has an entry in the taskbar" paradigm for the sake of having some shiny eye candy on the desktop is really worth it, and KDE3 already has support for hiding taskbar entries for arbitrary apps if that's what floats your boat (not tested to see if KDE4 has the same functionality).
Slashdot Mirror
Wish I had mod points, was about to make a very similar post. Nothing in science is absolute, it has never tried to "prove" the "truth" because that's essentially impossible. If we ever evolve (ha) to pan-dimensional beings capable of observing all points of space and time within our current universe in a single instant, we might be able to "prove" some truths about our current universe, but we have exactly the same problem of "proving" the "truths" of the new universe we would find ourselves inhabiting.
I imagine the evidence disproving evolution is the usual hand-wavy stuff about mutations not giving rise to new species (because that's the only way to cause a change in the host genome, honest), the "fact" that gaps in the fossil record mean extrapolations are flawed (many creationists take this to equal "completely made up"), "nothing as perfect as the human eye could ever have evolved naturally", the usual mumbo jumbo about the creationist creations of macro- and micro-evolution (seriously, WTF does that even mean in terms of speciation?) - there's many more tried and tested techniques. There was one in another post stating that "100million year old soft tissue and DNA" disproved evolution (not sure how, author didn't explain). And I'm unsure as to how soft tissue could have survived for 100million years, even if preserved in amber and buried under the south pole. The fact that evolution can be directly observed happening around us in organisms that have very short reproductive cycles (bacteria and insects mostly) is a fact that's usually conveniently sidestepped or, failing that, is pooh-poohed by saying "well of course some rats would survive warfarin poisoning, it's just what happens!". Sickle cell anaemia must similarly be a punishment for some sin in former lives, rather than an evolutionary precedence that made the hosts immune to malaria.
They make me chuckle.
I have a friend who's an astrophysicist who's one of those strange beings that can simultaneously believe two mutually contradictory viewpoints - she believes the earth and the universe is billions of years old, that we evolved from monkeys and that E=mc^2 during the week and that the earth is 4600 years old and humans are made from divine clay at weekends. Utterly bonkers :) As another poster noted, she was brought up in rural Ireland.
I've also met a fair few people who believe god created the universe, but that his creation was what we scientists call the big bang and that natural evolution is just another part of gods plan; don't have any problem with them believing that because it doesn't contradict science (barely intersects with it in fact, since their logic is "what we see is gods work" but at least they're not trying to pervert science in the process). Young earth creationists do seem to be largely an american phenomenon but you do get the occasional nutjob who's convinced of something ridiculous. Thankfully, no-one takes them seriously. Apart from Blair, unfortunately.
Can someone more familiar with theses document formats please clarify:
Surely the only sensible place to implement a macro runtime is in the application itself, and just use a meta-object to store the code in the doc itself...? Wouldn't it make more sense for the doc to just have a standardidsed API that any macro-enabled application that supported the format could interact with?
Apologies if this is already what it does, but saying "removing support for VBA from OOXML" seems to suggest that OOXML needs to have specific support for every macro language that can be bound to it.
Thanks for that, good to finally see something that seems ideally suited to the Cell.
As an aside, isn't the work to combine your current bog-standard processors with inbuilt "graphics processors" (a la AMD Fusion and Intel Larrabee) just going to turn every consumer CPU into a Cell-ish architecture within five years or so - a number-crunching core or two plus an array of "dumb" scalar processors?
Even more interestingly, they managed to do Quake 4 using CPU's only. Since modern graphics card are no longer just a bunch of vector processors but merely a colossal stack of many scalar processing units they should be able to be much more flexibly adapted to different types of processing - at the moment their internal software is generally specialised for polygon pushing, but I don't see any reason why nVidia or whoever could start developing an OpenRT stack to sit alongside their OpenGL and DirectX stacks, other than there not being much interest in consumer level raytracing just yet (is there raytracing work being done for GPGPU projects?).
Are there any reasons why current GPU designs can't be adapted for hardware assisted raytracing?
Think of every 12V line going into every hard drive in your machine. Now think of every 12V line having to be routed through the motherboard.
It essentially won't happen because it'll make motherboards much more complicated (read: expensive). That said, power-over-SATA shoudl have been in the e-SATA spec from the beginning, glad I didn't hop on the bandwagon earlier.
I think his point is that you can't get the docs, build a decocder and then test that it interprets the document correctly in time - you can't just read the instructions and go "oh yeah, that'll work", you have to actually try it.
3rd party word decoders have been at ~90% compatibility for an age now, but it's always getting the last 10% right that's been just out of reach thanks to obfuscation and the rest of it.
Same problem here. What's especially frustrating is actually having to *click* each submenu in order to and see what programs are available - if you're just browsing about looking at apps it's unusably annoying, if you know what you're looking for it's just slower than the old kicker K-menu.
At the moment I'd like to call Plasma the most overrated piece of shit that ever made it into something masquerading as a release. At the moment it offers me nothing but took away everything I loved about KDE 3.5, to the extent that GNOME is more configurable and has a saner interface. Thanks a bunch, Siego!
Well taken in that context (and it certainly seems likely) it does seem obvious that it's a ploy to influence OOXML ISO certification and adoption. But it still seems like one hell of a sacrifice because presumably if they're not lying, with this and the OOXML docs, FOSS might be able to write a reference decoder library faster than MS will. Of course, then there's extend and extinguish as I'm prepared to bet the farm on the OOXML spec having some hidden MS-only extras.
One thing I'd like to know is if ISO certification has a "Sorry, you lied about this, standard revoked" clause in it...
Yet another thing I'd love to know is whether this includes the spec for the macro language (technically part of the apps, I know) - supposed support for the doc standard and the VBA script would make OpenOffice seem like a good option to alot of companies.
So many questions...
Please note that the slogan I gave was from their marketing department. Any resemblance the actual decoder work has with pure, unadulterated hellfire of the anus that makes you wish you and everyone you'd ever met was dead is purely coincidental and not covered by their "CompilesForSure!" guarantee.
Perhaps even more bizzarely, on the two occasions where I didn't look at the file extensions the EXE archive opened up in WINE and extracted without a problem...! I find that BIOS updates typically come in exe format only, but HP's definitely ran well enough to make me a bootable CD ISO.
February 15th? Are they merely trying to recruit the programmers who attempted suicide the previous evening on account of not getting lucky?
;)
"Decoding MS binary formats - it's better than death!"
Wait, what? Brain not comprehending this. Unless TFA is a complete pack of lies, I'm going to have to give tentative applause. Perhaps the only interesting thing I can think of is that "royalty free" != "we won't sue you into oblivion if we think you're trespassing on our patents". Sorry MS, you taught me to be cynical.
Might not be what you're looking for, but ever since I discovered Python and SQLite I've found this little tool http://sqlitebrowser.sourceforge.net/ to be brilliant.
Granted, I'm not using SQLite to do anything complicated - mostly just as dumb storage for non-huge cross-linked lists but it still seems remarkably capable, very fast and very low on resources, with the GUI providing a nice interface for a quick gander at the data structure.
There's also a Ruby/GTK gizmo here http://rsqlitegui.rubyforge.org/
"Is this one of those things where you think that the whole world lives under US law?"
;)
Man, you saw that Twlight Zone episode too? Scared the crap out of me as a kid!
Perhaps I've had a very sheltered life, but how in God's name does someone equate a corporate high flyer with someone who's capable of analysing data in a critical, rational, objective fashion? ;)
;)
I used to work for a small financial company, who saved a crapload of money by migrating much of our backend over to FOSS (file servers, mail gateways, internal webapps (Plone = rocks) - the company was only 18 months old when they joined and had invested heavily in an MS setup that was going badly wrong due to terrible third party maintenance so we were given alot of free reign with what we (temporarily) broke in order to get to a stable and maintainable platform, which we did. We were later bought out by a huuuge corporate who had a large (100+) IT dept. and were very much an MS shop. Fair few people there who've used Linux (indeed, all the DBAs are RHCE's for Oracle plus we have a couple of pSeries boxes for the big fat DB's and apps, plus we have some Linux SANs and lots of ESX boxes), but the level of ignorance about Linux and OSS in general has frequently been staggering:
If we use Linux, then we have to open source all our data
Open source is just used by people too scared to pirate
There's no-one to support it (this made the DBA's laugh, the RH support contract must cost a fortune)
You can't expect users to have to use a command line for everything?!
Plone and Zope? Never heard of them, but we'll have to get rid of them since they won't run on windows
Now I'm very much a "best tool for the job" man, so obviously it'd be idiocy to attempt a conversion to Linux on any part of the org because everything's too entrenched. But if seasoned IT pros (a job, I thought, that prized rational, critical, logical thinking above pretty much everything else) can't even realise that maybe tht upstart OS has a use in some business niches I shudder to think what the (rule of thumb: generally an order of magnitude less tech acument than the contractors on the support desk) honchos at the top migh act like when presented with a problem they generally don't understand.
Yeah yeah, I must've been born yesterday to equate an IT pro with someone who's rational, critical, logical and technical...
Whilst I don't doubt the woeful situations you find yourselves in with the telcos over there, in my experience most people here don't give a crap about HD (everyone I've set up with a media centre has an HDTV, including two with 42" and 50" 1080p sets and they can barely tell the difference - they may be rich but they still don't see the point in spending money on something that's a highly marginal improvement on DVD/PAL DVB-T), they're just happy to get some *good* content, generally regardless of quality.
Sure, give them a choice between a lo-res and a hi-res, all other things being equal they'll go for the hi-res version. But if it's a choice between a lo-res YouTube-esque feed and a hi-res pay-per-view that's a bitch to set up and maintain (don't ask me about the problems I've had with SkyPlus boxes and HDCP) they'll go for the free version every time.
So I guess the cat might not be out of the bag in the states, and you likely have very different TV habits than I'm used to, but I still think that if your telco plutocracy makes life more and more difficult for the paying customer, more and more of those customers will seek out alternative entertainment (or the same entertainment through different/illicit channels). When Lost shifted from Channel 4 (free to everyone in the UK) to Sky (suck Murdoch's cock), most people I knew gave up on watching it. If they wanted to continue with the series, they waited for the DVD's to hit the bargain bin and went through a whole box set in a weekend or two sans adverts. The only TV shows I know of that still constitute water cooler talk (i.e. you want to have seen them in between them showing and work the next day) are Top Gear, Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe and the footie (whcih I don't care for personally).
Maybe I'm living in a utopian bubble where my immediate circle of friends and acquaintances aren't really that into "consuming" things, but I really do think your telcos will ultimately suffer in their increasingly anti-customer tirade, government granted monopoloy or not. Unless you're going to be forced to pay them extortionate amounts for compulsory cable or suchlike? I'm not disagreeing that the whole situation is farked though; it is, and I wish your country luck in getting it sorted out.
A might be a good place to start though, but I'll have to assume that's outside of MS's ability when it comes to providing a service for their loyal custo... ah, I think I just answered my own question.
The cat is already out of the bag on that one though; users that have had the taste of a computer hooked up to their TV rarely want to go back to a regular plain DVD player and a TV guide. Before the HTPC, the computer was "separate" from entertainment because it didn't come with a sofa attached. Now with a decent wireless mouse and keyboard a users gets the sofa, the DVD player, YouTube, their email, wikipedia, family photos, recipes (what with most people having their TV within sight of the kitchen) and, of course, the aforementioned downloadable movies (illegal or otherwise). Modern LCD TV's are basically so indistuinguishable from computer monitors technology-wise they I've yet to see one without a VGA, DVI or HDMI port.
:)
I've set up seven people with media centres of some sort (MythTV, mac minis + FrontRow, one Windows media box plus a couple of bog standard PC's because they wanted to be able to use the web during the adverts without having to shuffle off to the "computer room") and there's no way in hell those people would switch back - they love it. If Big Content won't offer them stuff for their HTPC's, they'll either buy a $BIG_CONTENT_APPROVED device and use their HTPC, or just not bother with Big Content at all, not when there's so much other stuff available to compete for that entertainment space. Similarly, everyone I've set up with a PVR tells me how much less TV they watch - all the stuff they know they want to watch is recorded for them to watch at their leisure so TV scheduling doesn't become a factor in relegating other forms of entertainment to the back burner. Combine that with the fact that many PVR's come with a computer attached "for free" and the above factors come into play as well.
I'm not a USian, but we have similar (though less severe) problems here in the UK WRT to bandwidth; almost all of our last mile copper is still owned by British Telecom (but rented out at a flat rate to every telco, enforced by OfCom) and recently we've had a furore from the telcos over things like the BBC streaming their TV over the net saying "the pipes cannae take it, Cap'n!" whilst the infrastructure fails to melt (of course the furore is about people actually using more of the bandwidth they've already paid for but that's besides the point for the purposes of this argument). Similar situation of massive overselling of bandwidth and a reluctance to invest in fatter backbones (though thankfully most last mile copper is capable of being able to sustain at least 1Mbps downstream which is just enough to comfortably stream video without having to wait too long, more usually 2-4Mbps and I'm not aware of any large city that doesn't have 24Mbps available, but I'm spoilt living in London - no doubt there are people in the country who will inform me they're still forced to use dialup).
What's changed is that now Big Content isn't the sole denizen of the living room - users have the option of absolutely craploads of other entertainment avenues available to them as well. If it plays its cards wrong, Big Content could soon find themselves increasingly marginalised in favour of more accessible content.
Just my £0.02
Damnit, I also swaer I sholdu get a bettre spelchekcer.
...that slashdot could make a fortune by marketing itself as a consultancy firm/consortium for everything tech related (mod system might need a '-1 Retarded Business Idea' added though); someone mentioned ages ago that if there was a scheme where you could bring in your DVD and "upgrade" to a HD-DVD/BluRay version for a nominal cost (say £5), adoption rates would skyrocket overnight. The combo DVD/HD-DVD discs were a nice thought but of little interest to people like me with extensive DVD collections (mostly ripped to my media centre).
But I guess no-one's taken up that idea because you don't get to gouge as much, plus it'd require studio backing ("why sell 1,000,000 at $5 apiece in six months when we can sell 100,000 at $30 apiece? The other 900,000 are bound to buy it at some point or other so we make more money that way!"). Still, think it would have worked out cheaper for the manufacturers in the end. If Tosh and the others had done this from the off I think the shoe would be on the other foot by now.
I'd recommend finding a friend with the Xbox 360 HD-DVD add-on and borrowing it to rip the disc, but that's exactly the sort of thing AACS was invented to stop, plus I'd be encouraging a violation of the DMCA, sooo... I think the official response is:
;)
"Give us more money, bitch. It's your duty as a consumer to maintain our profit margins"
Personally, I'd just return it for a standard DVD version but I'm a luddite stuckist who's sticking with DVD until the various hi-def formats can give me something better than what IMHO is a marginal difference for alot more moolah.
No, no icons on the desktop, what'd be the point in that? Icons live in the panel where they're easy and quick to get at. To me, icons on the desktop is like putting your phone underneath your typewriter.
;) it's just that there's bound to be loads of useful stuff implemented as "widget only", meaning awkward people like me who like an uncluttered (unused) desktop get left out for the sake of... well, I'm not exactly sure why. Perhaps there's already a mechanism for "put this widget in the systray instead of on the desktop" or something like that but I haven't found it yet.
I'm not against the implementation of widgets at all (indeed, with plasma they're pretty much a side effect), I'm aware that alot of people think they find them useful
Why not just treat them like a typical app and give them a taskbar entry so I don't need to hold down a special shortcut? I really don't think reinventing the "every interactive GUI program has an entry in the taskbar" paradigm for the sake of having some shiny eye candy on the desktop is really worth it, and KDE3 already has support for hiding taskbar entries for arbitrary apps if that's what floats your boat (not tested to see if KDE4 has the same functionality).
And then answer when it's at alpha will be the same as it's ever been. If I'm wrong, I'll even go so far as to buy a hat in order to eat it.