Re:I want is a way to tell it which torrent progra
on
A Preview of Opera 9.5
·
· Score: 1
Because: a) If anyone wants to alter any other MIME handling behaviour (e.g. get PDF's to open in Foxit), they'll now know how b) I wasn't aware of the enable/disable bit in opera:config, cheers for that!
Opera does ship with content blockers - right-click somewhere on a web page and hit the "block content" option. Click on the banner ads, edit them to block your own wildcards. Before that you could add a filter.ini file definition to your opera6rc.ini but that was a bit of a PITA to use.
They can't ship by default with an ad blocker else I imagine they'd get reamed by online ad companies for "stealing" or some such cobblers.
Luckily I haven't had any of the slowdown problems you mention (Gentoo, Debian and Ubuntu, dynamic linked version). Been using it since v5 on windows (my first ever non-IE web browser) and v6 on Linux.
I know what you mean about FF though - I want to like it, but I just find the Opera UI so much easier and faster to use, and the speed difference (real or apparent) adds up after a while. Mouse gestures under FF are still shit compared to Opera IMHO - they're far too laggy and are often mis-detected for me, and I still haven't found a convenient way to modify all of FF's keyboard shortcuts easily. What extension do you use to replicate the remember-scroll-position-on-reload function, or is this something you don't have?
I'm hoping that Opera will release some sort of extensions API at some point in the future, but at the moment there aren't a huge amount of FF functions/extensions that I miss that I can't replicate under Opera - there's a userJS script to emulate flashblock, for instance.
...although there's a few features that haven't been mentioned here but were part of the developer announcement, including:
Faster tab switching in UNIX (this is one of my biggest irritations about opera at the moment - tab switchng under windows is nearly instantaneous, under X there's a perceptible delay) QT4 builds 64bit builds
I imagine alot of this comes from the new rendering engine which is probably 64bit clean. It would have been nice to be able to configure bookmark syncing to use something other than an external web host (it's blocked for me at work), for example using FTP or WebDAV, or even just an external shared folder.
Opera still doesn't work well with my company's filters, all of which require NTLM auth. Opera still doesn't seem to manage this successfully and asks for for a password every time I open a page, unless I pass through a local NTM proxy (NTLMAPS).
That said, it's still my favourite browser under Linux and Windows.
Because if they put in a routine to the effect of;
if [ ping_wga_servers != 0 ]; then
is_genuine=TRUE fi
it'd be incredibly easy for people to get around it. As it is you have to NO-OP the routines out with a hex editor before you can get around WGA.
Re:I want is a way to tell it which torrent progra
on
A Preview of Opera 9.5
·
· Score: 5, Informative
tools > preferences > advanced > downloads > untick "hide files opened with opera", find "torrent", edit to your hearts content. Same for any other MIME type.
I've been trying to set up my Linux desktop with Windows-alike roaming profiles for ages now.
I have the kerberos single sign on for a multitude of services. I have the LDAP user metadata. I have NFSv4 file shares secured with kerberos, and autofs homes that enable me to use the same app settings on each machine. I have a groupware server (Kolab) serving all of my users (all two of them, ha!). But can I find any way of accessing my home drive (reliably) on my laptop when it's not plugged into the network?
If I ask on any forums, I'm either told to just use NFS homes (which of course doesn't work when your laptop might be a) on the other side of the planet and b) not plugged into the internet). So I need a way of syncing my server:/home/user with laptop:/home/user bi-directionally. Since there doesn't seem to be any easy way of doing it built into any Linux distro, I created a bunch of shellscripts (basically just a bunch of rsync commands that don't sync certain directories, e.g. ~/.maildir) that are location aware (i.e. they can tell if I'm on my local LAN or not), and sync to/from the file server at startup, and then just to the fileserver at shutdown (or of course I can inititate them manually). It's not perfect though, and I've had to restore some items that have been clobbered from backup (granted, windows often does the same thing with roaming profiles). It also means keeping a fairly disciplined file hierarchy - otherwise you can get broken symlinks galore, or config files that are repeatedly overwritten.
However, I believe the Linux desktop is crying out for a simple and automated way of doing it (perhaps a modified version of unison that, instead of querying the user for resolving conflicts just dumps conflicting files into a seperate directory?) - for most deployments, shared NFS homes are perfect but for laptop users outside of the network they're useless.
I've tried Coda and AFS and, apart from being hard to set up and containing (to me) severe limitations that doesn't really suit them for online/offline use, they seem to be fairly unstable. Perhaps I suck at adminning Coda and AFS, but I personally think using a different, and rather complex, filesystem for roaming homes is unnecessary and I wasn't really keen to put too much time into it.
Disclaimer: I'm not attempting to replicate MS' roaming profiles, because I think it can be done better - I just don't see any way of doing it other than shell script hackery at the moment, and I definitely need a way of doing something akin to roaming profiles. Should have filed my own Ask Slashdot ages ago:D
But if Linus, as an individual, isn't interested in doing things to the GUI, why should he? There are plenty of talented coders fiddling with the GUI and desktop subsystems, why would Linus chipping in make much of a difference? Personally I think he'd be wasted working on something he didn't like doing.
Your claims about the mainstream are sorta valid, but that's not Linus' fight - he doesn't really care about it, and just wants to help make the best kernel he can on techincal merit alone. The interview gives it away - pretty much all he uses a desktop for is a web browser, most of the rest of it is CLI stuff and his usage pattern is completely different to your average desktop PC user.
To analogise, if this was an OS war for the Battle Of The Desktop, Linus would be the dude in charge of making sure the supply lines were always well stocked and that if one supply line stopped, it wouldn't cause the entire army to grind to a halt. The generals on the front line would be people like Mark Shuttleworth and Miguel de Icaza.
In one way I agree with you, because there's alot of media oriented around various combinations of sex and violence masquerading as art.
However, the acceptance of violence did lead to a great many films and the like that simply wouldn't be possible without it - the work of people like Scorcese springs to mind. I have no problem with sex and violence when it's a valid part of the plot (and no, tacking some gratuitous T&A and gory SFX onto an otherwise good flick doesn't count as valid). I'll admit that it's very much a matter of opinion whether you find work like Scarface or Pulp Fiction as "art" but I think most people will agree they're fine stories with interesting characters and storylines. Not that they should be used as any kind of an excuse for the rest of the hyperviolent turds out there.
Also, consider Eggebrecht's perspective as a developer. Hitchcock's genius was in leaving alot of the suspense in the mind of the viewer - but computer games are generally about immersion, about being there - you can't really have your character walk slowly through the deserted military outpost, seeing fleeting shadows in the corner of his vision, and then suddenly cut to a close up of his sidekicks' face as the Evil Unseen Monster claims another victim. As a player you want to see what it'd be like to have some netherworld creature leap out at you and gore your squaddies, or run through a hail of bullets, or any number of action movie clichés.
All Eggebrecht is asking for is either a little bit more fairness in the process, or at least a decent explanation of why someone graphic in a computer game is much worse than the celluloid equivalent.
But games are interactive. Imagine a CSI game - people really would go around throwing maggots shovelled from a dismembered corpse (and where do they get the corpse from? Not from WalMart! They actually have to go out and find someone to kill!) onto people masturbating with their own faeces, and there ladies and gentelemen we have the end of society as we know it, and those damned hacker pedrophiles from the intrasphere will be stealing our childrens meggahurts!
Meh, just seems to be yet another example of the people who make the rules being out of touch with the people who have to follow them - personally I don't understand the logical disconnect where tits/graphic violence/sex are OK in one "artisitically justified" scenario, but not in another, slightly different medium. Granted you can argue about the semantics over this until the cows come home but I believe the core problem is that the people with their hand on the censor stamp just don't understand games./would like to hear from people who know more about the classification process than I, esp. WRT to the BBFC
Historians? If things turn out as bad as they conceivably could do if these powers were ritually abused, the role of "historian" in the future will be a very different concept to the ones we are used to.
He who controls the present controls the past. He who controls the past controls the future.
Yeah, I forgot about installing stuff in ~/, cheers for reminding me...!
Still through, for something like printer drivers (which you'll presumably want to be installed system-wide), installing to home isn't a very good solution IMHO.
I also agree with you though that linux distros should be automatically building in some sort of tripwire type setup to protect important system segments from scripts that are like this
"This inst_samsng_drv.sh wants to change entries in/bin,/usr/bin and/usr/lib. Cancel or Allow?";)
I'm probably in the minority of desktop Linux users who has a reasonably comprehensive log/file scanning setup; AFAICR chkrootkit and rkhunter both have checks for suid programs, and I'd love to see both of these apps installed and run by default (say, on shutdown) and generate a desktop alert of some description.
I still don't think that'd do much to stem this sort of problem though; if people run an installer, they're expecting it to be modifying certain files, and most desktop users of the fabled future aren't going to have the first idea of what changes should and shouldn't be being made.
As an aside, is there any echnical reason that Samsung can't provide the drivers as binary blobs and leave the packaging/installation to someone more competent? Heck, paying a Debian package maintainer $200 to do it would have generated a better package that'd be able to be used/adapted by practically every distro out there and would have avoided this PR-debacle-in-waiting.
If you allow the local user to install programs, then the local user is either; a) going to need write access to all the usual locations (either/usr/bin and/usr/lib, or/opt) which wouldn't solve the problem TFA is on about b) going to need to use some middleware that *does* have rwx access to/usr and a fine grained ACL system dictacting which users have access to what
"Driver" installs just need access to/lib.
Fact of the matter is that whatever user/process has the rights to install apps has the rights to fuck them up as well. Much like how windows can't help it if the user runs trojan_setup.exe.
As ther other poster noticed, things like SELinux offer incredibly fine grained access over what various users can and can't do, and if you go through the (fairly considerable) pain of setting it up it can give you an amazingly secure setup, but there's no way in hell it'd fly with everyday users or even most sysadmins. This is why Linux distros take such care with package management and like to retain control over their repositories - because they can't risk a third party, closed source package coming in and accidentally running a chmod -R 777 / on install. When you're dealing with companies that seemingly have little knowledge of Linux development and security models, this is a very real threat.
Most people I know, myself included, who like Radiohead do it because their albums are paragons of what an album should be. I'm another of these people that thinks OK Computer is probably the finest album ever made - as a bunch of singles it's so-so, but listening to the album is like reading a Neal Stephenson book with a good ending:)
The people who bought Creep after ending u shouting at the top of their voice whilst in a drunken clinch and didn't like the res of their stuff aren't really Radiohead fans; they're a fan of that Radiohead single.
Not that I'm slagging off singles either; they have their place.
And there are still plenty of (admittedly more leftfield) artists producing "album" albums. Boards of Canada being one of my current favourites, despite being entirely instrumental/sample driven.
Last I heard (sorry, not enough time to find a link) was the Dell were refusing to sell the Ubuntu machines to businesses and that they were marked for home use only, and therefore businesses using Windows *still* have to pay the windows tax twice (once for the OEM install and another for the VLK).
Not that I'm cynical, but I wouldn't be surprised if MS mandated this to ensure that Dell kept their OEM status. Can't have those pesky commies in business eating into MS' rightful tax income...
If the HP "business" laptops we usually buy are any indication, 64bit Vista (which these machines all ship with) definitely is mainstream. Heck, the nx7300 I bought for myself (works great in Linux by the way) came with a 64bit Vista Business installation that got waxed after an hour of fiddling with it.
Replying days after the thread has finished, but anyhoo...
As I've seen it, the police knew Deckard was a replicant and in fact probably had him manufactured for the sole purpose of hunting down the rogue Nexus replicants. If you look at Deckard's early scenes with Bryant, he a) tells him alot of information he would already know (he's been unemployed for, what, a few months? Nexus tech wouldn't evolve fast enough that he'd have no idea about a 6 month old replicant prototype) and b) there are a number of ambiguous phrases like "that's what you're here for" and the "Have you ever run that [VK] test on yourself?", not to mention his rather stilted emotional discourses with Rachael. I think this is probably why the scene where Deckard interviews Holden in the hospital was chopped, beause it gave a more concrete link to a past that Deckard never had.
And yeah, Ridley Scott came out ages ago saying Deckard was a replicant, and if anyone's seen his directors cut (far superior to the theatrical release IMHO) it's spelled out pretty bluntly with the unicorn sequence - an implanted memory that the police (namely Gaff) know about. Tyrell talks about the implantation of memories enabling humans to better control the replicants - that's exactly what Deckard his. A one-man slaughterhouse designed solely to kill other replicants.
Of course, I could be wrong:) But part of the appeal of Blade Runner is that there's so much detail it's possible to come out of the same film with a million different stories of what's actually happening.
If anyone hasn't seen it yet, there's a great little documentary that was out in the UK years ago to coincide with the release of the directors cut called On the Edge of Bladerunner, find a torrent as per usual. Like the film though, the subject matter is so dense that you wish it was twice as long:)
Scott kinda turned Dick's book on its head, but I believe it made for a better movie. There are two people I would trust to mess about with a good sci-fi story, and I wouldn't trust James Cameron to do it (sorry James) whereas Scott was, IMHO, at the very peak of his powers with this one. And yes, I did read the book before seeing the film. None of the other PKD adaptations I've seen have posed nearly so many questions or been nearly so finely layered, with the possible exception of A Scanner Darkly, which follows the book quite closely in any case.
As yet another aside (though somewhat more on-topic), if there's anything that'd tempt me to invest in BD/HD-DVD, it'd be a decent print of Blade Runner. The version released in the UK at least is a really crappy transfer with poor saturation and low quality compression, plus huge back borders at the side. A movie like Blade Runner, with effects and lighting and soundtrack that have yet to be consistently matched IMHO, would be a perfect poster-child for recalcitrant hi-def early adopters, much like the Matrix was for DVD.
Slashdot Mirror
Because:
a) If anyone wants to alter any other MIME handling behaviour (e.g. get PDF's to open in Foxit), they'll now know how
b) I wasn't aware of the enable/disable bit in opera:config, cheers for that!
Opera does ship with content blockers - right-click somewhere on a web page and hit the "block content" option. Click on the banner ads, edit them to block your own wildcards. Before that you could add a filter.ini file definition to your opera6rc.ini but that was a bit of a PITA to use.
They can't ship by default with an ad blocker else I imagine they'd get reamed by online ad companies for "stealing" or some such cobblers.
Luckily I haven't had any of the slowdown problems you mention (Gentoo, Debian and Ubuntu, dynamic linked version). Been using it since v5 on windows (my first ever non-IE web browser) and v6 on Linux.
I know what you mean about FF though - I want to like it, but I just find the Opera UI so much easier and faster to use, and the speed difference (real or apparent) adds up after a while. Mouse gestures under FF are still shit compared to Opera IMHO - they're far too laggy and are often mis-detected for me, and I still haven't found a convenient way to modify all of FF's keyboard shortcuts easily. What extension do you use to replicate the remember-scroll-position-on-reload function, or is this something you don't have?
I'm hoping that Opera will release some sort of extensions API at some point in the future, but at the moment there aren't a huge amount of FF functions/extensions that I miss that I can't replicate under Opera - there's a userJS script to emulate flashblock, for instance.
Isn't Opera already using QT on Linux?
...although there's a few features that haven't been mentioned here but were part of the developer announcement, including:
Faster tab switching in UNIX (this is one of my biggest irritations about opera at the moment - tab switchng under windows is nearly instantaneous, under X there's a perceptible delay)
QT4 builds
64bit builds
I imagine alot of this comes from the new rendering engine which is probably 64bit clean. It would have been nice to be able to configure bookmark syncing to use something other than an external web host (it's blocked for me at work), for example using FTP or WebDAV, or even just an external shared folder.
Opera still doesn't work well with my company's filters, all of which require NTLM auth. Opera still doesn't seem to manage this successfully and asks for for a password every time I open a page, unless I pass through a local NTM proxy (NTLMAPS).
That said, it's still my favourite browser under Linux and Windows.
Because if they put in a routine to the effect of;
if [ ping_wga_servers != 0 ]; then
is_genuine=TRUE
fi
it'd be incredibly easy for people to get around it. As it is you have to NO-OP the routines out with a hex editor before you can get around WGA.
tools > preferences > advanced > downloads > untick "hide files opened with opera", find "torrent", edit to your hearts content. Same for any other MIME type.
Is that an exclusive part of Completely Unfair NT v6.0? Or has that been part of windows since day one? ;)
I've been trying to set up my Linux desktop with Windows-alike roaming profiles for ages now.
:D
I have the kerberos single sign on for a multitude of services. I have the LDAP user metadata. I have NFSv4 file shares secured with kerberos, and autofs homes that enable me to use the same app settings on each machine. I have a groupware server (Kolab) serving all of my users (all two of them, ha!). But can I find any way of accessing my home drive (reliably) on my laptop when it's not plugged into the network?
If I ask on any forums, I'm either told to just use NFS homes (which of course doesn't work when your laptop might be a) on the other side of the planet and b) not plugged into the internet). So I need a way of syncing my server:/home/user with laptop:/home/user bi-directionally. Since there doesn't seem to be any easy way of doing it built into any Linux distro, I created a bunch of shellscripts (basically just a bunch of rsync commands that don't sync certain directories, e.g. ~/.maildir) that are location aware (i.e. they can tell if I'm on my local LAN or not), and sync to/from the file server at startup, and then just to the fileserver at shutdown (or of course I can inititate them manually). It's not perfect though, and I've had to restore some items that have been clobbered from backup (granted, windows often does the same thing with roaming profiles). It also means keeping a fairly disciplined file hierarchy - otherwise you can get broken symlinks galore, or config files that are repeatedly overwritten.
However, I believe the Linux desktop is crying out for a simple and automated way of doing it (perhaps a modified version of unison that, instead of querying the user for resolving conflicts just dumps conflicting files into a seperate directory?) - for most deployments, shared NFS homes are perfect but for laptop users outside of the network they're useless.
I've tried Coda and AFS and, apart from being hard to set up and containing (to me) severe limitations that doesn't really suit them for online/offline use, they seem to be fairly unstable. Perhaps I suck at adminning Coda and AFS, but I personally think using a different, and rather complex, filesystem for roaming homes is unnecessary and I wasn't really keen to put too much time into it.
Disclaimer: I'm not attempting to replicate MS' roaming profiles, because I think it can be done better - I just don't see any way of doing it other than shell script hackery at the moment, and I definitely need a way of doing something akin to roaming profiles. Should have filed my own Ask Slashdot ages ago
But if Linus, as an individual, isn't interested in doing things to the GUI, why should he? There are plenty of talented coders fiddling with the GUI and desktop subsystems, why would Linus chipping in make much of a difference? Personally I think he'd be wasted working on something he didn't like doing.
Your claims about the mainstream are sorta valid, but that's not Linus' fight - he doesn't really care about it, and just wants to help make the best kernel he can on techincal merit alone. The interview gives it away - pretty much all he uses a desktop for is a web browser, most of the rest of it is CLI stuff and his usage pattern is completely different to your average desktop PC user.
To analogise, if this was an OS war for the Battle Of The Desktop, Linus would be the dude in charge of making sure the supply lines were always well stocked and that if one supply line stopped, it wouldn't cause the entire army to grind to a halt. The generals on the front line would be people like Mark Shuttleworth and Miguel de Icaza.
(Sorry, couldn't think of a lame car analogy...)
In one way I agree with you, because there's alot of media oriented around various combinations of sex and violence masquerading as art.
However, the acceptance of violence did lead to a great many films and the like that simply wouldn't be possible without it - the work of people like Scorcese springs to mind. I have no problem with sex and violence when it's a valid part of the plot (and no, tacking some gratuitous T&A and gory SFX onto an otherwise good flick doesn't count as valid). I'll admit that it's very much a matter of opinion whether you find work like Scarface or Pulp Fiction as "art" but I think most people will agree they're fine stories with interesting characters and storylines. Not that they should be used as any kind of an excuse for the rest of the hyperviolent turds out there.
Also, consider Eggebrecht's perspective as a developer. Hitchcock's genius was in leaving alot of the suspense in the mind of the viewer - but computer games are generally about immersion, about being there - you can't really have your character walk slowly through the deserted military outpost, seeing fleeting shadows in the corner of his vision, and then suddenly cut to a close up of his sidekicks' face as the Evil Unseen Monster claims another victim. As a player you want to see what it'd be like to have some netherworld creature leap out at you and gore your squaddies, or run through a hail of bullets, or any number of action movie clichés.
All Eggebrecht is asking for is either a little bit more fairness in the process, or at least a decent explanation of why someone graphic in a computer game is much worse than the celluloid equivalent.
But games are interactive. Imagine a CSI game - people really would go around throwing maggots shovelled from a dismembered corpse (and where do they get the corpse from? Not from WalMart! They actually have to go out and find someone to kill!) onto people masturbating with their own faeces, and there ladies and gentelemen we have the end of society as we know it, and those damned hacker pedrophiles from the intrasphere will be stealing our childrens meggahurts!
/would like to hear from people who know more about the classification process than I, esp. WRT to the BBFC
Meh, just seems to be yet another example of the people who make the rules being out of touch with the people who have to follow them - personally I don't understand the logical disconnect where tits/graphic violence/sex are OK in one "artisitically justified" scenario, but not in another, slightly different medium. Granted you can argue about the semantics over this until the cows come home but I believe the core problem is that the people with their hand on the censor stamp just don't understand games.
A million bottles of beer? Don't give Macrom^H^H^H^H^H^H Adobe's coders any more ideas...! ;)
Linux support coming in 1,000,000... 999,999... 999,998...
Actually, a million seconds is less than two weeks, that's far too quick!
Commodem?
Particularly if your router is going to have be installed next to the toilet...
Historians? If things turn out as bad as they conceivably could do if these powers were ritually abused, the role of "historian" in the future will be a very different concept to the ones we are used to.
He who controls the present controls the past.
He who controls the past controls the future.
Yeah, I forgot about installing stuff in ~/, cheers for reminding me...!
Still through, for something like printer drivers (which you'll presumably want to be installed system-wide), installing to home isn't a very good solution IMHO.
I also agree with you though that linux distros should be automatically building in some sort of tripwire type setup to protect important system segments from scripts that are like this
/bin, /usr/bin and /usr/lib. Cancel or Allow?" ;)
"This inst_samsng_drv.sh wants to change entries in
I'm probably in the minority of desktop Linux users who has a reasonably comprehensive log/file scanning setup; AFAICR chkrootkit and rkhunter both have checks for suid programs, and I'd love to see both of these apps installed and run by default (say, on shutdown) and generate a desktop alert of some description.
I still don't think that'd do much to stem this sort of problem though; if people run an installer, they're expecting it to be modifying certain files, and most desktop users of the fabled future aren't going to have the first idea of what changes should and shouldn't be being made.
As an aside, is there any echnical reason that Samsung can't provide the drivers as binary blobs and leave the packaging/installation to someone more competent? Heck, paying a Debian package maintainer $200 to do it would have generated a better package that'd be able to be used/adapted by practically every distro out there and would have avoided this PR-debacle-in-waiting.
If you allow the local user to install programs, then the local user is either; /usr/bin and /usr/lib, or /opt) which wouldn't solve the problem TFA is on about /usr and a fine grained ACL system dictacting which users have access to what
/lib.
a) going to need write access to all the usual locations (either
b) going to need to use some middleware that *does* have rwx access to
"Driver" installs just need access to
Fact of the matter is that whatever user/process has the rights to install apps has the rights to fuck them up as well. Much like how windows can't help it if the user runs trojan_setup.exe.
As ther other poster noticed, things like SELinux offer incredibly fine grained access over what various users can and can't do, and if you go through the (fairly considerable) pain of setting it up it can give you an amazingly secure setup, but there's no way in hell it'd fly with everyday users or even most sysadmins. This is why Linux distros take such care with package management and like to retain control over their repositories - because they can't risk a third party, closed source package coming in and accidentally running a chmod -R 777 / on install. When you're dealing with companies that seemingly have little knowledge of Linux development and security models, this is a very real threat.
For a minute there, it sounded like Microsoft had moved to Gentoo for their package management... ;)
Disclaimer: I use and like Gentoo, for all its misgivings, so no flames please!
Shame to see that the -ck branch is now dead :(
3 .html
http://bhhdoa.org.au/pipermail/ck/2007-June/00789
Most people I know, myself included, who like Radiohead do it because their albums are paragons of what an album should be. I'm another of these people that thinks OK Computer is probably the finest album ever made - as a bunch of singles it's so-so, but listening to the album is like reading a Neal Stephenson book with a good ending :)
The people who bought Creep after ending u shouting at the top of their voice whilst in a drunken clinch and didn't like the res of their stuff aren't really Radiohead fans; they're a fan of that Radiohead single.
Not that I'm slagging off singles either; they have their place.
And there are still plenty of (admittedly more leftfield) artists producing "album" albums. Boards of Canada being one of my current favourites, despite being entirely instrumental/sample driven.
Last I heard (sorry, not enough time to find a link) was the Dell were refusing to sell the Ubuntu machines to businesses and that they were marked for home use only, and therefore businesses using Windows *still* have to pay the windows tax twice (once for the OEM install and another for the VLK).
Not that I'm cynical, but I wouldn't be surprised if MS mandated this to ensure that Dell kept their OEM status. Can't have those pesky commies in business eating into MS' rightful tax income...
If the HP "business" laptops we usually buy are any indication, 64bit Vista (which these machines all ship with) definitely is mainstream. Heck, the nx7300 I bought for myself (works great in Linux by the way) came with a 64bit Vista Business installation that got waxed after an hour of fiddling with it.
Replying days after the thread has finished, but anyhoo...
:) But part of the appeal of Blade Runner is that there's so much detail it's possible to come out of the same film with a million different stories of what's actually happening.
:)
As I've seen it, the police knew Deckard was a replicant and in fact probably had him manufactured for the sole purpose of hunting down the rogue Nexus replicants. If you look at Deckard's early scenes with Bryant, he a) tells him alot of information he would already know (he's been unemployed for, what, a few months? Nexus tech wouldn't evolve fast enough that he'd have no idea about a 6 month old replicant prototype) and b) there are a number of ambiguous phrases like "that's what you're here for" and the "Have you ever run that [VK] test on yourself?", not to mention his rather stilted emotional discourses with Rachael. I think this is probably why the scene where Deckard interviews Holden in the hospital was chopped, beause it gave a more concrete link to a past that Deckard never had.
And yeah, Ridley Scott came out ages ago saying Deckard was a replicant, and if anyone's seen his directors cut (far superior to the theatrical release IMHO) it's spelled out pretty bluntly with the unicorn sequence - an implanted memory that the police (namely Gaff) know about. Tyrell talks about the implantation of memories enabling humans to better control the replicants - that's exactly what Deckard his. A one-man slaughterhouse designed solely to kill other replicants.
Of course, I could be wrong
If anyone hasn't seen it yet, there's a great little documentary that was out in the UK years ago to coincide with the release of the directors cut called On the Edge of Bladerunner, find a torrent as per usual. Like the film though, the subject matter is so dense that you wish it was twice as long
Scott kinda turned Dick's book on its head, but I believe it made for a better movie. There are two people I would trust to mess about with a good sci-fi story, and I wouldn't trust James Cameron to do it (sorry James) whereas Scott was, IMHO, at the very peak of his powers with this one. And yes, I did read the book before seeing the film. None of the other PKD adaptations I've seen have posed nearly so many questions or been nearly so finely layered, with the possible exception of A Scanner Darkly, which follows the book quite closely in any case.
As yet another aside (though somewhat more on-topic), if there's anything that'd tempt me to invest in BD/HD-DVD, it'd be a decent print of Blade Runner. The version released in the UK at least is a really crappy transfer with poor saturation and low quality compression, plus huge back borders at the side. A movie like Blade Runner, with effects and lighting and soundtrack that have yet to be consistently matched IMHO, would be a perfect poster-child for recalcitrant hi-def early adopters, much like the Matrix was for DVD.