I think I agree with what you said. I went into a store that featured the X-box, and I concluded that yes, the graphics are better but not that better, the box is big'n'bulky and at least here in Europe, too expensive.
The fact that I can't watch DVDs without dashing out more dough for the remote, and the news of scratched DVDs in Japan didn't make it look any better.
As for games, remember, I am NOT a gamer, but the few games I think I would enjoy playing are Spyro, Eco (or was it Ico? You know, the dolphin thingy) Final fantasy and Mario Kart. None of these runs on the X-box. But from what I have seen, I can find similar games on the Playstation 2, to the ones that exist on the X-box.
In the end, I didn't and won't buy any console. Well, perhaps when the Playstation 2 becomes cheaper I'll go for it, I really like that Spyro dragon.
claiming that offloading the processing of an 802.11b card onto a 1.xGHz processor is going to "drag down" the system is a steaming pile.
I disagree. with Wi-Fi we are talking of much more intensive DSP than with winmodems. It'll kill about 25% of CPU cycles of a P4 2 GHz. If you think that's not a lot, think about the price difference between a P4 1.7 GHz and a P4 2 GHz.
It might be that C#.NET and the CLI will actually reinforce Java's position.
To understand why, you only have to remember what Gates said about Java at the very beginning. Oh, he was disparaging and ironic, expecting that Java will be unacceptably slow, and die a horrible death right there right then. It didn't happen. Sure, Java was and still is slow, but it solved so many problems that people cared less about the speed than uncle Bill liked. He thought the only way to program was C/C++, and that the unwashed crowds of programmers would soon come to their senses and worship Windows.
And now, with the safety of the historical distance, when peoplehave forgotten those totally unprofetic words, Bill is doing exactly the same! Surely many in the industry will now have a confirmation that the Java way is, indeed, a good way, even Bill says so!
When I wish to watch European DVDs , I simply either change the hard disk drive ( they are removable) to another installation of Windows 2000
No need to replace the hard disk. Just use DVD Genie, a nice software that will make most of the software DVD players think they are in whatever region you want. WinDVD, PowerDVD and many others are supported. With 23 DVD players and 9 DVD drives, I wonder how come you didn't know of this software earlier? (I don't mean to criticize, just genuinely surprised.)
Nothing is wrong with what I am doing now. I just don'w want it taken away. And noone is requireing the author anything. Just don't meddle with what is already good: to see the offers of used books.
I repeat: the author is not required to tell where one can pick up a used book. I think this is really clear, and you have missunderstood the whole issue.
As for how is the consumer screwed over: do I really have to list all the examples where it is, definitely, screwed? Do you live in a tower of glass or what? Amazon is doing a good thing here, for us, the little guys, the consumers. I support that.
I see the Guild's point, and I don't approve. For too much time and too many things the consumers have been screwed over. Having the option of buying a used copy almost immediately as a book is published, is a pro-consumer thing all around.
I can see a legit way that the authors could fight this: make the books so good that noone would ever part from them. Tough, but not impossible. No way I will ever sell my copy of "A book on C".
Not really. I think it's rather obvious that increased production means lower price. It's that simple.
And I would be surprised if you don't see how lower price will mean more PS2 sold. As a matter of fact, I myself may consider it, since I am looking for a new DVD player, and with the multiregion mods for PS2 floating around, might be just the right choice.
I don't fault the author, either, but the fact is that the gobeProductive that is mentioned on that page is actually gobeProductive 2.0! You can see this for yourself, if you click on the link in the table: http://gobe.com/storegobeproductive.html
So, there is nothing odd, there is Productive for Windows, which is Productive 3.0, and there is also Productive for BeOS, which is Productive 3.0. Easy does it.
Back in 1995 when Win95 came out, I had a 486/33 MHz with 4 MB RAM. And a 81 MB drive. Anyway, nobody thought I can run Win95 on such hardware. Well, I succeeded. I had no problems with the installation, and the interface was reasonably fast, but all I could run on it was some gfx viewer and Wordpad.
Mind you, this was Win95 "OSR 1". OSR 2 got more bloated, and Win98, which I am using nowadays on a laptop, is horribly slow in comparison.
BTW, I had another attempt at impossible Windows installations, the same year: I installed Windows NT workstation 3.51 on a 486/66 MHz with 8 MB RAM. Boy was that SLOW! But it worked.
Where have you been, sleeping under a rock for eons? Don't you know how easy it is to install PE in it's own partition of any size you like? http://www.betips.net/chunga.php?ID=495 Or even put it in a virtual filesystem of any size you like! http://www.betips.net/chunga.php?ID=510
For heaven's sake, even the birds on the trees are singing it, these tips have been out for ages, and in every BeOS-related thread on Slashdot they were mentioned at least 3 times.
I agree with number 3. ' I don't agree with number 1, because this si something you can't tell at this point of the projects, but I know that OpenBeOS is quite a bit far ahead with a precise implementation of variou API kits. So, this point is very much open to debate. Give it some time, and then we'll speak again. Number 2.: BeOS has a smaller number of applications than Linux, and yet it has a greater number of applications that I can and like to actually use. It has media players that are nice and easy to use, it has a few USABLE MIDI sequencers, it has many other media-related applications that are really useful. I don't really miss the applications existing on Linux, except for JDK and FreeCIV. That's really all I miss from Linux in BeOS. I think this point is also debatable.
But heck, this is/., this is for debates, I don't mind reading different opinions.
TheReg is published in the morning and news are added early afternoon, Greenwitch Time. They did not have a chance to do the article on the event, because it happened after office hours, local time. But I guess an attack on TheRegister, here at/., is always worth a point or two of karma:o)
What people fail to see is, just because the Earth won't become another Venus, doesn't mean we can't make a lot of damage. We can. And it's not like we are going to wipe out life from the Earth completely, because roaches, rats and weeds will survive. At the very least, some sort of unicellular organisms wll survive. But if we kill off diversity of lifeforms, our quality of life will go waaayyy down, we might even, well, die. Let me just say a good word for vegetation: that's what made this wonderful richness of lifeforms (which eventually resulted with the appearance homo sapiens on Earth) possible. Form billions of years there were only unicellular lifeforms on Earth, and the temperature was really high. However, when the plants finally appeared (relatively recently in the history of Earth), they dramatically decreased and stabilized the temperature and metheorological conditions on this planet, and created the environment in which more complex creatures emerged. I just want to reiterate: life will still be here, even long after the last zebra, dolphin, koala or eagle will be extinct. But ask yourself whether you want to live in such a place (provided we somehow survive).
(Note: I am just speculating here, but it looks plausible.) Kids: Many of the visitors at CeBit are parents with kids, and kids need some amusement. If these parents want to have a little time for themselves (and they do, believe me, just because you are a dad or mom, that doesn't completely kill the nerd in you) what better than let them play on a gameconsole or some such gadget.
Even if it's not a console, kids need a little interaction, forcing them to a "watch only, no touching" policy frustrates the heck out of them, and as a consequence, their parents.
So, the non-reinforcement of this rule might just have been a little expression of social skills, like what you have in many big companies. You don't always enforce a rule, except if you want to come off like a total jackass and be treated like one by your colleagues.
I'm going to try this tomorrow. I have to install Slackware 8.0 on one of our dev workstation, and I was thinking about experimenting with the size of the swap.
From the poster of the article: What makes this even more funny is that Microsoft officials denied that the company had complained to the Messe. but the show organizers confirmed that Richard Roy, vice president, corporate strategy, had complained.
Except the fact that it wasn't in Yale but in UK, that the rule wasn't in latin even though it was an ancient one, that they didn't compromise to coke and cake and that the sword wasn't to be carried to exams but everywhere in the campus... you got the story almost 100% right.
It's not that PS2 is kicked off Cebit, or Microsoft's initiative in that direction. No, what annoys me is Microsoft's systematic lying to the public, and then it gets away with it.
And since MS can do it without any consequences, they are going to repeat it, time and again.
How can someone who is so strongly-opinionated and blunt, so sure of himself to call the review "this is the most uninformed and uneducated review of a linux distribution I have ever read" afford to be so misinformed about Linux (yes, you can have swapping in a file, you can even share that file with Windows, read the Howto)? And moreover, how can someone who demonstrates such blatant arrogance and ignorance, get such high mods?
I totally agree with the review, to have a swap file instead of a partition totally makes sense for desktop installs, because you don't want to increase the number of primary partitions, which you have only 4 anyway.
(Well, I know it's in the whole Europe, but I can only live in one country at a time.) So, what I have seen here in Finland, is mild to cold reception. I didn't see anyone buying them during the time I spent in the shops, and very few playing the demo console. No queue at the demo, either.
This in sharp contrast to queues that formed at demo machines when FF 10 or Diablo were released.
What is the experience of other fellow European gamers with regards to the Xbox launch?
Slashdot Mirror
I think I agree with what you said. I went into a store that featured the X-box, and I concluded that yes, the graphics are better but not that better, the box is big'n'bulky and at least here in Europe, too expensive.
The fact that I can't watch DVDs without dashing out more dough for the remote, and the news of scratched DVDs in Japan didn't make it look any better.
As for games, remember, I am NOT a gamer, but the few games I think I would enjoy playing are Spyro, Eco (or was it Ico? You know, the dolphin thingy) Final fantasy and Mario Kart. None of these runs on the X-box. But from what I have seen, I can find similar games on the Playstation 2, to the ones that exist on the X-box.
In the end, I didn't and won't buy any console. Well, perhaps when the Playstation 2 becomes cheaper I'll go for it, I really like that Spyro dragon.
claiming that offloading the processing of an 802.11b card onto a 1.xGHz processor is going to "drag down" the system is a steaming pile.
I disagree. with Wi-Fi we are talking of much more intensive DSP than with winmodems. It'll kill about 25% of CPU cycles of a P4 2 GHz. If you think that's not a lot, think about the price difference between a P4 1.7 GHz and a P4 2 GHz.
It might be that C# .NET and the CLI will actually reinforce Java's position.
To understand why, you only have to remember what Gates said about Java at the very beginning. Oh, he was disparaging and ironic, expecting that Java will be unacceptably slow, and die a horrible death right there right then. It didn't happen. Sure, Java was and still is slow, but it solved so many problems that people cared less about the speed than uncle Bill liked. He thought the only way to program was C/C++, and that the unwashed crowds of programmers would soon come to their senses and worship Windows.
And now, with the safety of the historical distance, when peoplehave forgotten those totally unprofetic words, Bill is doing exactly the same!
Surely many in the industry will now have a confirmation that the Java way is, indeed, a good way, even Bill says so!
When I wish to watch European DVDs , I simply either change the hard disk drive ( they are removable) to another installation of Windows 2000
No need to replace the hard disk. Just use DVD Genie, a nice software that will make most of the software DVD players think they are in whatever region you want. WinDVD, PowerDVD and many others are supported. With 23 DVD players and 9 DVD drives, I wonder how come you didn't know of this software earlier? (I don't mean to criticize, just genuinely surprised.)
And BTW, look at what MSN is today. Hardly the mirror of the megagalactic (in development and money resources) company that stands behind it.
Nothing is wrong with what I am doing now. I just don'w want it taken away. And noone is requireing the author anything. Just don't meddle with what is already good: to see the offers of used books.
I repeat: the author is not required to tell where one can pick up a used book. I think this is really clear, and you have missunderstood the whole issue.
As for how is the consumer screwed over: do I really have to list all the examples where it is, definitely, screwed? Do you live in a tower of glass or what?
Amazon is doing a good thing here, for us, the little guys, the consumers. I support that.
I see the Guild's point, and I don't approve. For too much time and too many things the consumers have been screwed over. Having the option of buying a used copy almost immediately as a book is published, is a pro-consumer thing all around.
I can see a legit way that the authors could fight this: make the books so good that noone would ever part from them. Tough, but not impossible. No way I will ever sell my copy of "A book on C".
Not really. I think it's rather obvious that increased production means lower price. It's that simple.
And I would be surprised if you don't see how lower price will mean more PS2 sold.
As a matter of fact, I myself may consider it, since I am looking for a new DVD player, and with the multiregion mods for PS2 floating around, might be just the right choice.
A laser cannon mounted on the side of your personal submarine, so you can shoot fish??? Can you get any more dickless than that!?
The way I see it, he's not the loser, you are. He both got lucky and he also figured the easier way to success.
BTW, I hate the guts of those type of guys...
I don't fault the author, either, but the fact is that the gobeProductive that is mentioned on that page is actually gobeProductive 2.0! You can see this for yourself, if you click on the link in the table: http://gobe.com/storegobeproductive.html
So, there is nothing odd, there is Productive for Windows, which is Productive 3.0, and there is also Productive for BeOS, which is Productive 3.0. Easy does it.
Back in 1995 when Win95 came out, I had a 486/33 MHz with 4 MB RAM. And a 81 MB drive. Anyway, nobody thought I can run Win95 on such hardware. Well, I succeeded. I had no problems with the installation, and the interface was reasonably fast, but all I could run on it was some gfx viewer and Wordpad.
Mind you, this was Win95 "OSR 1". OSR 2 got more bloated, and Win98, which I am using nowadays on a laptop, is horribly slow in comparison.
BTW, I had another attempt at impossible Windows installations, the same year: I installed Windows NT workstation 3.51 on a 486/66 MHz with 8 MB RAM. Boy was that SLOW! But it worked.
Where have you been, sleeping under a rock for eons? Don't you know how easy it is to install PE in it's own partition of any size you like?r even put it in a virtual filesystem of any size you like!
http://www.betips.net/chunga.php?ID=495
O
http://www.betips.net/chunga.php?ID=510
For heaven's sake, even the birds on the trees are singing it, these tips have been out for ages, and in every BeOS-related thread on Slashdot they were mentioned at least 3 times.
I agree with number 3. '
/., this is for debates, I don't mind reading different opinions.
I don't agree with number 1, because this si something you can't tell at this point of the projects, but I know that OpenBeOS is quite a bit far ahead with a precise implementation of variou API kits. So, this point is very much open to debate. Give it some time, and then we'll speak again.
Number 2.: BeOS has a smaller number of applications than Linux, and yet it has a greater number of applications that I can and like to actually use. It has media players that are nice and easy to use, it has a few USABLE MIDI sequencers, it has many other media-related applications that are really useful. I don't really miss the applications existing on Linux, except for JDK and FreeCIV. That's really all I miss from Linux in BeOS. I think this point is also debatable.
But heck, this is
I think what once looked as science fiction in "Soylent green", is becoming really feasable.
TheReg is published in the morning and news are added early afternoon, Greenwitch Time. They did not have a chance to do the article on the event, because it happened after office hours, local time. /., is always worth a point or two of karma :o)
But I guess an attack on TheRegister, here at
What people fail to see is, just because the Earth won't become another Venus, doesn't mean we can't make a lot of damage. We can.
And it's not like we are going to wipe out life from the Earth completely, because roaches, rats and weeds will survive. At the very least, some sort of unicellular organisms wll survive. But if we kill off diversity of lifeforms, our quality of life will go waaayyy down, we might even, well, die.
Let me just say a good word for vegetation: that's what made this wonderful richness of lifeforms (which eventually resulted with the appearance homo sapiens on Earth) possible. Form billions of years there were only unicellular lifeforms on Earth, and the temperature was really high. However, when the plants finally appeared (relatively recently in the history of Earth), they dramatically decreased and stabilized the temperature and metheorological conditions on this planet, and created the environment in which more complex creatures emerged.
I just want to reiterate: life will still be here, even long after the last zebra, dolphin, koala or eagle will be extinct. But ask yourself whether you want to live in such a place (provided we somehow survive).
(Note: I am just speculating here, but it looks plausible.)
Kids: Many of the visitors at CeBit are parents with kids, and kids need some amusement. If these parents want to have a little time for themselves (and they do, believe me, just because you are a dad or mom, that doesn't completely kill the nerd in you) what better than let them play on a gameconsole or some such gadget.
Even if it's not a console, kids need a little interaction, forcing them to a "watch only, no touching" policy frustrates the heck out of them, and as a consequence, their parents.
So, the non-reinforcement of this rule might just have been a little expression of social skills, like what you have in many big companies. You don't always enforce a rule, except if you want to come off like a total jackass and be treated like one by your colleagues.
I'm going to try this tomorrow. I have to install Slackware 8.0 on one of our dev workstation, and I was thinking about experimenting with the size of the swap.
From the poster of the article: What makes this even more funny is that Microsoft officials denied that the company had complained to the Messe. but the show organizers confirmed that Richard Roy, vice president, corporate strategy, had complained.
Now you can calm down.
Except the fact that it wasn't in Yale but in UK, that the rule wasn't in latin even though it was an ancient one, that they didn't compromise to coke and cake and that the sword wasn't to be carried to exams but everywhere in the campus... you got the story almost 100% right.
It's not that PS2 is kicked off Cebit, or Microsoft's initiative in that direction. No, what annoys me is Microsoft's systematic lying to the public, and then it gets away with it.
And since MS can do it without any consequences, they are going to repeat it, time and again.
How can someone who is so strongly-opinionated and blunt, so sure of himself to call the review "this is the most uninformed and uneducated review of a linux distribution I have ever read" afford to be so misinformed about Linux (yes, you can have swapping in a file, you can even share that file with Windows, read the Howto)?
And moreover, how can someone who demonstrates such blatant arrogance and ignorance, get such high mods?
I totally agree with the review, to have a swap file instead of a partition totally makes sense for desktop installs, because you don't want to increase the number of primary partitions, which you have only 4 anyway.
(Well, I know it's in the whole Europe, but I can only live in one country at a time.) So, what I have seen here in Finland, is mild to cold reception. I didn't see anyone buying them during the time I spent in the shops, and very few playing the demo console. No queue at the demo, either.
This in sharp contrast to queues that formed at demo machines when FF 10 or Diablo were released.
What is the experience of other fellow European gamers with regards to the Xbox launch?
I agree both with yours and the original post. I think they nicely complement each other (but why do I have the impression you would disagree?).
As for tech/cyberwar, we already see it, and Microsoft vs. world is proof. I have seen enough cyberwar to last me three lifetimes.