MS never promised that every single device on the planet would "just work." You (or the news reporting service you read) mis-understood the "devices just work" project if that's what you believe.
Then it needs a new name, because that's what it says. Maybe "some devices just work" would be good, or "a few devices might work, give up hope for the rest." Hey, "don't even think about buying that printer" would be a good name for the project too.
Right egg, wrong chicken. The patent has to have been granted before it gets to a jury. This is either on the USPTO and the powers who run it (executive branch? Congress?)
And that's fine, a good move. Of course, at that MS is to blame for promising that devices would "just work" out of the box in Vista. Might eventually, but not at launch.
Not that they exist. It's MS's fault if it allows those things to take down the machine.
I dont call Linus a bastard because tux racer doesnt work on my old HP box.
No, but I'd call him a bastard if he let Tux Racer have hooks into the kernel, so that a crash in Tux Racer took down the whole box.
No one's saying MS should ensure that all 3rd party drivers work. What people are saying is that the Windows kernel should be designed so that these drivers don't have access to anything that could hose the machine.
But do you hook up you dvd player to the HDMI port?
Not yet, plan to get a better DVD player that does (current DVD player is 2001 vintage)
or the new HD-DVD player you will be buying in a year.
Don't figure to that soon
Or maybe you will get digital cable with HDMI support and hook that up.
Have it, and haven't gotten around to buying the cable yet!
The thing is, is that although your tv may have HDMI, it probably only has 1 port.
2, actually.
It's the same way it was back when TVs only shipped with a single RCA connector. Most people decided to leave their VCR and game system hooked up over Coax, and hook up the new dvd player to the single RCA connection.
You do make a good point. Eventually, I think you'll see more HDMI ports. Until then, it'll be either a switch, swap-out, or prioritization, at which point the PS2 probably loses. Or, you could be really cool and get a new home theater receiver.
Yeah, I think the bias here is that the slashdot crowd is a lot of college age people without flat-screen TVs. A lot of people I work with have flat-screens, and a lot of those (like mine) have HDMI connectors. I don't yet have anything hooked up through HDMI as none of my sources (cable box, older DVD player) have HDMI output. I figure I'll be getting a new DVD pretty soon to take advantage of it, though.
So in other words, I think HDMI penetration is higher than some people think, and with the price points on HDTVs dropping, it's also increasing fairly quickly.
If you have $600 to drop on a PS3, you have another $20 for cables, true. But if they're advertising this as some sort of luxury sports car of the gaming world, and charging a huge amount for HD and Blu-ray, why assume by default that people won't be able to use them?
Well, what HDMI cable should they put in? They're not all created equal. Throw in the bargain basement one? Middle tier? Videophile quality? They're not assuming that PS3 owners won't use the HDMI cable - they're assuming that the PS3 owner with a HDMI-capable TV will want to get their own HDMI cable at the price point they're comfortable with. Given that, the inclusion of any HDMI cable - all of which are more expensive than composite - increases the price of production needlessly.
I think they take a good approach. Throw in the cheapest cable that will connect the thing successfully to any TV, which is a composite cable. That way we avoid the old Christmas disappointment, the thing is guaranteed to work out of the box, but that cable adds all of $0.10 to the bottom line. However, for optimal viewing, users will want to purchase the HDMI cable of their choice. Seems like everybody wins.
There wasn't a need to develop an alternative. Remember kids, forking a major project is not a decision made lightly. Why split developer power if you don't have to?
There's the fact that he intentionally makes it a total pain in the ass to burn under linux. No, really, I love burning as root in 2.6.8+.
That $1000 you pay for title insurance when you buy a house? That's exactly what it's for. So if I find out that the person I bought my house from was a crook and stole the house from someone else, they may be able to force me out, but I collect on the insurance, pissed off but financially OK.
I hate to defend Verizon in light of this news article and I think there is a lot of crap that goes on in the name of better telecommunications that is simply hype. Despite all of this, in the face of the cable industry and their "phoney" ad campaign, Verizon is a fairly honorable company compared to their competition. In a system where we have little choices to be made in the case of broadband internet providers Verizon is probably one of the best companies that I know of. Certainly a sight better than Comcast and their incompetence or their outright lies.
In what sense? They have terrible customer service (yes, worse than Sprint), and I've had to call about 5 times in a year because my bill is wrong. And calling a blatant cash grab a "fee" is different than Comcast how?
What really bugs me is that Scoble says he can "see both sides" of the issue. What kind of workplace culture does Microsoft have, where they'd even consider imposing such an obnoxious feature?
I'll guarantee they've contracted work to some "user experience" guru who says some crap about how sound is a more primal sense than sight, and that to properly brand Windows you have to associate it with a sound, and that this sound must always be associated with Windows.
Of course, what they haven't thought of is that you don't want to associate your OS with a reboot these days. So this might backfire on them.
I'll not digress into the problems inherent in ruling heterogeneous cultures, which became apparant after the misguided nation-making-by-crayon that took place after WWI. I'd say the best chance for peace is to separate the various cultures geographically and give them self rule.
Honestly I think it's good to see them try and revamp a system once in awhile like the menu bar... I always found Office's to be massively confusing for the end user. Is it under Tools | Options? Tools | Customize? File | Page Setup? Tools?
That's because MS had a chimp randomly assign tasks to menu headings. I'd have recommended they get someone with some sense make that more intuitively organized, not re-do the entire thing and add a whole other learning curve.
The difference is that many things that are not patentable are treated as patentable simply by adding the words "by means of a computer" at the end
To me, that's a problem with the patent system in general, not software patents specifically. I wouldn't throw the proverbial baby out with the 1-click patent.
Easy there. Some kids get treated like that because they beat kids up, do tons of drugs, get pregnant/get others pregnant, bust curfew, drink, drive, join gangs, etc. If that wasn't you, then no, you didn't deserve it.
Supply and demand. Overall, most Americans, if choosing between 4 more weeks vacation or 4 weeks worth extra salary, will take the salary. Maybe if I could afford to do a lot of traveling, but I don't think I could afford 4 more vacations. I wouldn't want 4 more weeks of sitting at home.
And some people actually like their work.
Re:Americans traveling to other countries.
on
E-Passport In the Works
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Seriously, could someone explain to me the slashdot editors' obsession with junk science, specifically perpetual motion and free energy machines, and the like? This is not news. This is not for nerds, except to laugh at. This certainly doesn't matter, since variations on this crap have come around every few months for millennia.
If Stallman spent half as much time writing code as correcting people, Hurd might actually be out by now. I think it would be great if someone put out a version of Linux that used all BSD userland crap just to prove the point. Call it BSD/Linux just to confuse the crap out of people.
Glia are no longer considered 'noncomputational' by neuroscientists. Recent research seems to show that glia, and not just neurons, may perform computational tasks. This is highly controversial at present, but we are far from being able to say that just because an animal has lots of glia that that does not indicate a potential for high brain functions.
Studies I've seen associate glia specifically with an ability to support neurons in computational processing. If that's the case, then it certainly turns the dolphin study on its head, and supports the notion that's obvious to nearly anyone, namely that dolphins are damned smart animals.
Slashdot Mirror
MS never promised that every single device on the planet would "just work." You (or the news reporting service you read) mis-understood the "devices just work" project if that's what you believe.
Then it needs a new name, because that's what it says. Maybe "some devices just work" would be good, or "a few devices might work, give up hope for the rest." Hey, "don't even think about buying that printer" would be a good name for the project too.
Right egg, wrong chicken. The patent has to have been granted before it gets to a jury. This is either on the USPTO and the powers who run it (executive branch? Congress?)
And that's fine, a good move. Of course, at that MS is to blame for promising that devices would "just work" out of the box in Vista. Might eventually, but not at launch.
Shitty 3D drivers and hardware is not MS's fault.
Not that they exist. It's MS's fault if it allows those things to take down the machine.
I dont call Linus a bastard because tux racer doesnt work on my old HP box.
No, but I'd call him a bastard if he let Tux Racer have hooks into the kernel, so that a crash in Tux Racer took down the whole box.
No one's saying MS should ensure that all 3rd party drivers work. What people are saying is that the Windows kernel should be designed so that these drivers don't have access to anything that could hose the machine.
But do you hook up you dvd player to the HDMI port?
Not yet, plan to get a better DVD player that does (current DVD player is 2001 vintage)
or the new HD-DVD player you will be buying in a year.
Don't figure to that soon
Or maybe you will get digital cable with HDMI support and hook that up.
Have it, and haven't gotten around to buying the cable yet!
The thing is, is that although your tv may have HDMI, it probably only has 1 port.
2, actually.
It's the same way it was back when TVs only shipped with a single RCA connector. Most people decided to leave their VCR and game system hooked up over Coax, and hook up the new dvd player to the single RCA connection.
You do make a good point. Eventually, I think you'll see more HDMI ports. Until then, it'll be either a switch, swap-out, or prioritization, at which point the PS2 probably loses. Or, you could be really cool and get a new home theater receiver.
Yeah, I think the bias here is that the slashdot crowd is a lot of college age people without flat-screen TVs. A lot of people I work with have flat-screens, and a lot of those (like mine) have HDMI connectors. I don't yet have anything hooked up through HDMI as none of my sources (cable box, older DVD player) have HDMI output. I figure I'll be getting a new DVD pretty soon to take advantage of it, though. So in other words, I think HDMI penetration is higher than some people think, and with the price points on HDTVs dropping, it's also increasing fairly quickly.
If you have $600 to drop on a PS3, you have another $20 for cables, true. But if they're advertising this as some sort of luxury sports car of the gaming world, and charging a huge amount for HD and Blu-ray, why assume by default that people won't be able to use them?
Well, what HDMI cable should they put in? They're not all created equal. Throw in the bargain basement one? Middle tier? Videophile quality? They're not assuming that PS3 owners won't use the HDMI cable - they're assuming that the PS3 owner with a HDMI-capable TV will want to get their own HDMI cable at the price point they're comfortable with. Given that, the inclusion of any HDMI cable - all of which are more expensive than composite - increases the price of production needlessly.
I think they take a good approach. Throw in the cheapest cable that will connect the thing successfully to any TV, which is a composite cable. That way we avoid the old Christmas disappointment, the thing is guaranteed to work out of the box, but that cable adds all of $0.10 to the bottom line. However, for optimal viewing, users will want to purchase the HDMI cable of their choice. Seems like everybody wins.
Because such a thing doesn't exist outside Neal Stephenson novels?
There wasn't a need to develop an alternative. Remember kids, forking a major project is not a decision made lightly. Why split developer power if you don't have to?
There's the fact that he intentionally makes it a total pain in the ass to burn under linux. No, really, I love burning as root in 2.6.8+.
That $1000 you pay for title insurance when you buy a house? That's exactly what it's for. So if I find out that the person I bought my house from was a crook and stole the house from someone else, they may be able to force me out, but I collect on the insurance, pissed off but financially OK.
I'll vote for you.
I hate to defend Verizon in light of this news article and I think there is a lot of crap that goes on in the name of better telecommunications that is simply hype. Despite all of this, in the face of the cable industry and their "phoney" ad campaign, Verizon is a fairly honorable company compared to their competition. In a system where we have little choices to be made in the case of broadband internet providers Verizon is probably one of the best companies that I know of. Certainly a sight better than Comcast and their incompetence or their outright lies.
In what sense? They have terrible customer service (yes, worse than Sprint), and I've had to call about 5 times in a year because my bill is wrong. And calling a blatant cash grab a "fee" is different than Comcast how?
What really bugs me is that Scoble says he can "see both sides" of the issue. What kind of workplace culture does Microsoft have, where they'd even consider imposing such an obnoxious feature?
I'll guarantee they've contracted work to some "user experience" guru who says some crap about how sound is a more primal sense than sight, and that to properly brand Windows you have to associate it with a sound, and that this sound must always be associated with Windows.
Of course, what they haven't thought of is that you don't want to associate your OS with a reboot these days. So this might backfire on them.
I'll not digress into the problems inherent in ruling heterogeneous cultures, which became apparant after the misguided nation-making-by-crayon that took place after WWI. I'd say the best chance for peace is to separate the various cultures geographically and give them self rule.
Honestly I think it's good to see them try and revamp a system once in awhile like the menu bar... I always found Office's to be massively confusing for the end user. Is it under Tools | Options? Tools | Customize? File | Page Setup? Tools?
That's because MS had a chimp randomly assign tasks to menu headings. I'd have recommended they get someone with some sense make that more intuitively organized, not re-do the entire thing and add a whole other learning curve.
The difference is that many things that are not patentable are treated as patentable simply by adding the words "by means of a computer" at the end
To me, that's a problem with the patent system in general, not software patents specifically. I wouldn't throw the proverbial baby out with the 1-click patent.
Easy there. Some kids get treated like that because they beat kids up, do tons of drugs, get pregnant/get others pregnant, bust curfew, drink, drive, join gangs, etc. If that wasn't you, then no, you didn't deserve it.
Or machines? Gears are just physical manifestations of equations and math, as is amply pointed out by any book Stephenson has ever written.
Did you deserve it?
You're right, of course. Which is why I believe it presumptuous for Stallman to insist that things be called GNU/Linux.
Supply and demand. Overall, most Americans, if choosing between 4 more weeks vacation or 4 weeks worth extra salary, will take the salary. Maybe if I could afford to do a lot of traveling, but I don't think I could afford 4 more vacations. I wouldn't want 4 more weeks of sitting at home.
And some people actually like their work.
So emigrate.
This is for idiots.
If Stallman spent half as much time writing code as correcting people, Hurd might actually be out by now. I think it would be great if someone put out a version of Linux that used all BSD userland crap just to prove the point. Call it BSD/Linux just to confuse the crap out of people.
Glia are no longer considered 'noncomputational' by neuroscientists. Recent research seems to show that glia, and not just neurons, may perform computational tasks. This is highly controversial at present, but we are far from being able to say that just because an animal has lots of glia that that does not indicate a potential for high brain functions.
Studies I've seen associate glia specifically with an ability to support neurons in computational processing. If that's the case, then it certainly turns the dolphin study on its head, and supports the notion that's obvious to nearly anyone, namely that dolphins are damned smart animals.