I don't know. Seems that a lot of DVDs have unskippable ads already. It would be nice if they changed once in a while, instead of watching some commercial for a 5 year old car, or a commercial for a Disney movie I won't be able to buy for 6 more years because they put it in the "vault". Plus if they are significantly cheaper than the DVDs that are currently out there, then I could see this working. If they somehow said, 5 minutes of commercial maximum, and then you get to watch your movie, and it only costs $5 for the movie, this could completely replacing rentals. There's no way to force you to watch the commercials, they can only force them to play. So pop the movie in, let the commercials play, go make popcorn, get a drink, go to the bathroom, and by the time you are done, and ready to watch your movie, the commercials are over.
However, I think there's just way too many ways they would mess this up. Probably charge $15 for the movie, rather than the regular $20. The movie probably won't play at all if it can't contact the server for new commercials, and probably quite a few other problems. Everybody here always pictures the worst case scenario, which will probably what will happen, but it's not like an idea like this couldn't work if they implemented it correctly.
Maybe because an OS is probably the most complicated piece of software on your computer. Why should an operating system be cheaper than a word processor? Maybe we should be arguing that all software is overpriced, but prices seem to be similar across all vendors, not just from Microsoft. Photoshop Elements costs $100. It's actually a pretty good deal that Windows only costs $129. Without the operating system, the computer is nothing. Winzip costs $29.99, and Winzip Pro (whatever that is) is $49.99. Windows is starting to look like quite a value when comparing that. Especially considering I've never seen a use for winzip since Windows XP came out with built in zip support.
But Linux could not exist in it's current form without copyright. Without copyright, it would basically have a license more like BSD, which last I checked wasn't doing quite as well as Linux on the popularity front, or on the functionality part. Granted BSD is good for what it does, but there are many areas where it is lacking. Even more so than Linux.
You obviously don't remember UltraHLE. It was (is) an emulator that worked only with 3DFX cards and got very good results for the games that it worked with. The problem from what I recall was that it only played a few games, such as Mario 64, Zelda OOT, and Waverace. I think there may have been a total of 15 games that worked. It could also be used without a 3DFX card via a 3DFX wrapper, but performance in this case was very bad. That was back around 1999-2000. I remember looking up the N64 emulators a couple years back and finding that they had improved them quite a bit in terms of getting them to work on a wider variety of computers, but also remember that they hadn't got a whole lot of games working. I wonder what was so special about the N64 that made it so hard to emulate, especially considering the high quality of the PS1 emulators.
I also recall there being some CD key which was basically all 1's, or something to that effect, which worked with Office 97 and a few other Microsoft programs.
I remember a big craze back when I was in highschool. About 10 years ago. Almost all the kids were into it. We played mostly NES and Gameboy games. I remember Pokemon being a huge hit. I actually think it was more popular back then than it is now. You could play games on your computer that were only 1 generation behind the current technology. Now the emulation hasn't really kept up with the advancing consoles. The bests emulators you can find are Playstation and N64, which are very old systems by today's standards.
When the choice is gun or taser, taser is obviously the better answer. However, many cops have the attitude that since a taser won't kill you, it's easier to just taser you, and avoid any kind of confrontation at all. Instead of just taking an unarmed guy down the old fashioned way by tackling him, they just taser him.
You probably didn't stay in the cities, or did a lot of travelling. In Canada, between the cities, there's often no digital coverage, just old fashioned analog. This really eats up your battery power when travelling. I imagine the same is true in the US, where there are very large cities, with almost nothing in between.
The iPhone is great as a music player, but sucks as a phone, why not just get an iPod touch, and get a phone that actually gets good reception. I don't get reception at my house sounds like a pretty bad situation. Unless that's how you like it. If you live way out in the country, I could see that being acceptable. But anybody living in the city or the suburbs should not have to deal with not getting a signal.
You think that's bad, try comparing that to the Vista machines with 512 MB of RAM, or the XP machines they used to sell with 128 MB of RAM. The Mac mini was never meant to be a powerhouse (although the current one is pretty powerful), but that doesn't seem that far off from where most laptops were at the time it was released. The mac mini may have had low specs, but it was only $599, and had an awesome form factor. Can't find anything like that from the PC vendors.
Only about as much as 10 police officers, once you count salaries, health insurance, uniforms, weapons, vehicle, gas, insurance on vehicle, etc. Wait, once you add up all these expenses, it probably costs at least $200,000 a year per officer. So if this thing only gives as many tickets as one officer, and lasts for 5 years, than it's already paid for itself. Not to mention it could probably pull much longer shifts than an officer, and wouldn't take vacation, they could probably save quite a bit of money.
But what's technology? Where do you draw the line. If you argue that the cops shouldn't be able to use infra-red detection because they can't see infrared light, then they shouldn't be able to use a helicopter because cops can't fly. And even if we allow them to fly, they aren't allowed to use binoculars because that enhances their vision, by making things larger. Which is very close to infrared cameras enhancing the vision of the cop to see beyond the regular frequency in the electromagnetic spectrum.
However, that doesn't work when the speed limit doesn't reflect the speed that people are actually travelling on the road. I've seen lots of roads where the speed limit is set way below the actual speed that people travel. If you drive at the speed limit, then not only will you get a lot of other drivers really angry, but you'll probably be really unsafe too, as drivers will come up behind you at a really high speed. Also, for a little experiment in speed limits, try coordinating with 3 other people to each drive in one lane of the expressway at the speep limit. Not directly beside eachother, but with just enough room for other drivers to pass and go around you. Watch the traffic pile up behind you, and bring the city to a stand still, and watch the lack of traffic in front of you. What's really terrible is that speed limits are set such that they are not to be followed. Then they arrest you for going 2 km/h faster than the other guy, just because you happen to be going 30 km/h over the limit, and he was going 28 km/h over the limit.
I got a nasty email from ebay when I signed up with ebay@kibbee.ca. Seems they think that simply having the word ebay in your email address makes them think you are trying to impersonate somebody who actually works at ebay. If their users are dumb enough to fall for that one, they have bigger problems than people with suspicious email addressed.
That may be the case, but it seems that there's bugs in when Vista gives up that cached memory. I've known people who had 2GB of RAM, and were running almost no programs get out of memory errors because it didn't want to give up all the memory it had used for caching. Seems to me that using that much memory for cache is just a waste. Especially on a laptop. If you aren't going to ever use all that data (most likely you're not) it's just a big waste of battery power to read all that data off disk.
You could probably also boot into a VM and run Linux from within there, possibly off a LIVE CD, which would mean that you could still maintain a secure channel without having to reboot your computer. A windows virus could still spy on the VM, but if would have to be pretty advanced, and not your standard run of the mill spyware to spy on the contents of a VM.
Didn't that OJ Simpson cop (Mark Ferman??) plead the 5th when he was put on the stand during the OJ Simpson trial? He wasn't the one being tried, but because he knew what he said would incriminate him, he chose to take the 5th? Seems to me that if you're not required to give evidence against yourself, you could just argue that the encrypted data could hold evidence against you, and therefore, you should not be required to give them the key.
Last I checked you could use an iPod just fine under Linux in Amarok. No need to install iTunes, Also even if you use iTunes in Windows, if you use MP3s that you have ripped from your own CDs or acquired from services such as eMusic, or even pirated from IRC, there's no DRM involved. That's what I do, and it has never bothered me about DRM.
Personally just the design of the box costs them quite a bit. The fact that you can get a Mac Mini for only $599 says that their prices are actually pretty competitive. It's the only computer of it's size that's available, and for a niche product like that it actually has a really good price. The only reason that PCs cost less than Macs is because you can get a really crappy PC with really low specs. Mac doesn't sell a computer with really low specs, because they give a bad user experience.
And why wouldn't you buy directly from Apple. If you're going to buy online, they offer free engraving, and free shipping, so there's no reason not to go with them. When I bought my 3G Nano, I went to Walmart to buy one, but they didn't have any in stock, so I went to buy one online, and immediately went to the Apple store. Nobody else offers engraving. I wouldn't even think of going to Amazon to buy a tech product. That's mostly for books and DVDs isn't it?
Just because They are running it on a newer box, doesn't mean that it's faster than their old box running XP. I bought a new laptop with a Celeron 1.5, Intel GMA, and 512 MB of RAM. Guess how fast Vista runs on that. I've seen P3's at 500 MHz with 256 Megs of RAM that would run cirles around my laptop running Vista. Thankfully, I'm running Mandriva on my Laptop, so the speed is just fine. But just because somebody has bought a new box with Vista Preinstalled, doesn't mean they are getting a good user experience.
Another interesting twist on Arkanoid is Vortex which came with my iPod Nano. It's basically a circular version of Arkanoid, where the bricks are in the middle of the circle, and the paddle moves around the circle, using the iPod wheel. It gets interesting, because the gravity basically pulls towards the outside of the circle, so if you bounce the ball across the circle, and it misses the centre by enough, it ends up going right through the circle, and you have to move all the way to the other side to catch it.
That has a lot of insight. I remember reading a book review about a really thick book. I think it was War and Peace, or something like that. The writer of the review said that in order to get through the book, he basically cut the book in 3. After he did that, the book seemed like much less of a challenge. I know I experienced the same problem with Cryptonomicon. After reading forever, and realizing you're only half way through the book, you start to lose interest in the book. I stopped somewhere around 2/3 of the way through, because I got so tired of reading the same book and just wanted to move onto something else. Even though I was really enjoying the book, it was just too long.
The game just has to be smart about what parts to keep in memory. If you won't be getting to a certain point for hours, there's no point in having it in memory. The game knows you can't go from the place you are now to a place 100 rooms away in 10 seconds. Same with flight simulator games. You could technically fly around the whole world, but it only loads stuff in the vicinity of where you are. Games like Metroid although they don't have distinct levels still do little tricks to avoid loading. Between some areas where the entire scenery changes, and they have to load a lot of content, they put an elevator. What you're riding in the elevator it's loading the content. It looks likes it's not loading so the user isn't bothered. Personally I find it much more acceptable to wait 15 seconds in an elevator, than to wait 3 seconds while the game pauses with some big loading message on the screen.
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I don't know. Seems that a lot of DVDs have unskippable ads already. It would be nice if they changed once in a while, instead of watching some commercial for a 5 year old car, or a commercial for a Disney movie I won't be able to buy for 6 more years because they put it in the "vault". Plus if they are significantly cheaper than the DVDs that are currently out there, then I could see this working. If they somehow said, 5 minutes of commercial maximum, and then you get to watch your movie, and it only costs $5 for the movie, this could completely replacing rentals. There's no way to force you to watch the commercials, they can only force them to play. So pop the movie in, let the commercials play, go make popcorn, get a drink, go to the bathroom, and by the time you are done, and ready to watch your movie, the commercials are over.
However, I think there's just way too many ways they would mess this up. Probably charge $15 for the movie, rather than the regular $20. The movie probably won't play at all if it can't contact the server for new commercials, and probably quite a few other problems. Everybody here always pictures the worst case scenario, which will probably what will happen, but it's not like an idea like this couldn't work if they implemented it correctly.
Maybe because an OS is probably the most complicated piece of software on your computer. Why should an operating system be cheaper than a word processor? Maybe we should be arguing that all software is overpriced, but prices seem to be similar across all vendors, not just from Microsoft. Photoshop Elements costs $100. It's actually a pretty good deal that Windows only costs $129. Without the operating system, the computer is nothing. Winzip costs $29.99, and Winzip Pro (whatever that is) is $49.99. Windows is starting to look like quite a value when comparing that. Especially considering I've never seen a use for winzip since Windows XP came out with built in zip support.
But Linux could not exist in it's current form without copyright. Without copyright, it would basically have a license more like BSD, which last I checked wasn't doing quite as well as Linux on the popularity front, or on the functionality part. Granted BSD is good for what it does, but there are many areas where it is lacking. Even more so than Linux.
You obviously don't remember UltraHLE. It was (is) an emulator that worked only with 3DFX cards and got very good results for the games that it worked with. The problem from what I recall was that it only played a few games, such as Mario 64, Zelda OOT, and Waverace. I think there may have been a total of 15 games that worked. It could also be used without a 3DFX card via a 3DFX wrapper, but performance in this case was very bad. That was back around 1999-2000. I remember looking up the N64 emulators a couple years back and finding that they had improved them quite a bit in terms of getting them to work on a wider variety of computers, but also remember that they hadn't got a whole lot of games working. I wonder what was so special about the N64 that made it so hard to emulate, especially considering the high quality of the PS1 emulators.
I also recall there being some CD key which was basically all 1's, or something to that effect, which worked with Office 97 and a few other Microsoft programs.
I remember a big craze back when I was in highschool. About 10 years ago. Almost all the kids were into it. We played mostly NES and Gameboy games. I remember Pokemon being a huge hit. I actually think it was more popular back then than it is now. You could play games on your computer that were only 1 generation behind the current technology. Now the emulation hasn't really kept up with the advancing consoles. The bests emulators you can find are Playstation and N64, which are very old systems by today's standards.
When the choice is gun or taser, taser is obviously the better answer. However, many cops have the attitude that since a taser won't kill you, it's easier to just taser you, and avoid any kind of confrontation at all. Instead of just taking an unarmed guy down the old fashioned way by tackling him, they just taser him.
You probably didn't stay in the cities, or did a lot of travelling. In Canada, between the cities, there's often no digital coverage, just old fashioned analog. This really eats up your battery power when travelling. I imagine the same is true in the US, where there are very large cities, with almost nothing in between.
When did quality cease to be a feature?
The iPhone is great as a music player, but sucks as a phone, why not just get an iPod touch, and get a phone that actually gets good reception. I don't get reception at my house sounds like a pretty bad situation. Unless that's how you like it. If you live way out in the country, I could see that being acceptable. But anybody living in the city or the suburbs should not have to deal with not getting a signal.
You think that's bad, try comparing that to the Vista machines with 512 MB of RAM, or the XP machines they used to sell with 128 MB of RAM. The Mac mini was never meant to be a powerhouse (although the current one is pretty powerful), but that doesn't seem that far off from where most laptops were at the time it was released. The mac mini may have had low specs, but it was only $599, and had an awesome form factor. Can't find anything like that from the PC vendors.
Only about as much as 10 police officers, once you count salaries, health insurance, uniforms, weapons, vehicle, gas, insurance on vehicle, etc. Wait, once you add up all these expenses, it probably costs at least $200,000 a year per officer. So if this thing only gives as many tickets as one officer, and lasts for 5 years, than it's already paid for itself. Not to mention it could probably pull much longer shifts than an officer, and wouldn't take vacation, they could probably save quite a bit of money.
But what's technology? Where do you draw the line. If you argue that the cops shouldn't be able to use infra-red detection because they can't see infrared light, then they shouldn't be able to use a helicopter because cops can't fly. And even if we allow them to fly, they aren't allowed to use binoculars because that enhances their vision, by making things larger. Which is very close to infrared cameras enhancing the vision of the cop to see beyond the regular frequency in the electromagnetic spectrum.
However, that doesn't work when the speed limit doesn't reflect the speed that people are actually travelling on the road. I've seen lots of roads where the speed limit is set way below the actual speed that people travel. If you drive at the speed limit, then not only will you get a lot of other drivers really angry, but you'll probably be really unsafe too, as drivers will come up behind you at a really high speed. Also, for a little experiment in speed limits, try coordinating with 3 other people to each drive in one lane of the expressway at the speep limit. Not directly beside eachother, but with just enough room for other drivers to pass and go around you. Watch the traffic pile up behind you, and bring the city to a stand still, and watch the lack of traffic in front of you. What's really terrible is that speed limits are set such that they are not to be followed. Then they arrest you for going 2 km/h faster than the other guy, just because you happen to be going 30 km/h over the limit, and he was going 28 km/h over the limit.
I got a nasty email from ebay when I signed up with ebay@kibbee.ca. Seems they think that simply having the word ebay in your email address makes them think you are trying to impersonate somebody who actually works at ebay. If their users are dumb enough to fall for that one, they have bigger problems than people with suspicious email addressed.
That may be the case, but it seems that there's bugs in when Vista gives up that cached memory. I've known people who had 2GB of RAM, and were running almost no programs get out of memory errors because it didn't want to give up all the memory it had used for caching. Seems to me that using that much memory for cache is just a waste. Especially on a laptop. If you aren't going to ever use all that data (most likely you're not) it's just a big waste of battery power to read all that data off disk.
You could probably also boot into a VM and run Linux from within there, possibly off a LIVE CD, which would mean that you could still maintain a secure channel without having to reboot your computer. A windows virus could still spy on the VM, but if would have to be pretty advanced, and not your standard run of the mill spyware to spy on the contents of a VM.
Didn't that OJ Simpson cop (Mark Ferman??) plead the 5th when he was put on the stand during the OJ Simpson trial? He wasn't the one being tried, but because he knew what he said would incriminate him, he chose to take the 5th? Seems to me that if you're not required to give evidence against yourself, you could just argue that the encrypted data could hold evidence against you, and therefore, you should not be required to give them the key.
Last I checked you could use an iPod just fine under Linux in Amarok. No need to install iTunes, Also even if you use iTunes in Windows, if you use MP3s that you have ripped from your own CDs or acquired from services such as eMusic, or even pirated from IRC, there's no DRM involved. That's what I do, and it has never bothered me about DRM.
Personally just the design of the box costs them quite a bit. The fact that you can get a Mac Mini for only $599 says that their prices are actually pretty competitive. It's the only computer of it's size that's available, and for a niche product like that it actually has a really good price. The only reason that PCs cost less than Macs is because you can get a really crappy PC with really low specs. Mac doesn't sell a computer with really low specs, because they give a bad user experience.
And why wouldn't you buy directly from Apple. If you're going to buy online, they offer free engraving, and free shipping, so there's no reason not to go with them. When I bought my 3G Nano, I went to Walmart to buy one, but they didn't have any in stock, so I went to buy one online, and immediately went to the Apple store. Nobody else offers engraving. I wouldn't even think of going to Amazon to buy a tech product. That's mostly for books and DVDs isn't it?
Just because They are running it on a newer box, doesn't mean that it's faster than their old box running XP. I bought a new laptop with a Celeron 1.5, Intel GMA, and 512 MB of RAM. Guess how fast Vista runs on that. I've seen P3's at 500 MHz with 256 Megs of RAM that would run cirles around my laptop running Vista. Thankfully, I'm running Mandriva on my Laptop, so the speed is just fine. But just because somebody has bought a new box with Vista Preinstalled, doesn't mean they are getting a good user experience.
Another interesting twist on Arkanoid is Vortex which came with my iPod Nano. It's basically a circular version of Arkanoid, where the bricks are in the middle of the circle, and the paddle moves around the circle, using the iPod wheel. It gets interesting, because the gravity basically pulls towards the outside of the circle, so if you bounce the ball across the circle, and it misses the centre by enough, it ends up going right through the circle, and you have to move all the way to the other side to catch it.
That has a lot of insight. I remember reading a book review about a really thick book. I think it was War and Peace, or something like that. The writer of the review said that in order to get through the book, he basically cut the book in 3. After he did that, the book seemed like much less of a challenge. I know I experienced the same problem with Cryptonomicon. After reading forever, and realizing you're only half way through the book, you start to lose interest in the book. I stopped somewhere around 2/3 of the way through, because I got so tired of reading the same book and just wanted to move onto something else. Even though I was really enjoying the book, it was just too long.
The game just has to be smart about what parts to keep in memory. If you won't be getting to a certain point for hours, there's no point in having it in memory. The game knows you can't go from the place you are now to a place 100 rooms away in 10 seconds. Same with flight simulator games. You could technically fly around the whole world, but it only loads stuff in the vicinity of where you are. Games like Metroid although they don't have distinct levels still do little tricks to avoid loading. Between some areas where the entire scenery changes, and they have to load a lot of content, they put an elevator. What you're riding in the elevator it's loading the content. It looks likes it's not loading so the user isn't bothered. Personally I find it much more acceptable to wait 15 seconds in an elevator, than to wait 3 seconds while the game pauses with some big loading message on the screen.