I've had a lot of problems with this. First there's not fast-forward and rewind, and second the Flash videos often crash partway through if they are too long. I've tried Wii Media Centre X, From RedKawa, and it works OK, but the videos crash too often, and the fact that I can't fast forward is kind of a deal breaker.
If the Wii focuses on gaming, and isn't a home entertainment device then explain the following:
Full internet browser with Flash support (AKA Youtube)
Photo Channel with video support
Mii Channel (Yes i'm aware the Mii's show up in Wii sports, but that doesn't really affect the game too much).
Weather Channel
News Channel
Message board
Calendar
Everybody Votes Channel
To me, it seems the only thing missing from the Wii is the ability to play H.264/MPEG, and connect larger hard drives. It already has the USB ports to attach drives to, but the functionaliy isn't there. And if they added formats for a couple new video formats in the Photo Channel, then they'd be all set.
There isn't really that much interest in running Linux on the console. First, running Linux on the PS3 doesn't get you anything you don't get from running Linux on an ordinary PC. And for the actual functionality you can get from the PS3 with Linux, you could, for the same price or less, just buy a computer and install Linux on that, plus you could probably do a lot more with an actual computer. Sure it's a nice trick that it runs Linux if you happen to own a PS3, but it's not something that adds any dollar value to the PS3. At least not for me.
They are releasing a lot of minigames, I'll give you that, but there's also a lot of other stuff out there. Metroid Prime, Zelda, and the Mario series are all very much not minigames. Actually, they become more and more "epic" with each new game they release from any of those series.
I agree. I also happen to play my Wii about 10 hours a week. However, I only got it 2 months ago. Anyway, I find there's a lot of people complaining that they don't like the Wii, or that it's just a passing fad. The same could be said about the PS3 or the XBox 360. There's people who are going to like different consoles. That's why it's nice that this time we have 3 distinct consoles, and not 3 consoles that have the exact same feature set. If you don't like the Wii, don't buy it, It don't care. But there are obviously (based on sales) a lot of people who do like the Wii, so I wouldn't write it off as a failure. In less than a year, it's already sold 1/3 as many xboxes/GC that have ever sold, and that is while being supply constrained.
My Wife also likes to play games. But can't play any games where there's any kind of interactive fighting (Mario, Zelda, anything where thing attack you and you have to fight back). And she doesn't really like sports games. She however does play a lot of games like Mario Party, Animal Crossing, Harvest Moon, Tetris clones, and Mario Kart. People like this are ignored for a lot of games, and anybody who ignores them (MS, Sony) is missing out on a huger percentage of the market.
Have you tried PLF/EasyURPMI. I doubt that the Ubuntu repository is anywhere close to that big. I don't think I've found a single piece of Linux software that isn't included in there.
Maybe I just have different hardware or software needs, but for me, there is no 2% of stuff that doesn't work on Mandriva. For me, personally, it has always just worked. And considering only 2% isn't working, it's probably not that uncommon for people to not experience any problems with Mandriva. Also, Ubuntu might also have 2% of stuff not working, and you just haven't run into it. Like I said, the administration tools from Mandriva are much better, and maybe that's the "2%" of stuff that I don't like from Ubuntu. Also, saying that Ubuntu blew the doors off of Mandriva by filling in the last 2% is a little bit of an exaggeration. At most it is a minor improvemnt, and if you were already a happy Mandriva user, I don't think it would be worth switching over to Ubuntu.
Personally, I've been using Mandriva/Mandrake for about 5 years, and I don't see anything that Ubuntu has that Mandrake didn't have 3 years ago. I'm not sure why Ubuntu is catching all this attention. Maybe I'm missing something really big, but I seriously don't see what makes Ubuntu so much better than Mandriva, or most other desktop oriented distros. I actually prefer Mandriva, because I find that the Admin tools are much better.
you could always renice apache and mysql down to a lower priority. Possibly in a log-on/log-off script which would change the priorities and then reset them when you log out.
I think that every scientific calculator I've ever seen from the $10 cheapo calculators up to my TI-86 have a setting for whether your specifying angles in degrees, radians, or gradients (which i've never had a need to use). So basically, the answer to your question is, "it depends".
This concept is called expert user interfaces. Basically your UI can be complicated with lots of options and weird key shortcuts, provided the users are experts and will have the time to learn all this stuff. Photoshop is extremely daunting for someone who's never used it before. But for someone who is a graphic designer and spending 8 hours a day using it, they find it very usable. Personally I find GIMP easier to use than Photoshop, just because it isn't geared towards professional graphic designers. Blender is another great example. If you just want to throw together a quick 3D scene, and use it once a month, then it's probably not the tool for you. However, if you spend all your time rendering complex 3D scenes then you will probably find it quite useful.
But TPB doesn't host any actual files, just the torrent. So if the only people downloading Bob's torrents are people that he specifically invites, then why would he be putting it up on TPB at all. Since he is hosting the torrent, couldn't he just email the tracker to all the people who he wants to send the file to, or simply send them a URL to some password protected web directory so they could download the torrent file? Seems like a lot of extra risk to take, putting something like that up on a public site, when you just want to share it within a small group.
Isn't ColdFusion just about the worst programming language ever? I mean come on. HTML tags are not programming constructs. Stop trying to make programs using HTML tags. I realize this is completely off topic, but ColdFusion has to be the hardest to read programming language of all time.
Also, if you're too vague, such as "buffer overrun vulnerability in Windows that allows user rights escalation", then how do you know that what you are paying for is actually something that hasn't already been patched, or being sold by some other person on the site, or something you may have already discovered. Too specific, and people will be able to find the bug on their own, too vague, and people won't know what they're buying. Seems to me like a pretty hard problem to solve.
Well, they still have to pay programmers to fix the problems. Although they are slow to fix some bugs, they are still paying people a hell of a lot of money to fix all the mistakes they've made with their software. It's been shown that programming stuff right the first time is way cheaper than having to go back and fix it later.
If it's an independant gas station, I wouldn't be surprised if he was buying those rock star drinks from Costco. I worked for a small business once, and it's really appauling how much they charge for certain items compared to the national retailers. It was cheaper for us to buy chocolate bars at a major retailer, and resell them than it was to buy them from our distributor.
First I'm living in Ottawa, which has about a million people including the small surrounding towns. While I'm aware you can still find Apple stuff in a few stores, and that theres still a few places, it's not right out in your face like all the wintel computers you see everywhere. If you want to buy a Mac notebook, you have to go looking. Unless you are specifically looking for them, you probably won't see them. If you go out and shop for laptops, you're probably going to see 30 windows laptops for every 1 Mac laptop.
Same thing goes for just about anything. Don't promise what you can't provide. In my 4th year software engineering project class for university, some students took on monumental projects, and had to scale them back quite a bit to get something finished. The professor actually took this into consideration and many students lost marks because of it. However, the groups that were able to properly scope a project for the resources they had available were given better marks because it showed better planning ability. Vista is seen as a failure because of all the things it didn't provide (Monad shell, WinFS), and because it was way behind schedule. Even though it has some good features, it's seen as a failure because they promised so much that didn't show up in the end.
When I first heard of the iPhone there was a lot of rumours going around that this is actually what Apple was going to do. Sadly it never materialized. It would be nice for someone to make an unlocked phone that was actually worth getting, and that would actually get people started on the path to no contracts. Sadly though, this isn't how it works. If you don't sign a contract, and buy your own phone, you pay $300 (or more) for the phone, and $50 for the monthly service. If you sing a contract, you pay $0 for a phone, and still only pay $50 for the monthly service. Only advantage of buying an unlocked phone is that you can switch phone companies. But if you're planning on switching companies, then why are you signing up in the first place. If buying your own phone actually got you cheaper rates, I think a lot of people would go for that option.
I live in Canada and the Apple presence is kind of non-existent. Not counting the iPod, it's pretty hard to find any apple products here in Canada. You can order online, but in terms of physical presence, there is none. There used to be one shop I knew of that sold a lot of Apple stuff (notebooks, monitors, software) but they closed down recently.
Having a used CD market brings up the value of CDs. If you can't resell an album after buying it, like with iTunes, then you may not pay as much for it. However, if you buy an album for $14, and you know you can sell it later for $6, then the album really only costs your $8. Same thing goes with video games. Most games aren't worth $60. But if you know you can sell it later for $20 once you've beaten it, then paying $60 doesn't seem so bad.
However, this just shows how many employers are looking for people to fill positions. It doesn't really state how may positions are currently filled. Maybe there's just less people that actually know how to program well in Java. Maybe a lot of the of the people who know Java aren't doing Java, but are doing something else. Existence of job postings doesn't prove that one technology is better or more popular than another, just that they are having more trouble finding people to fill the available positions. Maybe Java really is more popular, but I've seen a lot more shops using.Net than Java. Of course, I could be wrong, but I don't think just looking up the number of job postings paints an accurate picture.
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I've had a lot of problems with this. First there's not fast-forward and rewind, and second the Flash videos often crash partway through if they are too long. I've tried Wii Media Centre X, From RedKawa, and it works OK, but the videos crash too often, and the fact that I can't fast forward is kind of a deal breaker.
To me, it seems the only thing missing from the Wii is the ability to play H.264/MPEG, and connect larger hard drives. It already has the USB ports to attach drives to, but the functionaliy isn't there. And if they added formats for a couple new video formats in the Photo Channel, then they'd be all set.
There isn't really that much interest in running Linux on the console. First, running Linux on the PS3 doesn't get you anything you don't get from running Linux on an ordinary PC. And for the actual functionality you can get from the PS3 with Linux, you could, for the same price or less, just buy a computer and install Linux on that, plus you could probably do a lot more with an actual computer. Sure it's a nice trick that it runs Linux if you happen to own a PS3, but it's not something that adds any dollar value to the PS3. At least not for me.
They are releasing a lot of minigames, I'll give you that, but there's also a lot of other stuff out there. Metroid Prime, Zelda, and the Mario series are all very much not minigames. Actually, they become more and more "epic" with each new game they release from any of those series.
I agree. I also happen to play my Wii about 10 hours a week. However, I only got it 2 months ago. Anyway, I find there's a lot of people complaining that they don't like the Wii, or that it's just a passing fad. The same could be said about the PS3 or the XBox 360. There's people who are going to like different consoles. That's why it's nice that this time we have 3 distinct consoles, and not 3 consoles that have the exact same feature set. If you don't like the Wii, don't buy it, It don't care. But there are obviously (based on sales) a lot of people who do like the Wii, so I wouldn't write it off as a failure. In less than a year, it's already sold 1/3 as many xboxes/GC that have ever sold, and that is while being supply constrained.
My Wife also likes to play games. But can't play any games where there's any kind of interactive fighting (Mario, Zelda, anything where thing attack you and you have to fight back). And she doesn't really like sports games. She however does play a lot of games like Mario Party, Animal Crossing, Harvest Moon, Tetris clones, and Mario Kart. People like this are ignored for a lot of games, and anybody who ignores them (MS, Sony) is missing out on a huger percentage of the market.
Have you tried PLF/EasyURPMI. I doubt that the Ubuntu repository is anywhere close to that big. I don't think I've found a single piece of Linux software that isn't included in there.
Maybe I just have different hardware or software needs, but for me, there is no 2% of stuff that doesn't work on Mandriva. For me, personally, it has always just worked. And considering only 2% isn't working, it's probably not that uncommon for people to not experience any problems with Mandriva. Also, Ubuntu might also have 2% of stuff not working, and you just haven't run into it. Like I said, the administration tools from Mandriva are much better, and maybe that's the "2%" of stuff that I don't like from Ubuntu. Also, saying that Ubuntu blew the doors off of Mandriva by filling in the last 2% is a little bit of an exaggeration. At most it is a minor improvemnt, and if you were already a happy Mandriva user, I don't think it would be worth switching over to Ubuntu.
Personally, I've been using Mandriva/Mandrake for about 5 years, and I don't see anything that Ubuntu has that Mandrake didn't have 3 years ago. I'm not sure why Ubuntu is catching all this attention. Maybe I'm missing something really big, but I seriously don't see what makes Ubuntu so much better than Mandriva, or most other desktop oriented distros. I actually prefer Mandriva, because I find that the Admin tools are much better.
you could always renice apache and mysql down to a lower priority. Possibly in a log-on/log-off script which would change the priorities and then reset them when you log out.
Do you trust that a 2x4 is 2 inches by 4 inches?
I think that every scientific calculator I've ever seen from the $10 cheapo calculators up to my TI-86 have a setting for whether your specifying angles in degrees, radians, or gradients (which i've never had a need to use). So basically, the answer to your question is, "it depends".
This concept is called expert user interfaces. Basically your UI can be complicated with lots of options and weird key shortcuts, provided the users are experts and will have the time to learn all this stuff. Photoshop is extremely daunting for someone who's never used it before. But for someone who is a graphic designer and spending 8 hours a day using it, they find it very usable. Personally I find GIMP easier to use than Photoshop, just because it isn't geared towards professional graphic designers. Blender is another great example. If you just want to throw together a quick 3D scene, and use it once a month, then it's probably not the tool for you. However, if you spend all your time rendering complex 3D scenes then you will probably find it quite useful.
But TPB doesn't host any actual files, just the torrent. So if the only people downloading Bob's torrents are people that he specifically invites, then why would he be putting it up on TPB at all. Since he is hosting the torrent, couldn't he just email the tracker to all the people who he wants to send the file to, or simply send them a URL to some password protected web directory so they could download the torrent file? Seems like a lot of extra risk to take, putting something like that up on a public site, when you just want to share it within a small group.
Missing option:
I already cracked it. I'm just waiting for them to release something with BD+ so I have something to decrypt.
Isn't ColdFusion just about the worst programming language ever? I mean come on. HTML tags are not programming constructs. Stop trying to make programs using HTML tags. I realize this is completely off topic, but ColdFusion has to be the hardest to read programming language of all time.
Also, if you're too vague, such as "buffer overrun vulnerability in Windows that allows user rights escalation", then how do you know that what you are paying for is actually something that hasn't already been patched, or being sold by some other person on the site, or something you may have already discovered. Too specific, and people will be able to find the bug on their own, too vague, and people won't know what they're buying. Seems to me like a pretty hard problem to solve.
Well, they still have to pay programmers to fix the problems. Although they are slow to fix some bugs, they are still paying people a hell of a lot of money to fix all the mistakes they've made with their software. It's been shown that programming stuff right the first time is way cheaper than having to go back and fix it later.
If it's an independant gas station, I wouldn't be surprised if he was buying those rock star drinks from Costco. I worked for a small business once, and it's really appauling how much they charge for certain items compared to the national retailers. It was cheaper for us to buy chocolate bars at a major retailer, and resell them than it was to buy them from our distributor.
First I'm living in Ottawa, which has about a million people including the small surrounding towns. While I'm aware you can still find Apple stuff in a few stores, and that theres still a few places, it's not right out in your face like all the wintel computers you see everywhere. If you want to buy a Mac notebook, you have to go looking. Unless you are specifically looking for them, you probably won't see them. If you go out and shop for laptops, you're probably going to see 30 windows laptops for every 1 Mac laptop.
Same thing goes for just about anything. Don't promise what you can't provide. In my 4th year software engineering project class for university, some students took on monumental projects, and had to scale them back quite a bit to get something finished. The professor actually took this into consideration and many students lost marks because of it. However, the groups that were able to properly scope a project for the resources they had available were given better marks because it showed better planning ability. Vista is seen as a failure because of all the things it didn't provide (Monad shell, WinFS), and because it was way behind schedule. Even though it has some good features, it's seen as a failure because they promised so much that didn't show up in the end.
When I first heard of the iPhone there was a lot of rumours going around that this is actually what Apple was going to do. Sadly it never materialized. It would be nice for someone to make an unlocked phone that was actually worth getting, and that would actually get people started on the path to no contracts. Sadly though, this isn't how it works. If you don't sign a contract, and buy your own phone, you pay $300 (or more) for the phone, and $50 for the monthly service. If you sing a contract, you pay $0 for a phone, and still only pay $50 for the monthly service. Only advantage of buying an unlocked phone is that you can switch phone companies. But if you're planning on switching companies, then why are you signing up in the first place. If buying your own phone actually got you cheaper rates, I think a lot of people would go for that option.
I live in Canada and the Apple presence is kind of non-existent. Not counting the iPod, it's pretty hard to find any apple products here in Canada. You can order online, but in terms of physical presence, there is none. There used to be one shop I knew of that sold a lot of Apple stuff (notebooks, monitors, software) but they closed down recently.
Having a used CD market brings up the value of CDs. If you can't resell an album after buying it, like with iTunes, then you may not pay as much for it. However, if you buy an album for $14, and you know you can sell it later for $6, then the album really only costs your $8. Same thing goes with video games. Most games aren't worth $60. But if you know you can sell it later for $20 once you've beaten it, then paying $60 doesn't seem so bad.
However, this just shows how many employers are looking for people to fill positions. It doesn't really state how may positions are currently filled. Maybe there's just less people that actually know how to program well in Java. Maybe a lot of the of the people who know Java aren't doing Java, but are doing something else. Existence of job postings doesn't prove that one technology is better or more popular than another, just that they are having more trouble finding people to fill the available positions. Maybe Java really is more popular, but I've seen a lot more shops using .Net than Java. Of course, I could be wrong, but I don't think just looking up the number of job postings paints an accurate picture.