It could use the same solution as Chromium, but it means it would only work for some people so they won't do it.
Erm, WTF?
"Some people" is the vast, vast majority of the planet, and I'm not just talking about OS. And they're willing to do GPU-accelerated rendering, which also only works for "some people."
This is honestly the lamest excuse they've come up with so far.
also could distribute a standalone player module for Linux - because after all, on other platforms they could simply use the native h.264 playback facilities that both Apple and Microsoft offer.
They could also have used native Linux playback facilities -- nVidia offers hardware-accelerated h.264 on Linux, and presumably they've paid for the license if they're putting it in hardware.
Firefox is proving, again and again, that this is a purely political fight for them.
Ah, and when you "pass it to the OS", you need to have paid for and OS from a vendor that has paid the licensing...
So you can support it only on OSes which have already done so. I've got Windows 7, which has done so. OS X has also done so. If you've got a recent nVidia card, chances are you've got a fully legal and paid-for hardware decoder which can be used just fine under Linux.
In fact, passing it to the OS, or to whatever local codec subsystem you've got, is a great way to ensure you can take advantage of hardware decoders. Insisting on implementing all this in the browser as a childish political move is a great way to ensure that Firefox will be the last to take advantage of hardware-accelerated WebM, if that ever surfaces.
Passing it to the OS pretty much ends the legal bullshit, and is the right choice technologically, also. It seems pretty clear that the only reason Firefox refuses to do so is because they don't want h.264 to win, even if it doesn't affect Firefox itself directly.
One example was the ability to override controller_path on a controller instance, or with at least some context from the current controller, rather than only on the class. I was using this to have one controller masquerade as another, depending on the context.
I don't remember why I was doing it that way, and it's entirely possible there's a better way. That's one thing I like about Rails being rigid sometimes, and about working with a framework at all -- it sometimes forces me into doing things the right way, instead of the sloppy way.
But this one, I had to monkey-patch Rails, and the only way to do so was incredibly ugly -- I had to override all of ActionController::Base#default_template_name, at least, just to make a one-line change.
I did get that one-line patch back into rails-core, so this isn't much of a complaint. All I'm saying is, to suggest that Rails has no limitations is naive and almost missing the point of Rails.
Point is, while there are distinct advantages to keeping up with Rails development, no one's forcing you to, which is a common point of FUD for people new to the Ruby community.
Seriously, WTF? I'm a one-man business, I'm out to make money. Does that justify me clubbing baby seals to do so?
Whether Microsoft is out to make money is completely fucking irrelevant to whether what they're doing is moral. Once you get past that, it should become obvious to you that my "clubbing baby seals" analogy is way out of proportion and doesn't apply. Otherwise, you're essentially saying it's OK to do whatever you want in the name of profit.
And if that's not what you want to say, why are you bringing up "they're out to make money" at all?
Apple used to do the same thing back in the 80's,
I'm sure they do, and in fact, it seems my university does spend money on Macs for at least some of the computer labs. They've also got plenty of open source on campus -- my current computer science class requires that any assignments should be able to compile and run on a particular Linux machine we all have SSH access to.
Your university could have went with open source, could have went with Linux (could have went with Apple, for that matter). They chose not to. Maybe you should be asking them why.
I know a few reasons why, and none of them have anything to do with the university simply making a choice.
Suppose they went with Linux. They now have to support Linux newbies with no idea WTF they're doing (and not just the comp sci ones), teachers who have to learn a new way of teaching (and all the peripherals they might use, like the ubiquitous "clickers"), etc, etc -- and the reason for this situation is that Windows has such a stranglehold on the desktop, so we're lucky if we get Mac versions of these things.
Then, when they graduate, they're trained with Linux. While that's valuable, most of them are going to go on to use Windows in their professional lives, again, because it's everywhere on the desktop.
Essentially, because Windows is such a monopoly^W^W^Wso popular, not having Windows available in some form would both impede learning while in school, and make one less employable after school.
Regardless, the point stands. Whatever reasons the university might have -- whether the legitimate ones I've outlined above, or something more backhanded and sinister -- I have no choice in the matter. Microsoft will be taking my hard-earned money, whether I want them to or not.
"Not flexible enough" is not an objection I have ever heard from ANYBODY who knew much about Rails.
I'll say it, then: Rails 2 wasn't as flexible as I wanted it to be. More than once, I had to monkey-patch things to make it do what I wanted. It was flexible because of Ruby and in spite of Rails.
Rails 3 changes a lot of that, but it's not a completely baseless accusation -- though the "I would do in PHP in 10 minutes" makes me a little scared of what kind of PHP code it would be.
No, seriously, when a JVM-based Ruby interpreter can outperform the C Ruby interpreter, the C version has speed problems.
Or the JVM runtime is better?
Hint: It's not an interpreter. It's a JIT-compiler which translates Ruby to Java bytecode. It's no surprise that this performs better than the C version, which is a bytecode interpreter -- the Java bytecode will be JIT-compiled again by Java into native code.
I don't disagree that there's room for improvement, but this whole "Ruby is slow" meme has got to stop. Slower than what, at doing what, and why do you care? Answer those questions, and we'll have something to talk about.
But these serve different purposes. The kind of app you'd use Sinatra for is the kind of app Rails would be worse at, and vice versa. Sinatra is more in the same space as Camping, and I don't know if anyone still uses Camping.
The others to compare would be things like Ramaze.
statements to the effect by 37 Signals that they "don't hire people unless they use a Mac" probably have a lot to do with this.
Erm, so what? I use Rails, and I have no ambitions to ever work for 37signals.
Yeah, I really want to spend extra money for a proprietary white box so I can be cool like you.
I showed up to Railsconf with a Dell running Ubuntu. I wasn't the only one, and I noticed another one of the conference-goers had set up a wireless access point called "I Hate Mac Fags."
Even if it weren't for the 'tude
Problem is, the Rails community is getting a little too diverse for this "tude" you describe to apply to any significant chunk of it.
You pay a high performance price for the dynamic nature of Ruby whether you need it or not.
You do. Or, specifically, Rails does -- it wouldn't be the framework it is without a language like Ruby to support it. Even if you didn't need it, it's surprisingly useful.
That said, it's not nearly as high as you think it is. What are you using instead? PHP? Show me a Rails-like framework in PHP, and I'll bet money it'll perform worse.
If you can find areas where you can prove you "don't need" that dynamism, you can always rewrite that chunk in C -- or Java, if you're running JRuby. Most of the time, it's just not worth it -- your time is more valuable than CPU time, and Rails can scale horizontally.
Re:It's a nice framework
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Rails 3.0 Released
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· Score: 2, Informative
One assumption is that the Rails community -- as you said, "straight from the top" -- embraced unsafe GETs and tried to block GWA in order to keep using unsafe GETs.
I don't know if this was ever true, but it hasn't been true for at least two years, probably longer. Rails has embraced REST to an obsessive degree, which means not only are GETs never used for unsafe operations, but if your UA supports PUT and DELETE, Rails will accept those. (If not, PUT and DELETE are emulated over POST -- still not GET.) I met all kinds of fascinating people at Railsconf this year, and we disagreed on all sorts of things, but I seriously don't remember a single person arguing that REST was a bad idea, certainly not that unsafe GETs are a good thing.
jemmyw was the reply which pointed this out to you, though not in as much detail.
So, anyone who was calling GWA "scary" because of this was wrong and either not representative of the Rails community, or you're telling us a story from at least 3-5 years ago, which is a long time in Rails development time.
That's a pretty standard political move -- though I would like to think our development communities are more mature than American politics, I'm not sure it has to be.
Yes. And I have a choice to buy elsewhere or build my own. As it happens, that's exactly what I do.
Good for you.
I go to a public university. As part of my computer science degree, I get a "free" -- that is, paid through via either tuition or tax dollars -- copy of several versions of Windows, Visual Studio, and about a dozen other random Microsoft products. In addition, there are dozens of computer labs around campus which are available to me for "free", meaning whether or not I use them, I'm paying for them one way or another.
So you see, it doesn't matter that my laptop came with Ubuntu preinstalled. I still have to pay for Windows, one way or another. Even if I went to another university, my tax dollars would still end up here.
Now, I don't have a huge problem with this, as there are likely hundreds, if not thousands, of random deals the university makes with outside vendors to give me free shit. I'm sitting here with a "free" water bottle that I got just for moving into the dorms.
But even you aren't pretending you can avoid Microsoft:
My business buys some MS products that my business uses (like SQL Server and Windows Server) and very cheaply at that.
Yep.
Nobody forced us to do this and we could switch to an open-source alternative if we wanted to (and we have a few reasons why we might one day, but not yet).
I'm betting the "not yet" reasons are significant, or you'd already have switched.
How many products does MS make? You want to get rid of every single one of them because they got convicted of bundling browsers and Windows pre-installation schemes?
I would, actually. It would send a powerful message -- when the head of your company is corrupt, you get fucked. If you don't want all your eggs in one basket that way, don't make a single gigantic corporation -- because it takes a gigantic corporation to make truly gigantic fuck-ups that even the government can't control.
It won't happen, of course. If the government won't do it to BP, I can't imagine they would do it to Microsoft.
How many businesses and consumers that depend on MS (out of their choice!) would be screwed out of a livelihood
When your livelihood is that tightly tied to a single vendor, you're in a dangerous situation anyway. I know -- I worked for a startup which lost everything that way.
Unfortunately, Word and OpenOffice still can't seem to agree on formatting. It's subtle, but it does result in screwing up my every attempt to place appropriate page breaks -- one will make the text just slightly longer than the other.
I've found a safe solution is to use OpenOffice, but ultimately produce a PDF if I care about printing. If I don't, I use something like Markdown and HTML.
Of your online downloaded games, how many do not have drm?
Eleven currently installed, by my count. I'm fairly sure I have more archived elsewhere.
Add to that the light form of DRM that Penny-Arcade's Greenhouse uses -- activate once per installation, unlimited activations, they just want to be able to track someone who decides to activate it a few thousand times, but no phoning home afterwards ever -- that brings it up to thirteen.
Plus a Windows-only MMO which I play under Wine, and which is questionable -- MMOs almost by definition have DRM, but this one has nothing other than the fact that it's an MMO, as far as I can tell.
besides from indie games, crap all.
Why are you excluding indie games? It's pretty much all I play anymore -- partly because, as you say, I prefer games which don't treat me like a criminal. Mostly because I have so little time to game, and relatively little money to spend on games, that I can afford to be picky.
Having them on writable media also allows them to be vulnerable to virii and the like.
All thirteen of the above games work on Linux. The fact that I pretty much only use Windows for Steam means I pretty much don't get virii and the like.
And let's talk about Steam -- I have every Valve game ever made, plus Mirror's Edge, none of which add any DRM beyond Steam itself. While I prefer DRM-free, Steam is a fair trade -- I'm always online, it's actually more convenient to use Steam than not, Valve is unlikely to go out of business anytime soon, and if I am still playing the same games decades from now, Steam's DRM is routinely cracked.
The pdf is of lesser quality because while text is in vector format, the images are at nowhere near the resolution used in the book in order to save size.
Ew. Poor decision on their part, then, as the PDF is technically capable of carrying far more resolution than the book.
While I agree pdfs are very handy, dead tree formats don't require power and are a lot nicer on the eyes.
By contrast, PDFs don't require a reading lamp, and it's very rare I'm not within a few meters of a device capable of displaying them.
Also, I have to ask, have you seen recent e-ink/epaper devices? I'm not sure if they quite match your 12000dpi, but they are noticeably better. I suspect that fairly soon, a printer of your quality will become akin to audiophile equipment when compared to a decent ebook reader -- it may be there already.
At the moment, I am forced to use dead-tree for classes, and while I do sometimes appreciate them -- nicer print, nice to have a separate display (even with my 2 monitors at 1920x1200 each, having more to work with isn't a bad thing), I can bring something to read over lunch without detaching my laptop.
Still, I'd trade all that to not have to carry multiple inch-thick books, and for the ability to ctrl+f.
Yay for college. Roughly 5-6 hours of sleep at night, 1-2 hours in the early afternoon (just when the morning's caffeine wears off).
Of course, Slashdot is currently eating up my increased productivity, so rather than dig up the study that demonstrates the positive effects of a mid-day nap, I'm going to start my physics homework:(
Prime example, baldurs gate 2, the original version came with a leather map and a 400 page manual because of all the d&d rules. Yes it came in pdf form on the disk too. But that's nowhere near the same.
True -- the PDF is searchable, and my laptop likely weighs far less. So you're right, it's subjective, partly because it seems like what objective advantages there are have been steadily shifting in the favor of digital media.
And with the possible exception of steam based games (which is still subject to it however likelihood is less) what happens when the manufacturer goes out of business and you lost your downloaded copy by hard drive failure or the like?
The same thing that happens when the manufacturer goes out of business and you lost your CD by scratches or the like. The difference is that, excluding DRM (or with Steam's DRM), the downloaded version can be backed up.
Technically, you can back up the physical media, but you'd lose your sentimental value.
Yes you can burn to dvd or place it on a spare hard drive, but for archival purposes pressed cds in cases in boxes tend to work rather well.
You seem to be implying that burning to DVD or placing on a spare hard drive wouldn't work well. Is that what you're saying?
You also seem to be suggesting that you'd get the physical media, use it for installation, and then archive it away. How many games let you do that?
with my typical max download speed an 8 gig game would take approx 15 1/2 hours.
Still not as long as it would take to play through a typical game, but sure. And that's ignoring the indie games I mentioned -- Lugaru installs to less than 40 megs, and that's after installation. The installer is most likely smaller. Sure, you can get a physical copy of Uplink or Darwinia, but why would you want to?
Do I want to make my net connection (of which I'm not the only user) go to snails pace for a whole day while I download a game? not really.
So throttle it -- web browsing doesn't take much -- and leave it running full-speed overnight. I can see your point, but it seems like your situation is becoming a minority -- and it's not so much that you love physical media, but that you don't love your Internet situation.
I'm now slowly going through them and re-ripping at a much higher bitrate. In that scenario, having media wins.
What? No, in that scenario, having the original quality wins -- that's why I always rip in flac.
What's more, then you don't have to swap tons of media in when you discover that MP3 is a terrible, terrible format and you probably want Vorbis or AAC -- instead, you can just run a script and automatically re-transcode from the original-quality Flac. (Why would you want to? So your MP3 player can play them, or in my case, so they'll fit on the 4 gig MicroSD in my phone.)
So no, I don't see it. Maybe if you're claiming physical media is cheaper -- but even then, DVDs are far cheaper per bit than CDs -- so rip to flac and archive on DVD if you don't have enough space. (But you do -- terabyte hard drives are cheap.)
With video, though...
But that's partly because backing up virtual only media (especially video) can take terabytes once you've got a reasonable collection
You've got a point -- a multi-terabyte NAS might not be as cheap.
However, I'm racking my brains trying to think why I'd want the media for games.
If you can give me another reason you want it for music, it might also apply to games.
With Steam and no physical media, I just download, copy the serial number, and go!
Wait, what? I thought one of the advantages is not needing a serial number. I just enter a credit card number (or paypal account), download, and go.
I'll be contemplating whether it's not just better to go looking at how much they'd cost to buy from Amazon or wherever...
Well, again, look for Flac (and drm-free, of course). There are a number of places which do it -- unfortunately neither iTunes nor Amazon does, and I know of no way to get a flac copy of any major label album, but indie is all over it.
right now it looks like I will have to explain to my children (well, my mates' children) that we once bought songs in bundles called Albums, on which the artists had sometimes painstakingly arranged songs into a specific order, for a certain effect.
Maybe not. When I buy a live recording of, say, an Umphrey's McGee show, it's arranged in a specific order, it fades from one song to the next, etc. And the reason is not because it's an "album", but because that's how they played it at a show.
Slashdot Mirror
It could use the same solution as Chromium, but it means it would only work for some people so they won't do it.
Erm, WTF?
"Some people" is the vast, vast majority of the planet, and I'm not just talking about OS. And they're willing to do GPU-accelerated rendering, which also only works for "some people."
This is honestly the lamest excuse they've come up with so far.
almost anyone who uses Linux as a desktop operating system probably has some version of FFMpeg installed anyway
They probably also have an nVidia card, which offers hardware-accelerated h.264 decoding on Linux.
also could distribute a standalone player module for Linux - because after all, on other platforms they could simply use the native h.264 playback facilities that both Apple and Microsoft offer.
They could also have used native Linux playback facilities -- nVidia offers hardware-accelerated h.264 on Linux, and presumably they've paid for the license if they're putting it in hardware.
Firefox is proving, again and again, that this is a purely political fight for them.
Ah, and when you "pass it to the OS", you need to have paid for and OS from a vendor that has paid the licensing...
So you can support it only on OSes which have already done so. I've got Windows 7, which has done so. OS X has also done so. If you've got a recent nVidia card, chances are you've got a fully legal and paid-for hardware decoder which can be used just fine under Linux.
In fact, passing it to the OS, or to whatever local codec subsystem you've got, is a great way to ensure you can take advantage of hardware decoders. Insisting on implementing all this in the browser as a childish political move is a great way to ensure that Firefox will be the last to take advantage of hardware-accelerated WebM, if that ever surfaces.
Passing it to the OS pretty much ends the legal bullshit, and is the right choice technologically, also. It seems pretty clear that the only reason Firefox refuses to do so is because they don't want h.264 to win, even if it doesn't affect Firefox itself directly.
One example was the ability to override controller_path on a controller instance, or with at least some context from the current controller, rather than only on the class. I was using this to have one controller masquerade as another, depending on the context.
I don't remember why I was doing it that way, and it's entirely possible there's a better way. That's one thing I like about Rails being rigid sometimes, and about working with a framework at all -- it sometimes forces me into doing things the right way, instead of the sloppy way.
But this one, I had to monkey-patch Rails, and the only way to do so was incredibly ugly -- I had to override all of ActionController::Base#default_template_name, at least, just to make a one-line change.
I did get that one-line patch back into rails-core, so this isn't much of a complaint. All I'm saying is, to suggest that Rails has no limitations is naive and almost missing the point of Rails.
Point is, while there are distinct advantages to keeping up with Rails development, no one's forcing you to, which is a common point of FUD for people new to the Ruby community.
MS is a business, they're out to make money.
...aaand that's the point I stop listening.
Seriously, WTF? I'm a one-man business, I'm out to make money. Does that justify me clubbing baby seals to do so?
Whether Microsoft is out to make money is completely fucking irrelevant to whether what they're doing is moral. Once you get past that, it should become obvious to you that my "clubbing baby seals" analogy is way out of proportion and doesn't apply. Otherwise, you're essentially saying it's OK to do whatever you want in the name of profit.
And if that's not what you want to say, why are you bringing up "they're out to make money" at all?
Apple used to do the same thing back in the 80's,
I'm sure they do, and in fact, it seems my university does spend money on Macs for at least some of the computer labs. They've also got plenty of open source on campus -- my current computer science class requires that any assignments should be able to compile and run on a particular Linux machine we all have SSH access to.
Your university could have went with open source, could have went with Linux (could have went with Apple, for that matter). They chose not to. Maybe you should be asking them why.
I know a few reasons why, and none of them have anything to do with the university simply making a choice.
Suppose they went with Linux. They now have to support Linux newbies with no idea WTF they're doing (and not just the comp sci ones), teachers who have to learn a new way of teaching (and all the peripherals they might use, like the ubiquitous "clickers"), etc, etc -- and the reason for this situation is that Windows has such a stranglehold on the desktop, so we're lucky if we get Mac versions of these things.
Then, when they graduate, they're trained with Linux. While that's valuable, most of them are going to go on to use Windows in their professional lives, again, because it's everywhere on the desktop.
Essentially, because Windows is such a monopoly^W^W^Wso popular, not having Windows available in some form would both impede learning while in school, and make one less employable after school.
Regardless, the point stands. Whatever reasons the university might have -- whether the legitimate ones I've outlined above, or something more backhanded and sinister -- I have no choice in the matter. Microsoft will be taking my hard-earned money, whether I want them to or not.
"Not flexible enough" is not an objection I have ever heard from ANYBODY who knew much about Rails.
I'll say it, then: Rails 2 wasn't as flexible as I wanted it to be. More than once, I had to monkey-patch things to make it do what I wanted. It was flexible because of Ruby and in spite of Rails.
Rails 3 changes a lot of that, but it's not a completely baseless accusation -- though the "I would do in PHP in 10 minutes" makes me a little scared of what kind of PHP code it would be.
No, seriously, when a JVM-based Ruby interpreter can outperform the C Ruby interpreter, the C version has speed problems.
Or the JVM runtime is better?
Hint: It's not an interpreter. It's a JIT-compiler which translates Ruby to Java bytecode. It's no surprise that this performs better than the C version, which is a bytecode interpreter -- the Java bytecode will be JIT-compiled again by Java into native code.
I don't disagree that there's room for improvement, but this whole "Ruby is slow" meme has got to stop. Slower than what, at doing what, and why do you care? Answer those questions, and we'll have something to talk about.
But these serve different purposes. The kind of app you'd use Sinatra for is the kind of app Rails would be worse at, and vice versa. Sinatra is more in the same space as Camping, and I don't know if anyone still uses Camping.
The others to compare would be things like Ramaze.
statements to the effect by 37 Signals that they "don't hire people unless they use a Mac" probably have a lot to do with this.
Erm, so what? I use Rails, and I have no ambitions to ever work for 37signals.
Yeah, I really want to spend extra money for a proprietary white box so I can be cool like you.
I showed up to Railsconf with a Dell running Ubuntu. I wasn't the only one, and I noticed another one of the conference-goers had set up a wireless access point called "I Hate Mac Fags."
Even if it weren't for the 'tude
Problem is, the Rails community is getting a little too diverse for this "tude" you describe to apply to any significant chunk of it.
You pay a high performance price for the dynamic nature of Ruby whether you need it or not.
You do. Or, specifically, Rails does -- it wouldn't be the framework it is without a language like Ruby to support it. Even if you didn't need it, it's surprisingly useful.
That said, it's not nearly as high as you think it is. What are you using instead? PHP? Show me a Rails-like framework in PHP, and I'll bet money it'll perform worse.
If you can find areas where you can prove you "don't need" that dynamism, you can always rewrite that chunk in C -- or Java, if you're running JRuby. Most of the time, it's just not worth it -- your time is more valuable than CPU time, and Rails can scale horizontally.
One assumption is that the Rails community -- as you said, "straight from the top" -- embraced unsafe GETs and tried to block GWA in order to keep using unsafe GETs.
I don't know if this was ever true, but it hasn't been true for at least two years, probably longer. Rails has embraced REST to an obsessive degree, which means not only are GETs never used for unsafe operations, but if your UA supports PUT and DELETE, Rails will accept those. (If not, PUT and DELETE are emulated over POST -- still not GET.) I met all kinds of fascinating people at Railsconf this year, and we disagreed on all sorts of things, but I seriously don't remember a single person arguing that REST was a bad idea, certainly not that unsafe GETs are a good thing.
jemmyw was the reply which pointed this out to you, though not in as much detail.
So, anyone who was calling GWA "scary" because of this was wrong and either not representative of the Rails community, or you're telling us a story from at least 3-5 years ago, which is a long time in Rails development time.
The same place the perl-is-line-noise people went -- nowhere.
Bring up pretty much any language on Slashdot, and you're going to get hate.
That's a pretty standard political move -- though I would like to think our development communities are more mature than American politics, I'm not sure it has to be.
Nah, he just grew up a bit.
Theoretically, if your 2.3.8 app ran with no warnings, it's also a valid 3.0 app.
have they made it stop be slow as shit?
If I pretend that's a complete sentence, then yes, for some time now.
Yes. And I have a choice to buy elsewhere or build my own. As it happens, that's exactly what I do.
Good for you.
I go to a public university. As part of my computer science degree, I get a "free" -- that is, paid through via either tuition or tax dollars -- copy of several versions of Windows, Visual Studio, and about a dozen other random Microsoft products. In addition, there are dozens of computer labs around campus which are available to me for "free", meaning whether or not I use them, I'm paying for them one way or another.
So you see, it doesn't matter that my laptop came with Ubuntu preinstalled. I still have to pay for Windows, one way or another. Even if I went to another university, my tax dollars would still end up here.
Now, I don't have a huge problem with this, as there are likely hundreds, if not thousands, of random deals the university makes with outside vendors to give me free shit. I'm sitting here with a "free" water bottle that I got just for moving into the dorms.
But even you aren't pretending you can avoid Microsoft:
My business buys some MS products that my business uses (like SQL Server and Windows Server) and very cheaply at that.
Yep.
Nobody forced us to do this and we could switch to an open-source alternative if we wanted to (and we have a few reasons why we might one day, but not yet).
I'm betting the "not yet" reasons are significant, or you'd already have switched.
How many products does MS make? You want to get rid of every single one of them because they got convicted of bundling browsers and Windows pre-installation schemes?
I would, actually. It would send a powerful message -- when the head of your company is corrupt, you get fucked. If you don't want all your eggs in one basket that way, don't make a single gigantic corporation -- because it takes a gigantic corporation to make truly gigantic fuck-ups that even the government can't control.
It won't happen, of course. If the government won't do it to BP, I can't imagine they would do it to Microsoft.
How many businesses and consumers that depend on MS (out of their choice!) would be screwed out of a livelihood
When your livelihood is that tightly tied to a single vendor, you're in a dangerous situation anyway. I know -- I worked for a startup which lost everything that way.
Unfortunately, Word and OpenOffice still can't seem to agree on formatting. It's subtle, but it does result in screwing up my every attempt to place appropriate page breaks -- one will make the text just slightly longer than the other.
I've found a safe solution is to use OpenOffice, but ultimately produce a PDF if I care about printing. If I don't, I use something like Markdown and HTML.
Of your online downloaded games, how many do not have drm?
Eleven currently installed, by my count. I'm fairly sure I have more archived elsewhere.
Add to that the light form of DRM that Penny-Arcade's Greenhouse uses -- activate once per installation, unlimited activations, they just want to be able to track someone who decides to activate it a few thousand times, but no phoning home afterwards ever -- that brings it up to thirteen.
Plus a Windows-only MMO which I play under Wine, and which is questionable -- MMOs almost by definition have DRM, but this one has nothing other than the fact that it's an MMO, as far as I can tell.
besides from indie games, crap all.
Why are you excluding indie games? It's pretty much all I play anymore -- partly because, as you say, I prefer games which don't treat me like a criminal. Mostly because I have so little time to game, and relatively little money to spend on games, that I can afford to be picky.
Having them on writable media also allows them to be vulnerable to virii and the like.
All thirteen of the above games work on Linux. The fact that I pretty much only use Windows for Steam means I pretty much don't get virii and the like.
And let's talk about Steam -- I have every Valve game ever made, plus Mirror's Edge, none of which add any DRM beyond Steam itself. While I prefer DRM-free, Steam is a fair trade -- I'm always online, it's actually more convenient to use Steam than not, Valve is unlikely to go out of business anytime soon, and if I am still playing the same games decades from now, Steam's DRM is routinely cracked.
The pdf is of lesser quality because while text is in vector format, the images are at nowhere near the resolution used in the book in order to save size.
Ew. Poor decision on their part, then, as the PDF is technically capable of carrying far more resolution than the book.
While I agree pdfs are very handy, dead tree formats don't require power and are a lot nicer on the eyes.
By contrast, PDFs don't require a reading lamp, and it's very rare I'm not within a few meters of a device capable of displaying them.
Also, I have to ask, have you seen recent e-ink/epaper devices? I'm not sure if they quite match your 12000dpi, but they are noticeably better. I suspect that fairly soon, a printer of your quality will become akin to audiophile equipment when compared to a decent ebook reader -- it may be there already.
At the moment, I am forced to use dead-tree for classes, and while I do sometimes appreciate them -- nicer print, nice to have a separate display (even with my 2 monitors at 1920x1200 each, having more to work with isn't a bad thing), I can bring something to read over lunch without detaching my laptop.
Still, I'd trade all that to not have to carry multiple inch-thick books, and for the ability to ctrl+f.
That would require custom implementation of course and may be too expensive
I don't know anything about this, but qemu exists. It can't be too hard to adapt it to emulate an appropriately-clocked CPU.
Yay for college. Roughly 5-6 hours of sleep at night, 1-2 hours in the early afternoon (just when the morning's caffeine wears off).
Of course, Slashdot is currently eating up my increased productivity, so rather than dig up the study that demonstrates the positive effects of a mid-day nap, I'm going to start my physics homework :(
Prime example, baldurs gate 2, the original version came with a leather map and a 400 page manual because of all the d&d rules. Yes it came in pdf form on the disk too. But that's nowhere near the same.
True -- the PDF is searchable, and my laptop likely weighs far less. So you're right, it's subjective, partly because it seems like what objective advantages there are have been steadily shifting in the favor of digital media.
And with the possible exception of steam based games (which is still subject to it however likelihood is less) what happens when the manufacturer goes out of business and you lost your downloaded copy by hard drive failure or the like?
The same thing that happens when the manufacturer goes out of business and you lost your CD by scratches or the like. The difference is that, excluding DRM (or with Steam's DRM), the downloaded version can be backed up.
Technically, you can back up the physical media, but you'd lose your sentimental value.
Yes you can burn to dvd or place it on a spare hard drive, but for archival purposes pressed cds in cases in boxes tend to work rather well.
You seem to be implying that burning to DVD or placing on a spare hard drive wouldn't work well. Is that what you're saying?
You also seem to be suggesting that you'd get the physical media, use it for installation, and then archive it away. How many games let you do that?
with my typical max download speed an 8 gig game would take approx 15 1/2 hours.
Still not as long as it would take to play through a typical game, but sure. And that's ignoring the indie games I mentioned -- Lugaru installs to less than 40 megs, and that's after installation. The installer is most likely smaller. Sure, you can get a physical copy of Uplink or Darwinia, but why would you want to?
Do I want to make my net connection (of which I'm not the only user) go to snails pace for a whole day while I download a game? not really.
So throttle it -- web browsing doesn't take much -- and leave it running full-speed overnight. I can see your point, but it seems like your situation is becoming a minority -- and it's not so much that you love physical media, but that you don't love your Internet situation.
I'm now slowly going through them and re-ripping at a much higher bitrate. In that scenario, having media wins.
What? No, in that scenario, having the original quality wins -- that's why I always rip in flac.
What's more, then you don't have to swap tons of media in when you discover that MP3 is a terrible, terrible format and you probably want Vorbis or AAC -- instead, you can just run a script and automatically re-transcode from the original-quality Flac. (Why would you want to? So your MP3 player can play them, or in my case, so they'll fit on the 4 gig MicroSD in my phone.)
So no, I don't see it. Maybe if you're claiming physical media is cheaper -- but even then, DVDs are far cheaper per bit than CDs -- so rip to flac and archive on DVD if you don't have enough space. (But you do -- terabyte hard drives are cheap.)
With video, though...
But that's partly because backing up virtual only media (especially video) can take terabytes once you've got a reasonable collection
You've got a point -- a multi-terabyte NAS might not be as cheap.
However, I'm racking my brains trying to think why I'd want the media for games.
If you can give me another reason you want it for music, it might also apply to games.
With Steam and no physical media, I just download, copy the serial number, and go!
Wait, what? I thought one of the advantages is not needing a serial number. I just enter a credit card number (or paypal account), download, and go.
I'll be contemplating whether it's not just better to go looking at how much they'd cost to buy from Amazon or wherever...
Well, again, look for Flac (and drm-free, of course). There are a number of places which do it -- unfortunately neither iTunes nor Amazon does, and I know of no way to get a flac copy of any major label album, but indie is all over it.
right now it looks like I will have to explain to my children (well, my mates' children) that we once bought songs in bundles called Albums, on which the artists had sometimes painstakingly arranged songs into a specific order, for a certain effect.
Maybe not. When I buy a live recording of, say, an Umphrey's McGee show, it's arranged in a specific order, it fades from one song to the next, etc. And the reason is not because it's an "album", but because that's how they played it at a show.