In a few years, these are in every CompUSA, but selling those shareware/PD collections, game demos, windows service packs, maybe a linux distro. Cheap stuff, a couple bucks a CD.
They'll make a decent profit off of it, and people will like it because it's easier than scraping download.com.
NOONE is going to stick their credit card in a vending machine and trust it to spit out a $500 photo-editing suite or a copy of Windows Server. Well, some would, I wouldnt.
And as for games, well, people who pay retail prices for games want the box for teh shelf. Besides, as I already said in this story, you cant burn the copy protection.
I've never had that happen, and I have disks 5 or 6 years old. Do you store them in a UV lightbox, or do you just use the cheapest media at the highest burn speeds possible?
Well, you can't burn SafeDisc or CDCOPS or whatever other cockamamie anti-copying schemes are on *every* PC game out there.
I'd pay full price for a cracked copy of the game, with the latest patches. I've had to crack tons of legitimately purchased games to get them to work properly. Or remove annoyances. ie; XIII is 4 CDs and asks you to swap them ALL the time, in between levels, sometimes a couple times at a pop.. All for no good reason, the entire game is on the HDD..
I see trialware/shareware/open source being sold for 5 bucks a cd from these machines. I just don't see it as a new way to distribute corporate goods. If I pay money I want the manual and box and everything else I got comin' to me. I suppose one could couple it with HP's publish-on-demand technology to do manuals..
Not games, or most desktop-targetted apps, because you can't burn their precious anti-copying schemes.
And if it was going to be higher-end office type stuff, like OS's or DVD authoring, or ANYTHING that costs 19.99 or higher, and people are going to want the box, the official CD, and most of all - THE MANUAL.
Dead tree manuals are easier to read than some.pdf or README file.
Re:version 10 for OS X?
on
Real Problems
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
Quicktime hits me up for bucks every time I run it too. Fuck apple.
The only streaming media player that works, without popping up ads, without asking for a credit card number, without a time-delay nagscreen, is.... Windows Media Player.
And when it dominates streaming content, watch Real and Apple and Vivo - or whoever else exists - cry foul and sue MS about it.
They still have to play their lame little games. You click the big "Free Realplayer" graphic on the homepage, then the next screen has a bunch of large "download now (only 19.95" icons for the paid version of RealPlayer.
The "Download Free Player" is a little text link on the bottom right, and it wouldnt even be onscreen if your browsers resolution was 800x600 or lower. I know plenty of older folks who run their machines at 800x600 on a 17" monitor because it's easier to read.
Real are their own worst enemy, the adware, the installer, finding the free player.. I haven't used realplayer in years because of it, and just ignore.ra links in browsers.
Without government regulation, and reliability standards set by the feds, it'll happen again.
Why would any corporation invest in equipment it might need, when it could just oversell what it has and pull a higher profit? Why would they run redundant transmission lines, or even retrofit the 50 year old ones if they aren't broken yet?
When a natural disaster hits, what comes back online first? Your landline phones. That's if they even go out. I can't remember the last time there was a phone outage - ie; the whole city/block without phone service.
The government, way back in the olden days, forced Ma Bell to meet a certain standard of reliability, and boo hoo if it means they spend more on infrastructure.
Why is it that every once in awhile all links will die for no reason?
Like, I'll click a headline and get a "games.slashdot.org" cannot be found. Clicking any other link will give me the same error. It's like it just stops trying to resolve stuff.
The only way to fix it is to shut down and restart. Bloatzilla does the same thing, and it's been this way for several versions.
It also often misrenders slashdots submission page, though not as often as it used to.
What gives? Lots of work on neato whizbang features like the new download manager, but the fundamentals - actual web browsing - still have annoying issues.
Guess that's just OSS. Noone can make anyone work on something as boring as a "this browser doesnt work" bug, when they'd rather invent some new way to click links.
Not only are they still around, the world is moving back towards a mainframe-ish approach.. Hell, a webserver is a mainframe-ish approach if you consider a browser a dumb terminal (which I do).
Mainframe + dumb terminals:
Code executes in one place (one machine to maintain from a software viewpoint). Code 'lives' with the data.
Collaboration/groupwork/etc is a no-brainer. "Brenda bring up invoice #43223 and blah blah blah".
Software is protected from users (for the most part).
PCs + Fat/thin Clients:
Code excutes all over. You wind up with versioning/dependency hell. It's a bitch to administrate. Just when you think everythings good, some jackass installs a swimming fish screensaver and you're back to level 0.
Data winds up in multiple, disjointed, locations. Bleh..
Where I work we installed, and still support (and will for a decade past the official HP EOL date) HP 9000 series mainframes. I mainly deal with moving that stuff to the PC world, and I can tell you, lifes a whole lot simpler when you dont have to worry about what version of the OS, etc, etc, etc is running on the client machines..
We're looking hard at Windows Terminal Services - essentially a modern day mainframe implementation, complete with GUI. Or we could go multiple X sessions, but our customers aren't to thrilled with the idea of *nix..
- CSS cracked. All hail DeCSS! Those dirty corporate bastards can suck on this! Now I can do "fair use" with all those movies I rent from blockbuster!
- Apple's DRM cracked. "To me the authors are vandals not revolutionaries, and may have ensured WMA becomes the standard."
Bah. The standard of what? The standard of what your overpriced iPod plays? Well that's always going to be AAC only, because Jobs said so, is it not?
Morons. Lets forget that MP3 already IS the standard, and has been so for nigh on a decade without Steve Job's official seal of approval.
Argue if you must. You know it's true. There are dozens of mp3 players. Everything plays mp3s these days, my DVD player, my car stereo, my phone.. What plays AAC? The iPod. One line of devices from one manufacturer under delusions of "we control the art world" grandeur.
Analogy: mp3 = elf, the binary standard linux uses by default. AAC = XBox Executable, a proprietary binary format that only runs on one company's line of devices (the xbox).
Fuck AAC, WMA, RA and every other proprietary MP3 clone.
Bah, of course if it was WMA cracked, would you be complaining that AAC might "become the standard?"
without the nitrane mp3 decoding engine, which IIRC they had to remove because of patent problems (and was really the whole point of winamp, in that it could playback CD quality mp3s on a 486..)
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't winamp get sluggish because someone sued them to take out their handwritten mp3 decoding code? What was it, nitrane, octane, something like that..
They were sued (by fraunhaufer?) for infringement, and took it out, and had it decode through the default MS codecs, which was much slower.
It didn't work, at least for my address. I don't know what it was a picture of, but it wasn't my neighbourhood. There's a school and park across the road from me, a 'compound' with a high school, library and post office 3 blocks away. The river empties into the bay only about a mile from my house. None of these landmarks were on that picture.
Its like it just arbitrarily threw a red dot onto some random pic, and people go "ooh and ahh" and never stop to realize the information is totally bogus.
Of course, that's how the geobasing application I wrote performed at the demo. Just drew some random maps, plotted some points, had a little animated car driving around a pre-recorded loop. Of course, the audience thought this was all real-time dispatching data being relayed from the town center.
It wasn't even their city, which made me shake my head, since I was demonstrating the software to the chiefs of police and the fire department, who you'd think would know the area well enough to say "hey, there's no Peanut Avenue here!!"
I've been thinking about this lately, having been watching some of the Anime on Adult Swim. I'm not a huge Anime freak or anything, but anyways..
The (better) animes really are sort of a miniseries format, even if they have a few seasons worth of episodes. It would seem to me that the creative force behind them spells out the plot for the entire series - or at least knows how it's going to begin and end - and the series as a whole becomes more cohesive and watchable.
American animated series' tend to be open ended. No end is planned, so they can just go on forever and ever.
For instance, Trigun. I realize that this was taken from a comic, and the series follows the comic, but the series flows. The characters evolve from the first episode til' the last. Compare to something like the Batman series (which also comes from a comic), each episode is completely independent of the last.
I guess both have advantages/disadvantages. If you miss a few episodes of Trigun, you run the risk of not knowing what the fuck is going on, especially if they were key episodes.. If you miss Batman, big deal.
Anyways, back to the 'real' sci-fi.. I'd love to see more vision put into it on TV, rather than having a series finale which was pulled from some hacks ass. "Capt Kirk and Picard travel thrrough time to ummmm tell Spock how to get Janeway pregnant so they can ummmm.. Klingons, lets think.. How about prevent a Klingon war? Sounds good lets shoot it and go home"
Ie; A plan - beginning and end - for Voyager would have made it a watchable show. Instead they just toss characters in here and there and the rest of the typical bulldink. I didnt watch the finale, but I'll bet hard cash that the day was saved with some cockamamie time traveling.
This is probably an April Fools joke, though I had the exact same idea for the hamster-case/cage product a few years ago when modding became all-the-rage.
This could be a real product, but the picture looks photoshopped. The tubes would interfere with the drives and heatsink, etc..
Also, could they not get in trouble for this: Endorsed by PETA as an ethical way to reintegrate your pets back into your hearts after the birth of the Internet.
I know that's just tongue-in-cheek silliness, but PETA doesn't endorse owning animals as pets in any form. Hell, those guys are protesting the "terrible living conditions" of honeybees. Which, btw, as a previous amateur apiculturalist (beekeeper), I can say is a complete crock. Domestic bee's have it much better than wild ones (No swarming, more than ample storage room for honey..) Hell, domestic hives have lived for decades, a wild hive is lucky to go a full year.
is *ALMOST* as funny as a mentally challenged 8 year old being anally raped by his AIDS infected ex-convice neighbour.
Seriously, give it up. You are so lame. Your jokes have no punchlines, no interest. They're just stupid.
Here's some other hilarious suggestions:
"Compaq to sell toilet paper" Haha get it? The idea of HP selling toilet paper! They're a computer company! That'd be just so WACKY and UNEXPECTED! And everybody will be tricked, posting about HP toilet paper, and their new line of PCs already caked with shit (lunix).
"Gender" was absorbed by the public as a politically correct replacement for "sex".
Sex is a biology term. It denotes the presence of a penis or vagina.
Gender was, indeed, a gramatical term. It started to be assigned new meaning around the turn of the century, and really took over in the sexual revolution of the 60s.
The word gender is needed in today's PC climate, because "sex" has only three possibilities. Male, female, or hermaphrodite.
"Gender" can mean (straight) male or female, or transvestite (pre op, post op), plushie, or whatever.
Yeah, weasaling out of Chapter 11 is a sign of a strong corporation with a bright future!
Me, I took 5 bucks out of my kids tooth-fairy money to buy a hit today. I'm a real go-getter! Just more proof that crack addiction truly is a profitable industry!
Slashdot Mirror
In a few years, these are in every CompUSA, but selling those shareware/PD collections, game demos, windows service packs, maybe a linux distro. Cheap stuff, a couple bucks a CD.
They'll make a decent profit off of it, and people will like it because it's easier than scraping download.com.
NOONE is going to stick their credit card in a vending machine and trust it to spit out a $500 photo-editing suite or a copy of Windows Server. Well, some would, I wouldnt.
And as for games, well, people who pay retail prices for games want the box for teh shelf. Besides, as I already said in this story, you cant burn the copy protection.
I've never had that happen, and I have disks 5 or 6 years old. Do you store them in a UV lightbox, or do you just use the cheapest media at the highest burn speeds possible?
Well, you can't burn SafeDisc or CDCOPS or whatever other cockamamie anti-copying schemes are on *every* PC game out there.
I'd pay full price for a cracked copy of the game, with the latest patches. I've had to crack tons of legitimately purchased games to get them to work properly. Or remove annoyances. ie; XIII is 4 CDs and asks you to swap them ALL the time, in between levels, sometimes a couple times at a pop.. All for no good reason, the entire game is on the HDD..
I see trialware/shareware/open source being sold for 5 bucks a cd from these machines. I just don't see it as a new way to distribute corporate goods. If I pay money I want the manual and box and everything else I got comin' to me. I suppose one could couple it with HP's publish-on-demand technology to do manuals..
Not games, or most desktop-targetted apps, because you can't burn their precious anti-copying schemes.
.pdf or README file.
And if it was going to be higher-end office type stuff, like OS's or DVD authoring, or ANYTHING that costs 19.99 or higher, and people are going to want the box, the official CD, and most of all - THE MANUAL.
Dead tree manuals are easier to read than some
Quicktime hits me up for bucks every time I run it too. Fuck apple.
The only streaming media player that works, without popping up ads, without asking for a credit card number, without a time-delay nagscreen, is.... Windows Media Player.
And when it dominates streaming content, watch Real and Apple and Vivo - or whoever else exists - cry foul and sue MS about it.
They still have to play their lame little games. You click the big "Free Realplayer" graphic on the homepage, then the next screen has a bunch of large "download now (only 19.95" icons for the paid version of RealPlayer.
.ra links in browsers.
The "Download Free Player" is a little text link on the bottom right, and it wouldnt even be onscreen if your browsers resolution was 800x600 or lower. I know plenty of older folks who run their machines at 800x600 on a 17" monitor because it's easier to read.
Real are their own worst enemy, the adware, the installer, finding the free player.. I haven't used realplayer in years because of it, and just ignore
Without government regulation, and reliability standards set by the feds, it'll happen again.
Why would any corporation invest in equipment it might need, when it could just oversell what it has and pull a higher profit? Why would they run redundant transmission lines, or even retrofit the 50 year old ones if they aren't broken yet?
When a natural disaster hits, what comes back online first? Your landline phones. That's if they even go out. I can't remember the last time there was a phone outage - ie; the whole city/block without phone service.
The government, way back in the olden days, forced Ma Bell to meet a certain standard of reliability, and boo hoo if it means they spend more on infrastructure.
Oh yeah. I mean to add that the "cannot find domain.com" shit happens even when browsing through a proxy, when there should be no DNS involved.
WTF is with that? It's friggin annoying because it'll happen at like the second-last stage of a multi-stage transaction.
I have to switch to IE to pay bills or make orders online, when the whole point was to use Fire??? for that, super duper security and all that.
Why is it that every once in awhile all links will die for no reason?
Like, I'll click a headline and get a "games.slashdot.org" cannot be found. Clicking any other link will give me the same error. It's like it just stops trying to resolve stuff.
The only way to fix it is to shut down and restart. Bloatzilla does the same thing, and it's been this way for several versions.
It also often misrenders slashdots submission page, though not as often as it used to.
What gives? Lots of work on neato whizbang features like the new download manager, but the fundamentals - actual web browsing - still have annoying issues.
Guess that's just OSS. Noone can make anyone work on something as boring as a "this browser doesnt work" bug, when they'd rather invent some new way to click links.
Not only that, this is a dupe from a month or two ago (and old news to boot).
Not only are they still around, the world is moving back towards a mainframe-ish approach.. Hell, a webserver is a mainframe-ish approach if you consider a browser a dumb terminal (which I do).
Mainframe + dumb terminals:
Code executes in one place (one machine to maintain from a software viewpoint). Code 'lives' with the data.
Collaboration/groupwork/etc is a no-brainer. "Brenda bring up invoice #43223 and blah blah blah".
Software is protected from users (for the most part).
PCs + Fat/thin Clients:
Code excutes all over. You wind up with versioning/dependency hell. It's a bitch to administrate. Just when you think everythings good, some jackass installs a swimming fish screensaver and you're back to level 0.
Data winds up in multiple, disjointed, locations. Bleh..
Where I work we installed, and still support (and will for a decade past the official HP EOL date) HP 9000 series mainframes. I mainly deal with moving that stuff to the PC world, and I can tell you, lifes a whole lot simpler when you dont have to worry about what version of the OS, etc, etc, etc is running on the client machines..
We're looking hard at Windows Terminal Services - essentially a modern day mainframe implementation, complete with GUI. Or we could go multiple X sessions, but our customers aren't to thrilled with the idea of *nix..
Well, I'm used to the slashdot hypocrisy.
- CSS cracked. All hail DeCSS! Those dirty corporate bastards can suck on this! Now I can do "fair use" with all those movies I rent from blockbuster!
- Apple's DRM cracked. "To me the authors are vandals not revolutionaries, and may have ensured WMA becomes the standard."
Bah. The standard of what? The standard of what your overpriced iPod plays? Well that's always going to be AAC only, because Jobs said so, is it not?
Morons. Lets forget that MP3 already IS the standard, and has been so for nigh on a decade without Steve Job's official seal of approval.
Argue if you must. You know it's true. There are dozens of mp3 players. Everything plays mp3s these days, my DVD player, my car stereo, my phone.. What plays AAC? The iPod. One line of devices from one manufacturer under delusions of "we control the art world" grandeur.
Analogy: mp3 = elf, the binary standard linux uses by default. AAC = XBox Executable, a proprietary binary format that only runs on one company's line of devices (the xbox).
Fuck AAC, WMA, RA and every other proprietary MP3 clone.
Bah, of course if it was WMA cracked, would you be complaining that AAC might "become the standard?"
without the nitrane mp3 decoding engine, which IIRC they had to remove because of patent problems (and was really the whole point of winamp, in that it could playback CD quality mp3s on a 486..)
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't winamp get sluggish because someone sued them to take out their handwritten mp3 decoding code? What was it, nitrane, octane, something like that..
They were sued (by fraunhaufer?) for infringement, and took it out, and had it decode through the default MS codecs, which was much slower.
It didn't work, at least for my address. I don't know what it was a picture of, but it wasn't my neighbourhood. There's a school and park across the road from me, a 'compound' with a high school, library and post office 3 blocks away. The river empties into the bay only about a mile from my house. None of these landmarks were on that picture.
Its like it just arbitrarily threw a red dot onto some random pic, and people go "ooh and ahh" and never stop to realize the information is totally bogus.
Of course, that's how the geobasing application I wrote performed at the demo. Just drew some random maps, plotted some points, had a little animated car driving around a pre-recorded loop. Of course, the audience thought this was all real-time dispatching data being relayed from the town center.
It wasn't even their city, which made me shake my head, since I was demonstrating the software to the chiefs of police and the fire department, who you'd think would know the area well enough to say "hey, there's no Peanut Avenue here!!"
Smoke and mirrors. Thats how you close the deal.
How about; MS works on .NET, an army of nerds work on Java, and Sun gets fat selling proprietary APIs to make the two interoperable?
I dunno, I don't even care about Sun or MS or all the corporate politics and bullshit there anymore.
Sun perhaps focuses on .net and abandons J2EE, dooming it to qausi-obscurity on sourceforge?
I've been thinking about this lately, having been watching some of the Anime on Adult Swim. I'm not a huge Anime freak or anything, but anyways..
The (better) animes really are sort of a miniseries format, even if they have a few seasons worth of episodes. It would seem to me that the creative force behind them spells out the plot for the entire series - or at least knows how it's going to begin and end - and the series as a whole becomes more cohesive and watchable.
American animated series' tend to be open ended. No end is planned, so they can just go on forever and ever.
For instance, Trigun. I realize that this was taken from a comic, and the series follows the comic, but the series flows. The characters evolve from the first episode til' the last. Compare to something like the Batman series (which also comes from a comic), each episode is completely independent of the last.
I guess both have advantages/disadvantages. If you miss a few episodes of Trigun, you run the risk of not knowing what the fuck is going on, especially if they were key episodes.. If you miss Batman, big deal.
Anyways, back to the 'real' sci-fi.. I'd love to see more vision put into it on TV, rather than having a series finale which was pulled from some hacks ass. "Capt Kirk and Picard travel thrrough time to ummmm tell Spock how to get Janeway pregnant so they can ummmm.. Klingons, lets think.. How about prevent a Klingon war? Sounds good lets shoot it and go home"
Ie; A plan - beginning and end - for Voyager would have made it a watchable show. Instead they just toss characters in here and there and the rest of the typical bulldink. I didnt watch the finale, but I'll bet hard cash that the day was saved with some cockamamie time traveling.
0$ profit
-$699 liscencing fee
= -$699 net profit
This is probably an April Fools joke, though I had the exact same idea for the hamster-case/cage product a few years ago when modding became all-the-rage.
This could be a real product, but the picture looks photoshopped. The tubes would interfere with the drives and heatsink, etc..
Also, could they not get in trouble for this:
Endorsed by PETA as an ethical way to reintegrate your pets back into your hearts after the birth of the Internet.
I know that's just tongue-in-cheek silliness, but PETA doesn't endorse owning animals as pets in any form. Hell, those guys are protesting the "terrible living conditions" of honeybees. Which, btw, as a previous amateur apiculturalist (beekeeper), I can say is a complete crock. Domestic bee's have it much better than wild ones (No swarming, more than ample storage room for honey..) Hell, domestic hives have lived for decades, a wild hive is lucky to go a full year.
Anyhow.
Fuck slashdot.
is *ALMOST* as funny as a mentally challenged 8 year old being anally raped by his AIDS infected ex-convice neighbour.
Seriously, give it up. You are so lame. Your jokes have no punchlines, no interest. They're just stupid.
Here's some other hilarious suggestions:
"Compaq to sell toilet paper" Haha get it? The idea of HP selling toilet paper! They're a computer company! That'd be just so WACKY and UNEXPECTED! And everybody will be tricked, posting about HP toilet paper, and their new line of PCs already caked with shit (lunix).
"Gender" was absorbed by the public as a politically correct replacement for "sex".
Sex is a biology term. It denotes the presence of a penis or vagina.
Gender was, indeed, a gramatical term. It started to be assigned new meaning around the turn of the century, and really took over in the sexual revolution of the 60s.
The word gender is needed in today's PC climate, because "sex" has only three possibilities. Male, female, or hermaphrodite.
"Gender" can mean (straight) male or female, or transvestite (pre op, post op), plushie, or whatever.
Zuse's machine(s) had no mechanism for program flow control. It ran a series of instructions in order, A, B, C, D, E..
There was no 'branch' or 'jump' instruction, and thus no conditionals. Ie; no way to represent "if A then B else C" or "goto D"
While the work was very impressive, it wasnt truly a programmable general purpose computer.
Yeah, weasaling out of Chapter 11 is a sign of a strong corporation with a bright future!
Me, I took 5 bucks out of my kids tooth-fairy money to buy a hit today. I'm a real go-getter! Just more proof that crack addiction truly is a profitable industry!
Man, when I was 20 I used to balloon my ASS off!