A mac mini is a perfectly valid (if expensive) media solution. I personally use 2 synology NASs feeding a Mac Mini which is a dedicated iTunes server feeding 4 apple TVs (When I win the lotto I might try out a promise pegasus but until then the synology NASs are growing the library nicely). It's a bit of a pain to remux mkvs to mp4s but it works and it's a really nice solution once you've gone through the headaches of setting it up (yes better than a boxee box -- tried it, now gathering dust, better than every DLNA solution I've tried). The Apple TVs are just really, really nice media end-points and iTunes is a perfectly good management system.
But yea iCloud has no place in any video solution (your purchased shows can be streamed -- movies can not, and this solution will introduce you to your ISP's bandwidth caps very quickly).
Since you're not complaining about processing power or ram, you're in the market for a NAS. There are several good brands. I personally use Synology. It's a bit pricy but you get what you pay for. Personally I'd just add a few external USB drives until the prices fall (they're pretty outrageous now). When prices fall, get a nice 5 bay and stock it with 3TB drives that will give you ~12 TB in raid 5 and ~9 TB in raid 6 (recommended unless you like living on the edge).
You'll probably find the Synology can replace your existing media server (it has a pretty good support community) but since its all linux you can mount the nfs like another hard drive wherever you want the space in your existing drive structure. As your media server grows you can just get another NAS and keep expanding that way as long as you need.
I hope he wins. I really, really, really hope he wins. I hope he wins all the way up to the supreme court where we can finally get laws like this struck down forever across the entire nation. Most prosecutors don't press these cases because they KNOW if they press them the laws will get struck down and they can't be used to harass or intimidate people anymore. But as long as they drag the preliminaries out as long as possible before deciding not to prosecute they can leave the cameraman in jail for a few days or weeks while the police can conveniently "lose" the evidence in question.
Really, no it's not. Look at it from Apple's perspective (or anyone who creates something for that matter). They created a music manager (itunes), a store, and the portable device used to play them. Apple considered that line a single product. In their view Windows had pretty much the same setup (if more open) in that there were little used music stores for windows media player, and mp3 players that plugged into windows. In their view real was perfectly free to make their own store, their own manager, and their own portable devices (or license a portable device from someone else) and compete with them even on the mac os.
I guess the TL;DR: is that instead of building a burger king next to the mcdonalds, Real tried to set up a counter inside the mcdonalds instead of doing the real hard work and competing fair and square.
There is one, simple, crucial fact that the right is missing in these debates. There is no free market in broadband access. If you are extremely lucky you can pick between your telephone company and your cable company and they tend to not compete on either price or service and quickly move to adopt the same draconian policies introduced by their "competitors" -- and again, this is if you're lucky, most people are stuck with their cable company. Not even the right will argue against regulating monopolies, we all realize that in the absence of competition monopolies will provide poor service for rates that border on extortion.
If you want to win the net neutrality debate with the right then offer a simple concession: IPSs which open up their network to third party providers can operate without regulation. Those providers that have no competition or only one competitor must put up with regulation.
You can also remind everyone that the government invented the internet (arpnet was a darpa project) so the Internet was never created to be run by businesses anymore than the national interstate system was, but that doesn't resonate nearly as well as shifting this back to a monopoly vs. consumer debate.
Ripping a blu-ray is a hellacious experience. Once you rip the disk to the hard drive you may have totally unprotected data but figuring out how to package that data can be a real challenge. A dvd can barely hold a movie, a blu ray can hold a movie and features that are as long or more-so than the original movie, so you just can't pick the file with the longest play-time. Getting sub-titles and chapters involves using several ( let me stress several here ) user-un-friendly programs in a long-tedious and very error-prone workflow. And the studios haven't even begun to exploit java to further obscure how to piece together the myriad bits and pieces of 50gigs of data into a single movie file.
Now someone can build a little PCI card with an HDMI in jack, press play on your player software, press record on your computer and ~2 hours later you have a perfectly encoded movie file that can be a perfect copy of the original.
Unfortunately it will take an act of a luddite congress to make accessing your video collection as painless, effortless and legal as accessing your music collection.
You're correct. Some t-mobile phones have UMA which allows calls to route over wi-fi and do not count against your minutes. I have no idea why there's a big push to femto-cells (sp) when this technology is available -- it guarantees perfect calls in the home regardless of your distance from the towers and it's a win/win for the customer and carrier since they're not burning limited air-time to handle the calls.
Someone already got Wing commander but Origin had some GREAT franchises before EA just let them all die on the vine. Privateer had a succesful reboot with microsoft's freelancer, but even that franchise is outdated now.
Ultima (before it went all mmorpg on us) was great and I'd like to see some off-line adventures return. It's STILL fun to boot up the old icon based 1-2-3-&4 occassionally.
And this was never a franchise but Archon and M.U.L.E. are two definate old school games that deserve to be introduced to a new generation!
I'm using a windows home server (HP but Asus started making them too). Basically it's a little box that's barely taller than the 4 hard drives it can hold. It's quiet and power efficient. It can centralize and store media files making them easy to share throughout the house but it also backs up the other computers in the house -- in fact it will even wake up a sleeping or hibernating laptop in the middle of the night to do the backup and then put it back to sleep when its done (something that just blew my mind when I first realized what was happening).
WHS doesn't have a concept of "raid" but you can flag folders to be duplicated and WHS will ensure that if it's possible they will be duplicated across hard drives. Adding hard drives is fairly simple. When you add a new one you can chose to add it to the storage pool or to use it to back up the WHS itself. The storage pool is pretty cool, there really aren't letter drives, WHS just maintains a giant pool of storage made up from all the connected hard drives so if you're running low on server space just add another hard drive.
Generally I'm happy letting the WHS backup my laptop and game machine. If anything happens to them the WHS can rebuild them. If anything happens to a drive on the WHS the folder redundancy will keep things healthy. I'd basically have to have a simultaneous, catastrophic loss of two or more hard drives on the WHS to start losing data and the odds on that are pretty long. One of these days I might build a small raid to backup all the media on the WHS but that's low priority right now.
For businesses Windows server 2008 has much the same capacity although it supposedly does image based backups (ie norton ghost, but WHS will do ghost backups as well with service pack 3). And of course apple's solution is time machine.
What this all boils down to is that Blizzard wants to be able to trust the client and since that's impossible to do, they want to legislate trust, which is also impossible. Really, what it boils down to is that Blizzard, an otherwise bright and savvy company, is being the epitome of stupid by trying to do something which can't be done. Never trust the client, in games, in finance, on the web, anywhere. Sure that means extra work for your servers but if you want to run a game, a website, anything, the server simply can't trust the client and if you can't code for that well then you just friggin fail.
You'd think Blizzard, with all their Battlenet experience would have figured this all out by the time they sat down to write the very first line of WoW.
The Boston media screwed up. The Boston Officials Screwed up. The two schmoes who put the signs up will pay for that as they're charged with everything from littering to having bad haircuts (real charge: making city officials look foolish). Big media tosses a bit of pocket change around to make sure things don't get any higher than the two dudes already arrested. And the exec at the cartoon network is fired because the cost of the advertising campaign exceeded the value of the show. So while the Boston Media and Officials try to convince themselves that two million dollars proves they were right, the rest of the country has pretty much concluded that Boston is one supremely messed up city.
Nope I have it exactly right. If Google wants to pump high-def videos to you they're going to have to pay AT&T for that "non-internet" spectrum AT&T is going to reserve for their own IP-TV offerings. If google won't pay then, if you as an individual want high-def videos from google you're going to have to shell out for a very high-priced bandwidth tier. So either google pays to use at&t's ip-tv bandwidth or you pay (out the wazoo) for the 10-20 megabit bandwidth you'll need to get high-def streaming video from google. Either way that's basically the tiered toll road everyone in the network neutrality debate is so frantic about -- they just have it wrong, they think the toll road will be layered on the existing 1.5-3megabit internet lines when in reality it's all about the expanded bandwidth that will become available over the next few years.
When AT*T runs fiber to your neighborhood and can offer 20 megabit (or more) dsl connections there's no law on the books that says they have to sell you that bandwidth as internet access.
Network neutrality would say google would have every bit as much access to that 20 megabits as at&t and that you the customer would have one rate plan that would give you 20 megabits (forget 1.5, 3, 6, 8, 10 megabit budget plans). But that sort of utopia just isn't going to happen -- ever.
Yup. Network neutrality was never about putting the crimp on "print media" sites like slashdot but all about controlling telephony and video where the REAL money is. What's really funny is that the "toll road" already exists. I have a 1.5 megabit dsl connection which is GREAT for my needs but if I want I can call AT&T right now and 10 minutes later after the operator takes my billing information and punches a few keys on her computer I can get 3 or even 6 megabits without needing to do anything to my hardware or software. In a few months the available bandwidth to my house will actually go up to 20 megabits and that my friends is multi-channel, high definition video on demand, and there's nothing in the world that says AT&T has to sell that bandwidth to me for use on the internet.
I think eventually the internet speeds will top out at 1.5-3 megabits realistically, you'll be able to get 6,8 and maybe even 10-20 but the price will effectively means that whatever AT&T would offer you in that bandwidth would be much cheaper. So if you want high-def youtube from google you'll have to pay an arm and a leg for the bandwidth to get it, or you can pay $49.99 a month to at&t for their IP offering.
So the internet toll road everyone is all scared about is really just the unused bandwidth and future tiered rate plans that will ensure at&t has their beloved toll road and there's nothing anybody can do about it.
Re:Be sure to *look* at them first
on
Plasma or LCD?
·
· Score: 1
I recently switched from CRT to LCD as my computer's display, and I'm a gamer. It doesn't matter what you get there is always a period of adjustment when you swap out a monitor be it CRT to CRT or to something different. Going from CRT to LCD that period of adjustment is longer and a bit more "painful" but it does pass. I shelled out for a NEC display, I made sure the response time was less than 12ms (eliminates ghosting -- mine is actually 4ms which is rock steady) and had a good rep on the street from amazon/new egg before I bought it, then made sure I knew the store's dead pixel policy (mine came with NONE which is common for NEC according to the boards).
Going on a year after "the switch" I'd never go back. I still sometimes gasp at the great pictures it manages to show, there's no ghosting, no dead pixels, just great pictures with lots and lots and LOTs of desk space. My only regret is that I didn't shell out for a wide-screen (2007 baby, 2007!).
As long as you know there's going to be a period of adjustment and prepare for it, it's not a bad or horrible transition. It just takes a while for your brain to go from regestering "not the way things are supposed to be" to "normal".
I recently stopped playing World of Warcraft and no longer had a reason to stay on the windows platform. I use open office, media player classic, and Firefox and that's pretty much it. So I thought I'd try Ubuntu out since I'd heard so many good things about it.
I burned the disk, backed up my data and took the plunge.
The problem was immediate. I have a lcd monitor, a top of the line NEC monitor that is smart enough to whine, moan and complain when the resolution isn't 1280x1024. Ubuntu however gave my top resolution options as 1024x768. I thought Ubuntu probably needed the NVidia drivers so I headed over and discovered that installing NVidia's Linux drivers made the US tax code read like a harry potter novel by comparison.
Needless to say, this ended my experiment with Linux. (And yes I know there's a command line to reconfigure the graphics shell but any time you need to send anyone to the command line to get an install working you've pretty much admitted failure.)
But wait! It doesn't end there! A few days later on Digg there was a thread about Linux being ready for the desktop! I relayed my casual user experience almost exactly the way I have here. Two hours later my user experience had been burried down to negative numbers as had all the other "negative testimonials". Yep, the Linux fan bois had run roughshod over anyone who actually had the nerve to explain why they still thought Linux wasn't ready for the desktop and there were legions of them.
So the problem is two fold really. Linux still doesn't nail the "out of box installs" anywhere near as well as Windows does and there is a sizable portion of the community that would kill the messengers rather than address the problem.
This assumes Google still even pays lip service to their "Do No Evil" credo. I think their dealings with China pretty much underscore that "Do No Evil" doesn't work when you have shareholders. The new credo is "Anything for a buck".
The "war" between hardcore and casual isn't a war at all. It's just casual players have reached a point in the game where they are unable to advance their characters further. They don't want epic handouts, they just want a way to continue to make progress with their character and thanks to time/skill or other factors are unable to participate in the 40 man raid guilds that allow that to happen.
It's not surprising given that it's been over a year since a new "casual" dungeon has been added to the game (dire maul).
Better to ask -- how many vulnerabilities were discovered or aided because of the very fact that Mozilla family of products are open source but have not been reported.
If google intends to compete with MS and IE then it's stupid for them to try and make their own browser. However it is VERY smart to throw all their weight and resources into making mozilla so killer it blows IE out of the water.
I'm just really surprised they haven't ported the popular google toolbar into a firefox extension yet.
1] A cell phone with bluetooth capability. 2] A bluetooth enabled headset. 3] All major music formats including ogg. 4] A "bookmark" feature (useful for book on tape or book on mp3). 5] Stopwatch with lap timing and counters. (For those of us who exercise) 6] FM tuner. 7] XM or Syrius Tuner. 8] Uses standard flash ram cards for expansion. 9] USB 2.0 at minimum. 10] Rechargable battery and docking station. 11] Garage door opener (for those who exercise and need a way to get into the house without lugging your keys around):)
That's my wish list. To date, nobody has even come close.
I'm not going to lie and say a job in Saudi Arabia or Iraq or anywhere in the middle east or central asia is going to be either easy or perfectly safe but then again neather is a job in LA or New York.
One thing is perfectly true however and that is the media has an agenda and is skewing the reports out of the region to fit that agenda (remember quagmire reports three days into the ground assault?)
One thing you can do to really get on top of the situation is to check out the Iraqi blogs, those tell the true story, the story filtered by people just like you and me, not somebody who's greatest ambition in life is to get President Bush out of office.
Slashdot Mirror
A mac mini is a perfectly valid (if expensive) media solution. I personally use 2 synology NASs feeding a Mac Mini which is a dedicated iTunes server feeding 4 apple TVs (When I win the lotto I might try out a promise pegasus but until then the synology NASs are growing the library nicely). It's a bit of a pain to remux mkvs to mp4s but it works and it's a really nice solution once you've gone through the headaches of setting it up (yes better than a boxee box -- tried it, now gathering dust, better than every DLNA solution I've tried). The Apple TVs are just really, really nice media end-points and iTunes is a perfectly good management system.
But yea iCloud has no place in any video solution (your purchased shows can be streamed -- movies can not, and this solution will introduce you to your ISP's bandwidth caps very quickly).
Since you're not complaining about processing power or ram, you're in the market for a NAS. There are several good brands. I personally use Synology. It's a bit pricy but you get what you pay for. Personally I'd just add a few external USB drives until the prices fall (they're pretty outrageous now). When prices fall, get a nice 5 bay and stock it with 3TB drives that will give you ~12 TB in raid 5 and ~9 TB in raid 6 (recommended unless you like living on the edge).
You'll probably find the Synology can replace your existing media server (it has a pretty good support community) but since its all linux you can mount the nfs like another hard drive wherever you want the space in your existing drive structure. As your media server grows you can just get another NAS and keep expanding that way as long as you need.
I hope he wins. I really, really, really hope he wins. I hope he wins all the way up to the supreme court where we can finally get laws like this struck down forever across the entire nation. Most prosecutors don't press these cases because they KNOW if they press them the laws will get struck down and they can't be used to harass or intimidate people anymore. But as long as they drag the preliminaries out as long as possible before deciding not to prosecute they can leave the cameraman in jail for a few days or weeks while the police can conveniently "lose" the evidence in question.
Really, no it's not. Look at it from Apple's perspective (or anyone who creates something for that matter). They created a music manager (itunes), a store, and the portable device used to play them. Apple considered that line a single product. In their view Windows had pretty much the same setup (if more open) in that there were little used music stores for windows media player, and mp3 players that plugged into windows. In their view real was perfectly free to make their own store, their own manager, and their own portable devices (or license a portable device from someone else) and compete with them even on the mac os.
I guess the TL;DR: is that instead of building a burger king next to the mcdonalds, Real tried to set up a counter inside the mcdonalds instead of doing the real hard work and competing fair and square.
There is one, simple, crucial fact that the right is missing in these debates. There is no free market in broadband access. If you are extremely lucky you can pick between your telephone company and your cable company and they tend to not compete on either price or service and quickly move to adopt the same draconian policies introduced by their "competitors" -- and again, this is if you're lucky, most people are stuck with their cable company. Not even the right will argue against regulating monopolies, we all realize that in the absence of competition monopolies will provide poor service for rates that border on extortion.
If you want to win the net neutrality debate with the right then offer a simple concession: IPSs which open up their network to third party providers can operate without regulation. Those providers that have no competition or only one competitor must put up with regulation.
You can also remind everyone that the government invented the internet (arpnet was a darpa project) so the Internet was never created to be run by businesses anymore than the national interstate system was, but that doesn't resonate nearly as well as shifting this back to a monopoly vs. consumer debate.
Ripping a blu-ray is a hellacious experience. Once you rip the disk to the hard drive you may have totally unprotected data but figuring out how to package that data can be a real challenge. A dvd can barely hold a movie, a blu ray can hold a movie and features that are as long or more-so than the original movie, so you just can't pick the file with the longest play-time. Getting sub-titles and chapters involves using several ( let me stress several here ) user-un-friendly programs in a long-tedious and very error-prone workflow. And the studios haven't even begun to exploit java to further obscure how to piece together the myriad bits and pieces of 50gigs of data into a single movie file.
Now someone can build a little PCI card with an HDMI in jack, press play on your player software, press record on your computer and ~2 hours later you have a perfectly encoded movie file that can be a perfect copy of the original.
Unfortunately it will take an act of a luddite congress to make accessing your video collection as painless, effortless and legal as accessing your music collection.
The new format is a bit more adventurous than it looks at first blush.
You're correct. Some t-mobile phones have UMA which allows calls to route over wi-fi and do not count against your minutes. I have no idea why there's a big push to femto-cells (sp) when this technology is available -- it guarantees perfect calls in the home regardless of your distance from the towers and it's a win/win for the customer and carrier since they're not burning limited air-time to handle the calls.
Someone already got Wing commander but Origin had some GREAT franchises before EA just let them all die on the vine. Privateer had a succesful reboot with microsoft's freelancer, but even that franchise is outdated now.
Ultima (before it went all mmorpg on us) was great and I'd like to see some off-line adventures return. It's STILL fun to boot up the old icon based 1-2-3-&4 occassionally.
And this was never a franchise but Archon and M.U.L.E. are two definate old school games that deserve to be introduced to a new generation!
I'm using a windows home server (HP but Asus started making them too). Basically it's a little box that's barely taller than the 4 hard drives it can hold. It's quiet and power efficient. It can centralize and store media files making them easy to share throughout the house but it also backs up the other computers in the house -- in fact it will even wake up a sleeping or hibernating laptop in the middle of the night to do the backup and then put it back to sleep when its done (something that just blew my mind when I first realized what was happening).
WHS doesn't have a concept of "raid" but you can flag folders to be duplicated and WHS will ensure that if it's possible they will be duplicated across hard drives. Adding hard drives is fairly simple. When you add a new one you can chose to add it to the storage pool or to use it to back up the WHS itself. The storage pool is pretty cool, there really aren't letter drives, WHS just maintains a giant pool of storage made up from all the connected hard drives so if you're running low on server space just add another hard drive.
Generally I'm happy letting the WHS backup my laptop and game machine. If anything happens to them the WHS can rebuild them. If anything happens to a drive on the WHS the folder redundancy will keep things healthy. I'd basically have to have a simultaneous, catastrophic loss of two or more hard drives on the WHS to start losing data and the odds on that are pretty long. One of these days I might build a small raid to backup all the media on the WHS but that's low priority right now.
For businesses Windows server 2008 has much the same capacity although it supposedly does image based backups (ie norton ghost, but WHS will do ghost backups as well with service pack 3). And of course apple's solution is time machine.
What this all boils down to is that Blizzard wants to be able to trust the client and since that's impossible to do, they want to legislate trust, which is also impossible. Really, what it boils down to is that Blizzard, an otherwise bright and savvy company, is being the epitome of stupid by trying to do something which can't be done. Never trust the client, in games, in finance, on the web, anywhere. Sure that means extra work for your servers but if you want to run a game, a website, anything, the server simply can't trust the client and if you can't code for that well then you just friggin fail.
You'd think Blizzard, with all their Battlenet experience would have figured this all out by the time they sat down to write the very first line of WoW.
The Boston media screwed up. The Boston Officials Screwed up. The two schmoes who put the signs up will pay for that as they're charged with everything from littering to having bad haircuts (real charge: making city officials look foolish). Big media tosses a bit of pocket change around to make sure things don't get any higher than the two dudes already arrested. And the exec at the cartoon network is fired because the cost of the advertising campaign exceeded the value of the show. So while the Boston Media and Officials try to convince themselves that two million dollars proves they were right, the rest of the country has pretty much concluded that Boston is one supremely messed up city.
Did I miss anything?
Nope I have it exactly right. If Google wants to pump high-def videos to you they're going to have to pay AT&T for that "non-internet" spectrum AT&T is going to reserve for their own IP-TV offerings. If google won't pay then, if you as an individual want high-def videos from google you're going to have to shell out for a very high-priced bandwidth tier. So either google pays to use at&t's ip-tv bandwidth or you pay (out the wazoo) for the 10-20 megabit bandwidth you'll need to get high-def streaming video from google. Either way that's basically the tiered toll road everyone in the network neutrality debate is so frantic about -- they just have it wrong, they think the toll road will be layered on the existing 1.5-3megabit internet lines when in reality it's all about the expanded bandwidth that will become available over the next few years.
When AT*T runs fiber to your neighborhood and can offer 20 megabit (or more) dsl connections there's no law on the books that says they have to sell you that bandwidth as internet access.
Network neutrality would say google would have every bit as much access to that 20 megabits as at&t and that you the customer would have one rate plan that would give you 20 megabits (forget 1.5, 3, 6, 8, 10 megabit budget plans). But that sort of utopia just isn't going to happen -- ever.
Yup. Network neutrality was never about putting the crimp on "print media" sites like slashdot but all about controlling telephony and video where the REAL money is. What's really funny is that the "toll road" already exists. I have a 1.5 megabit dsl connection which is GREAT for my needs but if I want I can call AT&T right now and 10 minutes later after the operator takes my billing information and punches a few keys on her computer I can get 3 or even 6 megabits without needing to do anything to my hardware or software. In a few months the available bandwidth to my house will actually go up to 20 megabits and that my friends is multi-channel, high definition video on demand, and there's nothing in the world that says AT&T has to sell that bandwidth to me for use on the internet.
I think eventually the internet speeds will top out at 1.5-3 megabits realistically, you'll be able to get 6,8 and maybe even 10-20 but the price will effectively means that whatever AT&T would offer you in that bandwidth would be much cheaper. So if you want high-def youtube from google you'll have to pay an arm and a leg for the bandwidth to get it, or you can pay $49.99 a month to at&t for their IP offering.
So the internet toll road everyone is all scared about is really just the unused bandwidth and future tiered rate plans that will ensure at&t has their beloved toll road and there's nothing anybody can do about it.
I recently switched from CRT to LCD as my computer's display, and I'm a gamer. It doesn't matter what you get there is always a period of adjustment when you swap out a monitor be it CRT to CRT or to something different. Going from CRT to LCD that period of adjustment is longer and a bit more "painful" but it does pass. I shelled out for a NEC display, I made sure the response time was less than 12ms (eliminates ghosting -- mine is actually 4ms which is rock steady) and had a good rep on the street from amazon/new egg before I bought it, then made sure I knew the store's dead pixel policy (mine came with NONE which is common for NEC according to the boards).
Going on a year after "the switch" I'd never go back. I still sometimes gasp at the great pictures it manages to show, there's no ghosting, no dead pixels, just great pictures with lots and lots and LOTs of desk space. My only regret is that I didn't shell out for a wide-screen (2007 baby, 2007!).
As long as you know there's going to be a period of adjustment and prepare for it, it's not a bad or horrible transition. It just takes a while for your brain to go from regestering "not the way things are supposed to be" to "normal".
I recently stopped playing World of Warcraft and no longer had a reason to stay on the windows platform. I use open office, media player classic, and Firefox and that's pretty much it. So I thought I'd try Ubuntu out since I'd heard so many good things about it.
I burned the disk, backed up my data and took the plunge.
The problem was immediate. I have a lcd monitor, a top of the line NEC monitor that is smart enough to whine, moan and complain when the resolution isn't 1280x1024. Ubuntu however gave my top resolution options as 1024x768. I thought Ubuntu probably needed the NVidia drivers so I headed over and discovered that installing NVidia's Linux drivers made the US tax code read like a harry potter novel by comparison.
Needless to say, this ended my experiment with Linux. (And yes I know there's a command line to reconfigure the graphics shell but any time you need to send anyone to the command line to get an install working you've pretty much admitted failure.)
But wait! It doesn't end there! A few days later on Digg there was a thread about Linux being ready for the desktop! I relayed my casual user experience almost exactly the way I have here. Two hours later my user experience had been burried down to negative numbers as had all the other "negative testimonials". Yep, the Linux fan bois had run roughshod over anyone who actually had the nerve to explain why they still thought Linux wasn't ready for the desktop and there were legions of them.
So the problem is two fold really. Linux still doesn't nail the "out of box installs" anywhere near as well as Windows does and there is a sizable portion of the community that would kill the messengers rather than address the problem.
and a rather good image (I use it as my wallpaper)
http://www.mondolithic.com/06Gallery08.htm
This assumes Google still even pays lip service to their "Do No Evil" credo. I think their dealings with China pretty much underscore that "Do No Evil" doesn't work when you have shareholders. The new credo is "Anything for a buck".
The "war" between hardcore and casual isn't a war at all. It's just casual players have reached a point in the game where they are unable to advance their characters further. They don't want epic handouts, they just want a way to continue to make progress with their character and thanks to time/skill or other factors are unable to participate in the 40 man raid guilds that allow that to happen.
It's not surprising given that it's been over a year since a new "casual" dungeon has been added to the game (dire maul).
Better to ask -- how many vulnerabilities were discovered or aided because of the very fact that Mozilla family of products are open source but have not been reported.
Open source cuts both ways.
It may have many downloads but according to recent press reports IE is actually gaining back ground it lost to firefox.
We've owned space for nearly half a century now and have the flags to prove it :)
o nL anding/flag.jpg
http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/Shared/News2001/Mo
If google intends to compete with MS and IE then it's stupid for them to try and make their own browser. However it is VERY smart to throw all their weight and resources into making mozilla so killer it blows IE out of the water.
I'm just really surprised they haven't ported the popular google toolbar into a firefox extension yet.
The ideal mp3 player would be...
:)
1] A cell phone with bluetooth capability.
2] A bluetooth enabled headset.
3] All major music formats including ogg.
4] A "bookmark" feature (useful for book on tape or book on mp3).
5] Stopwatch with lap timing and counters. (For those of us who exercise)
6] FM tuner.
7] XM or Syrius Tuner.
8] Uses standard flash ram cards for expansion.
9] USB 2.0 at minimum.
10] Rechargable battery and docking station.
11] Garage door opener (for those who exercise and need a way to get into the house without lugging your keys around)
That's my wish list. To date, nobody has even come close.
I'm not going to lie and say a job in Saudi Arabia or Iraq or anywhere in the middle east or central asia is going to be either easy or perfectly safe but then again neather is a job in LA or New York.
One thing is perfectly true however and that is the media has an agenda and is skewing the reports out of the region to fit that agenda (remember quagmire reports three days into the ground assault?)
One thing you can do to really get on top of the situation is to check out the Iraqi blogs, those tell the true story, the story filtered by people just like you and me, not somebody who's greatest ambition in life is to get President Bush out of office.
http://iraqthemodel.blogspot.com/