There is a very simple fix that will make all P2P networks useless. Industry and government will get together and come up with a plan to cap all residential broadband upstream bitrates to the low kilobit/sec range (uncapped service might be offered for say $50/month extra; very few will buy it). Educational institutes will be pressured to do the same on student accounts. Businesses will gladly crack down on employee P2P usage. Result: P2P dries up quickly.
Since this is a win/win situation for every party except the individual end user, I'm predicting we'll see these limits in place within 5 years.
This would also kill online gaming, which would obviously be bad for game development/publishing companies but also bad for "enthusiast" hardware manufacturers and possibly the entire PC hardware industry. I'm not sure if those most affected have the lobbying clout to do anything about it, but expect some major bloodshed.
I wouldn't say that, but the argument would seem to be that it's at least a lot flatter than what is presented to it by conventional drivers' off-axis response.
Additionally, I think there is a case to be made that the reflected sound of a typical wall, flat or not, helps localize sound "in the room" since we all hear sounds in rooms with walls every day, and develop certain expectations in that regard. One reason, I believe, that many recording studio environments try to eliminate only the most direct, short-path reflections and simply diffuse the rest rather than constructing anechoic boxes. Anechoic boxes sound weird unless you're used to that.
I'm just spouting off my own pseudo-theory here, by the way; I have no reason to believe B&O utilized any of this reasoning when designing their speakers.
While I agree with what you say, it sounds like this is would be an argument against 360 degree coverage. Wouldn't that amplify the effect, meaning that you'd have to do more with the eq?
I think what you're missing here is that the uneven frequency response reflecting off walls in a typical system is a result of the varying dispersion pattern of conventional frontward-firing drivers. By constructing a system that fires in all directions, the walls receive all frequencies equally rather than only those which are not attenuated by uneven dispersion.
I guess I'm just having a hard time accepting the idea that, after being trained to minimize reflections and go for direct sound, a 360 degree radiator will minimize the effects of reflections.
The idea is the walls are treated to the same full-range sound as a nearfield listener is, and in turn reflect a relatively full-range sound toward the listener. This may or may not be better than no reflections at all (depending on the characteristics or your room, and possibly personal tastes) but it seems clearly better than reflections full of huge dips at the frequencies approaching each driver's upper limits through the mechanism explained by crucini.
By "unlimited" they mean "you can remain connected for an umlimited number of hours", as opposed to a metered/per hour system, or one with limits placed on connection as alluded to above. It's just archaic dial-up language being applied to describe the "always on" aspect of this type of connection.
For all the reasons already stated over and over again, they certainly can not/will not be offering unlimited data transfer at this price.
This actually happened a few months ago with the Matrox Parhelia - it was disappointingly average in gaming performance, and pretty much all the sites mentioned above expressed that. It didn't actually even suck, it was just marketed as a hardcore gamer's card and fell far short of expectations.
At the same time, though, it's difficult to refute what you're saying other than in certain specific cases like the Parhelia, because the vast majority of video hardware is faster and better than the previous generation; that the reviews confirm this doesn't really suggest any lack of integrity on the part of the reviewers.
Or, as I often have to tell Microsoft-users - it's not a feature, it's a bug. Usually referring to the fact that you can embed Flash in an email in such a way that it Outlook doesn't ask you if you're sure you want to use flash. Windows people think this is a great feature, and don't understand the security risks involved in running arbitrary OLE objects on your computer without your permission
I've got news for you: there are solid reasons for intelligent, knowledgeable people to use Windows under certain circumstances. Yes, it was exceedingly foolish of Microsoft to enable automatic execution of untrusted files in HTML document by default, but this is a reflection of the stupidity of Microsoft, not on "Windows people" as a group. I use Windows, I use other software to read my mail (software which does not parse HTML or execute anything), I know how to secure the rest of my box, and I don't appreciate being lumped in with "Windows people" and being told what I think is a great feature. Windows fits my current needs on the desktop better than the available alternatives, and I am far from stupid.
By the same logic (assuming you primarily use *nix), is it safe to assume you are a 40-year-old virgin with taped-together hornrim glasses, who plays MUDs for 20+ hours a week and has the most complete collection ever of Star Trek, The Original Series (on Betamax, because somebody convinced you it's technologically superior)? Welcome to the land of prejudice and over-generalization.
I can't imagine anything that would "disgruntle" warezers quicker than kicking them off the network. Not only that, but it seems to me that this move will also:
a) focus the spotlight on Dalnet as The Enemy, encouraging disparate groups of warez kiddies to unite and attack Dalnet when they might otherwise be busy attacking each other
b) be construed as an implicit challenge, at least by types who are accustomed to thinking in the territorial/anti-authoritarian terms of 13-year olds ("You can't use our servers for this stuff anymore." "Oh yeah? Take *this* then.")
It's a lose-lose. By taking this active role, Dalnet has simultaneously identified itself as a responsible party and moderator of content (to copyright holders) and an enemy to be defeated (to the warezers).
Re:Why so upset about this concept?
on
You Can't Link Here
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Many corporations of all sizes are very particular about controlling the manner in which information is presented. A mundane example is one whereby the price of an item for sale is revealed prematurely, before the sales pitch describing the benefits and language designed to preemptively overcome the objections of a prospective customer. The more general case is one of context; not that a particular piece of information might necessarily be misunderstood out of context, but more that information might be revealed without the "benefit" of carefully crafted supporting information and framework, i.e., "spin".
A simple solution to the DRM debacle is this: The reason that "fair use" came into being concering audio casettes and VCRs was that you could *not* get sonic/video quality equal to the original. With digial copying (i.e. "ripping"), I can "rip" a CD on my machine using 320kbps sample-rates and get sonic quality that's as close to the theoretical "perfect" as I can get. The answer is simple: make it illegal to have software that samples anything higher than 96kbps - that way, you're getting about the same degredation in sonic quality as you would get by recording an LP to Cassette (1st generation signal loss). With that schema, you'd never really need DRM, because you could SONICALLY tell the difference between the original recording and a "ripped" copy.
No. I use the mp3 format to rip hundreds of CDs which I purchased in order to burn them onto CD and listen to them in my car. Your plan penalizes me, allowing me only unlistenably poor copies of music I have already paid for.
Palladium is not DRM. Palladium is hardware enforced encryption. Depending on how pedantic you're willing to get, you could say Palladium is "the working name given to some software" and leave it at that. The referenced article, however, deals specifically with DRM as one of the likely uses of Palladium technology so please be willing to make that herculean logical leap when posting.
No one is forcing you, or will force you to use anything related to Palladium Gee, ya think? Nobody claims that MS is holding a gun to anybody's head, how on earth does that invalidate comments about the program? Nobody held a gun to your head and forced you to read the previous poster's comments, but I see that didn't stop you from replying.
Windows XP can phone home for you, or you can do it yourself. Big deal. It is a big deal in that it is completely unnecessary with regard to the functionality of the product, and it presumes every install of XP is a criminal act involving pirated software until that transaction is successfully made to the satisfaction of Microsoft.
That check box clicking thing got you down? Whats wrong with software that offers to keep itself current? On the one hand you say MS sucks for its security problems, and then on other hand when they design software to help reduce exploitability after a compromise is found you freak out. You cant have it both ways. Irrelevant trolling. The issue is not that MS generously wishes to fix the bugs in its software mere months after the are brought to enough people's attention that they can no longer be successfully ignored; the issue is that MS insists on packaging unknown, untrusted (by the user), unrelated malware and asserting insane levels of control in the attached EULA, which one of course must click in order to have the original bugs fixed.
I have no idea what you are talking about, but its definately not related to Palladium If you don't understand how hardware-enforced encryption to which I do not hold the key running on my machine might be likened to a blackbox, then your statement is more of a personal admission of general confusion than the smart, stinging rhetorical question you probably had in mind.
Even then, it's doubtful if it will matter with many embedded real-time systems. And it ain't
gonna matter with consumer equipment, either. There will simply be massive "civil disobedience" and it will be roundly ignored
OK, so the public at large rejects DRM-enabled hardware. (At least that segment of the public not too ignorant to care, but that's another issue.) Fine. What about when micros~1 releases "Windows DRM" and utterly stops supporting previous versions? Also fine, as long as the new features offered aren't too compelling, we just won't upgrade.
But what happens when the next generation of DellGatewayCompaq PCs arrive with PentiumDRM chips and Windows DRM, and suddenly 100,000 business desktops are running this new stuff? (Those responsible for IT purchases may be knowledgeable and filled to the brim with social responsibility, but the PHB who signs the purchase order is probably not.) History has taught us that, bundled with all these desktops, will be a new version of Office DRM Deluxe, with new backwards-incompatible formats for.doc and.xls. and.mdb. And suddenly the easy, "just ignore it" decision-making process that leads to the type of civil disobedience you're talking about will be replaced with a more difficult "hmm, my next PC can either grok these de facto standards or not" decision. Disobedience will have some pain associated with it as the "standards" change again.
As long as people are running windows 98 on non-DRM hardware this will never fly past the drawing board. People will not upgrade thier computers to view content and if they are forced to that content will never catch on.
People will be forced to consider upgrading not to view DRM-protected (or not) content, but due to Microsoft's refusal to support operating systems such as Win98 which still allow the user at least the illusion of being in control of his own computer. I'm not talking about "tech support" when I say support, I'm talking about:
- not certifying drivers any more for Win9x. I just bought an ATI Radeon 9700 and I am only able to use it on my Win98 machine because someone at ATI had the good sense to make drivers for WinME (which is still "certifiable", I leave it as an exercise for the class to find the irony in that term) that work fine on Win95/98 machines depite not being certified for those OSs. And made sure the word got out. I'm sure all you linux folks out there are rolling your eyes at complaints by a Windows user that drivers are getting hard to come by, but I wouldn't be using this OS if I didn't want nearly universal hardware support. And it's going to go away if I don't jump on XP, or whatever is coming next.
- not offering DirectX upgrades for Win9x. This will break more and more games in the next couple of years, since the new generation of gaming video cards work their magic through the expanded features of the new DirectX APIs (as well as existing OpenGL functions and proprietery extensions, but plenty of game developers ignore GL in favor of developing to the masses). And face it, since office productivity apps have run as fast as they need to for years now, gaming drives the upgrade market more than anything else.
Ultimately these and other similar factors will force users into hard decisions, balancing the pros and cons of driver support for newer hardware/playing the latest games vs. being Microsoft's bitch. And having chosen the path that leads to bitchdom, they will accept the burden of DRM crap. Or they won't accept it, but it will be too late.
I have to disagree. The cost of studio time needn't be more than a drop in the bucket compared to promotion costs; when you pay multi-hundred-dollars per hour for studio time you're paying for proven, often "name brand" talent behind the board, a range of well-recognized equipment that provides a "wow" factor to the musicians as well as ensuring that they (and the producer) will have access to stuff they are comfortable with, and all the amenities befitting rock stars of a given stature (or having the illusion of said stature). There are plenty of independant facilities that are perfectly capable of professional results at a fraction of the cost, it just takes some shopping around.
Not to mention the ever-increasing availability of semipro equipment for the do-it-yourselfers, much of which is capable of sound quality that closely approaches that of megabuck studio rigs.
Also, no, the RIAA doesn't own all the studios; the label hires a producer, who understandably prefers to work in expensive facilities with Neve or Focusrite or SSL consoles and a few channels of vintage Pultec compressors, where the chairs are comfortable and the coffee is really really good, and since the last 3 albums he produced were done with that equipment and made the labels millions, he gets what he wants. And the artists probably don't complain much.
So you're saying that, because a person is uninformed about a particular aspect of online communication, he should be immediately stripped of his right to use the internet rather than, oh, educated? You're drawing some very broad conclusions about a person's intelligence and learning ability based on his not being properly informed (by your standards) on one little issue. That is to me an offensively elitist attitude.
Scenario absurdum: You (yes, you) fall victim to an exploit of some kind, which has been published but only on forums you do not frequent. By your logic you should immediately throw your hands into the air, crying "This darn internet is just too complex for me to use! I shall give it up immediately and, furthermore, I shall forever protect this secret from my friends and family, for clearly if they can't discover it for themselves then they are idiots like me. But at least I get to be an idiot with an air of superiority about me."
Being uninformed does not equal being unable to "handle" something, and to assume so is foolish.
John Carmack made some interesting statements in a video interview with GameSpot at last year's QuakeCon that support your observation. To (badly) paraphrase and summarize, he spoke at some length about striving for photorealism as opposed to "cartoony" graphics, and the necessary changes in gameplay that result. I remember particularly an observation that a game that approaches photorealism requires something more like real-world pacing in order to maintain suspension of disbelief; a character that runs Original Doom-Style at 80 miles an hour is jarringly out of place in a realistic virtual world. So yes, I would expect a less frantic, more suspenseful gaming experience.
I apologize for the lack of a relevant link, but all I have is a series of.asf files renamed for my convenience.
Apparently today's mods have a sense of humor too, as demonstrated by modding your idiotic troll + as insightful as well. Do you see the humor, or are you too busy congratulating yourself on receiving the One True insightful rating amongst the sea of meaningless moderations by the "morons", i.e., moderations you disagree with or don't understand?
- Kick/ban the prosecuting attorney, explaining to the jury that use of all caps is interpreted as shouting and considered rude. Inform the prosecuter that he has been "pwnt". - Call the judge a "newb" if he appears to disagree with Heckencamp's reasoning. - Threaten to ban the United States' entire subnet for a repeat offense. - Plead "not guilty by reason of total pwnage, hahahahahaha!!!!!1111111"
This is simply an example of misinformed or intentionally imflammatory reporting. Indeed, no files are exposed other than those that are intentionally shared; the "scary news" is that these files can be accessed through a web browser as well as through Morpheus. Big deal.
This is similar to the police stings you hear about from time to time (at least in the movies) where known felons are contacted in large groups and told they have won some attractive prize; all who show up are promptly arrested.
Not that anybody will be arrested as a result of dialing 1-800-usa-hack to sign up, but if you think a job offer is going to be the result as opposed to an immediate phone tap and lots of extra attention on your ip address, you are sadly deluded...
In Tacoma, the city ran the cables and provided the television feed, but stopped short of becoming the local ISP, choosing instead to make the wires available to established providers. The end result is even more competition in the local market than is immediately obvious. (I currently pay $26.50/mo for basic 1Mb/128K service with a real shell account, a pair of email addresses, a decent usenet feed and the usual stuff.) This setup has the city doing exactly what they know and do well, i.e., providing infrastructure. I'll leave it for others to debate the pros and cons of a municipal government running a cable TV service, but the city's decision to stay out of the ISP business eliminates most of the concerns voiced immediately above IMHO. And I have a real ISP with real experience in the area, much more so than seems to be the case with *@home customers.
Regarding the question posed in the article, I was connected 3 days after ordering service and have had exactly one outage in the year I've been on the Click network (related to physical maintenance of the wires on my street). My ISP has real people at the other end of the phone if I need to contact them, and they're knowledgeable and generally helpful. ("Oh, you're going to use a Linksys box? OK, we'll send Jim to do your install, he's done a million of those.") And frankly I'm happier spending my money with the city I live in than helping suppoort a big telco, but that's another issue...
God, do all you "old PC NAT box" folks have fears about your manhood or do you just not read? The man clearly stated that he was looking for info on router appliances, and just as clearly excluded homebuilt PCs as a topic of discussion, but everybody and their brother still has to trot out the damn things, perhaps to demonstrate their questionable 1337tness by tossing it off so casually, as if it were a trivial solution (which it can be, in terms of technical difficulty. But the man mentioned $$$ and watts).
God help us when you all have actual beowolf clusters in your basements to brag about at every opportunity...
When an individual puts a system more expensive than that found in a concert hall in his living room without doing a thorough assessment of ALL sources of sound interference, then that person is just spending money to look like he is spending money.
Well said; I may have misunderstood the point of your post above. Objective measurements and subjective listening may not be quite apples and oranges, but I cringe when I think I hear people discarding the value of listening entirely in favor of measurements.
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There is a very simple fix that will make all P2P networks useless. Industry and government will get together and come up with a plan to cap all residential broadband upstream bitrates to the low kilobit/sec range (uncapped service might be offered for say $50/month extra; very few will buy it). Educational institutes will be pressured to do the same on student accounts. Businesses will gladly crack down on employee P2P usage. Result: P2P dries up quickly.
Since this is a win/win situation for every party except the individual end user, I'm predicting we'll see these limits in place within 5 years.
This would also kill online gaming, which would obviously be bad for game development/publishing companies but also bad for "enthusiast" hardware manufacturers and possibly the entire PC hardware industry. I'm not sure if those most affected have the lobbying clout to do anything about it, but expect some major bloodshed.
I wouldn't say that, but the argument would seem to be that it's at least a lot flatter than what is presented to it by conventional drivers' off-axis response.
Additionally, I think there is a case to be made that the reflected sound of a typical wall, flat or not, helps localize sound "in the room" since we all hear sounds in rooms with walls every day, and develop certain expectations in that regard. One reason, I believe, that many recording studio environments try to eliminate only the most direct, short-path reflections and simply diffuse the rest rather than constructing anechoic boxes. Anechoic boxes sound weird unless you're used to that.
I'm just spouting off my own pseudo-theory here, by the way; I have no reason to believe B&O utilized any of this reasoning when designing their speakers.
While I agree with what you say, it sounds like this is would be an argument against 360 degree coverage. Wouldn't that amplify the effect, meaning that you'd have to do more with the eq?
I think what you're missing here is that the uneven frequency response reflecting off walls in a typical system is a result of the varying dispersion pattern of conventional frontward-firing drivers. By constructing a system that fires in all directions, the walls receive all frequencies equally rather than only those which are not attenuated by uneven dispersion.
I guess I'm just having a hard time accepting the idea that, after being trained to minimize reflections and go for direct sound, a 360 degree radiator will minimize the effects of reflections.
The idea is the walls are treated to the same full-range sound as a nearfield listener is, and in turn reflect a relatively full-range sound toward the listener. This may or may not be better than no reflections at all (depending on the characteristics or your room, and possibly personal tastes) but it seems clearly better than reflections full of huge dips at the frequencies approaching each driver's upper limits through the mechanism explained by crucini.
Ahh, suddenly it all becomes clear.
By "unlimited" they mean "you can remain connected for an umlimited number of hours", as opposed to a metered/per hour system, or one with limits placed on connection as alluded to above. It's just archaic dial-up language being applied to describe the "always on" aspect of this type of connection.
For all the reasons already stated over and over again, they certainly can not/will not be offering unlimited data transfer at this price.
This actually happened a few months ago with the Matrox Parhelia - it was disappointingly average in gaming performance, and pretty much all the sites mentioned above expressed that. It didn't actually even suck, it was just marketed as a hardcore gamer's card and fell far short of expectations.
At the same time, though, it's difficult to refute what you're saying other than in certain specific cases like the Parhelia, because the vast majority of video hardware is faster and better than the previous generation; that the reviews confirm this doesn't really suggest any lack of integrity on the part of the reviewers.
Or, as I often have to tell Microsoft-users - it's not a feature, it's a bug. Usually referring to the fact that you can embed Flash in an email in such a way that it Outlook doesn't ask you if you're sure you want to use flash. Windows people think this is a great feature, and don't understand the security risks involved in running arbitrary OLE objects on your computer without your permission
I've got news for you: there are solid reasons for intelligent, knowledgeable people to use Windows under certain circumstances. Yes, it was exceedingly foolish of Microsoft to enable automatic execution of untrusted files in HTML document by default, but this is a reflection of the stupidity of Microsoft, not on "Windows people" as a group. I use Windows, I use other software to read my mail (software which does not parse HTML or execute anything), I know how to secure the rest of my box, and I don't appreciate being lumped in with "Windows people" and being told what I think is a great feature. Windows fits my current needs on the desktop better than the available alternatives, and I am far from stupid.
By the same logic (assuming you primarily use *nix), is it safe to assume you are a 40-year-old virgin with taped-together hornrim glasses, who plays MUDs for 20+ hours a week and has the most complete collection ever of Star Trek, The Original Series (on Betamax, because somebody convinced you it's technologically superior)? Welcome to the land of prejudice and over-generalization.
I can't imagine anything that would "disgruntle" warezers quicker than kicking them off the network. Not only that, but it seems to me that this move will also:
a) focus the spotlight on Dalnet as The Enemy, encouraging disparate groups of warez kiddies to unite and attack Dalnet when they might otherwise be busy attacking each other
b) be construed as an implicit challenge, at least by types who are accustomed to thinking in the territorial/anti-authoritarian terms of 13-year olds ("You can't use our servers for this stuff anymore." "Oh yeah? Take *this* then.")
It's a lose-lose. By taking this active role, Dalnet has simultaneously identified itself as a responsible party and moderator of content (to copyright holders) and an enemy to be defeated (to the warezers).
Many corporations of all sizes are very particular about controlling the manner in which information is presented. A mundane example is one whereby the price of an item for sale is revealed prematurely, before the sales pitch describing the benefits and language designed to preemptively overcome the objections of a prospective customer. The more general case is one of context; not that a particular piece of information might necessarily be misunderstood out of context, but more that information might be revealed without the "benefit" of carefully crafted supporting information and framework, i.e., "spin".
A simple solution to the DRM debacle is this: The reason that "fair use" came into being concering audio casettes and VCRs was that you could *not* get sonic/video quality equal to the original. With digial copying (i.e. "ripping"), I can "rip" a CD on my machine using 320kbps sample-rates and get sonic quality that's as close to the theoretical "perfect" as I can get. The answer is simple: make it illegal to have software that samples anything higher than 96kbps - that way, you're getting about the same degredation in sonic quality as you would get by recording an LP to Cassette (1st generation signal loss). With that schema, you'd never really need DRM, because you could SONICALLY tell the difference between the original recording and a "ripped" copy.
No. I use the mp3 format to rip hundreds of CDs which I purchased in order to burn them onto CD and listen to them in my car. Your plan penalizes me, allowing me only unlistenably poor copies of music I have already paid for.
Palladium is not DRM. Palladium is hardware enforced encryption.
Depending on how pedantic you're willing to get, you could say Palladium is "the working name given to some software" and leave it at that. The referenced article, however, deals specifically with DRM as one of the likely uses of Palladium technology so please be willing to make that herculean logical leap when posting.
No one is forcing you, or will force you to use anything related to Palladium
Gee, ya think? Nobody claims that MS is holding a gun to anybody's head, how on earth does that invalidate comments about the program? Nobody held a gun to your head and forced you to read the previous poster's comments, but I see that didn't stop you from replying.
Windows XP can phone home for you, or you can do it yourself. Big deal.
It is a big deal in that it is completely unnecessary with regard to the functionality of the product, and it presumes every install of XP is a criminal act involving pirated software until that transaction is successfully made to the satisfaction of Microsoft.
That check box clicking thing got you down? Whats wrong with software that offers to keep itself current? On the one hand you say MS sucks for its security problems, and then on other hand when they design software to help reduce exploitability after a compromise is found you freak out. You cant have it both ways.
Irrelevant trolling. The issue is not that MS generously wishes to fix the bugs in its software mere months after the are brought to enough people's attention that they can no longer be successfully ignored; the issue is that MS insists on packaging unknown, untrusted (by the user), unrelated malware and asserting insane levels of control in the attached EULA, which one of course must click in order to have the original bugs fixed.
I have no idea what you are talking about, but its definately not related to Palladium
If you don't understand how hardware-enforced encryption to which I do not hold the key running on my machine might be likened to a blackbox, then your statement is more of a personal admission of general confusion than the smart, stinging rhetorical question you probably had in mind.
Even then, it's doubtful if it will matter with many embedded real-time systems. And it ain't gonna matter with consumer equipment, either. There will simply be massive "civil disobedience" and it will be roundly ignored
.doc and .xls. and .mdb. And suddenly the easy, "just ignore it" decision-making process that leads to the type of civil disobedience you're talking about will be replaced with a more difficult "hmm, my next PC can either grok these de facto standards or not" decision. Disobedience will have some pain associated with it as the "standards" change again.
OK, so the public at large rejects DRM-enabled hardware. (At least that segment of the public not too ignorant to care, but that's another issue.) Fine. What about when micros~1 releases "Windows DRM" and utterly stops supporting previous versions? Also fine, as long as the new features offered aren't too compelling, we just won't upgrade.
But what happens when the next generation of DellGatewayCompaq PCs arrive with PentiumDRM chips and Windows DRM, and suddenly 100,000 business desktops are running this new stuff? (Those responsible for IT purchases may be knowledgeable and filled to the brim with social responsibility, but the PHB who signs the purchase order is probably not.) History has taught us that, bundled with all these desktops, will be a new version of Office DRM Deluxe, with new backwards-incompatible formats for
People will be forced to consider upgrading not to view DRM-protected (or not) content, but due to Microsoft's refusal to support operating systems such as Win98 which still allow the user at least the illusion of being in control of his own computer. I'm not talking about "tech support" when I say support, I'm talking about:
- not certifying drivers any more for Win9x. I just bought an ATI Radeon 9700 and I am only able to use it on my Win98 machine because someone at ATI had the good sense to make drivers for WinME (which is still "certifiable", I leave it as an exercise for the class to find the irony in that term) that work fine on Win95/98 machines depite not being certified for those OSs. And made sure the word got out. I'm sure all you linux folks out there are rolling your eyes at complaints by a Windows user that drivers are getting hard to come by, but I wouldn't be using this OS if I didn't want nearly universal hardware support. And it's going to go away if I don't jump on XP, or whatever is coming next.
- not offering DirectX upgrades for Win9x. This will break more and more games in the next couple of years, since the new generation of gaming video cards work their magic through the expanded features of the new DirectX APIs (as well as existing OpenGL functions and proprietery extensions, but plenty of game developers ignore GL in favor of developing to the masses). And face it, since office productivity apps have run as fast as they need to for years now, gaming drives the upgrade market more than anything else.
Ultimately these and other similar factors will force users into hard decisions, balancing the pros and cons of driver support for newer hardware/playing the latest games vs. being Microsoft's bitch. And having chosen the path that leads to bitchdom, they will accept the burden of DRM crap. Or they won't accept it, but it will be too late.
I have to disagree. The cost of studio time needn't be more than a drop in the bucket compared to promotion costs; when you pay multi-hundred-dollars per hour for studio time you're paying for proven, often "name brand" talent behind the board, a range of well-recognized equipment that provides a "wow" factor to the musicians as well as ensuring that they (and the producer) will have access to stuff they are comfortable with, and all the amenities befitting rock stars of a given stature (or having the illusion of said stature). There are plenty of independant facilities that are perfectly capable of professional results at a fraction of the cost, it just takes some shopping around.
Not to mention the ever-increasing availability of semipro equipment for the do-it-yourselfers, much of which is capable of sound quality that closely approaches that of megabuck studio rigs.
Also, no, the RIAA doesn't own all the studios; the label hires a producer, who understandably prefers to work in expensive facilities with Neve or Focusrite or SSL consoles and a few channels of vintage Pultec compressors, where the chairs are comfortable and the coffee is really really good, and since the last 3 albums he produced were done with that equipment and made the labels millions, he gets what he wants. And the artists probably don't complain much.
A game that can warez itself!
(Yes, I know what peer networking really means in the context of the article, but it wasn't funny that way.)
So you're saying that, because a person is uninformed about a particular aspect of online communication, he should be immediately stripped of his right to use the internet rather than, oh, educated? You're drawing some very broad conclusions about a person's intelligence and learning ability based on his not being properly informed (by your standards) on one little issue. That is to me an offensively elitist attitude.
Scenario absurdum: You (yes, you) fall victim to an exploit of some kind, which has been published but only on forums you do not frequent. By your logic you should immediately throw your hands into the air, crying "This darn internet is just too complex for me to use! I shall give it up immediately and, furthermore, I shall forever protect this secret from my friends and family, for clearly if they can't discover it for themselves then they are idiots like me. But at least I get to be an idiot with an air of superiority about me."
Being uninformed does not equal being unable to "handle" something, and to assume so is foolish.
It's only a matter of time before MS starts bundling the Xbox free with Windows.
Even Pac-Man clearly glorifies occult-flavored necro-cannibalism as the hero races to eat undead spirits before they eat him.
Will the madness never end???
John Carmack made some interesting statements in a video interview with GameSpot at last year's QuakeCon that support your observation. To (badly) paraphrase and summarize, he spoke at some length about striving for photorealism as opposed to "cartoony" graphics, and the necessary changes in gameplay that result. I remember particularly an observation that a game that approaches photorealism requires something more like real-world pacing in order to maintain suspension of disbelief; a character that runs Original Doom-Style at 80 miles an hour is jarringly out of place in a realistic virtual world. So yes, I would expect a less frantic, more suspenseful gaming experience.
.asf files renamed for my convenience.
I apologize for the lack of a relevant link, but all I have is a series of
Apparently today's mods have a sense of humor too, as demonstrated by modding your idiotic troll + as insightful as well. Do you see the humor, or are you too busy congratulating yourself on receiving the One True insightful rating amongst the sea of meaningless moderations by the "morons", i.e., moderations you disagree with or don't understand?
- Kick/ban the prosecuting attorney, explaining to the jury that use of all caps is interpreted as shouting and considered rude. Inform the prosecuter that he has been "pwnt".
- Call the judge a "newb" if he appears to disagree with Heckencamp's reasoning.
- Threaten to ban the United States' entire subnet for a repeat offense.
- Plead "not guilty by reason of total pwnage, hahahahahaha!!!!!1111111"
This is simply an example of misinformed or intentionally imflammatory reporting. Indeed, no files are exposed other than those that are intentionally shared; the "scary news" is that these files can be accessed through a web browser as well as through Morpheus. Big deal.
This is similar to the police stings you hear about from time to time (at least in the movies) where known felons are contacted in large groups and told they have won some attractive prize; all who show up are promptly arrested.
Not that anybody will be arrested as a result of dialing 1-800-usa-hack to sign up, but if you think a job offer is going to be the result as opposed to an immediate phone tap and lots of extra attention on your ip address, you are sadly deluded...
In Tacoma, the city ran the cables and provided the television feed, but stopped short of becoming the local ISP, choosing instead to make the wires available to established providers. The end result is even more competition in the local market than is immediately obvious. (I currently pay $26.50/mo for basic 1Mb/128K service with a real shell account, a pair of email addresses, a decent usenet feed and the usual stuff.) This setup has the city doing exactly what they know and do well, i.e., providing infrastructure. I'll leave it for others to debate the pros and cons of a municipal government running a cable TV service, but the city's decision to stay out of the ISP business eliminates most of the concerns voiced immediately above IMHO. And I have a real ISP with real experience in the area, much more so than seems to be the case with *@home customers.
Regarding the question posed in the article, I was connected 3 days after ordering service and have had exactly one outage in the year I've been on the Click network (related to physical maintenance of the wires on my street). My ISP has real people at the other end of the phone if I need to contact them, and they're knowledgeable and generally helpful. ("Oh, you're going to use a Linksys box? OK, we'll send Jim to do your install, he's done a million of those.") And frankly I'm happier spending my money with the city I live in than helping suppoort a big telco, but that's another issue...
God, do all you "old PC NAT box" folks have fears about your manhood or do you just not read? The man clearly stated that he was looking for info on router appliances, and just as clearly excluded homebuilt PCs as a topic of discussion, but everybody and their brother still has to trot out the damn things, perhaps to demonstrate their questionable 1337tness by tossing it off so casually, as if it were a trivial solution (which it can be, in terms of technical difficulty. But the man mentioned $$$ and watts).
God help us when you all have actual beowolf clusters in your basements to brag about at every opportunity...
When an individual puts a system more expensive than that found in a concert hall in his living room without doing a thorough assessment of ALL sources of sound interference, then that person is just spending money to look like he is spending money.
Well said; I may have misunderstood the point of your post above. Objective measurements and subjective listening may not be quite apples and oranges, but I cringe when I think I hear people discarding the value of listening entirely in favor of measurements.