"How do you think they're going to get to customers? Through a broadband pipe. Cable companies have them. We have them. Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain't going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there's going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they're using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?"
Clearly this guy has a stick up his pipe (and it's tubes, not pipes you moron). IANAE but here's how I figure it: I pay my ISP for access to the Internet. Google pays their ISP for access to the Internet. What happens in between is called the cost of doing business. You don't hear Walmart bitching because they have to ship their crap from Elbonia to Hometown, USA in order to sell it.
"The Internet can't be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment and for a Google or Yahoo! or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes free is nuts!"
No. What's nuts is that I guess he forgot about the $60/mo raping they're handing people. Yes, I realize that in the tiny land of Nugotheosia every house has a 1Tb/s fiber tube connected straight to the Internets for only $1/mo. However, this is the America we're talking about, where infrastructure has to span huge distances and urban areas usually only have one or two providers.
There's not much news here really. Telecoms trying to screw their customers for more profit: old news. Political parties disagreeing about levels of governmental regulation: old news. Even if the bill does pass, it probably has more holes than the proverbial block of Swiss cheese and will be about as effective as the CAN SPAM act.
I think i'd prefer something like that over the damned ctrl+alt+backspace in linux I've hit that so many damned times by accident
But it offers some fun:)
* n00b has signed in * n00b: Hey, I just started using linux. It's neat. guru: Liar. n00b: I'm using gaim on linux! I just installed it! guru: Prove it n00b: How? guru: Press CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE * n00b has signed out *
Forget where I saw that. Might have been UserFriendly or somesuch.
Yes you can - usually. In Task Manager, find process "Explorer.exe" and kill it. If it doesn't restart right away, go to File -> New Task, and run Explorer.exe.
That is one way, yes. A much cleaner way that very few people are aware of is this:
Go to Start > Shutdown. When the dialog appears, hold CTRL+ALT+SHIFT and press Cancel. Explorer will cleanly unload all of it's resources and shutdown. To start it back up, open Task Manager (CTRL+SHIFT+ESC is one way) and go to File > New Task and run 'explorer'.
This method was designed for people writing plugins and handlers for Explorer who needed to be able to unload it all and start fresh without rebooting or uncleanly killing Explorer's process. Can be nice to know.
Nuclear weapons are the one great threat to the very existence of mankind (that we have created ourself). They should be irradicated utterly, and no one whatsoever should have them at all.
National ID cards are no more a violation of privacy than having a driver's license. These simply provide identification for everyone in the country in lieu of having state IDs or no ID at all.
I am not REQUIRED to have a driver's license and I am free to travel state-to-state without one. A driver's license is a form of identification, true, but that's more a secondary function. If law enforcement can demand/require the display of the National ID at any time, that IS a violation of privacy.
The closest thing we have to a National ID card are social security cards. Each citizen has a number that's already used to index just about everything known about that individual. National ID cards will solve none of the shortcomings of social security numbers.
The existence of this information has legitimate uses...You come off sounding as though you're against bank accounts, credit cards, and signing your name on university enrollments.
There is a difference between giving information out on a case-by-case basis and having a federal identification card. There have been times when I've refused to give my SSN/phone number/address/etc just because some schmuck company thinks they should have it.
I'm not some paranoid privacy nutjob, but I do think that citizens deserve a certain level of privacy and freedom, and a National ID cuts unacceptably into both of those. These cards would do little more than allow the government to keep it's thumb firmly on it's citizens.
Now it's even easier to pick out nice fat targets.
I don't really buy this. Anyone bright enough to pull off any sort of assault would have the ability to locate targets without randomly scrolling around Google Maps. The reasons behind censoring these images is probably more along the lines of making it harder for somebody to get detailed layout of a facility where dangerous materials/objects are located. By pixelating the area, it's a lot harder to plan a "raid" of the facility and it's a cheap way to try and provide a little more public safety. Whether it's ineffectual or not is open for debate.
That said, there are other interesting things to be found via Maps. For example, near Great Falls, MT's Malmstrom AFB you can find several places (one, two) that many people have identified as Minuteman III nuclear missile silos.
I think it comes down to the fact that any nefarious groups who have the dedication and resources to pull something off probably have better planning materials than Google Maps at their disposal.
As the attached bacteria rotate their flagella, feeding on surrounding glucose, they push their bead forward at speeds of around 15 microns per second.
As interesting as this sounds, they sure aren't going anywhere very fast.
15 microns is about 0.00059 inches, so to travel one inch, it would take about 1,700 seconds, or a half an hour. IANAD, but it seems like you'd have better luck just letting the body's digestive and circulatory systems do the work for you.
As an added bonus you won't need to start spraying Lysol's Mold and Mildew Remover in your eyes, ears, and uh, other places.
Regarding the recent action GoDaddy took against Seclists.org, I want to know just *why* I should keep my domains at GoDaddy, and not transfer to somebody who shows some respect for their customers.
I find it disgraceful that GoDaddy would bend over when somebody like MySpace pushes a little. How can I now know that my domains are safe from being shut down on a whim? By not following any meaningful procedure to resolve the conflict, you have caused myself and many others to loose any faith we had with you as a registrar.
When my domains expire in a few months, I will be transferring them to another registrar unless GoDaddy publicly apologizes to Fyodor Vaskovich, the owner of Seclists.org. In addition, he should also receive some compensation for his trouble, such as a free three-year renewal for all his domains.
Maybe if they get hit hard enough, somebody over there--maybe even ol' Bobby Parsons (does anyone know his email address?)--will figure out that companies can't pull this kind of crap anymore without repercussions.
So when is a new model going to look past the edges of our solar system?
The guy's on crack.
The real reason behind the ice ages is the Sun's evil sister-star: Nemesis.
According to my scientific analysis, it just so happens that Nemesis orbits our solar system once every 100,000 or 41,000 years, exactly the same period as between ice ages on Earth. As the rouge star passes closest to the Sun, it triggers an influx of neutrino emissions in the star's inner core of dark matter. This results in an ion-theta flux imbalance which reduces the star's luminosity by a factor of omega/psi.
As everyone knows, the main problem with Milankovitch cycles is that they can't explain how the ice ages go from 100,000 year cycle to 41,000 year cycle. The cycles predicted by the Nemesis Model line up with the observations, and thus the model is proven. Now go buy my book.
Do you know what the version number is of Windows XP? It's Windows NT 5.1. Care to guess what the version number was of Windows 2000? Windows NT 5.0.
And Vista is Windows NT 6.0 (though I think that's primarily used to describe the kernel more than anything). Considering that there is not a standard for determining version numbers, they add up to little more than marketing gimmicks. It doesn't really matter if Vista is a major revision and OSX 10.whatever is a minor revision. What it comes down to is: are you willing to pay $X for the new upgrade?
I have no idea what kinds of features Apple's recent upgrades offer, but I have a hard time believing that they are worth $150 a pop. Heck, after 5 updates to OSX, you've shelled out around $750, nearly five times the cost of upgrading XP to Vista Home Premium (what most home users will go for). It's also worth recalling that Microsoft has published two service packs and many smaller updates for XP that while primarily for security/stability reasons, they did provide some new features. These were free.
Is it worth it? I guess that's up to consumers, but I think that Apple hypes up and then tries to milk it's updates as much as possible. Of that $150, how much of it is for the pretty box and the ability to say, "I have the latest and greatest!"?
I'd mod you up but you're already +5 so I'll just reply and say Thanks.:)
Oddly enough, I'm not really at +5, but +4. The extra point comes from my karma bonus, though I thought that went away after you got near +5. When it shows +5 is there still the moderation drop-down menu? I wondered why I never seem to break the +4 barrier--maybe I should start disabling the bonus.
I think it's the same service (provided by Intuit), but other students or such like myself who have an AGI of $27,000 or less can go to taxfreedom.com and do their federal taxes online for free. The program this year is actually quite good from both a technical and interface point of view.
For state income, some states let you do free filing online via their own websites (like UT), but AL, AR, AZ, GA, ID, IA, KY, MA, MI, MN, MO, MS, MT, NY, ND, NC, OK, OR, RI, VT, and WV are all members of the Free File Alliance, and you can usually file taxes in these states for free online.
I'm a poor student, so my only goal is to get my refund back as fast as possible. Granted, my return is simple, but it took only 6 days last year from submission to direct deposit. In any case, I've found that there's no reason not to file online, especially if it's free.
But it accurately reflects what their attitudes was, and likely still is.
I would hazard a guess that most people won't even read the part of his speech where he compares ISVs (independent software vendors) to pawns.
He wasn't saying the developers are pawns as in "worthless minions to do our evil bidding" or "clueless morons who can't make it without us". It was more of a chess analogy, saying that while each of the individual vendors/developers are not strong by themselves, when you take them as a group they are a very important part of any platform's success. He goes on to say that these developers are a big part of what can make or break you.
Unfortunately the speech is a nasty raster image, so it's a pain to copy/paste, but this excerpt is a good example:
They are very valuable pawns in the struggle however. We cannot succeed without them. If you've ever tried to play chess with only the pieces in the back row, you've experienced losing, OK, because you've got to have those pawns. They're essential. So you can't win without them and you have to take good care of them.
Could he have used a better, less easily misconstrued term? Sure, and it's impossible to really know what he was thinking at the time, but it doesn't appear as evil as Slashdot seems to be trying to make it out to be.
is it too much to have hosts that are not 30 something smart asses?
How can you say that!?!
They had a white male host, a black female host, and an Asian female host! Aside from finding a Hispanic hermaphrodite, how could it get any better than that?
is safer than XP or Vista. but still safer than Vista (;-))
You say this with what evidence?
Vista hasn't even been released to the public yet and the only versions people have seen are unfinished betas and a very few corporate users who have started playing with the new RTM Enterprise. You know you're on Slashdot when a product that isn't even out yet has already been relegated to the insecure/unsafe/junk software category.
However, I see you have that little winky smiley thing at the end of your post. Does that mean you're just kidding and it's all a joke? Or are you serious, but going under the guise of joking so if somebody calls you out on your statement you can just say "whoosh!"? Emoticons are stupid--better for people to say what they mean and stick with that.
It's true that WMV videos are in an ASF container, however the codec itself is an implementation of the VC-1 codec, a standardized codec that is open to free implementation by anyone (like FFmpeg).
XVID/various "divx" AVIs - low market penetration
Uh... AVI containers are probably the single most widespread video container available. *Everything* can read them. As for DivX/XviD...
I suppose the best open and reasonably widespread alternative is mpeg 4
DivX/Xvid *are* an implementation of MPEG-4, and it's more and more common for systems to have decoders for them. Downside for Internet video is the lack of streaming support--(typically) the entire file has to download to start watching.
My biggest beef with Flash-served videos are that usually the player sucks making it difficult to seek the video. Additionally, it's hard/impossible to save the video to your hard drive for later/unbuffered viewing. Finally, Flash videos usually suck pretty hard when it comes to quality/filesize tradeoffs.
Personally, my favorite video format for online stuff would be WMV, mostly because it is designed to stream content and has great support on Windows and Linux (not sure about Apple). The downside is the DRM crap that some people try and throw in, however ignoring that, for streaming and HD playback on Windows it's very good.
I suppose Quicktime would be next up since the container also supports streaming (Quicktime itself is not a codec, common ones used are Sorenson 3 and H.264), but the Quicktime player for Windows blows hardcore. It is the slowest and most unresponsive application, even running on a brand new dual core system. For that reason alone I avoid.mov files whenever possible.
If it has less than 3% market share or the version is over three years old, strongly consider what your effort is worth before changing code to support it.
Whew! It's a good thing then that Apple is just about to pierce 3% of the desktop market share! Of course you should be careful making claims like that around here since Linux desktops are around only 3% as well, though a quick search didn't turn up any recent numbers.
I find it humorous when people (and certain stupid stereotyping commercials) talk about how consumers are switching from PCs to Apple in droves when just now they are approaching 3% (OSX being released in 2001). I don't anticipate much of an impact, but I do have to wonder what a new release of Windows will do to Apple's market share.
Why not another Star Trek? Oh wait, with some minor modifcations, Stargate is Star Trek.
And with some minor modifications Star Trek is Doctor Who which with some minor modifications is Battlestar Galactica which is very similar to Lost in Space which seems a lot like Futurama, a show that brings back memories of Andromeda which is like that old show...
Science fiction based around space travel is simply a variation on a theme. Some guys have this thing (Stargate, Enterprise, TARDIS, Galactica, Jupiter 2, Planet Express) that takes them around the galaxy and they meet these bad guys and they have to outwit them and they do nice things and sometimes bad things and gosh that's all there is to it.
Some have more direction (new BSG, DS9) than others which just wander around (TNG, Dr Who) while some do a bit of both (SG1). Nobody is claiming that Stargate is a brilliant new idea, just that it's an idea it's been well executed and well received (based on it's 10 years on the air if nothing else).
can someone rate it for me? say, on a scale between 1 (farscape) and 10 (the new battlestar)?
I would have thought 1 would be where Voyager sits?:)
I'd have to put it at 9.5 or 10, simply because I enjoy it as much as BSG.
The thing with Stargate is that just like BSG (Black Market), it has a few episodes that just aren't that great (The Light). Also shared with BSG, it's *much* better if you know the backstory and have been watching the show instead of trying to just jump right in (though there are episodes where this would be fine).
I've watched SG-1 since it first aired in 1997 and can say that I've enjoyed it. Overall it's been quite good and it has had some stellar episodes. Atlantis struggled the first season, but has gotten better over time and I'm looking forward to the rest of the 3rd season.
Out of the box, Linux supports a wider range of hardware than Windows does.
I don't have to modeprobe ndiswrapper in XP to get my wireless network card to work every time I reboot my computer.
I refuse to believe the argument that Linux supports more (or even as much) hardware as a recent version of Windows, based simply on empirical evidence. Network cards (especially wireless), graphic cards, and storage controllers *all* fair better on a Windows system. You might say this is because the vendors write drivers for Windows and not Linux, and you'd be right.
Slashdot Mirror
There's not much news here really. Telecoms trying to screw their customers for more profit: old news. Political parties disagreeing about levels of governmental regulation: old news. Even if the bill does pass, it probably has more holes than the proverbial block of Swiss cheese and will be about as effective as the CAN SPAM act.
Good idea? Sure. Will it fly? Like a chicken.
I think i'd prefer something like that over the damned ctrl+alt+backspace in linux I've hit that so many damned times by accident
:)
But it offers some fun
* n00b has signed in *
n00b: Hey, I just started using linux. It's neat.
guru: Liar.
n00b: I'm using gaim on linux! I just installed it!
guru: Prove it
n00b: How?
guru: Press CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE
* n00b has signed out *
Forget where I saw that. Might have been UserFriendly or somesuch.
Yes you can - usually. In Task Manager, find process "Explorer.exe" and kill it. If it doesn't restart right away, go to File -> New Task, and run Explorer.exe.
That is one way, yes. A much cleaner way that very few people are aware of is this:
Go to Start > Shutdown. When the dialog appears, hold CTRL+ALT+SHIFT and press Cancel. Explorer will cleanly unload all of it's resources and shutdown. To start it back up, open Task Manager (CTRL+SHIFT+ESC is one way) and go to File > New Task and run 'explorer'.
This method was designed for people writing plugins and handlers for Explorer who needed to be able to unload it all and start fresh without rebooting or uncleanly killing Explorer's process. Can be nice to know.
Nuclear weapons are the one great threat to the very existence of mankind (that we have created ourself). They should be irradicated utterly, and no one whatsoever should have them at all.
That sounds like a job for Superman!
$4 Canadian is like, what? a dime?
Ah, poor Canada. For those confused about America's northern neighbor here are some comparisons:
America: A country with four seasons: spring, summer, fall, winter.
Canada: A country with two seasons: cold and not-as-cold (but still pretty cold).
America: Has the most powerful military machine on the planet.
Canada: Has two jeeps and one helicopter, currently waiting on parts.
America: Finds it difficult to apologize, especially to China.
Canada: Apologizes as a form of introduction.
And the one that reminded me of all this:
American: Wouldn't bend over to pick up a Canadian quarter.
Canadian: Wouldn't do it either.
I kid, I kid. (source)
National ID cards are no more a violation of privacy than having a driver's license. These simply provide identification for everyone in the country in lieu of having state IDs or no ID at all.
I am not REQUIRED to have a driver's license and I am free to travel state-to-state without one. A driver's license is a form of identification, true, but that's more a secondary function. If law enforcement can demand/require the display of the National ID at any time, that IS a violation of privacy.
The closest thing we have to a National ID card are social security cards. Each citizen has a number that's already used to index just about everything known about that individual. National ID cards will solve none of the shortcomings of social security numbers.
The existence of this information has legitimate uses...You come off sounding as though you're against bank accounts, credit cards, and signing your name on university enrollments.
There is a difference between giving information out on a case-by-case basis and having a federal identification card. There have been times when I've refused to give my SSN/phone number/address/etc just because some schmuck company thinks they should have it.
I'm not some paranoid privacy nutjob, but I do think that citizens deserve a certain level of privacy and freedom, and a National ID cuts unacceptably into both of those. These cards would do little more than allow the government to keep it's thumb firmly on it's citizens.
Now it's even easier to pick out nice fat targets.
I don't really buy this. Anyone bright enough to pull off any sort of assault would have the ability to locate targets without randomly scrolling around Google Maps. The reasons behind censoring these images is probably more along the lines of making it harder for somebody to get detailed layout of a facility where dangerous materials/objects are located. By pixelating the area, it's a lot harder to plan a "raid" of the facility and it's a cheap way to try and provide a little more public safety. Whether it's ineffectual or not is open for debate.
That said, there are other interesting things to be found via Maps. For example, near Great Falls, MT's Malmstrom AFB you can find several places (one, two) that many people have identified as Minuteman III nuclear missile silos.
I think it comes down to the fact that any nefarious groups who have the dedication and resources to pull something off probably have better planning materials than Google Maps at their disposal.
As the attached bacteria rotate their flagella, feeding on surrounding glucose, they push their bead forward at speeds of around 15 microns per second.
As interesting as this sounds, they sure aren't going anywhere very fast.
15 microns is about 0.00059 inches, so to travel one inch, it would take about 1,700 seconds, or a half an hour. IANAD, but it seems like you'd have better luck just letting the body's digestive and circulatory systems do the work for you.
As an added bonus you won't need to start spraying Lysol's Mold and Mildew Remover in your eyes, ears, and uh, other places.
I'd suggest that everyone here who is disgusted with this action, especially those who have domains registered with GoDaddy, email GoDaddy public relations and/or email their domain registration support.
Just as an example, here is what I sent: Maybe if they get hit hard enough, somebody over there--maybe even ol' Bobby Parsons (does anyone know his email address?)--will figure out that companies can't pull this kind of crap anymore without repercussions.
So when is a new model going to look past the edges of our solar system?
The guy's on crack.
The real reason behind the ice ages is the Sun's evil sister-star: Nemesis.
According to my scientific analysis, it just so happens that Nemesis orbits our solar system once every 100,000 or 41,000 years, exactly the same period as between ice ages on Earth. As the rouge star passes closest to the Sun, it triggers an influx of neutrino emissions in the star's inner core of dark matter. This results in an ion-theta flux imbalance which reduces the star's luminosity by a factor of omega/psi.
As everyone knows, the main problem with Milankovitch cycles is that they can't explain how the ice ages go from 100,000 year cycle to 41,000 year cycle. The cycles predicted by the Nemesis Model line up with the observations, and thus the model is proven. Now go buy my book.
I was unaware that 3*$129=$750
Doh, I saw the Canadian price ($149).
In any case, they are about to release 10.5, so it is 5 * $129 = $645. It's four times the cost of upgrading XP to Vista, not five. My mistake.
Do you know what the version number is of Windows XP? It's Windows NT 5.1. Care to guess what the version number was of Windows 2000? Windows NT 5.0.
And Vista is Windows NT 6.0 (though I think that's primarily used to describe the kernel more than anything). Considering that there is not a standard for determining version numbers, they add up to little more than marketing gimmicks. It doesn't really matter if Vista is a major revision and OSX 10.whatever is a minor revision. What it comes down to is: are you willing to pay $X for the new upgrade?
I have no idea what kinds of features Apple's recent upgrades offer, but I have a hard time believing that they are worth $150 a pop. Heck, after 5 updates to OSX, you've shelled out around $750, nearly five times the cost of upgrading XP to Vista Home Premium (what most home users will go for). It's also worth recalling that Microsoft has published two service packs and many smaller updates for XP that while primarily for security/stability reasons, they did provide some new features. These were free.
Is it worth it? I guess that's up to consumers, but I think that Apple hypes up and then tries to milk it's updates as much as possible. Of that $150, how much of it is for the pretty box and the ability to say, "I have the latest and greatest!"?
I'd mod you up but you're already +5 so I'll just reply and say Thanks. :)
:)
Oddly enough, I'm not really at +5, but +4. The extra point comes from my karma bonus, though I thought that went away after you got near +5. When it shows +5 is there still the moderation drop-down menu? I wondered why I never seem to break the +4 barrier--maybe I should start disabling the bonus.
In any case, no problem
TurboTax online
I think it's the same service (provided by Intuit), but other students or such like myself who have an AGI of $27,000 or less can go to taxfreedom.com and do their federal taxes online for free. The program this year is actually quite good from both a technical and interface point of view.
For state income, some states let you do free filing online via their own websites (like UT), but AL, AR, AZ, GA, ID, IA, KY, MA, MI, MN, MO, MS, MT, NY, ND, NC, OK, OR, RI, VT, and WV are all members of the Free File Alliance, and you can usually file taxes in these states for free online.
I'm a poor student, so my only goal is to get my refund back as fast as possible. Granted, my return is simple, but it took only 6 days last year from submission to direct deposit. In any case, I've found that there's no reason not to file online, especially if it's free.
Could anything happen at this point that even might help SCO?
Of course! Just as soon as they figure out the second step they'll be set.
I would hazard a guess that most people won't even read the part of his speech where he compares ISVs (independent software vendors) to pawns.
He wasn't saying the developers are pawns as in "worthless minions to do our evil bidding" or "clueless morons who can't make it without us". It was more of a chess analogy, saying that while each of the individual vendors/developers are not strong by themselves, when you take them as a group they are a very important part of any platform's success. He goes on to say that these developers are a big part of what can make or break you.
Unfortunately the speech is a nasty raster image, so it's a pain to copy/paste, but this excerpt is a good example:
Could he have used a better, less easily misconstrued term? Sure, and it's impossible to really know what he was thinking at the time, but it doesn't appear as evil as Slashdot seems to be trying to make it out to be.
Whos going to play young kirk? Old Kirk?
:)
THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE!
(I love the shattering glass sound effect. Quality stuff
is it too much to have hosts that are not 30 something smart asses?
How can you say that!?!
They had a white male host, a black female host, and an Asian female host! Aside from finding a Hispanic hermaphrodite, how could it get any better than that?
Enjoy your politically correct science, dammit!
is safer than XP or Vista.
but still safer than Vista (;-))
You say this with what evidence?
Vista hasn't even been released to the public yet and the only versions people have seen are unfinished betas and a very few corporate users who have started playing with the new RTM Enterprise. You know you're on Slashdot when a product that isn't even out yet has already been relegated to the insecure/unsafe/junk software category.
However, I see you have that little winky smiley thing at the end of your post. Does that mean you're just kidding and it's all a joke? Or are you serious, but going under the guise of joking so if somebody calls you out on your statement you can just say "whoosh!"? Emoticons are stupid--better for people to say what they mean and stick with that.
8675309
WMV - proprietary
.mov files whenever possible.
It's true that WMV videos are in an ASF container, however the codec itself is an implementation of the VC-1 codec, a standardized codec that is open to free implementation by anyone (like FFmpeg).
XVID/various "divx" AVIs - low market penetration
Uh... AVI containers are probably the single most widespread video container available. *Everything* can read them. As for DivX/XviD...
I suppose the best open and reasonably widespread alternative is mpeg 4
DivX/Xvid *are* an implementation of MPEG-4, and it's more and more common for systems to have decoders for them. Downside for Internet video is the lack of streaming support--(typically) the entire file has to download to start watching.
My biggest beef with Flash-served videos are that usually the player sucks making it difficult to seek the video. Additionally, it's hard/impossible to save the video to your hard drive for later/unbuffered viewing. Finally, Flash videos usually suck pretty hard when it comes to quality/filesize tradeoffs.
Personally, my favorite video format for online stuff would be WMV, mostly because it is designed to stream content and has great support on Windows and Linux (not sure about Apple). The downside is the DRM crap that some people try and throw in, however ignoring that, for streaming and HD playback on Windows it's very good.
I suppose Quicktime would be next up since the container also supports streaming (Quicktime itself is not a codec, common ones used are Sorenson 3 and H.264), but the Quicktime player for Windows blows hardcore. It is the slowest and most unresponsive application, even running on a brand new dual core system. For that reason alone I avoid
If it has less than 3% market share or the version is over three years old, strongly consider what your effort is worth before changing code to support it.
Whew! It's a good thing then that Apple is just about to pierce 3% of the desktop market share! Of course you should be careful making claims like that around here since Linux desktops are around only 3% as well, though a quick search didn't turn up any recent numbers.
I find it humorous when people (and certain stupid stereotyping commercials) talk about how consumers are switching from PCs to Apple in droves when just now they are approaching 3% (OSX being released in 2001). I don't anticipate much of an impact, but I do have to wonder what a new release of Windows will do to Apple's market share.
Why not another Star Trek? Oh wait, with some minor modifcations, Stargate is Star Trek.
And with some minor modifications Star Trek is Doctor Who which with some minor modifications is Battlestar Galactica which is very similar to Lost in Space which seems a lot like Futurama, a show that brings back memories of Andromeda which is like that old show...
Science fiction based around space travel is simply a variation on a theme. Some guys have this thing (Stargate, Enterprise, TARDIS, Galactica, Jupiter 2, Planet Express) that takes them around the galaxy and they meet these bad guys and they have to outwit them and they do nice things and sometimes bad things and gosh that's all there is to it.
Some have more direction (new BSG, DS9) than others which just wander around (TNG, Dr Who) while some do a bit of both (SG1). Nobody is claiming that Stargate is a brilliant new idea, just that it's an idea it's been well executed and well received (based on it's 10 years on the air if nothing else).
can someone rate it for me? say, on a scale between 1 (farscape) and 10 (the new battlestar)?
:)
I would have thought 1 would be where Voyager sits?
I'd have to put it at 9.5 or 10, simply because I enjoy it as much as BSG.
The thing with Stargate is that just like BSG (Black Market), it has a few episodes that just aren't that great (The Light). Also shared with BSG, it's *much* better if you know the backstory and have been watching the show instead of trying to just jump right in (though there are episodes where this would be fine).
I've watched SG-1 since it first aired in 1997 and can say that I've enjoyed it. Overall it's been quite good and it has had some stellar episodes. Atlantis struggled the first season, but has gotten better over time and I'm looking forward to the rest of the 3rd season.
Out of the box, Linux supports a wider range of hardware than Windows does.
I don't have to modeprobe ndiswrapper in XP to get my wireless network card to work every time I reboot my computer.
I refuse to believe the argument that Linux supports more (or even as much) hardware as a recent version of Windows, based simply on empirical evidence. Network cards (especially wireless), graphic cards, and storage controllers *all* fair better on a Windows system. You might say this is because the vendors write drivers for Windows and not Linux, and you'd be right.