I think the general mentality of the players is atrocious. There's a few sensible people and so very many immature white rapper wannabes, racists, etc.
But thinking economically, people who behave that way form the majority of Blizzard's revenue stream.
Blizzard is a mindless corporation. Do you think they would happily kick/ban/remove 90% of their revenue stream to keep an intelligent, well mannered 10% still paying?
Unfortunately the invisible hand favors morons in WoW.
There is an addon as part of the ACE suite of addons called "SpamSentry". In two weeks it intercepted and filtered over 200 unsolicited whispers. There's no looking back once you're protected!
What's the shortest text that can be copyrighted? 5 words? 6 words? I will call each phrase/sentence a form of strong art.
I will construct sentences based on each word combination. There are probably millions of english words so it will take some time. But soon every phrase of text will be copyrighted in english.
Any form of english language communication will therefore be violation of my copyright(s).
I urge people who speak other languages to perform the same duties.
Soon all language will be violation of copyright.
Then, we can proceed to either
a) release all phrases into free-use within the public domain, but prevent any profit taking from our work b) eradicate all forms of communication on the planet.
I'm serious. That's really what copyright allows for. Let's do it.
Do you honestly believe that the author of the New Scientist article was suggesting that Carbon Dioxide was practically non-existent in earth's atmosphere prior to the industrial revolution and the invention of steam power? You're not willing to interpret the text as the simplest and most common explanation but you're adhering to a poor interpretation of bad phrasework?
Do you really, really believe that?
I need to know, because I am trying to work out how someone apparently literate enough to post on Slashdot could be so imbecilic.
But I understand, you may have been dictating. Speech to text technology has a lot to answer for.
It seems to me the RIAA having an "expert witness" was a rather token gesture to imply a degree of diligence was taken when approaching the case. For the most part this seems to have worked for them, but it is nice now to see the true strength of their case being tried... this is what courts do really, isn't it, by testing the accounts of two conflicting parties with regards to a particular event.
I am certainly looking forward to seeing what happens next.
Can the RIAA replace their expert with, say, an expert? Or is it too late, they've bought the ticket and they have to take the ride?
We presume we are testing Vista and XP gaming performance on hardware capable of running both OS's correctly, not on legacy hardware. Your assertion that Vista performance is bad simply because you don't own hardware that Vista was designed for is questionable (and barely scraping in with minimum requirements will not win you any performance races, either).
Otherwise, embedded linux beats all other OS's because Vista doesn't run well off a wristwatch, whereas the embedded linux OS runs fine.
No, the validity of the comparison must take hardware into account. Suggesting that hardware does not need to scale upwards to meet the growth in functionality of new operating systems is farcical. This is true for Apple operating systems, Linux and Windows.
Of course, the guns/weapons/items/etc in the subscriber premium content will be hugely powerful compared to the stock standard non-subscriber gear, presumably so that only paying customers can compete (please don't tell me MMO's aren't competitive).
I read your post. The specifications for the machine you bought are at least a year old, it's contemporary for 18 months ago at the performance end.
So, you bought old Dell stock, they saw you coming and they took your cash. I guess that's why Mikey Dell is such a happy guy. If Dell made a system with an Intel 8086 CPU running at 4.7MHz today, it would be brand new, but it wouldn't run Vista so great. If you're not sure about PC hardware specifications, there are a lot of websites out there, HardOCP, Toms Hardware, Anandtech, Extremetech, these sites can help you with reviews and performance graphs to allow you to inform yourself about the capabilities of current hardware. It should help you from falling prey to poor marketing from giant hardware vendors.
It doesn't change anything, you've got old hardware running a new OS. If you're really having performance issues those issues are without doubt going to be directly attributable to the nVidia drivers, which, oddly enough, are very poor quality for everything but DirectX 10 hardware... which, because you have a legacy system, you don't have.
Maybe (I think I said this earlier), you should run an OS of the same vintage as your hardware. Maybe (I think I said this earlier), you would find that running an OS that is designed for the hardware you have instead of the hardware you don't, you'll get application performance on par with the quality of your legacy hardware.
No, Britney Spears was manufactured by the RIAA. Likewise, Paris Hilton inherited her millions. Lucas wasn't rich when he started, he just made up a product everyone liked. Then he messed it up later on, but at least he did it all himself.
I agree, I have an IBM PC-XT and it ran fine with DOS2.0 and then I installed Vista and it doesn't even work and the game framerates are awful!
It's not just M$ too I have a 286 running at 12MHz and I installed Edgy Eft and turned up all the graphics details and it runs incredibly slowly, it's just unacceptable.
Enough jokes at the expense of the parent aside. He's running Vista on hardware that is a couple of years old, and he has the audacity to complain about performance on legacy equipment.
Vista was designed to run on mainstream computer systems that you can buy today. Not mainstream computer systems that you bought 5 years ago. If you got old gear, use old software. If you want to use more demanding software, you need more capable hardware.
In other news, slashdotters continue to complain about microsoft products that do what they're intended to do but don't get you a girlfriend or a BJ. Heck, even if they wrote software that does that, slashdotters would complain about the licensing fees and then make a few Ballmer chair jokes.
But otherwise, his edits for Star Wars have been of mixed quality - the remastering work was some of the best ever done in film-making history. His plot and character changes (ala Greedo) have been abhorrent.
Lucas makes more money than I can imagine. Maybe he knows something you don't? Don't be so quick to laugh when someone calls a self-made millionaire a genius.
Most people aren't trying to desperately abolish copyright. Copyright as it stands must be removed and replaced with, say, the original intent for copyright, which is a reasonably short (20 years?) monopoly on an intellectual property to allow and encourage people to think up new ideas, and be assured of a degree of income from that.
Copyright should never persist beyond 20 years since date of copyright, even if the creator dies during this period (for the purpose of the estate of the copyright holder, I am thinking of the children after all).
Just think of everything that has been devised 20 years ago and earlier. A lot of rich content could be in the public domain. Imagine the innovation that could take place with people creating derivative works!
A large console underneath the surface of mars, with a funny looking handprint.
When discussing with chief scientist/agent Douglas Quaid, he commented "Two weeeeks". Then he put his hand on the console, melted the ice, got blown outside and his face puffed up and burst.
Seriously, if you were going to try to fix the health system, would you try to do it without use of technology?
Without I/T systems and infrastructure, obviously any new system you implement to replace the older, obviously inefficient systems would be paper based.
While paper based methods are necessary for some systems (see George W. Bush, US Elections for clarification), I cannot see that being applicable to health care.
I've been using it since Beta and I'm pretty comfortable with it. It does work. Yes, there is a learning curve. It's a long one, but it's not steep.
Is it better? I think it looks nicer. I don't have any serious problems with day to day stuff in excel or word.
I work in a high profile enterprise scenario so I can't use openoffice.org (I use that at home, I like free software and it's a great, if underrated and undersold product).
But I have to say this article made me think. You can't customise the ribbons!! You just get to customise the quick-links bar. There's a design flaw right there. Ok, so, Microsoft, it's not really a flaw, it's a design decision, but that ribbon should be user customisable. At least the product supports add-ons. Maybe Microsoft is hoping to make Office popular by means of community add-ons, like some elements of the game industry?
It won't stop me using the product (I like having a job, what can I say), but it is definately a shortcoming. Software, as a tool, must be customisable. The open source guys get it. Why can't Microsoft? You don't have to make the customisation tools obvious so as not to confuse the lowest common denominator, but at least make them available.
I wouldn't be surprised if customisation functionality is put back in after the first service pack/release.
Actually Da Vinci was presumably either independently wealthy or had some kind of patronage (I am not a historian), likewise the statue carvers were presumably slaves that got fed by their slave owners (I guess that is just like RIAA contracts) and I think JK was on the dole when she wrote the first Harry Potter (or maybe she had some part time job)
But in most cases it's true that they're not specifically commissioned works (except perhaps the easter island heads, I think someone specifically wanted those for some reason, although they might have just done it for the cool factor).
But, quite true, it seems that the best works are created by independent artists who are then railroaded into these organisations, I can't think of a band being famous before their work, or an artist being famous before their paintings. Except of course the "manufactured" artists like boy bands etc etc.
In the case of graphics design, the only area where Apple has a legitimate market, I'll give you that. You said yourself you don't need Office to do your work, so you're not a regular business user. Some tools are better suited than others for some jobs, and remarkably enough, Apple has a niche where the machines are tools instead of fashion accessories.
Elsewhere in business, my argument still stands quite well.
With Microsoft, you're not locked into software, either. You can use Openoffice.org, you can even replace the shell if you don't like it that much. Service packs are free. Upgrades, just like with OS X, cost you money.
As a matter of fact, you've just told us that you're locked into using Apple gear because of the software available for it... ironic, isn't it?
You can't live in the past. You'll have to buy new clothes, new car tyres, eventually everything needs to be replaced. Congratulations on lasting so long with what is now an anachronism.
But ours is a society of upgrades and replacements. Even the linux guys will tell you, as a matter of fact one of the most appealing things for me about open source is the sheer rate at which upgrades and improvements are made available.
I bet you wouldn't be doing so great if you had Linux from 2000. But Linux, in the past 7 years, has made tremendously more progress than Windows has. Maybe some part of that is because Linux still has a way to go, but a lot of it is because of the great community and business community that drives it. You don't see people complaining about wanting to or needing to upgrade their Linux installs, do you?
Just like people do with other abandonware, people bypass those mechanisms. They are already bypassed. And if Microsoft isn't supporting the applications, they have some very patchy legal ground to take action against anyone with a legitimate license for their product, regardless of the method used to fulfill the license.
I'd also like to point out, as you mention yourself, if Vista becomes obselete, then... why would you use it?
Nobody uses Win98 or 3.11 anymore (apart from a few crazy nutjobs).
We see this every upgrade cycle. Before the new product, everyone is busy flaming XP, 2000, NT4.0 whatever as a useless, buggy, unstable OS. As soon as Microsoft releases the new product, suddenly nobody wants to upgrade because XP, 2000, NT4.0 whatever is perfectly fine, stable enough, does the job they need. Then when they adopt the new product anyway, it's useless, buggy, and unstable (but they still won't admit that it's less so than the previous version).
Slashdot Mirror
I think the general mentality of the players is atrocious. There's a few sensible people and so very many immature white rapper wannabes, racists, etc.
But thinking economically, people who behave that way form the majority of Blizzard's revenue stream.
Blizzard is a mindless corporation. Do you think they would happily kick/ban/remove 90% of their revenue stream to keep an intelligent, well mannered 10% still paying?
Unfortunately the invisible hand favors morons in WoW.
There is an addon as part of the ACE suite of addons called "SpamSentry". In two weeks it intercepted and filtered over 200 unsolicited whispers. There's no looking back once you're protected!
I prefer the Logitech G15, also backlight, but with a lot of other functionality.
Certainly it's the prime gaming keyboard of our time, even Logitech has yet to release a product that comes close.
What's the shortest text that can be copyrighted? 5 words? 6 words? I will call each phrase/sentence a form of strong art.
I will construct sentences based on each word combination. There are probably millions of english words so it will take some time. But soon every phrase of text will be copyrighted in english.
Any form of english language communication will therefore be violation of my copyright(s).
I urge people who speak other languages to perform the same duties.
Soon all language will be violation of copyright.
Then, we can proceed to either
a) release all phrases into free-use within the public domain, but prevent any profit taking from our work
b) eradicate all forms of communication on the planet.
I'm serious. That's really what copyright allows for. Let's do it.
Do you honestly believe that the author of the New Scientist article was suggesting that Carbon Dioxide was practically non-existent in earth's atmosphere prior to the industrial revolution and the invention of steam power? You're not willing to interpret the text as the simplest and most common explanation but you're adhering to a poor interpretation of bad phrasework?
Do you really, really believe that?
I need to know, because I am trying to work out how someone apparently literate enough to post on Slashdot could be so imbecilic.
But I understand, you may have been dictating. Speech to text technology has a lot to answer for.
Anyone ever hear of this before?
I don't think I've ever heard of this before.
Does that mean that Microsoft innovated?
I bet the slashbots will find some way to discredit this. After all, only Apple and Linux innovate, right?
It seems to me the RIAA having an "expert witness" was a rather token gesture to imply a degree of diligence was taken when approaching the case. For the most part this seems to have worked for them, but it is nice now to see the true strength of their case being tried... this is what courts do really, isn't it, by testing the accounts of two conflicting parties with regards to a particular event.
I am certainly looking forward to seeing what happens next.
Can the RIAA replace their expert with, say, an expert? Or is it too late, they've bought the ticket and they have to take the ride?
It's true, we need more heroes like the EFF and NewYorkCountryLawyer.
We presume we are testing Vista and XP gaming performance on hardware capable of running both OS's correctly, not on legacy hardware. Your assertion that Vista performance is bad simply because you don't own hardware that Vista was designed for is questionable (and barely scraping in with minimum requirements will not win you any performance races, either).
Otherwise, embedded linux beats all other OS's because Vista doesn't run well off a wristwatch, whereas the embedded linux OS runs fine.
No, the validity of the comparison must take hardware into account. Suggesting that hardware does not need to scale upwards to meet the growth in functionality of new operating systems is farcical. This is true for Apple operating systems, Linux and Windows.
Of course, the guns/weapons/items/etc in the subscriber premium content will be hugely powerful compared to the stock standard non-subscriber gear, presumably so that only paying customers can compete (please don't tell me MMO's aren't competitive).
I read your post. The specifications for the machine you bought are at least a year old, it's contemporary for 18 months ago at the performance end.
So, you bought old Dell stock, they saw you coming and they took your cash. I guess that's why Mikey Dell is such a happy guy. If Dell made a system with an Intel 8086 CPU running at 4.7MHz today, it would be brand new, but it wouldn't run Vista so great. If you're not sure about PC hardware specifications, there are a lot of websites out there, HardOCP, Toms Hardware, Anandtech, Extremetech, these sites can help you with reviews and performance graphs to allow you to inform yourself about the capabilities of current hardware. It should help you from falling prey to poor marketing from giant hardware vendors.
It doesn't change anything, you've got old hardware running a new OS. If you're really having performance issues those issues are without doubt going to be directly attributable to the nVidia drivers, which, oddly enough, are very poor quality for everything but DirectX 10 hardware... which, because you have a legacy system, you don't have.
Maybe (I think I said this earlier), you should run an OS of the same vintage as your hardware. Maybe (I think I said this earlier), you would find that running an OS that is designed for the hardware you have instead of the hardware you don't, you'll get application performance on par with the quality of your legacy hardware.
No, Britney Spears was manufactured by the RIAA. Likewise, Paris Hilton inherited her millions. Lucas wasn't rich when he started, he just made up a product everyone liked. Then he messed it up later on, but at least he did it all himself.
I agree, I have an IBM PC-XT and it ran fine with DOS2.0 and then I installed Vista and it doesn't even work and the game framerates are awful!
It's not just M$ too I have a 286 running at 12MHz and I installed Edgy Eft and turned up all the graphics details and it runs incredibly slowly, it's just unacceptable.
Enough jokes at the expense of the parent aside. He's running Vista on hardware that is a couple of years old, and he has the audacity to complain about performance on legacy equipment.
Vista was designed to run on mainstream computer systems that you can buy today. Not mainstream computer systems that you bought 5 years ago. If you got old gear, use old software. If you want to use more demanding software, you need more capable hardware.
In other news, slashdotters continue to complain about microsoft products that do what they're intended to do but don't get you a girlfriend or a BJ. Heck, even if they wrote software that does that, slashdotters would complain about the licensing fees and then make a few Ballmer chair jokes.
The vista patches are all just to disable the one-click activation hacks that are circulating.
Hi.. ET is a Spielberg film.
But otherwise, his edits for Star Wars have been of mixed quality - the remastering work was some of the best ever done in film-making history. His plot and character changes (ala Greedo) have been abhorrent.
Lucas makes more money than I can imagine. Maybe he knows something you don't? Don't be so quick to laugh when someone calls a self-made millionaire a genius.
Most people aren't trying to desperately abolish copyright. Copyright as it stands must be removed and replaced with, say, the original intent for copyright, which is a reasonably short (20 years?) monopoly on an intellectual property to allow and encourage people to think up new ideas, and be assured of a degree of income from that.
Copyright should never persist beyond 20 years since date of copyright, even if the creator dies during this period (for the purpose of the estate of the copyright holder, I am thinking of the children after all).
Just think of everything that has been devised 20 years ago and earlier. A lot of rich content could be in the public domain. Imagine the innovation that could take place with people creating derivative works!
A large console underneath the surface of mars, with a funny looking handprint.
When discussing with chief scientist/agent Douglas Quaid, he commented "Two weeeeks". Then he put his hand on the console, melted the ice, got blown outside and his face puffed up and burst.
True story.
Seriously, if you were going to try to fix the health system, would you try to do it without use of technology?
Without I/T systems and infrastructure, obviously any new system you implement to replace the older, obviously inefficient systems would be paper based.
While paper based methods are necessary for some systems (see George W. Bush, US Elections for clarification), I cannot see that being applicable to health care.
But that makes me think, with all this closed source development, how can you tell if someone's ripping off someone else's code? Who audits the code?
I've been using it since Beta and I'm pretty comfortable with it. It does work. Yes, there is a learning curve. It's a long one, but it's not steep.
Is it better? I think it looks nicer. I don't have any serious problems with day to day stuff in excel or word.
I work in a high profile enterprise scenario so I can't use openoffice.org (I use that at home, I like free software and it's a great, if underrated and undersold product).
But I have to say this article made me think. You can't customise the ribbons!! You just get to customise the quick-links bar. There's a design flaw right there. Ok, so, Microsoft, it's not really a flaw, it's a design decision, but that ribbon should be user customisable. At least the product supports add-ons. Maybe Microsoft is hoping to make Office popular by means of community add-ons, like some elements of the game industry?
It won't stop me using the product (I like having a job, what can I say), but it is definately a shortcoming. Software, as a tool, must be customisable. The open source guys get it. Why can't Microsoft? You don't have to make the customisation tools obvious so as not to confuse the lowest common denominator, but at least make them available.
I wouldn't be surprised if customisation functionality is put back in after the first service pack/release.
Actually Da Vinci was presumably either independently wealthy or had some kind of patronage (I am not a historian), likewise the statue carvers were presumably slaves that got fed by their slave owners (I guess that is just like RIAA contracts) and I think JK was on the dole when she wrote the first Harry Potter (or maybe she had some part time job)
But in most cases it's true that they're not specifically commissioned works (except perhaps the easter island heads, I think someone specifically wanted those for some reason, although they might have just done it for the cool factor).
But, quite true, it seems that the best works are created by independent artists who are then railroaded into these organisations, I can't think of a band being famous before their work, or an artist being famous before their paintings. Except of course the "manufactured" artists like boy bands etc etc.
In the case of graphics design, the only area where Apple has a legitimate market, I'll give you that. You said yourself you don't need Office to do your work, so you're not a regular business user. Some tools are better suited than others for some jobs, and remarkably enough, Apple has a niche where the machines are tools instead of fashion accessories.
Elsewhere in business, my argument still stands quite well.
With Microsoft, you're not locked into software, either. You can use Openoffice.org, you can even replace the shell if you don't like it that much. Service packs are free. Upgrades, just like with OS X, cost you money.
As a matter of fact, you've just told us that you're locked into using Apple gear because of the software available for it... ironic, isn't it?
You can't live in the past. You'll have to buy new clothes, new car tyres, eventually everything needs to be replaced. Congratulations on lasting so long with what is now an anachronism.
But ours is a society of upgrades and replacements. Even the linux guys will tell you, as a matter of fact one of the most appealing things for me about open source is the sheer rate at which upgrades and improvements are made available.
I bet you wouldn't be doing so great if you had Linux from 2000. But Linux, in the past 7 years, has made tremendously more progress than Windows has. Maybe some part of that is because Linux still has a way to go, but a lot of it is because of the great community and business community that drives it. You don't see people complaining about wanting to or needing to upgrade their Linux installs, do you?
Just like people do with other abandonware, people bypass those mechanisms. They are already bypassed. And if Microsoft isn't supporting the applications, they have some very patchy legal ground to take action against anyone with a legitimate license for their product, regardless of the method used to fulfill the license.
I'd also like to point out, as you mention yourself, if Vista becomes obselete, then... why would you use it?
Nobody uses Win98 or 3.11 anymore (apart from a few crazy nutjobs).
We see this every upgrade cycle. Before the new product, everyone is busy flaming XP, 2000, NT4.0 whatever as a useless, buggy, unstable OS. As soon as Microsoft releases the new product, suddenly nobody wants to upgrade because XP, 2000, NT4.0 whatever is perfectly fine, stable enough, does the job they need. Then when they adopt the new product anyway, it's useless, buggy, and unstable (but they still won't admit that it's less so than the previous version).