That sucks. When I want a disk image for a backup I boot into linux and run dd if=/dev/diskIwanttobackup of=./filetostoreitin and voila, several minutes later I get a complete image.
Restoring is as easy as dd of=/dev/diskIwanttobackup if=./filetostoreitin
OTOH I recognise I'm unusual in backing up whole disks like that. And it does suck that MS broke back compat in their restore software.
At what point does their filtering of content lose them common carrier status and mean they have to filter *everything* or be liable for everything a customer can get at on their network?
Surely they're either a common carrier (they carry all traffic regardless) or they're not? In which case I'd expect people to start suing because they don't block child porn, or their network was used when little susie was abducted by that man off the net or terrorists emailed each other about a plot or... well, millions of possibilities.
"Don't tell me the studios don't love that annoying ability."
Oh they do and it pisses me off no end, no argument there.
"Don't tell me the studios don't love that annoying ability."
I believe they're also made of a far more scratch resistant material.
"And the much greater data density is also of great value from a copy protection and distribution POV. Hard drive storage of ripped movies becomes much more expensive"
Wait, wait, am I reading this right - more capacity is a BAD thing?
Internet downloads are even more prohibitive in terms of both bandwidth (not everyone has unlimited high bandwidth connections) and time (not everyone has the patience to wait 3-6 weeks to download a movie they want to see).
Newsflash for ya - the storage format isn't gonna matter a rats arse (to borrow your phrase) when it comes to net downloads, which will continue to be downsampled and compressed as necessary. It doesn't matter whether HD-DVD or BluRay becomes the defacto standard, it's utterly immaterial to downloads.
"More space should equal higher bitrates."
And with BluRay it does.
Now, the DRM is an issue I'll agree with you on, it sucks big time. But the rest of your post wasn't much help.
There's the rootkit thing, which people on slashdot seem to think had some effect on folks outside of slashdot. It really didn't.
Then there's the fact that against the wisdom of slashdot they made the PS3 very expensive by putting bluray in it and then didn't have the good grace to fall over and go bankrupt because slashdot said it would never sell.
Err...
Personaly I'm quite happy with all my Sony kit, it's generally good quality, good spec and shiny. It's also pretty pricy I guess.
"And even those with 8MB offerings still have caps in place (British Telecom, I'm looking at you)."
Stop looking at them. See if you can get service from Be (bethere.co.uk).
24Mb/s
In reality I got 17, until British Telecom (absolute arseholes) cut me off for two weeks due to a "fault" and now it sits at about 10. Still, not bad for 19 quid a month.
"I've found that most people who aren't either professional or dedicated hobbyist cooks or serious gourmands don't really know intuitively what's going to taste good. They know they like "chicken primavera", "buffalo wings", "pizza", or "eggplant parmesan" and might look up a recipe or two"
There is a middle ground of folks who aren't *dedicated* hobbyists but who have enough experience to throw things together well and experiment reasonably frequently.
You don't have to be dedicated to come up with your own recipes that taste good, just experimental and not afraid to throw the odd thing straight in the bin (using red wine instead of white in Gothnet's pesto, pancetta, garlic, tomato, rocket and wine sauce was a BAD plan). You get there after a while though. Maybe most people don't make the effort though, as you say.
I hear you on the pepper sauce. I wouldn't go as far as buying vintages or single crops, but there is more to hot sauce than either vinegar, sat and chili powder, or the other extreme of habanero oil. Personally I like a piri-piri style hot sauce with lime (and stuff).
BTW - habaneros aren't the hottest chili any more, check out the Dorset Naga.
(and yes, that's right, the world's hottest chili comes not from Mexico or the far east, but from one of England's sleepier shires...)
Fair enough. I think some dev companies (square for a start) will start to care about the extra capacity sooner or later. Maybe MS just hasn't planned the same lifetime for the X360 as Sony have for the PS3. Not necessarily a bad thing if, in a couple of years, they come out with something that beats the socks off the PS3 in othe hardware terms.
"knowing that no matter who won they could come out with an external player without risking being on the losing side."
Really?
I thought the current HD-DVD addon had no capability to do HD-DVD games and was movie only?
And even if it could do games then microsoft would fall into that (historically) fatal mixed-estate trap, where an X360 game is no longer just going to work on every console but will require people to check they have the righthardware first. Like a PC game.
Whereas Sony have the extra BluRay capacity from the word go.
I'm not sure how big a problem it would be, but it has been a problem for people in the past, and you may find that no (or not many) games developers would target the newer hardware as they wouldn't be assured of the whole install base as a market.
The triple layer HD-DVD did have a couple of extra gig on dual layer BD. However there are quad layer BD discs in the pipeline (have been demo'd, not production yet) that will have FAR more capacity.
And this:
Note that I have not actually seen a Blu-Ray disc play,
Followed by this:
any Blu-Ray player other than the PS3 is slow as hell with simple menu animations. By "slow as hell", I mean you will actually see it redrawing each frame in blocks, for a tiny menu taking up maybe an eighth of the screen.
Just desroys your credibility, sorry.
Java runs quite happily on a cheap mobile phone these days, I don't think for a second that anything that can decrypt HD video on the fly isn't going to ave the power to run a little java on the side. So when you say:
"The menus aren't really going to be much more than standard DVD menus."
You're talking out of your arse. And as for region coding, whilst the early versions of the standard don't support it, it was certainly being worked on.
You can also put BluRay on DVD using the AVCREC format, much like the HD-REC format for HD-DVD.
HD-DVD has been moving on to things like "Managed Copy", which is designed to allow (for example) legally ripping a movie to your iPod
That's part of AACS but was not included in the first version due to Toshiba (yes, the HD-DVD backer, Toshiba) requesting an interim standard because the main one was taking so long. So it looks like older HD-DVD discs and players likely didn't support that either, and going forward BluRay probably will.
Now, I'm not saying BluRay was the vastly superior format, but I am saying that HD-DVD was not all you've said here, and BluRay does have some advantages in capacity and throughput.
"I submit that if animals have the right to not be tortured, they must be responsible to not torture and we must punish or lock up animals that do persist in torture"
"Superior" synthetics are not superior in the way that counts: rarity.
And if that's the only reason people like them then I just lost a little more faith in humanity.
The rarity is enforced by DeBeers. They're not all that rare (how can they be, they're at every corner jewellery shop in every town and village in the western world).
""where do species come from." This is the kind of question that science is not supposed to answer because, whatever the answer is, it can't be reproduced."
Err, no, we can observe historical and reasonably contemporary examples of speciation, we know where species come from and your theory is a load of old cod.
"we "smart" people smugly shop for micronutrients, dehydrated horse piss and extracts of Chinese weeds at the organic food store to ward off cancer."
Speak for yourself mate. Some of us got wise to that nonsense a long time and spend a lot of time trying to disabuse other folks of the notion that there's anything to these mystical, pseudo scientific lies.
(By the way, whilst I don't care for "chinese weeds" to "ward off cancer", organic food has recently been shown in a proper scientific study by the EU to contain more nutrients)
So IP laws are not overbearing and overstretched? The DMCA doesn't put ridiculous restrictions on what you can do with hardware and media you've bought? Drug and other laws are not disproportionately prosecuted and don't criminalise those that harm only themselves (or noone at all)?
From my chemistry and physics studies at school, along with various other bits and pieces of knowledge picked up from news sources, computer games and... well... my old chemistry teacher who told us how to make bombs, I probably couldn't truthfully say "no" to that question.
You are quite correct - the roots lie in places where people with half a brain treat the stories told by other people with half a brain as anything other than anecdotal data.
I know you're trying to be witty. Equally, you know I'm referring to news stories and genuine, factual accounts of legislation, bad policing and dodgy politicians, not conjecture from Anonymous Coward.
"So I guess they'll be looking for a fear that deviates from the norm - people being too cool, shitting their pants too much or whatever other subtleties there are. You will probably be fine."
That would seem sensible, however from TFA it doesn't seem like they're getting a very good hit ratio.
700 out of 70,000 were found to either be violating a weapons ban, in posession of drugs or wanted on an outstanding warrant. I'm wondering what the background rate is and if a monkey could do better!
I meant paranoia on the part of the individual passenger that he is being hunted/watched/tageted, drawing attention to himself as a result and fulfilling his paranoid delusion.
Traveller: "They're all after me!" Agent: "That guy looks a bit shaky! Get him!" Traveller: "I was right! they are after me!"
I see where you're coming from, but I didn't mean it that way.
I know it's popular to class meth as "teh most addictive thing evAR!" but I've not seen much in the way of studies or evidence in that direction. Any links?
(especially seeing as the wiki link you provided puts amphetamine and cannibis addiction a little way below that of alcohol and barely above LSD... your claims and your posted addiction scale aren't really supported by your link.)
Slashdot Mirror
That sucks. When I want a disk image for a backup I boot into linux and run dd if=/dev/diskIwanttobackup of=./filetostoreitin and voila, several minutes later I get a complete image.
Restoring is as easy as dd of=/dev/diskIwanttobackup if=./filetostoreitin
OTOH I recognise I'm unusual in backing up whole disks like that. And it does suck that MS broke back compat in their restore software.
I shall now go through the replies to my post, one by one, and judge if they are worthy uses of win95. You First!
Right, I know sod all about netware, and you still have apps that need the system. Seems a good reason to keep it around to me!
The OP mentioned file ops that I was wondering about, but your situation warrants hanging on to 95 as long as is practical.
I too was wondering where that line was.
... well, millions of possibilities.
At what point does their filtering of content lose them common carrier status and mean they have to filter *everything* or be liable for everything a customer can get at on their network?
Surely they're either a common carrier (they carry all traffic regardless) or they're not? In which case I'd expect people to start suing because they don't block child porn, or their network was used when little susie was abducted by that man off the net or terrorists emailed each other about a plot or
Bad path to go down.
Try Google!
But I'll give you the first one free
"(I have one Win 95B station at my desk just to do drive data recovery and to do a few file tasks that XP doesn't want to let you do...)
"
Why?
Seriously, what can it do that XP can't? I'm interested.
File tasks are usually (IMHO) much better donw under Linux, which doesn't try to stop you doing anything.
"Blu-ray supports region encoding."
HD-DVD was getting it too.
"Don't tell me the studios don't love that annoying ability."
Oh they do and it pisses me off no end, no argument there.
"Don't tell me the studios don't love that annoying ability."
I believe they're also made of a far more scratch resistant material.
"And the much greater data density is also of great value from a copy protection and distribution POV. Hard drive storage of ripped movies becomes much more expensive"
Wait, wait, am I reading this right - more capacity is a BAD thing?
Internet downloads are even more prohibitive in terms of both bandwidth (not everyone has unlimited high bandwidth connections) and time (not everyone has the patience to wait 3-6 weeks to download a movie they want to see).
Newsflash for ya - the storage format isn't gonna matter a rats arse (to borrow your phrase) when it comes to net downloads, which will continue to be downsampled and compressed as necessary. It doesn't matter whether HD-DVD or BluRay becomes the defacto standard, it's utterly immaterial to downloads.
"More space should equal higher bitrates."
And with BluRay it does.
Now, the DRM is an issue I'll agree with you on, it sucks big time. But the rest of your post wasn't much help.
There's the rootkit thing, which people on slashdot seem to think had some effect on folks outside of slashdot. It really didn't.
Then there's the fact that against the wisdom of slashdot they made the PS3 very expensive by putting bluray in it and then didn't have the good grace to fall over and go bankrupt because slashdot said it would never sell.
Err...
Personaly I'm quite happy with all my Sony kit, it's generally good quality, good spec and shiny. It's also pretty pricy I guess.
"And even those with 8MB offerings still have caps in place (British Telecom, I'm looking at you)."
Stop looking at them. See if you can get service from Be (bethere.co.uk).
24Mb/s
In reality I got 17, until British Telecom (absolute arseholes) cut me off for two weeks due to a "fault" and now it sits at about 10. Still, not bad for 19 quid a month.
"I've found that most people who aren't either professional or dedicated hobbyist cooks or serious gourmands don't really know intuitively what's going to taste good. They know they like "chicken primavera", "buffalo wings", "pizza", or "eggplant parmesan" and might look up a recipe or two"
There is a middle ground of folks who aren't *dedicated* hobbyists but who have enough experience to throw things together well and experiment reasonably frequently.
You don't have to be dedicated to come up with your own recipes that taste good, just experimental and not afraid to throw the odd thing straight in the bin (using red wine instead of white in Gothnet's pesto, pancetta, garlic, tomato, rocket and wine sauce was a BAD plan). You get there after a while though. Maybe most people don't make the effort though, as you say.
I hear you on the pepper sauce. I wouldn't go as far as buying vintages or single crops, but there is more to hot sauce than either vinegar, sat and chili powder, or the other extreme of habanero oil. Personally I like a piri-piri style hot sauce with lime (and stuff).
BTW - habaneros aren't the hottest chili any more, check out the Dorset Naga.
(and yes, that's right, the world's hottest chili comes not from Mexico or the far east, but from one of England's sleepier shires...)
Fair enough. I think some dev companies (square for a start) will start to care about the extra capacity sooner or later. Maybe MS just hasn't planned the same lifetime for the X360 as Sony have for the PS3. Not necessarily a bad thing if, in a couple of years, they come out with something that beats the socks off the PS3 in othe hardware terms.
When I torrent a movie, I often get some bullshit Trojan,
You're doing something SERIOUSLY wrong then. Movies don't usually come in executable format, you know.
"knowing that no matter who won they could come out with an external player without risking being on the losing side."
Really?
I thought the current HD-DVD addon had no capability to do HD-DVD games and was movie only?
And even if it could do games then microsoft would fall into that (historically) fatal mixed-estate trap, where an X360 game is no longer just going to work on every console but will require people to check they have the righthardware first. Like a PC game.
Whereas Sony have the extra BluRay capacity from the word go.
I'm not sure how big a problem it would be, but it has been a problem for people in the past, and you may find that no (or not many) games developers would target the newer hardware as they wouldn't be assured of the whole install base as a market.
The triple layer HD-DVD did have a couple of extra gig on dual layer BD. However there are quad layer BD discs in the pipeline (have been demo'd, not production yet) that will have FAR more capacity.
And this:
Note that I have not actually seen a Blu-Ray disc play,
Followed by this:
any Blu-Ray player other than the PS3 is slow as hell with simple menu animations. By "slow as hell", I mean you will actually see it redrawing each frame in blocks, for a tiny menu taking up maybe an eighth of the screen.
Just desroys your credibility, sorry.
Java runs quite happily on a cheap mobile phone these days, I don't think for a second that anything that can decrypt HD video on the fly isn't going to ave the power to run a little java on the side. So when you say:
"The menus aren't really going to be much more than standard DVD menus."
You're talking out of your arse. And as for region coding, whilst the early versions of the standard don't support it, it was certainly being worked on.
You can also put BluRay on DVD using the AVCREC format, much like the HD-REC format for HD-DVD.
HD-DVD has been moving on to things like "Managed Copy", which is designed to allow (for example) legally ripping a movie to your iPod
That's part of AACS but was not included in the first version due to Toshiba (yes, the HD-DVD backer, Toshiba) requesting an interim standard because the main one was taking so long. So it looks like older HD-DVD discs and players likely didn't support that either, and going forward BluRay probably will.
Now, I'm not saying BluRay was the vastly superior format, but I am saying that HD-DVD was not all you've said here, and BluRay does have some advantages in capacity and throughput.
"I submit that if animals have the right to not be tortured, they must be responsible to not torture and we must punish or lock up animals that do persist in torture"
Then you're an idiot.
"Superior" synthetics are not superior in the way that counts: rarity.
And if that's the only reason people like them then I just lost a little more faith in humanity.
The rarity is enforced by DeBeers. They're not all that rare (how can they be, they're at every corner jewellery shop in every town and village in the western world).
""where do species come from." This is the kind of question that science is not supposed to answer because, whatever the answer is, it can't be reproduced."
Err, no, we can observe historical and reasonably contemporary examples of speciation, we know where species come from and your theory is a load of old cod.
"we "smart" people smugly shop for micronutrients, dehydrated horse piss and extracts of Chinese weeds at the organic food store to ward off cancer."
Speak for yourself mate. Some of us got wise to that nonsense a long time and spend a lot of time trying to disabuse other folks of the notion that there's anything to these mystical, pseudo scientific lies.
(By the way, whilst I don't care for "chinese weeds" to "ward off cancer", organic food has recently been shown in a proper scientific study by the EU to contain more nutrients)
So IP laws are not overbearing and overstretched?
The DMCA doesn't put ridiculous restrictions on what you can do with hardware and media you've bought?
Drug and other laws are not disproportionately prosecuted and don't criminalise those that harm only themselves (or noone at all)?
Yeah, FACTS, idiot.
That's certainly an interesting conundrum.
From my chemistry and physics studies at school, along with various other bits and pieces of knowledge picked up from news sources, computer games and... well... my old chemistry teacher who told us how to make bombs, I probably couldn't truthfully say "no" to that question.
You are quite correct - the roots lie in places where people with half a brain treat the stories told by other people with half a brain as anything other than anecdotal data.
I know you're trying to be witty. Equally, you know I'm referring to news stories and genuine, factual accounts of legislation, bad policing and dodgy politicians, not conjecture from Anonymous Coward.
"So I guess they'll be looking for a fear that deviates from the norm - people being too cool, shitting their pants too much or whatever other subtleties there are. You will probably be fine."
That would seem sensible, however from TFA it doesn't seem like they're getting a very good hit ratio.
700 out of 70,000 were found to either be violating a weapons ban, in posession of drugs or wanted on an outstanding warrant. I'm wondering what the background rate is and if a monkey could do better!
I meant paranoia on the part of the individual passenger that he is being hunted/watched/tageted, drawing attention to himself as a result and fulfilling his paranoid delusion.
Traveller: "They're all after me!"
Agent: "That guy looks a bit shaky! Get him!"
Traveller: "I was right! they are after me!"
I see where you're coming from, but I didn't mean it that way.
I ought to do my own research I guess.
Interesting/Amusing/Scary that the first hit is a site run by Narconon...
I know it's popular to class meth as "teh most addictive thing evAR!" but I've not seen much in the way of studies or evidence in that direction. Any links?
(especially seeing as the wiki link you provided puts amphetamine and cannibis addiction a little way below that of alcohol and barely above LSD... your claims and your posted addiction scale aren't really supported by your link.)
It was indeed. Something like ecstasy/speed.
Of course our hero simply finds something WAAAAAY stronger and gets his high anyway.