Thank you very much for the link to that sales tracker page. That was the information I really wanted, and I didn't know that had been stored somewhere. That is awesome, and I'm keeping that link.
I just checked again on the list of bestselling DVDs on Amazon. The Firefly set is ranked at #59. That may not sound impressive, except consider the following: This is about as low as I've seen its rank, as the interest is gradually fading. They update this list HOURLY, and I've checked on it quite frequently over the past year or so. It sat consistently in the top 20 for most of that year. The other thing is that DVDs come and go from that bestseller list frequently. The ones on there now are not the ones that were there 3 months ago, or 6 months ago, or a year ago. And yet Firefly has been on there all that time, mostly in the top 20. The Serenity movie was hanging in there about 10 spots lower than Firefly through most of that time.
There are some pretty impressive amounts of sales going on for it to sit in the best selling list that long. Also, I don't think the point is lost on the network people that this show has managed to build up a following much bigger after it was gone and off the air than it ever had in its short life. That shows that it's not just the hype and publicity and TV ads for it that are keeping up interest for it. It is actually people being introduced to the show by friends and loving it and telling others about it--THREE YEARS AFTER IT WAS CANCELLED!
I have been listening to a podcast about the Firefly universe called The Signal. One of the things they broadcast was an interview with Jewel Staite, who played Kaylee. She mentioned that the rights deal they signed for the making of Serenity options the cast for a trilogy of movies. Joss and Universal's deal to get those rights from Fox included that they cannot make more of the TV series for 10 years (from the cancellation in 2003). They do, however, have full rights to keep making movies. Also, if it does well, they could offer to buy out the remainder of that 10 years from Fox if they really wanted to.
If anything is going to float this boat, I think it will be the very strong DVD sales, which are already showing. They could even make more episodes to release straight to DVD. That probably wouldn't qualify as a TV show, so they could do that without running afoul of the Fox deal.
Stop trying to deny that Linux has any problems. A well set up Linux system does work very well, (I use one at work) but I have run into many of the same problems the original poster experienced--hardware incompatibility, having to mess with config or make files, etc. when trying to set up some Linux systems at home.
I have tried several distros from the Linux Format magazine I have a subscription to and some other pieces of software from it. I wanted to try out a program called Phonoripper, that was included on the DVD. The configure/make/make install wouldn't work because the distro was missing the TCL/TK development libraries. I tried to set that up too, and the versions were incompatible, etc. I never could get Phonoripper set up. Most distros still don't detect integrated wireless cards in laptops very well--the newest Knoppix I tried a couple months ago didn't even detect it.
I really like Linux, and I have seen amazing strides in it in the last 5 years or so. I also know that most of the hardware detection problems are due to the headstrong jerks who make the hardware refusing to release any specs for drivers to be written. Aside from all that, you seem to have this irritating attitude I've seen a lot. You have a couple of things going for you: You probably know what you're doing better than most, and you got lucky (or shopped well) on the hardware you are running it on. So you can stroll down the path whistling a happy tune about how your good experience must be what everyone is supposed to have. So when this guy reports some bad hardware support and trying to compile something that has messed up make files and picky dependencies (which are very familiar problems to me), you accuse him of lying. You're giving Linux users a bad name--grow up.
As I think someone has mentioned, they have a couple of Shinobi games on there, but not Revenge of Shinobi. Wasn't that widely considered to be one of the best of the series? Also, this falls in my personal favorites--the Streets of Rage games were excellent. The controls of Streets of Rage 2 were just about perfected, and there was a pretty good balance in the four playable characters. (Um, except that Axl had that incredibly awesome sliding uppercut that was da bomb.) That was some pretty good multi-player cooperative game play. I think it had one of the more unusual features I've seen. When you had lost all your lives and were going to continue, you could select which character you wanted to continue the game with.
Also, I'm not aware of a port yet of my two favorite arcade games. They were the X-Men and Avengers games. They were fairly similar multi-player beat-em-ups, but were a lot of fun. Before you suggest MAME, I'm wondering if they have actually come to any of the newer consoles like XBox, Game Cube, or PS2.
It's common sense that most people have lost sight of. Lots of people who think they're sophisticated investors have these ideas about using OPM (other people's money) and "leveraging", and all this other stuff that can work sometimes if the best laid plans all work out according to your ideal way you hope they will. If anything else happens--layoff, illness, you're screwed because you have taken on extra risk. Most people don't factor the risk of having debt into their investment return calculations. If you don't watch it, you could look up in ten years and those student loans will STILL be hanging on your back.
If you can be debt-free (a reasonable mortgage excepted) and have an emergency fund of around 3-6 months of accessible cash, you are sitting in a very strong position, and investing with cash from that point is a much more powerful thing. Also, there are psychological and emotional factors to not owing your life to the banks. There is a master/servant relationship that comes into place when you borrow money. The lender has a claim on your life to tell you what to do that I would just rather be free of. I look forward to when we get our house paid off, and I can walk out into the back yard and feel the grass between my toes that I own. I won't be living in someone else's house.
That's right. Thanks to DRM and the DMCA, I can't skip/FF all the junk on the original, but I can easily make a full quality copy without the restrictions.
By ripping that original and making a new copy of it without the restrictions, you have bypassed the copy protection and therefore broken the DMCA, a federal law. I obviously don't think doing that is wrong; I'm just pointing out that it is against the law. I'm just bringing up that both of the actions you described are technically illegal.
You made an excellent point in the discussion, but with a 0 rating, you'll not be visible enough in the Slashdot viewing. I want to bring this point up to a more noticeable level. (Karma's useful sometimes)
I have mentioned before a real possible solution to this is to give the telco's what the want on the condition they loose the "common carrier" status. They treat traffic differently, but if any of their customers downloads child porn or carries out other illegal activities they are held liable for it. For those that stick to net nuetrality, they can keep the "common carrier" status.
I actually brought this point up in my letters to my state's senators this week. (It's Idaho though, so it's not like we hold a lot of power. But maybe they can bring this serious point up for discussion.) Their non-discrimination of whose traffic they carry and how they carry it is what gives them the status of "common carrier". That label is what insulates them from liability for illegal material that is transmitted around on their pipes. This applies to stuff like the postal service, UPS, telephone service, etc., where they just pass everything along without knowing the content or treating it differently based on it. If they take that seemingly small step of treating web traffic differently based on whose it is, they would then be making knowing decisions about what traffic to carry, and would therefore no longer be a common carrier. This would be total B.S. if congress lets them get away with discriminating packets and yet keeping their common carrier status.
This is quite a first I've seen on an Ask Slashdot. Someone's question is a very detailed list of the specifications of what they want a technological solution for. That's almost a miracle in itself that the question made sense, was slightly challenging to answer and research, and didn't involve asking for legal advice. Most amazing of all was that someone actually provided a link to a device to purchase that seems to do exactly what was asked for and more. Bravo!
OK, everyone, the Ask Slashdot category has been redeemed this once. I ask all Slashdotters to study this occurrence and try to implement these features on future iterations of Ask Slashdot.
The quality of posts, and especially moderating has gone downhill. You got the most popular cheat code of all time WRONG, and got modded up to +5 for it. *hangs head in shame*
The massively overly complex password based continue system (context sensitive, using upper and lowercase letters in addition to numerals) that plagued such games as Metroid[...]
Yeah, my friend JUSTIN BAILEY told me about this.;)
WTF? I fail to understand how 'pass into the public domain' came to mean 'have no barriers to copying'.
You're making an assumption about the definition of barriers. You are thinking of physical, practical barriers, where the only consideration is, "Is it possible?" The other kind are legal barriers, where there is the consideration of, "Are you allowed to?" That is why the anti-DRM people are protesting. More on that below:
If the only copy you have of a work that is in the public domain is burdened by DRM, break the damn DRM. It's not like it's going to be hard to break it 70 years after it was invented. Jesus.
Except that, again, you are not understanding the legal barrier side. Due to some of the evil provisions in the DMCA, breaking DRM protection is against the law, even if the material has expired from its copyright.
The concept of DRM as a practical barrier to stop copying is ludicrous on its face, although the media cartels don't seem to understand this. The large scale commercial infringers who care nothing for the law will be able to break the DRM if they want to. DRM is only effective coupled with legal barriers against it. The big problem that is worth protesting is that legal protection for DRM is redundant with legal protection for copyright. It puts up some smoke and mirrors so that the cartels can equate breaking DRM with breaking copyright, when they're actually not a 1 to 1 correlation. What is actually happening is legislating a different action to be illegal, when it really shouldn't be. Breaking DRM itself is an amoral action--neither good nor bad.
So that's why DRM is idiodic, but here are the things it accomplishes that they do want. 1. It obviously legislates more profit for themselves. By criminalizing time-shifting and format-shifting and several other actions that are legal under copyright law, it forces a lot of people to re-purchase media that they have already purchased in other forms. 2. A lot (but not all) of DRM breaking is because of people infringing copyright. Copyright infringement itself is a bit hard to find and prove. DRM breaking, however, because of the machine aspect of it, is a lot easier to find and prove. So they want it all to be one bucket: the easy to find action is now the crime, rather than containing some that's crime and some that isn't, which would be hard to sort through.
Jeez, it's not hard to get the good taste with the cheap water. We have a faucet-mounted water filter at our kitchen sink at home, and we just keep a pitcher of that going in the fridge. Where I work, I've seen several people that use those pitchers with the Brita filters in the top of them--not hard at all.
It's definitely cheaper because those filters are good for hundreds(?) of gallons of water. I hate seeing all those little plastic water bottles getting thrown away. Get one of those hard plastic re-useable water bottles please, so you can just wash it out every few days and not produce more unecessary trash/recycling.
I have two aspects of this to comment on, and it is actual information from experience. I have had this happen a lot with my cell phone interfering with the speakers of the guy I shared a cubicle with. Several people have proposed that the problem happens just because the phone is sitting right next to the speaker, and if you move it a little farther away, it fixes the problem. That is not correct. The signal does not drop off that quickly. I mean, it's communicating with a cell tower hundreds/thousands of feet away, so it's probably not going to disappear from moving it a foot away. In my case, my phone was on my desk, and my cubemate's speakers were about 5 feet away. The method of moving the phone does work to some extent, but it's effective based on positioning, rather than distance. While my phone was buzzing my cubemate's speakers, I could turn the phone different ways, and the buzzing would come and go.
The other quick fact is about the types of phones. I've heard a couple of people say only GSM phones do this. Mine is a Nokia 8260 on the older AT&T TDMA network, so it also does it. From the other reports, it sounds like Verizon's network (CDMA) may be one of the few that doesn't, although I don't think we've heard from Sprint people yet, and I don't know what kind of network they use.
The main reason why the Happauge cards are recommended over the ton of cheap capture cards out there is that the Happauge ones have an mpg encoder built onto the card, which takes most of the work off of the processor. You can use a cheaper computer with less grunt for recording then. Also, you can do stuff like putting in 2+ capture cards and the computer doesn't get swamped.
When I had to move from Ohio to Idaho to start a job in 2000, the company was offering a full service relocation package which included about everything--packing and moving, transport cars, house hunting trip, cash allowances for leaving current lease in the old place and for setting up in the new place, etc. Or the other option was to take a $13,000 cash option and move ourselves.
So ask the company if they offer a cash out choice and how much that would be. Then it is up to you to evaluate how difficult and costly you think moving yourself would be. For us, we were just graduating college, so it was a no brainer to take the cash and just spend a few thousand to move our small amount of stuff.
Yeah, I don't doubt that there is a way to get them to work. My main point was that they created a spreadsheet program that imitates Excel in almost every respect, including naming their functions the exact same thing. That would lead people to believe that typing in the functions and equations they know from Excel should work. Instead, they changed the syntax of the functions around for no reason I can tell except just to be different.
Your brain is coming at this from the totally wrong angle. When people are talking about complexity, which do you think they are referring to? a) number of steps b) number of keystrokes c) shortest amount of time
And the answer is---NONE OF THE ABOVE! What they are referring to is how easy it is to figure out how to do something if you don't already have the knowledge. Your answer about how simple it is on gentoo with "emerge nvidia-kernel" is senseless because how would someone just know to type that? And your second comment about how it only partially works until you type "eselect opengl set nvidia" only emphasises this point even more.
With the Windows way, people can start from no knowledge and still accomplish their goal with just a little reasoning: "This video card is from NVidia, so I'll check the NVidia web site." From there it is very easy to see the link for 'Download Drivers' and then the site walks them by the hand through finding the one they need by selecting what video card they have and what their version of Windows is, and then they just double click it, etc., etc. There is no special training required to know what the heck "eselect opengl set nvidia" means.
VLOOKUP and HLOOKUP equations that my wife uses every day in Excel for her work as a Supply/Demand Analyst do not work in OO.o. Yes, OO.o has functions that are named that, but no amount of tweaking and fixing of syntax could get them to work.
I know this is just going to get dissed as another of those "most people don't use that" things, but really, it's just pigheaded for the OO.o developers to name a function exactly the same as in MS Excel, but make sure it won't work when typed in the same way.
And of course, by this time it's too late to change that because they would be screwing things up for all of their users who have gotten used to that different way the formulas work in OO.o. I'll just have to live with this situation that for my wife's computer, I'll always have to keep a working setup with some kind of WINE/Crossover thing to keep MS Office running.
I wish they would open source PointBlank, or even offer it for sale. They could make a little money from that. I remember playing that in the SGI lab we had in college. It was a ton of fun, and much better than BZFlag.
We have pretty good voice recognition - but we USE it mostly only for automated telephone response services and such.
Maybe other implementations of it are better, but the ones I've encountered on the telephone systems suck a$$. They can almost never recognize my voice, and it is so bad that I usually give the phone to my wife if she's around because they can usually understand her. It is rather annoying to be anywhere around people and have to carry on this conversation just to get some movie listings.
"movies" "MOVIES" "MOVIES" "boise, idaho" "BOISE, IDAHO" "BOISE, IDAHO!!!!! YOU BROKEN DOWN PIECE OF %^&*@*%$^!!!"
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you very much for the link to that sales tracker page. That was the information I really wanted, and I didn't know that had been stored somewhere. That is awesome, and I'm keeping that link.
I just checked again on the list of bestselling DVDs on Amazon. The Firefly set is ranked at #59. That may not sound impressive, except consider the following:
This is about as low as I've seen its rank, as the interest is gradually fading. They update this list HOURLY, and I've checked on it quite frequently over the past year or so. It sat consistently in the top 20 for most of that year. The other thing is that DVDs come and go from that bestseller list frequently. The ones on there now are not the ones that were there 3 months ago, or 6 months ago, or a year ago. And yet Firefly has been on there all that time, mostly in the top 20. The Serenity movie was hanging in there about 10 spots lower than Firefly through most of that time.
There are some pretty impressive amounts of sales going on for it to sit in the best selling list that long. Also, I don't think the point is lost on the network people that this show has managed to build up a following much bigger after it was gone and off the air than it ever had in its short life. That shows that it's not just the hype and publicity and TV ads for it that are keeping up interest for it. It is actually people being introduced to the show by friends and loving it and telling others about it--THREE YEARS AFTER IT WAS CANCELLED!
I have been listening to a podcast about the Firefly universe called The Signal. One of the things they broadcast was an interview with Jewel Staite, who played Kaylee. She mentioned that the rights deal they signed for the making of Serenity options the cast for a trilogy of movies. Joss and Universal's deal to get those rights from Fox included that they cannot make more of the TV series for 10 years (from the cancellation in 2003). They do, however, have full rights to keep making movies. Also, if it does well, they could offer to buy out the remainder of that 10 years from Fox if they really wanted to.
If anything is going to float this boat, I think it will be the very strong DVD sales, which are already showing. They could even make more episodes to release straight to DVD. That probably wouldn't qualify as a TV show, so they could do that without running afoul of the Fox deal.
Stop trying to deny that Linux has any problems. A well set up Linux system does work very well, (I use one at work) but I have run into many of the same problems the original poster experienced--hardware incompatibility, having to mess with config or make files, etc. when trying to set up some Linux systems at home.
I have tried several distros from the Linux Format magazine I have a subscription to and some other pieces of software from it. I wanted to try out a program called Phonoripper, that was included on the DVD. The configure/make/make install wouldn't work because the distro was missing the TCL/TK development libraries. I tried to set that up too, and the versions were incompatible, etc. I never could get Phonoripper set up. Most distros still don't detect integrated wireless cards in laptops very well--the newest Knoppix I tried a couple months ago didn't even detect it.
I really like Linux, and I have seen amazing strides in it in the last 5 years or so. I also know that most of the hardware detection problems are due to the headstrong jerks who make the hardware refusing to release any specs for drivers to be written. Aside from all that, you seem to have this irritating attitude I've seen a lot. You have a couple of things going for you: You probably know what you're doing better than most, and you got lucky (or shopped well) on the hardware you are running it on. So you can stroll down the path whistling a happy tune about how your good experience must be what everyone is supposed to have. So when this guy reports some bad hardware support and trying to compile something that has messed up make files and picky dependencies (which are very familiar problems to me), you accuse him of lying. You're giving Linux users a bad name--grow up.
As I think someone has mentioned, they have a couple of Shinobi games on there, but not Revenge of Shinobi. Wasn't that widely considered to be one of the best of the series? Also, this falls in my personal favorites--the Streets of Rage games were excellent. The controls of Streets of Rage 2 were just about perfected, and there was a pretty good balance in the four playable characters. (Um, except that Axl had that incredibly awesome sliding uppercut that was da bomb.) That was some pretty good multi-player cooperative game play. I think it had one of the more unusual features I've seen. When you had lost all your lives and were going to continue, you could select which character you wanted to continue the game with.
Also, I'm not aware of a port yet of my two favorite arcade games. They were the X-Men and Avengers games. They were fairly similar multi-player beat-em-ups, but were a lot of fun. Before you suggest MAME, I'm wondering if they have actually come to any of the newer consoles like XBox, Game Cube, or PS2.
It's common sense that most people have lost sight of. Lots of people who think they're sophisticated investors have these ideas about using OPM (other people's money) and "leveraging", and all this other stuff that can work sometimes if the best laid plans all work out according to your ideal way you hope they will. If anything else happens--layoff, illness, you're screwed because you have taken on extra risk. Most people don't factor the risk of having debt into their investment return calculations. If you don't watch it, you could look up in ten years and those student loans will STILL be hanging on your back.
If you can be debt-free (a reasonable mortgage excepted) and have an emergency fund of around 3-6 months of accessible cash, you are sitting in a very strong position, and investing with cash from that point is a much more powerful thing. Also, there are psychological and emotional factors to not owing your life to the banks. There is a master/servant relationship that comes into place when you borrow money. The lender has a claim on your life to tell you what to do that I would just rather be free of. I look forward to when we get our house paid off, and I can walk out into the back yard and feel the grass between my toes that I own. I won't be living in someone else's house.
By ripping that original and making a new copy of it without the restrictions, you have bypassed the copy protection and therefore broken the DMCA, a federal law. I obviously don't think doing that is wrong; I'm just pointing out that it is against the law. I'm just bringing up that both of the actions you described are technically illegal.
I actually brought this point up in my letters to my state's senators this week. (It's Idaho though, so it's not like we hold a lot of power. But maybe they can bring this serious point up for discussion.) Their non-discrimination of whose traffic they carry and how they carry it is what gives them the status of "common carrier". That label is what insulates them from liability for illegal material that is transmitted around on their pipes. This applies to stuff like the postal service, UPS, telephone service, etc., where they just pass everything along without knowing the content or treating it differently based on it. If they take that seemingly small step of treating web traffic differently based on whose it is, they would then be making knowing decisions about what traffic to carry, and would therefore no longer be a common carrier. This would be total B.S. if congress lets them get away with discriminating packets and yet keeping their common carrier status.
They already get paid at both ends because they're serving the customer at each end.
This is quite a first I've seen on an Ask Slashdot. Someone's question is a very detailed list of the specifications of what they want a technological solution for. That's almost a miracle in itself that the question made sense, was slightly challenging to answer and research, and didn't involve asking for legal advice. Most amazing of all was that someone actually provided a link to a device to purchase that seems to do exactly what was asked for and more. Bravo!
OK, everyone, the Ask Slashdot category has been redeemed this once. I ask all Slashdotters to study this occurrence and try to implement these features on future iterations of Ask Slashdot.
No it isn't. Please read the DMCA.
The quality of posts, and especially moderating has gone downhill. You got the most popular cheat code of all time WRONG, and got modded up to +5 for it. *hangs head in shame*
"Vista is the most secure operating system in the industry."
Of course, it's industry is unreleased operating systems
You're making an assumption about the definition of barriers. You are thinking of physical, practical barriers, where the only consideration is, "Is it possible?" The other kind are legal barriers, where there is the consideration of, "Are you allowed to?" That is why the anti-DRM people are protesting. More on that below:
Except that, again, you are not understanding the legal barrier side. Due to some of the evil provisions in the DMCA, breaking DRM protection is against the law, even if the material has expired from its copyright.
The concept of DRM as a practical barrier to stop copying is ludicrous on its face, although the media cartels don't seem to understand this. The large scale commercial infringers who care nothing for the law will be able to break the DRM if they want to. DRM is only effective coupled with legal barriers against it. The big problem that is worth protesting is that legal protection for DRM is redundant with legal protection for copyright. It puts up some smoke and mirrors so that the cartels can equate breaking DRM with breaking copyright, when they're actually not a 1 to 1 correlation. What is actually happening is legislating a different action to be illegal, when it really shouldn't be. Breaking DRM itself is an amoral action--neither good nor bad.
So that's why DRM is idiodic, but here are the things it accomplishes that they do want.
1. It obviously legislates more profit for themselves. By criminalizing time-shifting and format-shifting and several other actions that are legal under copyright law, it forces a lot of people to re-purchase media that they have already purchased in other forms.
2. A lot (but not all) of DRM breaking is because of people infringing copyright. Copyright infringement itself is a bit hard to find and prove. DRM breaking, however, because of the machine aspect of it, is a lot easier to find and prove. So they want it all to be one bucket: the easy to find action is now the crime, rather than containing some that's crime and some that isn't, which would be hard to sort through.
...like this one? I thought they just made it so you could play copies of games.
Jeez, it's not hard to get the good taste with the cheap water. We have a faucet-mounted water filter at our kitchen sink at home, and we just keep a pitcher of that going in the fridge. Where I work, I've seen several people that use those pitchers with the Brita filters in the top of them--not hard at all.
It's definitely cheaper because those filters are good for hundreds(?) of gallons of water. I hate seeing all those little plastic water bottles getting thrown away. Get one of those hard plastic re-useable water bottles please, so you can just wash it out every few days and not produce more unecessary trash/recycling.
There's always that possibility.
I have two aspects of this to comment on, and it is actual information from experience. I have had this happen a lot with my cell phone interfering with the speakers of the guy I shared a cubicle with. Several people have proposed that the problem happens just because the phone is sitting right next to the speaker, and if you move it a little farther away, it fixes the problem. That is not correct. The signal does not drop off that quickly. I mean, it's communicating with a cell tower hundreds/thousands of feet away, so it's probably not going to disappear from moving it a foot away. In my case, my phone was on my desk, and my cubemate's speakers were about 5 feet away. The method of moving the phone does work to some extent, but it's effective based on positioning, rather than distance. While my phone was buzzing my cubemate's speakers, I could turn the phone different ways, and the buzzing would come and go.
The other quick fact is about the types of phones. I've heard a couple of people say only GSM phones do this. Mine is a Nokia 8260 on the older AT&T TDMA network, so it also does it. From the other reports, it sounds like Verizon's network (CDMA) may be one of the few that doesn't, although I don't think we've heard from Sprint people yet, and I don't know what kind of network they use.
The main reason why the Happauge cards are recommended over the ton of cheap capture cards out there is that the Happauge ones have an mpg encoder built onto the card, which takes most of the work off of the processor. You can use a cheaper computer with less grunt for recording then. Also, you can do stuff like putting in 2+ capture cards and the computer doesn't get swamped.
When I had to move from Ohio to Idaho to start a job in 2000, the company was offering a full service relocation package which included about everything--packing and moving, transport cars, house hunting trip, cash allowances for leaving current lease in the old place and for setting up in the new place, etc. Or the other option was to take a $13,000 cash option and move ourselves.
So ask the company if they offer a cash out choice and how much that would be. Then it is up to you to evaluate how difficult and costly you think moving yourself would be. For us, we were just graduating college, so it was a no brainer to take the cash and just spend a few thousand to move our small amount of stuff.
Yeah, I don't doubt that there is a way to get them to work. My main point was that they created a spreadsheet program that imitates Excel in almost every respect, including naming their functions the exact same thing. That would lead people to believe that typing in the functions and equations they know from Excel should work. Instead, they changed the syntax of the functions around for no reason I can tell except just to be different.
Your brain is coming at this from the totally wrong angle. When people are talking about complexity, which do you think they are referring to?
a) number of steps
b) number of keystrokes
c) shortest amount of time
And the answer is---NONE OF THE ABOVE! What they are referring to is how easy it is to figure out how to do something if you don't already have the knowledge. Your answer about how simple it is on gentoo with "emerge nvidia-kernel" is senseless because how would someone just know to type that? And your second comment about how it only partially works until you type "eselect opengl set nvidia" only emphasises this point even more.
With the Windows way, people can start from no knowledge and still accomplish their goal with just a little reasoning:
"This video card is from NVidia, so I'll check the NVidia web site."
From there it is very easy to see the link for 'Download Drivers' and then the site walks them by the hand through finding the one they need by selecting what video card they have and what their version of Windows is, and then they just double click it, etc., etc. There is no special training required to know what the heck "eselect opengl set nvidia" means.
VLOOKUP and HLOOKUP equations that my wife uses every day in Excel for her work as a Supply/Demand Analyst do not work in OO.o. Yes, OO.o has functions that are named that, but no amount of tweaking and fixing of syntax could get them to work.
I know this is just going to get dissed as another of those "most people don't use that" things, but really, it's just pigheaded for the OO.o developers to name a function exactly the same as in MS Excel, but make sure it won't work when typed in the same way.
And of course, by this time it's too late to change that because they would be screwing things up for all of their users who have gotten used to that different way the formulas work in OO.o. I'll just have to live with this situation that for my wife's computer, I'll always have to keep a working setup with some kind of WINE/Crossover thing to keep MS Office running.
I wish they would open source PointBlank, or even offer it for sale. They could make a little money from that. I remember playing that in the SGI lab we had in college. It was a ton of fun, and much better than BZFlag.
Maybe other implementations of it are better, but the ones I've encountered on the telephone systems suck a$$. They can almost never recognize my voice, and it is so bad that I usually give the phone to my wife if she's around because they can usually understand her. It is rather annoying to be anywhere around people and have to carry on this conversation just to get some movie listings.
"movies"
"MOVIES"
"MOVIES"
"boise, idaho"
"BOISE, IDAHO"
"BOISE, IDAHO!!!!! YOU BROKEN DOWN PIECE OF %^&*@*%$^!!!"