I really don't think Microsoft is worrying too much that people aren't buying their console based on the fact that it doesn't support a 7-year-old console's games.
Aside from that, the development, and probably the use, of this emulator is/was illegal. Not to mention that you have to get your Xbox modded, which (a) allows you to pirate Xbox games (which will certainly destroy any added revenue owing to the very small crowd that buys an Xbox based on the fact that it can now play, poorly, a few PSX games), (b) locks you out of Xbox Live (which, coincidentally, is another source of income for Microsoft), and (c) is also illegal (or, at least, the law seems to consider it so).
So, no, i don't think this helps Microsoft at all.
I completely agree. X is horrible. PicoGUI seems to be doing well, and hopefully it'll address these problems when it's more mature. I can't say for sure, though, because i'm really not very Linux-smart, and i couldn't get it to compile. (Oops:D )
Forgive my idiocy. I've spent too long posting to forums that use stuff like [url=http://www.blah.com]. Sigh.
I agree. It's just so much water under the bridge now, so there's no point trying to get people to agree with me or anything, but i absolutely hate the new names that've been chosen for the various Mozilla-based browsers. "Chimera", i think, was an excellent name for a browser, and "Camino" or whatever it is now, is retarded. And "Firebird"? How generic can you get? That name has been used for EVERYTHING.
Anyway, if everybody is going to be as childish and immature as these FirebirdSQL jack-asses are, they should probably just change the names of all of their browsers to some random number, or a code, or something. Maybe then people won't kick and stomp about it.
"5047bc596a4bab2dc7f7c120bb22dec5" has a nice ring to it, don't you think?
Er... i'm not sure about it, since i don't have the service, but isn't one of the ideas behind the paying guys to make sure dupes don't get put out?
Surely the occasional complaint is alright, but every single person on here that's bitching about dupes KNOWS there's gonna be a hundred other guys saying the exact same thing. He's not doing anybody a favour. If you want to write a big long-winded philosophical essay about why Slashdot shouldn't post dupes, please register and utilise your journal space.
In any case, i'm so off-topic it's not even funny, so i'll desist now.
You know, the only thing worse than Slashdot posting dupes is eighty users posting "OMGZ I HATE TEHSE DUPES TEHY R SICH TEH FAGORT PLS SLAHSODT STOP POSTING THESE DUPES U STUPID FAGNARDS THX" every time it happens. Dupe posts are just as bad as dupe articles, so kindly shut up, suh.
So think about this. As the original research I conducted indicates (and has been verified by SoundScan via BusinessWeek.com), the record labels began to reduce the number of releases BEFORE the Napster hearings. When they went in front of Congress to complain about downloading, Hilary Rosen could confidently state that sales were going to suffer.
Because it was engineered.
I don't understand why nobody's commented on this yet. This has some pretty big implications, doesn't it? I'm sure they can shoot it down just as easily as anything else, but if this can be proven somehow (or even if just a couple respectable firms agree on it), this would make a nice dent in the RIAA's argument, and might even get the unwashed masses to start thinking about the people behind that shiny new Britney Spears CD.
Um... is my thread listing messed up? If i'm seeing this correctly, you replied to a post about Fileplanet and talked about using 3D game engines for movies. Did i miss something?
Granted, a lot of computer-(mostly-)illiterate adults ("the masses", as we call them) have started using Google as their search engine of choice, as opposed to Yahoo! or MSN or Excite, but i've learnt recently that teen-agers and smaller children haven't begun to follow this trend so much on their own. I'm in eleventh grade, and only the two or three computer-literate students at my school actually use Google. Everyone else uses Yahoo!. Similarly, my brothers and sisters, all of whom are below the eighth-grade level, use Yahoo! (and "Yahooligans" or whatever) for their searches for school projects and games and what-not (one of my youngest sister's favourite pastimes is to search Yahoo! for something like "fun games", and then proceed to download every ad-ware/spy-ware Java-based puzzle game she can find). I'm willing to bet (by observation of some of my brothers' and sisters' friends, and how they use the computer(s) when they come over) that this isn't just isolated to the students at my school and my siblings, but rather is a wide-spread phenomenon, at least in this area.
I'm not exactly sure what i'm getting at, but i guess if Google wants to fight Yahoo! in this battle that Yahoo! is evidently intent on winning, Google may want to hook some of the younger audience, who haven't quite figured out how advanced Google can be. They're attracted to Yahoo! (i'm guessing) because of three things:
(01) Yahoo! Instant Messenger is a semi-common instant messenger (not as much so as ICQ/AIM/MSN, but i know a couple persons that use it), and i'm willing to bet a good portion of Yahoo!'s search engine users uses it mainly because of its association to Y!IM.
(02) Yahoo! Mail is probably the second-most-common free e-mail service among "the masses". While i personally hate it (i'm a Hotmail person myself), i know many persons (including teachers) that use Yahoo! Mail instead of Hotmail. I don't know why, but they do, and i'm willing to bet that a good portion of the search engine users comes from that as well.
(03) Finally, Yahoo! does a lot of stuff to appeal to the younger audience. They have "categories" or whatever, evidently to make finding things easier (i've always found it stupid myself), and they use lots of pictures and colours that (i'm assuming) kids like. And that Yahooligans thing. Google is just kind of plain-text, and for us, that's great, but for some people, that's a symbol of unprofessionalism.
In any case, just some thoughts. I'm not saying that i want a Google Mail or a Google Instant Messenger or anything like that (i certainly don't), but maybe that's something for Google to think about.
On a related subject, i always used Infoseek before i perfected my Google skills. But then they were bought out by Go. Does anyone remember Infoseek?:(
I'm totally going off on a tangent here, but i just thought i might like to express my immense dislike of ZSNES. I mean, it's got great compatibility, and the sound and graphics emulation is fairly excellent, but the interface SUCKS HORRIBLY. I don't understand why everyone loves it so much. I can't bear to use that program, the interface for it is so incredibly awkward. This is why i sacrifice a bit of speed, compatibility, and precision, and use SNES9x.
He tells you why he chose Agent Under Fire. From the forum post:
Basically there is a bug in the save handling, which has been found in several games, I just took 007 because only one save is needed for both US and PAL game version - for other games you usually need two (or even more).
I don't have an Xbox, and i don't care about the Xbox enough to want to understand exactly what "save handling" he's talking about, or how it relates to Linux, but that's the gist of it. I agree with you about EA though. Commies.
Indeed. I got a RioVolt SP250 in November of 2001, and i haven't had a single problem with it. Aside from the lack of Vorbis support, and the slightly large form factor (when compared to iRivers, at least), i'd say it's one of the best MP3/CD players around. Certainly better than those horrible Sony ones with the red back-lit screens, and the RCA ones. I haven't tried iRiver, but i suspect that the world champion title for MP3/CD players is between Rio and iRiver.
But i don't know. Maybe the older models (SP150, SP50, &c.) were genuinely bad. The parent gives the impression that he owned a RioVolt (though perhaps not the same one) for at least 2 years, so i don't know. Not sure when the SP250 came out.
Heh. Like i said, "college" when referring to the education itself, "university"/"college"/"school"/whatever when referring to the actual institution (for example, i might call the University of Iowa "the university", but if asked what my education was, i would say i'm "in college"). I wouldn't know about the reasons, but i suppose that you're right in saying that only Americans do it. Oh well.
He's referring to "in the English language in general", or, if he's not, he should be. Where i come from (Iowa), "college" refers to any type of education after high school, be it a technical school, a community college, or a state university. Whenever we refer to our post-high school education, we say college. "What college are you going to?" "I don't want to go to a big college." "Do you plan on attending college?" &c.. I suppose it depends on what you're referring to. If you're referring to the notion of post-high school education itself, then you say "college", but if you're referring to an actual place, an institution, you say "school" or "university", or whatever fits. My 2 cents, heh.
PPS: Yes, you CAN enable focus-follows-mouse (X mouse, as Microsoft calls it) in Windows. It's one of the first options in TweakUI, which is a program that i do not install Windows without. One of the very first things one should get when installing any form of Windows is TweakUI. Though, i suppose you can call that an add-on. Hm, it should come with Windows, i think. Oh well.
I can not tell you how much i agree! UNIX zealots whine and whine about how everyone in the world should be on UNIX instead of Windows (or old Mac OS, or whatever other non-UNIX system fits here), and they bitch and gripe about how nobody will switch, even though 90% of the functionality that they think they will lose when they switch is, in fact, there. But none of these crusaders for security and justice actually do anything about it. Call me vain, but appearance in an operating system is VERY important to me. Probably one of the top three. UNIX (and by "UNIX" i mean "every UNIX, UNIX-based OS, or UNIX clone, except Mac OS X") can look good, but it is very, very hard to do. Another thing that's extremely important to me is ease of use. UNIX is starting to get this, and some distributions (Mandrake is the one most prominent in my mind) especially, but it's still a long road to get to Windows' or OS X's level.
It seems all the people that are demanding that everyone move to UNIX are too busy writing programs for the 20-year veteran to actually make the switch happen. It comes down to organising your priorities. Which do we want to happen first? Getting everyone to switch to UNIX as soon as possible, or making UNIX as robust and powerful as possible? If the answer is the latter, keep on doing what you're doing. But if the answer is the former, the UNIX programmers need to stop developing ultra-secure, ultra-powerful, ultra-complex, ultra-hard-to-use-unless-you've-been-running-UNIX- your-entire-life developer and adminstrator programs, and start developing things that actually matter to the common user, such as the sound server, the desktop environment, the utilities (control panels and the like, which Mandrake does pretty well), easy-to-use front-ends for all the configuration files that are buried deep in the UNIX file structure (such front-ends may fall into the previous category of "utilities"), and other commonly-used programs, such as a GOOD (notice capital letters here and afterwards) Web browser, a GOOD image editor, a GOOD e-mail client, a GOOD Usenet client, &c.. Security is pretty important to me, but it's not a matter of "we don't even bother doing anything if this isn't 100% hacker/cracker/vulnerability-proof", which is how most UNIX developers (from my point of view) seem to think. And all of the aforementioned things need to be available OUT OF THE BOX. I can't even get my mouse acceleration to work right in Linux. In Windows, there are only two steps i must take: (01) install Windows; (02) there is no 02.
That's my biggest gripe about UNIX. Not flame wars or programming libraries or APIs or Mozilla vulnerabilities, but the fact that the developers who want people to switch are only working on programs for people that have already switched (or have never used Windows/Mac OS/whatever in the first place).
I can see where you're going. Personally, though, it's not using them or being around people using them that i hate, but rather a specific group of people using them that i hate (using the word loosely). In my school (i'm in high school), every single student that i've come across, from 7th grade to 12th grade, has a cell phone. I have yet to meet one that doesn't. And they all whine and cry about how they're not allowed to have phones at school, and how they need them for safety and emergencies and all kinds of other bull shit, but in fact they only use them for calling their drop-out boyfriends in study hall. And they all have "lists" (or whatever you call them) with like a hundred persons on them. The size of one's cell phone list is the equivalent of one's penis size at my school. It's really fucking sickening, i think. Anyway, i hate people like that. Heh.
Personally i would love it if everyone replaced floppies with SuperDisks. In fact, i don't understand why it never happened.:/ (If you don't know what a SuperDisk is, think 120-meg floppies.)
No suh, i do not know how to fix everything. I couldn't tell you what was wrong, either. My guess would be hardware, but that's just a guess. I wasn't trying to elevate myself above Linux users in my post; they have far more patience (er... with their computers, anyway) and technical skill than i do, and for that i commend them. I've used Linux, and, to be honest, i'd have to say i suck at it. I ended up formatting my Linux partition a month after i installed it, because through all that time, i could not get my mouse acceleration, sound, or wireless NIC working right. I compiled stuff, i modified files, i read FAQs and newsgroups, i downloaded drivers, &c., but i couldn't get it to work. I can find my way around Linux, but compared to a lot of the people on Slashdot, i know very little about it. In any case, i'm kind of rambling, but... yeah. I hate Windows 2000, the solution to your problem is to upgrade to XP.:p (PS: I'm joking, please don't flame the shit out of me for saying that.)
Ah, you are right. I can't believe i forgot that. Yeah, recording is a missing feature. Depending on your needs, that may or may not be a big factor (certainly not one for me, because i don't watch TV).
Also, in regards to the guy a couple posts down that says "DMCA" (to whom i will respond in this reply to save space). Yeah, another flaw that i missed. DVD has all the regional lock-out, anti-pirating/anti-copying, &c., bull shit, but that doesn't matter for most people. I mean, i can understand how the region thing can piss you off (and it kind of pisses me off too, even though i have yet to desire a non-Region-1 DVD). And no one should be concerned with the anti-pirating/anti-copying stuff except people that use operating systems that are blocked out of access (or whatever the problem is... i haven't been keeping up on the whole story with DVD and Linux). However, if you do use Linux (or whatever operating system it is that doesn't work with the DVDs), i suppose then you'd be justified in being angry. That problem doesn't affect me, so i, like the general public, usually ignore it (i'm sorry, i know it's bad:p ).
Uh... i agree with you on the notion that they're kind of shoving HDTV down our throats, but your DVD argument falls through. DVDs are superior in every way to VHS. They're better quality, and you're right, not a whole lot of people care much about that. But they also hold the ability to do things VHS is incapable of, such as:
- real-time (as in, while the movie plays) commentary
- different subtitle languages, and the ability to enable/disable them
- different audio languages
- portability (ability to play them in computers, video game systems, and portable DVD players)
- chapter selection (ability to skip to pretty much any point in a movie easily)
- no need to rewind (a task that i personally despise)
- double-sidedness (in order to show really long films, or in order to show both wide-screen and "normal" versions of a film)
and probably many other features. Also, is it just me, or do animated films benefit from DVD (over VHS) far more than live-action films? Also, aren't DVDs cheaper than VHS?
I was responding to this entire thread of Windows bashers, really... i just picked this one to reply to because it seemed the most pretentious, heh. I don't mind people having problems with Windows; i don't work for Microsoft or anything, and i think alternative operating systems are great, but a lot of these people are just mindlessly bashing the shit out of Windows, either because they automatically think that because many of Microsoft's policies and ideas are ridiculous (and yes, they are), Windows must automatically suck; or because of one of the things i listed in my above post.
It's not just programmers that are depicted unrealistically in movies. C'mon, you've all seen movies or TV shows, they rarely EVER depict anything related to computers realistically. Who remembers the computers in "Jurassic Park"? "This is a UNIX system! I know this!" Ha, what crap. "Hackers" was pretty realistic -- until they showed the computers. Some of the computers in "Hackers" were based on real computers (Apples, mostly, if i remember right), but a lot of them were totally wishful thinking on part of the writers (or whoever it was that designed the computers). And don't forget commercials. Commercials for online services like Yahoo! and Priceline and Expedia all show less-than-realistic shots of computers. For example, notice in the one hotel commercial with the mosquito nets (don't know who that is... Expedia, maybe), the woman moves the mouse to a hyperlink, and it stays the same cursor the entire time. Doesn't change to a hand or anything, it just remains a big, stupid, fake-looking black arrow.
So, yeah... really, i can't remember anything related to computers on television or in the movies that i've seen that was realistic. Most shows and movies seem to create their own operating systems, also, i guess to get around paying Microsoft/Apple royalties or whatever? Although, i did notice that pretty much every single computer in "24" was running OS X. Hopefully now that all students have to learn about modern operating systems in school (from elementary on up), the designers (or whoever it is, again, that does this stuff) will start to realise that they're not fooling many people.
What the fuck. I don't know how an article about "why nerds are unpopular" turned into a huge Windows-bashing session, but i'll bite (again...). If you Linux people are so god-damned intelligent, why can you not keep your XP machines from crashing all the time? I'm just a lowly junior in high school with no job, no girlfriend, and no money to my name, but somehow i have managed to live with Windows XP since build 2474, on multiple computers, WITHOUT A SINGLE CRASH. But you Linux people are so smart. Linux lets you do anything you want without warning you about it. You change anything on the system you want. If software crashes, you just kill it or restart X or whatever. You have the almost obsessive patience and intelligence to compile all your software, and then when it breaks you have the almost obsessive patience and intelligence to go hunting through billions of text files in billions of directories scattered across your entire hard drive to fix it. But you do not quite grasp the incredibly complex task of not crashing Windows.
Like i've mentioned before in several posts, i've used several versions (each) of Linux, Windows, and the Mac OS (as well as DOS, BeOS, and several other operating systems), and the only ones that have ever crashed on me are previous versions of Windows, Mac OS 7, and Mac OS 8. Windows XP has never crashed for me, and neither has Linux. Now, i consider myself an intelligent person, but i have very little programming experience (just a little Visual Basic, BASIC, and Java, the former of which will get me labelled as a fool on Slashdot instantly), and i really don't know all that much about internal operating system workings like APIs and junk like that. But i appear to be intelligent enough not to crash my fucking computer, even when i'm running all kinds of alpha-blended windows and third-party theming applications and transparent high-resource mouse cursors and other such "garbage" (as many would call it) that suck up system resources and can result in crashes if you don't know what you're doing.
Why can't you keep your XP computers running, O Holy Ones? My guess is one of the following: (01) you're wanting it to crash so you can have an excuse to agree with everyone that says "omgz teh lunax si teh best cos teh windoze sux0rz + crashes"; (02) you're trying to make it do something it can't; (03) you're using some outlandish, crazy hardware that is not meant for personal computers or does not have Windows drivers; (04) you had some tiny stupid problem like incorrect/incompatible NVIDIA drivers, and instead of using your extensive knowledge to fix it (which you could have done easily), you fall back on some excuse like "well Red Hat detects my drivers right" or "FreeBSD didn't have this problem". I'm willing to bet probably 80% of you "Windows doesn't work"/"Windows crashes" people have formed your judgements based on one of the above asinine reasons.
PS: I know Linux and BSD are different things, but to save space in this post i have grouped BSD, Darwin, HURD, Linux, UNIX, and whatever other UNIX or UNIX-like systems any of you may be running into "Linux".
Slashdot Mirror
Aside from that, the development, and probably the use, of this emulator is/was illegal. Not to mention that you have to get your Xbox modded, which (a) allows you to pirate Xbox games (which will certainly destroy any added revenue owing to the very small crowd that buys an Xbox based on the fact that it can now play, poorly, a few PSX games), (b) locks you out of Xbox Live (which, coincidentally, is another source of income for Microsoft), and (c) is also illegal (or, at least, the law seems to consider it so).
So, no, i don't think this helps Microsoft at all.
That should've read:
I completely agree. X is horrible. PicoGUI seems to be doing well, and hopefully it'll address these problems when it's more mature. I can't say for sure, though, because i'm really not very Linux-smart, and i couldn't get it to compile. (Oops :D )
Forgive my idiocy. I've spent too long posting to forums that use stuff like [url=http://www.blah.com]. Sigh.
I completely agree. X is horrible. PicoGUI seems to be doing well, and hopefully it'll address these problems when it's more mature. I can't say for sure, though, because i'm really not very Linux-smart, and i couldn't get it to compile. (Oops :D )
Anyway, if everybody is going to be as childish and immature as these FirebirdSQL jack-asses are, they should probably just change the names of all of their browsers to some random number, or a code, or something. Maybe then people won't kick and stomp about it.
"5047bc596a4bab2dc7f7c120bb22dec5" has a nice ring to it, don't you think?
Surely the occasional complaint is alright, but every single person on here that's bitching about dupes KNOWS there's gonna be a hundred other guys saying the exact same thing. He's not doing anybody a favour. If you want to write a big long-winded philosophical essay about why Slashdot shouldn't post dupes, please register and utilise your journal space.
In any case, i'm so off-topic it's not even funny, so i'll desist now.
That is all.
So think about this. As the original research I conducted indicates (and has been verified by SoundScan via BusinessWeek.com), the record labels began to reduce the number of releases BEFORE the Napster hearings. When they went in front of Congress to complain about downloading, Hilary Rosen could confidently state that sales were going to suffer.
Because it was engineered.
I don't understand why nobody's commented on this yet. This has some pretty big implications, doesn't it? I'm sure they can shoot it down just as easily as anything else, but if this can be proven somehow (or even if just a couple respectable firms agree on it), this would make a nice dent in the RIAA's argument, and might even get the unwashed masses to start thinking about the people behind that shiny new Britney Spears CD.
Um... is my thread listing messed up? If i'm seeing this correctly, you replied to a post about Fileplanet and talked about using 3D game engines for movies. Did i miss something?
Granted, a lot of computer-(mostly-)illiterate adults ("the masses", as we call them) have started using Google as their search engine of choice, as opposed to Yahoo! or MSN or Excite, but i've learnt recently that teen-agers and smaller children haven't begun to follow this trend so much on their own. I'm in eleventh grade, and only the two or three computer-literate students at my school actually use Google. Everyone else uses Yahoo!. Similarly, my brothers and sisters, all of whom are below the eighth-grade level, use Yahoo! (and "Yahooligans" or whatever) for their searches for school projects and games and what-not (one of my youngest sister's favourite pastimes is to search Yahoo! for something like "fun games", and then proceed to download every ad-ware/spy-ware Java-based puzzle game she can find). I'm willing to bet (by observation of some of my brothers' and sisters' friends, and how they use the computer(s) when they come over) that this isn't just isolated to the students at my school and my siblings, but rather is a wide-spread phenomenon, at least in this area.
I'm not exactly sure what i'm getting at, but i guess if Google wants to fight Yahoo! in this battle that Yahoo! is evidently intent on winning, Google may want to hook some of the younger audience, who haven't quite figured out how advanced Google can be. They're attracted to Yahoo! (i'm guessing) because of three things:
(01) Yahoo! Instant Messenger is a semi-common instant messenger (not as much so as ICQ/AIM/MSN, but i know a couple persons that use it), and i'm willing to bet a good portion of Yahoo!'s search engine users uses it mainly because of its association to Y!IM.
(02) Yahoo! Mail is probably the second-most-common free e-mail service among "the masses". While i personally hate it (i'm a Hotmail person myself), i know many persons (including teachers) that use Yahoo! Mail instead of Hotmail. I don't know why, but they do, and i'm willing to bet that a good portion of the search engine users comes from that as well.
(03) Finally, Yahoo! does a lot of stuff to appeal to the younger audience. They have "categories" or whatever, evidently to make finding things easier (i've always found it stupid myself), and they use lots of pictures and colours that (i'm assuming) kids like. And that Yahooligans thing. Google is just kind of plain-text, and for us, that's great, but for some people, that's a symbol of unprofessionalism.
In any case, just some thoughts. I'm not saying that i want a Google Mail or a Google Instant Messenger or anything like that (i certainly don't), but maybe that's something for Google to think about.
On a related subject, i always used Infoseek before i perfected my Google skills. But then they were bought out by Go. Does anyone remember Infoseek? :(
I'm totally going off on a tangent here, but i just thought i might like to express my immense dislike of ZSNES. I mean, it's got great compatibility, and the sound and graphics emulation is fairly excellent, but the interface SUCKS HORRIBLY. I don't understand why everyone loves it so much. I can't bear to use that program, the interface for it is so incredibly awkward. This is why i sacrifice a bit of speed, compatibility, and precision, and use SNES9x.
Basically there is a bug in the save handling, which has been found in several games, I just took 007 because only one save is needed for both US and PAL game version - for other games you usually need two (or even more).
I don't have an Xbox, and i don't care about the Xbox enough to want to understand exactly what "save handling" he's talking about, or how it relates to Linux, but that's the gist of it. I agree with you about EA though. Commies.
You make an extremely cogent point.
But i don't know. Maybe the older models (SP150, SP50, &c.) were genuinely bad. The parent gives the impression that he owned a RioVolt (though perhaps not the same one) for at least 2 years, so i don't know. Not sure when the SP250 came out.
Eh, that's my experience, anyway.
Heh. Like i said, "college" when referring to the education itself, "university"/"college"/"school"/whatever when referring to the actual institution (for example, i might call the University of Iowa "the university", but if asked what my education was, i would say i'm "in college"). I wouldn't know about the reasons, but i suppose that you're right in saying that only Americans do it. Oh well.
He's referring to "in the English language in general", or, if he's not, he should be. Where i come from (Iowa), "college" refers to any type of education after high school, be it a technical school, a community college, or a state university. Whenever we refer to our post-high school education, we say college. "What college are you going to?" "I don't want to go to a big college." "Do you plan on attending college?" &c.. I suppose it depends on what you're referring to. If you're referring to the notion of post-high school education itself, then you say "college", but if you're referring to an actual place, an institution, you say "school" or "university", or whatever fits. My 2 cents, heh.
PS: I hate focus-follows-mouse.
PPS: Yes, you CAN enable focus-follows-mouse (X mouse, as Microsoft calls it) in Windows. It's one of the first options in TweakUI, which is a program that i do not install Windows without. One of the very first things one should get when installing any form of Windows is TweakUI. Though, i suppose you can call that an add-on. Hm, it should come with Windows, i think. Oh well.
It seems all the people that are demanding that everyone move to UNIX are too busy writing programs for the 20-year veteran to actually make the switch happen. It comes down to organising your priorities. Which do we want to happen first? Getting everyone to switch to UNIX as soon as possible, or making UNIX as robust and powerful as possible? If the answer is the latter, keep on doing what you're doing. But if the answer is the former, the UNIX programmers need to stop developing ultra-secure, ultra-powerful, ultra-complex, ultra-hard-to-use-unless-you've-been-running-UNIX- your-entire-life developer and adminstrator programs, and start developing things that actually matter to the common user, such as the sound server, the desktop environment, the utilities (control panels and the like, which Mandrake does pretty well), easy-to-use front-ends for all the configuration files that are buried deep in the UNIX file structure (such front-ends may fall into the previous category of "utilities"), and other commonly-used programs, such as a GOOD (notice capital letters here and afterwards) Web browser, a GOOD image editor, a GOOD e-mail client, a GOOD Usenet client, &c.. Security is pretty important to me, but it's not a matter of "we don't even bother doing anything if this isn't 100% hacker/cracker/vulnerability-proof", which is how most UNIX developers (from my point of view) seem to think. And all of the aforementioned things need to be available OUT OF THE BOX. I can't even get my mouse acceleration to work right in Linux. In Windows, there are only two steps i must take: (01) install Windows; (02) there is no 02.
That's my biggest gripe about UNIX. Not flame wars or programming libraries or APIs or Mozilla vulnerabilities, but the fact that the developers who want people to switch are only working on programs for people that have already switched (or have never used Windows/Mac OS/whatever in the first place).
I can see where you're going. Personally, though, it's not using them or being around people using them that i hate, but rather a specific group of people using them that i hate (using the word loosely). In my school (i'm in high school), every single student that i've come across, from 7th grade to 12th grade, has a cell phone. I have yet to meet one that doesn't. And they all whine and cry about how they're not allowed to have phones at school, and how they need them for safety and emergencies and all kinds of other bull shit, but in fact they only use them for calling their drop-out boyfriends in study hall. And they all have "lists" (or whatever you call them) with like a hundred persons on them. The size of one's cell phone list is the equivalent of one's penis size at my school. It's really fucking sickening, i think. Anyway, i hate people like that. Heh.
Personally i would love it if everyone replaced floppies with SuperDisks. In fact, i don't understand why it never happened. :/ (If you don't know what a SuperDisk is, think 120-meg floppies.)
No suh, i do not know how to fix everything. I couldn't tell you what was wrong, either. My guess would be hardware, but that's just a guess. I wasn't trying to elevate myself above Linux users in my post; they have far more patience (er... with their computers, anyway) and technical skill than i do, and for that i commend them. I've used Linux, and, to be honest, i'd have to say i suck at it. I ended up formatting my Linux partition a month after i installed it, because through all that time, i could not get my mouse acceleration, sound, or wireless NIC working right. I compiled stuff, i modified files, i read FAQs and newsgroups, i downloaded drivers, &c., but i couldn't get it to work. I can find my way around Linux, but compared to a lot of the people on Slashdot, i know very little about it. In any case, i'm kind of rambling, but... yeah. I hate Windows 2000, the solution to your problem is to upgrade to XP. :p (PS: I'm joking, please don't flame the shit out of me for saying that.)
Also, in regards to the guy a couple posts down that says "DMCA" (to whom i will respond in this reply to save space). Yeah, another flaw that i missed. DVD has all the regional lock-out, anti-pirating/anti-copying, &c., bull shit, but that doesn't matter for most people. I mean, i can understand how the region thing can piss you off (and it kind of pisses me off too, even though i have yet to desire a non-Region-1 DVD). And no one should be concerned with the anti-pirating/anti-copying stuff except people that use operating systems that are blocked out of access (or whatever the problem is... i haven't been keeping up on the whole story with DVD and Linux). However, if you do use Linux (or whatever operating system it is that doesn't work with the DVDs), i suppose then you'd be justified in being angry. That problem doesn't affect me, so i, like the general public, usually ignore it (i'm sorry, i know it's bad :p ).
- real-time (as in, while the movie plays) commentary
- different subtitle languages, and the ability to enable/disable them
- different audio languages
- portability (ability to play them in computers, video game systems, and portable DVD players)
- chapter selection (ability to skip to pretty much any point in a movie easily)
- no need to rewind (a task that i personally despise)
- double-sidedness (in order to show really long films, or in order to show both wide-screen and "normal" versions of a film)
and probably many other features. Also, is it just me, or do animated films benefit from DVD (over VHS) far more than live-action films? Also, aren't DVDs cheaper than VHS?
I was responding to this entire thread of Windows bashers, really... i just picked this one to reply to because it seemed the most pretentious, heh. I don't mind people having problems with Windows; i don't work for Microsoft or anything, and i think alternative operating systems are great, but a lot of these people are just mindlessly bashing the shit out of Windows, either because they automatically think that because many of Microsoft's policies and ideas are ridiculous (and yes, they are), Windows must automatically suck; or because of one of the things i listed in my above post.
So, yeah... really, i can't remember anything related to computers on television or in the movies that i've seen that was realistic. Most shows and movies seem to create their own operating systems, also, i guess to get around paying Microsoft/Apple royalties or whatever? Although, i did notice that pretty much every single computer in "24" was running OS X. Hopefully now that all students have to learn about modern operating systems in school (from elementary on up), the designers (or whoever it is, again, that does this stuff) will start to realise that they're not fooling many people.
Like i've mentioned before in several posts, i've used several versions (each) of Linux, Windows, and the Mac OS (as well as DOS, BeOS, and several other operating systems), and the only ones that have ever crashed on me are previous versions of Windows, Mac OS 7, and Mac OS 8. Windows XP has never crashed for me, and neither has Linux. Now, i consider myself an intelligent person, but i have very little programming experience (just a little Visual Basic, BASIC, and Java, the former of which will get me labelled as a fool on Slashdot instantly), and i really don't know all that much about internal operating system workings like APIs and junk like that. But i appear to be intelligent enough not to crash my fucking computer, even when i'm running all kinds of alpha-blended windows and third-party theming applications and transparent high-resource mouse cursors and other such "garbage" (as many would call it) that suck up system resources and can result in crashes if you don't know what you're doing.
Why can't you keep your XP computers running, O Holy Ones? My guess is one of the following: (01) you're wanting it to crash so you can have an excuse to agree with everyone that says "omgz teh lunax si teh best cos teh windoze sux0rz + crashes"; (02) you're trying to make it do something it can't; (03) you're using some outlandish, crazy hardware that is not meant for personal computers or does not have Windows drivers; (04) you had some tiny stupid problem like incorrect/incompatible NVIDIA drivers, and instead of using your extensive knowledge to fix it (which you could have done easily), you fall back on some excuse like "well Red Hat detects my drivers right" or "FreeBSD didn't have this problem". I'm willing to bet probably 80% of you "Windows doesn't work"/"Windows crashes" people have formed your judgements based on one of the above asinine reasons.
PS: I know Linux and BSD are different things, but to save space in this post i have grouped BSD, Darwin, HURD, Linux, UNIX, and whatever other UNIX or UNIX-like systems any of you may be running into "Linux".