Many companies pay rent on for property. That is not out of the ordinary. It's a long stretch between paying rent, and giving one person all the assets of a company for private ownership. The music production company would only have 2 assets, their copyrighted content, and their contracts with artists. If you put all their copyrights in the ownership of some person, they no longer own most of their assets. It would be more like Bill Gates holding all the copyright of all the Microsoft products.
The problem is that all the politicians are RIAA stooges. You can't get to a high ranking spot in American politics without having significant corportate backing. What they really need to do is get rid of corporate donations, and limit personal donations to something like $500.
Would the shareholders really allow that though. What you have with this idea, is that a single person could hold almost all the assets of a company. If you have a music/movie/tv production company, then one person would hold all the assets. You could never really ensure against that person leaving the company with all your copyrights. They could extort a lot of money out of the company by threatening to leave, and bring all the copyrights to some other competitor.
You want an OS without bloat? from what I hear, you can run KDE4 on only 256 MB of RAM. Sure it's not the OS, but that's where linux is headed. I would like to see MS die if only for the fact that I think it would yield cheap, low powered computers that could save the world tons of energy. May current laptop is a Celeron 1.5 GHz with 512 MB of RAM. It runs everything I want using Linux and KDE. Web development, web browsing, email, office apps, and a little bit of light photo editing on GIMP. It does all this while only consuming 20 watts. When I think of all the people with 300 watt + monitor desktop workstations out there, I think it is obvious as to why there is such a problem with energy in this world.
Before you go running off to buy a motherboard, and more memory, make sure Windows and the applications you're running can handle the extra memory. With 32 bit windows you could only allocated 2 gigs of RAM to any process unless the process did some really tricky hacking (like SQL Server, I'm not aware of any others) that let them use more. We have some web servers with 2 Gigs of RAM, and that probably the perfect amount, since most people report that you can't get ASP.Net to use more than 1.2-1.4 gigs anyway, no matter what you do. Even if you are running 64 bit windows, you would probably have to make sure that you're running a 64 bit version of MatLab, and that it's set up to handle having extra memory. Having lots of memory works well if you have lots of apps that need to access around 0.5-1 GB of RAM, but if you want 1 app to access 16 GB of RAM, it can get a little tricky.
The Wii only supports 480p anyway, so why would you want to play higher resolution videos? Playing anything higher is just wasting processor cycles, electricity and disk space.
I was working on Wii Media Server of sorts that would use the browser and flash plugin to let you play mp3 files hosted from an apache server on your Wii. I was originally working on it for the purpose of streaming video to the Wii, but it also supported Audio. It ended up working quite well from what I remember. The reason I stopped working on it was because the video quality was quite terrible.
However, If you've used a Wii, you'd notice that load time isn't that much of a problem. At least not as much as it was on the PS2. I think that it's entirely possible to make a game with no loading on the Wii. Same with the Gamecube. If there is loading, it's because the publisher is too stupid, or doesn't care. If Metriod on the GC can get away with no load times, as well as Super Mario Galaxy on the Wii, I would think that most games could get away with no load times. The only game I have for the Wii that has a loading time is Super Swing Golf. I think they could do the entire game without loading screens, if only they took the time to bother.
I don't really think it's that bad for Nintendo. Since they actually make money from the console, and this would just add an extra selling point, it would just mean more profit for Nintendo.
I would love to be able to use my Wii as a media server. If they would just add support to the photo channel to play H.264 videos, and support a usb hard drive or smb share, then I would be set. I don't really need a fancy interface. I just want to be able to play videos on my wii. Even without a hard disc, I would accept only using SD cards for watching videos from, if only I could play h.264 encoded videos.
I haven't seen too many demos of HD, but here's the things I think deserve some attention. The sky, which often shows "bands" of colour on DVD, and macroblocking, like with fire, or flashes of light. You can put all the resolution you want to into a movie, but if it's compressed too much, or with a crappy compression format, then this is still going to be a major problem. The frame is 4x times the size (in area), and the disc only has about 4-5 times the capacity. So if they haven't changed the encoding formats, I think we are still going to have a lot of the same quality problems we had before. Especially since they are trying to fit even higher quality audio with more channels on the disc as well.
Also, that statement (doesn't run on non-*nix) doesn't really hold much water anyway. What systems aren't nix-based? MacOS has been unix based for years now. It's only Windows that remains. And even with windows there's a few ways to run unix apps on your windows machine either via Cygwin, or via a VM with an entire unix OS.
Sure many of the core applications are just copying closed source counterparts. But there is a lot of true innovation. There are a lot of apps that are more than just knock offs of some closed source program. Take the Metisse desktop for instance. Where is it's closed source counterpart. The GIMP is known for specifically (for better or worse) doing everything they can not to be just a direct copy of Photoshop. Sure there's a lot of apps that aim to copy a specific closed source app, like OpenOffice, or Mono, but there is a lot of innovation going on in open source software.
Just print out 1000. It doesn't cost that much compared to 300 ballots, or 600 ballots, or however many ballots you think you might need. And print out a couple extra incase somebody makes a mistake and needs an extra ballots. For a voting area with 1000 voters, just print out 2000 ballots. That will make sure you have enough. The cost of the ballots is miniscule, and compared to the cost to buy computers in other voting districts, is nothing. You can probably print all the ballots for a single riding for less than the cost of a single voting machine.
If you can print up your own ballots on any printer, what's to stop you from printing up extra ballots at home and slipping a few extras in the ballot box. Once they are in there, they would be hard to tell from the authentic ones. I hope they are incorporating some kind of security features into these ballots, and aren't just using standard inkjet printers on standard inkjet paper. The paper ballots we use up here in Canada are printed on special paper, to ensure that people aren't printing up extra ballots. Each printed ballot is accounted for.
That's weird, because even on my 1mbit/125kbit Rogers connection, I get faster speeds than that. Might be something wrong with your configuration. Or something wrong with your local service. Up here in Ottawa, I don't know anybody who's ever had a problem using bittorrent. I often max out my connection to 120 KB/s when downloading torrents.
But 10 years ago, I was doing stuff on my computer that it just couldn't do well, because it wasn't fast enough. Editing video, encoding audio, playing graphically intense games. It's getting to the point that all the stuff I do, or would want to do with my computer could be done with a moderately priced system. Right now, the only thing I would like out of my computer would be a little more storage space, and possibly faster video encoding. However, if I just went out and bought a 500 GB drive like I've been meaning to, I wouldn't have much of a need for more space, and I only have an AMD 3200, so if I had a newer processor, I'm sure the video encoding would be up to where I want it to be. 10 years ago I could think of a lot of reasons that I would need more speed out or my home computer. With each passing day, I'm starting to wonder how long it will be before the computer is just fast enough.
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Many companies pay rent on for property. That is not out of the ordinary. It's a long stretch between paying rent, and giving one person all the assets of a company for private ownership. The music production company would only have 2 assets, their copyrighted content, and their contracts with artists. If you put all their copyrights in the ownership of some person, they no longer own most of their assets. It would be more like Bill Gates holding all the copyright of all the Microsoft products.
The problem is that all the politicians are RIAA stooges. You can't get to a high ranking spot in American politics without having significant corportate backing. What they really need to do is get rid of corporate donations, and limit personal donations to something like $500.
Would the shareholders really allow that though. What you have with this idea, is that a single person could hold almost all the assets of a company. If you have a music/movie/tv production company, then one person would hold all the assets. You could never really ensure against that person leaving the company with all your copyrights. They could extort a lot of money out of the company by threatening to leave, and bring all the copyrights to some other competitor.
You want an OS without bloat? from what I hear, you can run KDE4 on only 256 MB of RAM. Sure it's not the OS, but that's where linux is headed. I would like to see MS die if only for the fact that I think it would yield cheap, low powered computers that could save the world tons of energy. May current laptop is a Celeron 1.5 GHz with 512 MB of RAM. It runs everything I want using Linux and KDE. Web development, web browsing, email, office apps, and a little bit of light photo editing on GIMP. It does all this while only consuming 20 watts. When I think of all the people with 300 watt + monitor desktop workstations out there, I think it is obvious as to why there is such a problem with energy in this world.
Before you go running off to buy a motherboard, and more memory, make sure Windows and the applications you're running can handle the extra memory. With 32 bit windows you could only allocated 2 gigs of RAM to any process unless the process did some really tricky hacking (like SQL Server, I'm not aware of any others) that let them use more. We have some web servers with 2 Gigs of RAM, and that probably the perfect amount, since most people report that you can't get ASP.Net to use more than 1.2-1.4 gigs anyway, no matter what you do. Even if you are running 64 bit windows, you would probably have to make sure that you're running a 64 bit version of MatLab, and that it's set up to handle having extra memory. Having lots of memory works well if you have lots of apps that need to access around 0.5-1 GB of RAM, but if you want 1 app to access 16 GB of RAM, it can get a little tricky.
The Wii only supports 480p anyway, so why would you want to play higher resolution videos? Playing anything higher is just wasting processor cycles, electricity and disk space.
I was working on Wii Media Server of sorts that would use the browser and flash plugin to let you play mp3 files hosted from an apache server on your Wii. I was originally working on it for the purpose of streaming video to the Wii, but it also supported Audio. It ended up working quite well from what I remember. The reason I stopped working on it was because the video quality was quite terrible.
If my iPod Nano can handle h.264, then why not the Wii? I don't see why the XBox would have a problem with either for that matter.
However, If you've used a Wii, you'd notice that load time isn't that much of a problem. At least not as much as it was on the PS2. I think that it's entirely possible to make a game with no loading on the Wii. Same with the Gamecube. If there is loading, it's because the publisher is too stupid, or doesn't care. If Metriod on the GC can get away with no load times, as well as Super Mario Galaxy on the Wii, I would think that most games could get away with no load times. The only game I have for the Wii that has a loading time is Super Swing Golf. I think they could do the entire game without loading screens, if only they took the time to bother.
I don't really think it's that bad for Nintendo. Since they actually make money from the console, and this would just add an extra selling point, it would just mean more profit for Nintendo.
I would love to be able to use my Wii as a media server. If they would just add support to the photo channel to play H.264 videos, and support a usb hard drive or smb share, then I would be set. I don't really need a fancy interface. I just want to be able to play videos on my wii. Even without a hard disc, I would accept only using SD cards for watching videos from, if only I could play h.264 encoded videos.
I haven't seen too many demos of HD, but here's the things I think deserve some attention. The sky, which often shows "bands" of colour on DVD, and macroblocking, like with fire, or flashes of light. You can put all the resolution you want to into a movie, but if it's compressed too much, or with a crappy compression format, then this is still going to be a major problem. The frame is 4x times the size (in area), and the disc only has about 4-5 times the capacity. So if they haven't changed the encoding formats, I think we are still going to have a lot of the same quality problems we had before. Especially since they are trying to fit even higher quality audio with more channels on the disc as well.
The original Ford Mustang retailed for somewhere around $3000. That's inflation for ya.
You might want to do a little research on the climate of India before you suggest that everyone just ride around on bicycles.
Also, that statement (doesn't run on non-*nix) doesn't really hold much water anyway. What systems aren't nix-based? MacOS has been unix based for years now. It's only Windows that remains. And even with windows there's a few ways to run unix apps on your windows machine either via Cygwin, or via a VM with an entire unix OS.
Sure many of the core applications are just copying closed source counterparts. But there is a lot of true innovation. There are a lot of apps that are more than just knock offs of some closed source program. Take the Metisse desktop for instance. Where is it's closed source counterpart. The GIMP is known for specifically (for better or worse) doing everything they can not to be just a direct copy of Photoshop. Sure there's a lot of apps that aim to copy a specific closed source app, like OpenOffice, or Mono, but there is a lot of innovation going on in open source software.
Just print out 1000. It doesn't cost that much compared to 300 ballots, or 600 ballots, or however many ballots you think you might need. And print out a couple extra incase somebody makes a mistake and needs an extra ballots. For a voting area with 1000 voters, just print out 2000 ballots. That will make sure you have enough. The cost of the ballots is miniscule, and compared to the cost to buy computers in other voting districts, is nothing. You can probably print all the ballots for a single riding for less than the cost of a single voting machine.
If you can print up your own ballots on any printer, what's to stop you from printing up extra ballots at home and slipping a few extras in the ballot box. Once they are in there, they would be hard to tell from the authentic ones. I hope they are incorporating some kind of security features into these ballots, and aren't just using standard inkjet printers on standard inkjet paper. The paper ballots we use up here in Canada are printed on special paper, to ensure that people aren't printing up extra ballots. Each printed ballot is accounted for.
Maybe it's just me, but it doesn't even sound like it's in tune.
Of course, dogs never mate outside their own breed. Never happend. All those non-pure bred dogs you hear about are just a myth.
That's weird, because even on my 1mbit/125kbit Rogers connection, I get faster speeds than that. Might be something wrong with your configuration. Or something wrong with your local service. Up here in Ottawa, I don't know anybody who's ever had a problem using bittorrent. I often max out my connection to 120 KB/s when downloading torrents.
Couldn't you get around this by opening a new account?
Seems to me like it could be done pretty easily.
Statistics & Data Analysis = $9800
Application Deployment = $5200
total = $15000
But 10 years ago, I was doing stuff on my computer that it just couldn't do well, because it wasn't fast enough. Editing video, encoding audio, playing graphically intense games. It's getting to the point that all the stuff I do, or would want to do with my computer could be done with a moderately priced system. Right now, the only thing I would like out of my computer would be a little more storage space, and possibly faster video encoding. However, if I just went out and bought a 500 GB drive like I've been meaning to, I wouldn't have much of a need for more space, and I only have an AMD 3200, so if I had a newer processor, I'm sure the video encoding would be up to where I want it to be. 10 years ago I could think of a lot of reasons that I would need more speed out or my home computer. With each passing day, I'm starting to wonder how long it will be before the computer is just fast enough.
The problem is that the mail men want to live a much more lavish life than they did 100 years ago. Even though nothing about their jobs has changed.