The data of stations located in areas not listed in the Hadley Climate Research Unit Temperature UK (HadCRUT) survey often does not show any substantial warming in the late 20th century and the early 21st century.
There is the key word: often. That does not mean that all, or even the majority, of the stations shows this. Is the percentage of stations not getting much warmer the same as the percentage in the officially used data? They just leave that point dangling in the hope that we will infer that it is not the same.
Already people have taken this to say more that it does. Some blogs have already claimed that ALL of the stations used did not show warming. For example, here is a blatent bit of misquoting from a randomly googled blog:
The data from the unused stations reportedly did not show any substantial warming trends.
Oh dear. It is just a slight change, but it completely changes the meaning. And where is that skepticism that is supposed to be at work here? Why assume that the economic think tank is correct?
I will wait to find what the selection criteria was before taking this to be any proof of a global conspiracy.
Individuals in the company refer to their work being stolen, but official Microsoft statements and press releases are always more carefully worded and will talk about copying or infringment of copyright. Also, do you have any examples of Microsoft behaving harsher to others. If you copy their code in a similar way and then voluntarily cease and desist then they will not persue it further. Things go to court only if negotiation fails.
Plus it's ironic that Microsoft, the "king" of software development is having all those problems with subcontractors writing code for them.
I don't think that you will find anyone who claims they are the king of software development. They are very willing to simply buy up someone's work to base their products on. They have done that ever since MS-DOS. It's just the proprietry version of the code reuse that happens in the open souce world.
However, it is their Achilles heal because they cannot guarantee the origin of the code. I can't help but wonder whether they might start to shy away from this practice after the troubles that they have had. On the other hand, when developing for a different market like China, it makes sense to use local knowledge of language and mindset of the people.
I'm referring to the original theft of CP/M code that went into PC-DOS 1.0.
Ah yes, the sensational claim that there is a hidden command that prints Gary Kildall's name, but nobody will disclose the name of that command. That sounds plausible. Nobody has even attempted to prove that any copying has occured. And there had been, it would have been done by Seattle Computer Products and not Microsoft.
You may be right about stacker...
Don't worry, it is a common myth about code copying. I believed it myself until recently.
The Apple code theft I'm referring to is the Quicktime code that they stole to start Windows Media
It is not exactly a smoking gun that you make it out to be. A third party takes some code that they ported for Apple (or maybe it was new code that they wrote as part of that process) and they used it for another job that they did for Intel. Microsoft joins later on. Who knows if they knew where the code originated? It certainly wouldn't be the first time that a consultant has reused work that they had done previously for another client.
To top it off, the link you provided in another message refers to some analysis where some of this copied code has an Intel copyright on it. It really is a stretch to say that this is code that Microsoft copied.
You should work as hard as you can and take as little as you need, then you are a communist.
I saved up to buy my house that way. It is not just a communist thing.
Apportioning work allotments and wondering if poetry is a valued product is capitalist thinking.
I disagree. In my example of a hippie commune with the poet in question, the enrichment of the mind might be valued as high as the growing of food.
In communist countries they still had artists. Somebody had to make a value judgement to say that was a worthwhile thing to do. They did pure science even when there might not be a payoff. Once again, someone had to weigh up whether this had value to society.
As for work allotments, do you actually think that people work 18 hours a day in communist countries?
Posting anon, because even though i know these things, I'm not communist
Oh dear. That is rather telling. Do you not feel free to speak about such things in public? Is that because of your oppressive government, or because of how evil you believe communism is?
No, I am not assuming anything about the neighbor. I specifically left it up to the society has to work out the details.
I am not being an advocate here. I was merely stating that taking from your neighbor isn't stealing if that is the societal norm and your neighbor is also doign it. If the contributors don't actively participate then it is no different from someone not paying taxes in a capitalist society. Eventually they will lose their property and their place in that society.
And what code did they still from these companies? The controversies that I know with these companies are:
DR-DOS: A pre-release version of Windows 3.1 had code to prevent it loading on non MS-DOS systems. This code was not used in the production version. There was also a vapourware announcement of MS-DOS 5 to kill off a new release of DR-DOS. However, DR-DOS was later found to have stolen some FreeDOS code.
Stacker: This was a patent dispute, not a code stealing dispute. Microsoft had thought it had changed its code enough to get around the patent, but it wasn't enough and they got sued.
Apple? Umm.. Look and feel perhaps? I'm not sure what you mean on this one.
Communism and freedom/self-determination are mutually exclusive.
Why? In my post I envisioned a society where people did use a democratic process to determine how their society was run while still retaining a system of communism. Rather than just make an assertion that this is wrong, back up your ideas.
Communism can be used as a system of government by an oppressive regime. That doesn't mean that it can only be used by an oppressive regime.
I think that the problem we have when discussing this sort of thing is that we are conditioned to think in terms of "what's in it for me". Self-interest is a major part of our society, and I don't think that we are aware of how much we are indoctrinated into this way of thought. And I am not making a value judgement when I say "indoctrinated". All children are indoctrinated into a particular mindset, but that mindset varies depending on country and socio-economic background.
I agree. I really don't understand why companies get themselves in this hole. Though I wonder what happens if you do manage to customise and replace the code for your TV and something goes wrong with it. Could you really blame Sharp for not providing support to TVs with altered firmware? It would be a tech support nightmare!
The only time that GPL does become a problem is if you used it during the development process for something that you thought would never need to be released and then find that circumstances change and you would like to do so. You have limited your options.
That reminds me of the case of the Topfield set top boxes, where they used GCC to develop their software but then ran afoul of the licence when they wanted to release a development kit to allow people to write their own applications for the box (or TAPs). I don't know why Topfield didn't want to release their customised GCC code (maybe they thought that it might lead to them being forced to release too much of their other system code they had written), but they ended up withdrawing the SDK. In that case, the public lost out.
Basically, if a company wants to use GPL software, they need to plan it out carefully. They should define the exact areas of code that they are willing to open up and ensure there is enough of a buffer between it and other code. In the case of your TV, ensure the MPEG decoding software is completely separate from the GPL network handling code. Spell out in all in the documentation including warranty issues and links to the GPL code. Don't make adhering to the GPL licence an afterthought. Then nobody can complain about GPL "gotchas".
Given that the defendants are also ridiculously litigious about software patents
There is a big difference between publicly licenceing a patented technology to others (or at least uses that technology in a product of their own) verses a company who just sits on a portfolio of patents without using them to see what becomes hugely popular before suing all and sundry. If the first that you hear of these patents is when they start suing people, then you have a submarine patent. And that's bad.
Taking the fruits of your neighbors labor to supply for yourself would be called stealing if it was done directly and without the government as a middle man.
But if your neighbors are taking the fruits of their neighbors' labor to supply themselves, then the whole system becomes fair again. Sure you have to work out a system of apportioning work allotments so that one person is not being ask to provide a disproportionate of labor, but that is up to the society to figure out.
Each society might have different ideas of what constitutes work. A hippie commune might deem poetry to be a valid and valued product, whereas some other collective might only rank something that contributes materially to the society. This determination could be done democratically. Democracy and communism are not mutually exclusive.
When the science is being used as an excuse to control everyone's life, then everyone is a peer
That is not the definition of a peer. A peer is someone who is knowledgable enough about the subject matter to be able to judge it intelligently.
However, if you want to give it a try, read some papers about the climate published in scientific journals. That way you are not filtering the message through an blogger with an axe to grind (from both sides of the debate). You will then not find anyone who says that you should believe in climate change "just because" (as the grandparent put it), because in a published paper they have to show their working.
We have a few examples of classic denialist behaviour here. You start off by acting like the suppressed whistleblower. You've got the facts, but the man is trying to keep you down.
The weather exhibits chaotic behavior and to find precisely one single cause for variation is futile, like CO2 emissions from human activities
Denialist behaviour: keep making the same point that has been discredited time and time again. Weather is not the same as climate. If you toss a coin a hundred times, it will come up heads approximately 50% of the time. But that doesn't mean that you will know what the result will be on the 101st toss.
The hottest day on record! screams the summary. Er, well since 1941. Well and good, how do you know the hottest day last century in Australia didn't happen in 1940?
(No, it says the hottest month on record.) Now you have a bit of denialist misdirection. You couldn't argue with the fact that it was the hottest month on record, so you tried to change what they said to being the hottest month in the last century.
In any case, do you have any reason to think that some month in 1940 was hotter than any in the years after that? Or maybe are you trying to introduce unjustified doubt. This is textbook stuff: you don't have any facts with which to argue, so you just ask questions (that you can't answer yourself - I'll give you a hint, RTFA) to make it appear that opposition haven't considered all the possibilities.
The Earth has been getting warmer since about 10,000 years ago. Truth. AGW doesn't explain that
This one is my favourite. What makes you think that it is getting warmer? Oh, you suddenly believe what the scientists say! The hockey stick graph gets discredited because we apparently can't accurately measure the temperatures before 1850, but we can measure it 110,000 years ago. It is this that cherry picking of results of which both sides accuse the other.
But is it relevant? Can the sudden increase in warming over the last century really be attributed to the end of the last ice age? As a comparison, 1998 was dramatically hotter than the surrounding years. This is not attributed (by anyone reliable) to global warming, but rather to El Nino. Do you think that it is possible that the similar sudden increase in temperature seen over the century may also be attributable to something other than the extremely mild warming the planet saw prior to that?
I have always maintained that it is not the amount of temperature change that is the problem, but the speed of which it occurs. If it happens too fast, the all animals (including humans) have problems adapting. This results in a large number of species going extinct.
No weather model can correctly predict past, known, climate; how can one believe that the future predictions are correct?
That's a pretty bold statement. Which models have you look at? This might be one of those "Something doesn't exist, although I have never bothered to check" moments.
It doesn't work in Internet Explorer 8 either. It does for the first few tabs, but eventually just shows the results page as you said.
That is the first time that I have used image search on Bing. I like how you get the list of images in a frame down the side when you click on an image. It means there is less need to load the results in different tabs. Ooh, and I just tried the "find more sizes" option - that's really cool. It shows a list of the same image from different sites in various resolutions. I get sick of using google image search and keep finding tiny resulting pictures. I just wish that Bing allow you to sort the image list by resolution.
For MS I honestly don't know a lot about their actions on privacy, but I doubt they'd be any better than Google and I don't want to reward them for hiding their intentions.
You don't know about Microsoft's actions on privacy and you have no idea what they say about it. Did you know that both Bing and Google have their (very extensive) privacy policies linked on the bottom of their search pages?
Microsoft have got quite good at listing privacy policies and asking for permission before having their Windows software call back to home base. Generally speaking you can opt out of sending info back to their servers with the obvious exceptions like Genuine Windows Advantage and the annoying exception of Microsoft Security Essentials - where you have to choose either basic or advanced membership of Microsoft SpyNet (which collects info about discovered malware). I'm sure that previously you could opt out of that system.
Creating a standard, expecting everyone to use it, then charging a license fee for it is _evil_.
What exactly is evil? Firstly, they haven't created a standard. If they had then surely they would have published the specifications somewhere. exFAT is a proprietry file format.
I don't know if they expect everyone to use it, although they may hope that everyone uses it. If it is a sin to hope that your product is popular, then most of the companies in the world are going to hell.
Finally, why is charging a license fee for something evil? If you don't want to pay to use it, then don't use it. That is the same argument as saying if you don't want people to see your source code, don't incorporate GPL code into it.
So your argument is that a console is better because it can play 0% of old games, when a PC can only play 80% of them.
If you don't want to waste your time trying out old titles, then don't do it. You are not obliged to play old games on new PCs. If you have a relatively recent PC then just buy games from the last 5 years. How is that any different from what you are saying about consoles?
Just consider it a bonus that a game from 14 years ago might work too. And I'm talking games for DOS, Windows and virtually ALL of the older consoles (using emulators). That would be impossible on a console (excluding the games that have been re-released as I mentioned before).
But quite simply, if you don't want to take the chance, don't play old games and you are still no worse off than if you owned a console.
1. you're on/. , you obviously haven't gotten close enough to a girl to ask one out, let alone marry one
Yawn. That wasn't even funny five years ago. However...
2. if we assume, for the moment, that the first part of your premise is in fact factual, way to wear the pants in the family, letting the mrs encroach on your domain, wussemeyer...
I wouldn't take relationship advice from someone who claims to have never been close to a girl.
And to be on topic, the design of this unit makes me want to avoid it out of spite for the idiot who thought that looking crazy was a good idea. This is why you should never draw your designs on a folded up napkin.
There's a lot of games that can't be run on DOSbox...
And there are a lot of games that CAN be run on a modern system. Just for a laugh, I tried one of the oldest games taht I could find in my collection under Windows 7 (beta). It is Microsoft Fury 3, released in 1995 (before the N64). It played perfectly! The game never came with an option to change the resolution of the game, so it looked better when playing it in a window rather than full screen.
I have tried some older ones under DOSBox before, but they were non-action ones so they didn't really stress the system. So at least you have SOME chance that a game that old will play on a new PC system.
Also, it should be pointed out to the GP that you can still play some old SNES and N64 games on the Wii using Virtual Console. But this requires that you buy the games again, which annoys me when I still have the original in my hands. At least there is no hassle having to transfer the games from the old catridges.
FWIW, I find Australians don't like tinkering with technology and are bit insecure.
I definitely would not agree with that. For a long time, I could not under stand why our US friends would complain about not being able to buy a computer without paying the Microsoft tax. Here in Australia it is trivial to go to a computer shop and get a system without any OS at all. Sure, the department stores don't do it, but the ubiquitous corner computer shop would have no problems with this.
There are places that mostly tend to sell the parts rather than complete systems. I have spent a lot of time in the rather long queues at one such place and watched a whole procession of people walking out with all the componants of a computer - just separately boxed. There are also the many markets and swap meets selling the latest grey imports from asia. We have quite a large culture of rolling your own computer system.
Go to Officeworks, still half of their ASUS netbooks are Linux based.
Thanks for that. Their website doesn't list them at all. I will go check out my local store later. I have found some of the staff in my local one to be surprisingly knowledgeable.
That's the point of a netbook.. and the reason why Linux is so popular on them.
Wow, good point. I hated the way the netbook morphed into the slightly larger subnotebook market. People didn't seem to understand point of the cheap, tiny computer. Now I find I have fallen into that trap myself! Still, 32GB SSD seems like a nice minimum point without going to a full hard drive.
I live in Australia, and find it quite rare to find Linux based netbooks in shops. They are available, but mostly from the more specialist retailers. Even then they only have very low specs.
I just got back from Singapore, where I was hoping to pick up a cheap Linux netbook to use over there at a conference. Not only were prices similar to Australia for computer stuff, but virtually all the netbooks ran Windows. There were only a couple of places that I came across that offered Linux, and they were not cheap. They also seemed to be older models. I was disappointed.
That said, anyone who is really interested in Linux would not be satisfied with the simplified versions that come with netbooks. If you are going to wipe the OS to install your own distro, then it doesn't make a great deal of difference what the original operating system is. Any cost savings for having Linux seem to be offset by the premium of buying such a rare beast.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder how many low-intensity sex sessions are actually false positives caused by tossing and turning.
But doesn't that count as foreplay?
The data of stations located in areas not listed in the Hadley Climate Research Unit Temperature UK (HadCRUT) survey often does not show any substantial warming in the late 20th century and the early 21st century.
There is the key word: often. That does not mean that all, or even the majority, of the stations shows this. Is the percentage of stations not getting much warmer the same as the percentage in the officially used data? They just leave that point dangling in the hope that we will infer that it is not the same.
Already people have taken this to say more that it does. Some blogs have already claimed that ALL of the stations used did not show warming. For example, here is a blatent bit of misquoting from a randomly googled blog:
The data from the unused stations reportedly did not show any substantial warming trends.
Oh dear. It is just a slight change, but it completely changes the meaning. And where is that skepticism that is supposed to be at work here? Why assume that the economic think tank is correct?
I will wait to find what the selection criteria was before taking this to be any proof of a global conspiracy.
Individuals in the company refer to their work being stolen, but official Microsoft statements and press releases are always more carefully worded and will talk about copying or infringment of copyright. Also, do you have any examples of Microsoft behaving harsher to others. If you copy their code in a similar way and then voluntarily cease and desist then they will not persue it further. Things go to court only if negotiation fails.
Plus it's ironic that Microsoft, the "king" of software development is having all those problems with subcontractors writing code for them.
I don't think that you will find anyone who claims they are the king of software development. They are very willing to simply buy up someone's work to base their products on. They have done that ever since MS-DOS. It's just the proprietry version of the code reuse that happens in the open souce world.
However, it is their Achilles heal because they cannot guarantee the origin of the code. I can't help but wonder whether they might start to shy away from this practice after the troubles that they have had. On the other hand, when developing for a different market like China, it makes sense to use local knowledge of language and mindset of the people.
I'm referring to the original theft of CP/M code that went into PC-DOS 1.0.
Ah yes, the sensational claim that there is a hidden command that prints Gary Kildall's name, but nobody will disclose the name of that command. That sounds plausible. Nobody has even attempted to prove that any copying has occured. And there had been, it would have been done by Seattle Computer Products and not Microsoft.
You may be right about stacker...
Don't worry, it is a common myth about code copying. I believed it myself until recently.
The Apple code theft I'm referring to is the Quicktime code that they stole to start Windows Media
It is not exactly a smoking gun that you make it out to be. A third party takes some code that they ported for Apple (or maybe it was new code that they wrote as part of that process) and they used it for another job that they did for Intel. Microsoft joins later on. Who knows if they knew where the code originated? It certainly wouldn't be the first time that a consultant has reused work that they had done previously for another client.
To top it off, the link you provided in another message refers to some analysis where some of this copied code has an Intel copyright on it. It really is a stretch to say that this is code that Microsoft copied.
I hope that it doesn't make me a bad man, but a colony of starving poets is the funniest concept that I have heard about this year!
And you never know, it might actually work. I would pay to see them.
You should work as hard as you can and take as little as you need, then you are a communist.
I saved up to buy my house that way. It is not just a communist thing.
Apportioning work allotments and wondering if poetry is a valued product is capitalist thinking.
I disagree. In my example of a hippie commune with the poet in question, the enrichment of the mind might be valued as high as the growing of food.
In communist countries they still had artists. Somebody had to make a value judgement to say that was a worthwhile thing to do. They did pure science even when there might not be a payoff. Once again, someone had to weigh up whether this had value to society.
As for work allotments, do you actually think that people work 18 hours a day in communist countries?
Posting anon, because even though i know these things, I'm not communist
Oh dear. That is rather telling. Do you not feel free to speak about such things in public? Is that because of your oppressive government, or because of how evil you believe communism is?
No, I am not assuming anything about the neighbor. I specifically left it up to the society has to work out the details.
I am not being an advocate here. I was merely stating that taking from your neighbor isn't stealing if that is the societal norm and your neighbor is also doign it. If the contributors don't actively participate then it is no different from someone not paying taxes in a capitalist society. Eventually they will lose their property and their place in that society.
And what code did they still from these companies? The controversies that I know with these companies are:
Communism and freedom/self-determination are mutually exclusive.
Why? In my post I envisioned a society where people did use a democratic process to determine how their society was run while still retaining a system of communism. Rather than just make an assertion that this is wrong, back up your ideas.
Communism can be used as a system of government by an oppressive regime. That doesn't mean that it can only be used by an oppressive regime.
I think that the problem we have when discussing this sort of thing is that we are conditioned to think in terms of "what's in it for me". Self-interest is a major part of our society, and I don't think that we are aware of how much we are indoctrinated into this way of thought. And I am not making a value judgement when I say "indoctrinated". All children are indoctrinated into a particular mindset, but that mindset varies depending on country and socio-economic background.
Following the rules isn't all that hard to do.
I agree. I really don't understand why companies get themselves in this hole. Though I wonder what happens if you do manage to customise and replace the code for your TV and something goes wrong with it. Could you really blame Sharp for not providing support to TVs with altered firmware? It would be a tech support nightmare!
The only time that GPL does become a problem is if you used it during the development process for something that you thought would never need to be released and then find that circumstances change and you would like to do so. You have limited your options.
That reminds me of the case of the Topfield set top boxes, where they used GCC to develop their software but then ran afoul of the licence when they wanted to release a development kit to allow people to write their own applications for the box (or TAPs). I don't know why Topfield didn't want to release their customised GCC code (maybe they thought that it might lead to them being forced to release too much of their other system code they had written), but they ended up withdrawing the SDK. In that case, the public lost out.
Basically, if a company wants to use GPL software, they need to plan it out carefully. They should define the exact areas of code that they are willing to open up and ensure there is enough of a buffer between it and other code. In the case of your TV, ensure the MPEG decoding software is completely separate from the GPL network handling code. Spell out in all in the documentation including warranty issues and links to the GPL code. Don't make adhering to the GPL licence an afterthought. Then nobody can complain about GPL "gotchas".
Given that the defendants are also ridiculously litigious about software patents
There is a big difference between publicly licenceing a patented technology to others (or at least uses that technology in a product of their own) verses a company who just sits on a portfolio of patents without using them to see what becomes hugely popular before suing all and sundry. If the first that you hear of these patents is when they start suing people, then you have a submarine patent. And that's bad.
Taking the fruits of your neighbors labor to supply for yourself would be called stealing if it was done directly and without the government as a middle man.
But if your neighbors are taking the fruits of their neighbors' labor to supply themselves, then the whole system becomes fair again. Sure you have to work out a system of apportioning work allotments so that one person is not being ask to provide a disproportionate of labor, but that is up to the society to figure out.
Each society might have different ideas of what constitutes work. A hippie commune might deem poetry to be a valid and valued product, whereas some other collective might only rank something that contributes materially to the society. This determination could be done democratically. Democracy and communism are not mutually exclusive.
When the science is being used as an excuse to control everyone's life, then everyone is a peer
That is not the definition of a peer. A peer is someone who is knowledgable enough about the subject matter to be able to judge it intelligently.
However, if you want to give it a try, read some papers about the climate published in scientific journals. That way you are not filtering the message through an blogger with an axe to grind (from both sides of the debate). You will then not find anyone who says that you should believe in climate change "just because" (as the grandparent put it), because in a published paper they have to show their working.
We have a few examples of classic denialist behaviour here. You start off by acting like the suppressed whistleblower. You've got the facts, but the man is trying to keep you down.
The weather exhibits chaotic behavior and to find precisely one single cause for variation is futile, like CO2 emissions from human activities
Denialist behaviour: keep making the same point that has been discredited time and time again. Weather is not the same as climate. If you toss a coin a hundred times, it will come up heads approximately 50% of the time. But that doesn't mean that you will know what the result will be on the 101st toss.
The hottest day on record! screams the summary. Er, well since 1941. Well and good, how do you know the hottest day last century in Australia didn't happen in 1940?
(No, it says the hottest month on record.) Now you have a bit of denialist misdirection. You couldn't argue with the fact that it was the hottest month on record, so you tried to change what they said to being the hottest month in the last century.
In any case, do you have any reason to think that some month in 1940 was hotter than any in the years after that? Or maybe are you trying to introduce unjustified doubt. This is textbook stuff: you don't have any facts with which to argue, so you just ask questions (that you can't answer yourself - I'll give you a hint, RTFA) to make it appear that opposition haven't considered all the possibilities.
The Earth has been getting warmer since about 10,000 years ago. Truth. AGW doesn't explain that
This one is my favourite. What makes you think that it is getting warmer? Oh, you suddenly believe what the scientists say! The hockey stick graph gets discredited because we apparently can't accurately measure the temperatures before 1850, but we can measure it 110,000 years ago. It is this that cherry picking of results of which both sides accuse the other.
But is it relevant? Can the sudden increase in warming over the last century really be attributed to the end of the last ice age? As a comparison, 1998 was dramatically hotter than the surrounding years. This is not attributed (by anyone reliable) to global warming, but rather to El Nino. Do you think that it is possible that the similar sudden increase in temperature seen over the century may also be attributable to something other than the extremely mild warming the planet saw prior to that?
I have always maintained that it is not the amount of temperature change that is the problem, but the speed of which it occurs. If it happens too fast, the all animals (including humans) have problems adapting. This results in a large number of species going extinct.
No weather model can correctly predict past, known, climate; how can one believe that the future predictions are correct?
That's a pretty bold statement. Which models have you look at? This might be one of those "Something doesn't exist, although I have never bothered to check" moments.
Yes, in some cases you can. I simple list of ingredients cannot, but then I don't think a protocol would be considered just a list of ingredients.
It doesn't work in Internet Explorer 8 either. It does for the first few tabs, but eventually just shows the results page as you said.
That is the first time that I have used image search on Bing. I like how you get the list of images in a frame down the side when you click on an image. It means there is less need to load the results in different tabs. Ooh, and I just tried the "find more sizes" option - that's really cool. It shows a list of the same image from different sites in various resolutions. I get sick of using google image search and keep finding tiny resulting pictures. I just wish that Bing allow you to sort the image list by resolution.
For MS I honestly don't know a lot about their actions on privacy, but I doubt they'd be any better than Google and I don't want to reward them for hiding their intentions.
You don't know about Microsoft's actions on privacy and you have no idea what they say about it. Did you know that both Bing and Google have their (very extensive) privacy policies linked on the bottom of their search pages?
Microsoft have got quite good at listing privacy policies and asking for permission before having their Windows software call back to home base. Generally speaking you can opt out of sending info back to their servers with the obvious exceptions like Genuine Windows Advantage and the annoying exception of Microsoft Security Essentials - where you have to choose either basic or advanced membership of Microsoft SpyNet (which collects info about discovered malware). I'm sure that previously you could opt out of that system.
Creating a standard, expecting everyone to use it, then charging a license fee for it is _evil_.
What exactly is evil? Firstly, they haven't created a standard. If they had then surely they would have published the specifications somewhere. exFAT is a proprietry file format.
I don't know if they expect everyone to use it, although they may hope that everyone uses it. If it is a sin to hope that your product is popular, then most of the companies in the world are going to hell.
Finally, why is charging a license fee for something evil? If you don't want to pay to use it, then don't use it. That is the same argument as saying if you don't want people to see your source code, don't incorporate GPL code into it.
So your argument is that a console is better because it can play 0% of old games, when a PC can only play 80% of them.
If you don't want to waste your time trying out old titles, then don't do it. You are not obliged to play old games on new PCs. If you have a relatively recent PC then just buy games from the last 5 years. How is that any different from what you are saying about consoles?
Just consider it a bonus that a game from 14 years ago might work too. And I'm talking games for DOS, Windows and virtually ALL of the older consoles (using emulators). That would be impossible on a console (excluding the games that have been re-released as I mentioned before).
But quite simply, if you don't want to take the chance, don't play old games and you are still no worse off than if you owned a console.
1. you're on /. , you obviously haven't gotten close enough to a girl to ask one out, let alone marry one
Yawn. That wasn't even funny five years ago. However...
2. if we assume, for the moment, that the first part of your premise is in fact factual, way to wear the pants in the family, letting the mrs encroach on your domain, wussemeyer...
I wouldn't take relationship advice from someone who claims to have never been close to a girl.
And to be on topic, the design of this unit makes me want to avoid it out of spite for the idiot who thought that looking crazy was a good idea. This is why you should never draw your designs on a folded up napkin.
There's a lot of games that can't be run on DOSbox...
And there are a lot of games that CAN be run on a modern system. Just for a laugh, I tried one of the oldest games taht I could find in my collection under Windows 7 (beta). It is Microsoft Fury 3, released in 1995 (before the N64). It played perfectly! The game never came with an option to change the resolution of the game, so it looked better when playing it in a window rather than full screen.
I have tried some older ones under DOSBox before, but they were non-action ones so they didn't really stress the system. So at least you have SOME chance that a game that old will play on a new PC system.
Also, it should be pointed out to the GP that you can still play some old SNES and N64 games on the Wii using Virtual Console. But this requires that you buy the games again, which annoys me when I still have the original in my hands. At least there is no hassle having to transfer the games from the old catridges.
FWIW, I find Australians don't like tinkering with technology and are bit insecure.
I definitely would not agree with that. For a long time, I could not under stand why our US friends would complain about not being able to buy a computer without paying the Microsoft tax. Here in Australia it is trivial to go to a computer shop and get a system without any OS at all. Sure, the department stores don't do it, but the ubiquitous corner computer shop would have no problems with this.
There are places that mostly tend to sell the parts rather than complete systems. I have spent a lot of time in the rather long queues at one such place and watched a whole procession of people walking out with all the componants of a computer - just separately boxed. There are also the many markets and swap meets selling the latest grey imports from asia. We have quite a large culture of rolling your own computer system.
Go to Officeworks, still half of their ASUS netbooks are Linux based.
Thanks for that. Their website doesn't list them at all. I will go check out my local store later. I have found some of the staff in my local one to be surprisingly knowledgeable.
That's the point of a netbook.. and the reason why Linux is so popular on them.
Wow, good point. I hated the way the netbook morphed into the slightly larger subnotebook market. People didn't seem to understand point of the cheap, tiny computer. Now I find I have fallen into that trap myself! Still, 32GB SSD seems like a nice minimum point without going to a full hard drive.
I live in Australia, and find it quite rare to find Linux based netbooks in shops. They are available, but mostly from the more specialist retailers. Even then they only have very low specs.
I just got back from Singapore, where I was hoping to pick up a cheap Linux netbook to use over there at a conference. Not only were prices similar to Australia for computer stuff, but virtually all the netbooks ran Windows. There were only a couple of places that I came across that offered Linux, and they were not cheap. They also seemed to be older models. I was disappointed.
That said, anyone who is really interested in Linux would not be satisfied with the simplified versions that come with netbooks. If you are going to wipe the OS to install your own distro, then it doesn't make a great deal of difference what the original operating system is. Any cost savings for having Linux seem to be offset by the premium of buying such a rare beast.