"If you can't figure out a way around this, then i think i speak for most of the linux/bsd community when i say that we don't want you in our club anyway. This is really only going to serve to block people that shouldn't be using bittorrent. If you have a legit purpose for it, then this really shouldn't effect you."
I don't know if you were joking or half-joking, but sentiments and statements like this only serve to reinforce the sense of elitism and exclusivity of the linux community in the minds of joe public. This what is holding back the growth of the linux community and the general acceptance of linux and OSS among the general computing public, as well as aiding the perpetuation of companies like MS and Apple.
How does one determine who should and shouldn't be allowed to use a particular protocol or software? Less peers on bittorrent means shorter TTLs and less bandwidth on torrents, how is that a good thing?
"So you block some legitimate use... There are typically other ways of getting those materials anyway, so no major harm done."
Well some places you block port 80, or better still entirely remove internet access. there are typically other ways of getting those materials anyway, going to libraries, out to do field research, traveling to foreign countries, making long distance phone calls..so no major harm.
Such as? What necessary piece of functionality does IE have that Mozilla (or Opera, or others) don't have? Unfortunately its most likely the "windows feature" of having IE sitting on your desktop ready to go out of the box, or once you're done installing.
Yet another reason to not buy DRM ridden original movies, aside of course from the fact these movies were probably not worth watching in the first place.
Hey...maybe they're doing consumers a favor by not letting them watch said movie.
If it's required, many players will wonder why the hell they should buy the console version in the first place. Because they prefer not to, or cannot spend the money on a full gaming PC.
This has long been my problem with console shooters. The lack of precision of the thumbsticks. They did however make a Keyboard and Mouse that plugged directly into the Dreamcast, though I'm unsure if it works with Quake3.
The problem really is they need to design a more intuitive / effective controller mechanism, one that works as well as the keyboard + mouse combo in shooters. FPS with a lightgun type device and a 1 handed directional controller in the offhand would be really cool, maybe the Wii will deliver on that at some point.
Sorry, 2 years is "old"? I have machine three times that age that work perfectly. I despair at this idea that we all need to buy brand new machines every year. Well you don't really _have_ to buy a new PC every year, or necessarily even upgrade it. It all depends on your needs, and yours apparently are adequately served by a six year old PC. The upside is that a $500 PC that you buy today should serve you happily for the next 5 to 10 years though.
I personally consider 2 years as "older" considering Notebook models are obsoleted in 4 - 6 months, new GPUs are released in 6 to 8 month timeframes etc, and generally find 4 - 6 year old PCs unbearably slow when running windows XP/2K, and not compatible enough with current applications when running 95/98/ME. If you're not an overly demanding user, spending $500 on a new PC every 2 to 4 years doesn't sound that atrocious.
Essentially the graphics card in a 2 year old PC is 2 - 4 generations behind what is currently on the market if it was current generation during its time of purchase. I'd personally consider a PC with a GPU 2 to 4 generations old, a CPU 1 - 2 Generations behind current and ram and motherboard architecture 1 to 2 generations behind current to be "older" hardware.
You: I've not had any hardware incompatibilities so far but YMMV. The closest I've gotten to driver incompatibilities was one of the motherboards had an onboard Creative SB Live 5.1 chip. But a visit to Creative's website solved that, though it took some digging.
I clearly stated it was an onboard SB Live 5.1 chip. If you had even cared to check before trolling, you would have turned up this link to the drivers: Here if you can be bothered now, look. Or more likely just proceed with your sarcasm and baseless cynicism. Its not like I said it was perfect, I said it didn't have driver issues.
Besides, did you even read the BBC article?
"When I bought it, my Dell Dimension 8200 was fairly state-of-the-art (a few stats for the experts: Pentium 4 processor running at 2GHz, 384MB of RAM, a 64MB graphics card, and a Creative SB Live audio card)." If you expect to run Vista on a 2+ year old Dell with 384mb ram and a 64mb graphics card, you need to take a reality check, admittedly its within the specs listed on the Vista box, but when was the last time you bought games, applications or a Microsoft OS that performed decently at minimum or even recommended specs?
Surprisingly driver and hardware compatibility issues for Vista are actually not that bad, I've installed it on 3 PCs so far, two older systems (1 1/2 and 2 years old) and one newer system (1 month old)
I've not had any hardware incompatibilities so far but YMMV. The closest I've gotten to driver incompatibilities was one of the motherboards had an onboard Creative SB Live 5.1 chip. But a visit to Creative's website solved that, though it took some digging.
There are many reasons to avoid Vista, but from my experiences so far, drivers surprisingly isn't one of them. The main reason I'd avoid Vista is the price and the loss in performance, though no new OS generally increases performance on the same hardware, especially in the case of MS. Many are beginning to compare Vista to ME, which may still be a valid comparison at this point, but the driver do work.
Borrow a disk from someone who has purchased a copy, and install it as a 30 day evaluation copy, you may not like the way it looks or performs but you'll be surprised at how much hardware in compatible out of the box. Some small consolation I guess.
Not to be an MS Apologist, but Vista really doesn't seem all that bad. Its driver support is actually pretty decent. I'm evaluating Vista Business on my office desktop atm, its been installed for 2 weeks, aside from it feeling a little bloated its working fine so far. (A64-3500+, 1 GB Ram, nforce 4 mobo, nVidia 6800GS)
I was quite surprised actually when I installed it on a slightly older PC last week, I was having serious problems getting the onboard RAID on the MSI K8N SLI Platinum to work properly with an additional drive. More likely an MSI problem than an XP Problem. (1GB DDR400, A64-3000+ CPU, nVidia 6800GS)
XP just wouldn't recognize the additional drive, or the onboard SATA controller for the drive. I figured since the install was pretty much shot I'd try installing a copy of Vista business upgrade and see how much worse it could get. I was actually shocked when everything was detected on install, and its running fine (if a little slowly) now.
So in a sense it actually reduced my aggravation, though mainly because I'm not the one who has to use that PC.
I don't think its so much a problem with words or expressions not existing, or necessarily the popularity, part of the issue is English is spoken by such diverse cultures, with so many localized versions and expressions, that typically it is decanted down to essential words and phrases. Its too much of a global language.
With sufficient fluency, English also has many / all of the subtle nuances, sarcasm, cynicism, obfuscation that is available to the French, Chinese and Japanese languages for example.
Its just that with English, its often considered pretentious or excessive to be using many of the forms of words that have been relegated to antiquity.
I'd imagine though that learning Chinese, Russian or Japanese as a 2nd language is liable to be way more frustrating and difficult than French especially if seeking to attain native fluency.
IMO, FFT:A (Final Fantasy Tactics : Advance) on the DS is kinda tiring, the screen is too small, I found myself sticking the cart back into my GBA when playing FFT:A.
Having a blast replaying FF: Tactics on my 3.10OE-A' PSP though (and yes I own the original PSX game, multiple copies of it)
Why don't you log in on your slashID so we can identify you and refute your claims?
You have nothing to fear on Slashdot, there is much love for the DS and little for Sony here, some of us might be inclined to take you more seriously then.
There are a number of fairly organized malware purveyors from Canada as well, I think what separates the malware originating from North America, and the malware coming from the East is the purpose of the malware.
In NA, its mainly spyware or extortionware. From the East a majority of them are keyloggers, dialers.
They're likely to hurt themselves more than tackling the problem of "piracy". More of the usual punishing of paying customers, its not like people will be more willing to pay for games if you put additional hassle into their experience. And its definately not like it won't be cracked eventually. So unless your game is approaching greatness I don't think this will help their sales much if at all.
I personally won't buy any game I know to be encumbered by additional DRM such as online verification. I don't even really mind the more intrusive on-disk protection schemes, Safedisk, Securom, Starforce as much. Though usually they lead to lower compatibility and more stability issues than games which are not as rigidly copy protected.
Starforce protected games used to be a total bitch, but its not as bad these days and IMO not near as bad as having to online verify/force update your games.
HL2 was a tremendous pain in the ass because of the pathetic bandwidth they have for the Steam service. (From outside the USA, it took me about five hours of downloading/updating/verification to get my retail copy validated and updated before I could play the game.
Steam updates still take a fair bit of time, the only upside is possibly that if you lose your media, you can redownload all the binaries if you've registered them under your steam account, not sure if there is still a DVD copy protection check though.
The biggest value add I'd imagine would be online play, and also the ability to run player mods, if it was compelling many more people would buy the game for the replayability.
DRM is no substitute for releasing a quality product.
"Real scientists don't bother to argue with religious people any more than they'd bother to argue with the guy on the corner talking to a leprechaun. You can't exactly reason or argue or even discuss with people who claim that they talk to invisible, omnipotent, omnipresent beings that live in the sky."
Flamebait modding of the parent just reinforces the point that religious fanatics (which are arguably a vast majority of the religious communities) cannot and will not engage in an argument or discussion that they do not think they can "win".
I had a several Sociology and Social Science Professors who maintained that: "Christianity (religion) is an incorrigible proposition" Which is to say whatever you assert / argue / say only serves to make their cases and convictions stronger.
The reason many "real scientists" will not argue with the religious, is they acutely realize (generally through prior experience or encounters) that it is a complete waste of their time, ultimately the argument on which the religion is based relies on no observable or provable fact or phenomena.
FWIW, I spent 3 years living in Tornado alley (Rural N.E. Missouri, town population 25,000) and I was on satellite provided by Dish Network at the time.
I only once had an outage, during one particularly severe thunderstorm. And this was in an area prone to thunderstorms, snowfall in excess of 6" and occasional golfball sized hail.
All in all I would say satellite is not a problem in rural areas, it wasn't exactly cheap, but compared to the crap cable provided by Cable One in the area, it was an excellent value.
There is one possibility, but its not cheap, and tops out at 4GB (you have to slot in DDR DIMM Modules) If you really wanted to and could afford it, you could pick up a few and RAID them.
"India happens to be the world's largest democracy, their voting system is simpler and more secure than what can be found in recent US elections."
In theory it is, in practice though, one has to question how much simpler and more secure it is. The lack of high level manipulation of the elections, Corporate lobbys, campaign contributions etc. Usually gives way to more grassroots friendly approaches to "vote purchasing" and vote rigging, stipends, developmental funds, basic infrastructure etc. Due largely to the great disparity in wealth between the middle and upper classes and the the vast majority dwelling between that and below the poverty line.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know if you were joking or half-joking, but sentiments and statements like this only serve to reinforce the sense of elitism and exclusivity of the linux community in the minds of joe public. This what is holding back the growth of the linux community and the general acceptance of linux and OSS among the general computing public, as well as aiding the perpetuation of companies like MS and Apple.
How does one determine who should and shouldn't be allowed to use a particular protocol or software? Less peers on bittorrent means shorter TTLs and less bandwidth on torrents, how is that a good thing?
Well some places you block port 80, or better still entirely remove internet access. there are typically other ways of getting those materials anyway, going to libraries, out to do field research, traveling to foreign countries, making long distance phone calls..so no major harm.
Same premise, where do you draw the line though?
Yet another reason to not buy DRM ridden original movies, aside of course from the fact these movies were probably not worth watching in the first place.
Hey...maybe they're doing consumers a favor by not letting them watch said movie.
Modern Art is quite a good game too, as are many of the boardgames from Mayfair.
The World of Warcraft boardgame is also surprisingly decent, heh.
Well in Japan they have (or used to have) Yen and Pachinko balls.
This has long been my problem with console shooters. The lack of precision of the thumbsticks. They did however make a Keyboard and Mouse that plugged directly into the Dreamcast, though I'm unsure if it works with Quake3.
The problem really is they need to design a more intuitive / effective controller mechanism, one that works as well as the keyboard + mouse combo in shooters. FPS with a lightgun type device and a 1 handed directional controller in the offhand would be really cool, maybe the Wii will deliver on that at some point.
I personally consider 2 years as "older" considering Notebook models are obsoleted in 4 - 6 months, new GPUs are released in 6 to 8 month timeframes etc, and generally find 4 - 6 year old PCs unbearably slow when running windows XP/2K, and not compatible enough with current applications when running 95/98/ME. If you're not an overly demanding user, spending $500 on a new PC every 2 to 4 years doesn't sound that atrocious.
Essentially the graphics card in a 2 year old PC is 2 - 4 generations behind what is currently on the market if it was current generation during its time of purchase. I'd personally consider a PC with a GPU 2 to 4 generations old, a CPU 1 - 2 Generations behind current and ram and motherboard architecture 1 to 2 generations behind current to be "older" hardware.
You: I've not had any hardware incompatibilities so far but YMMV. The closest I've gotten to driver incompatibilities was one of the motherboards had an onboard Creative SB Live 5.1 chip. But a visit to Creative's website solved that, though it took some digging.
BBC reporter:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6407419.stm Me, any day of the week, over some n00b reporter, thanks for asking though.
I clearly stated it was an onboard SB Live 5.1 chip. If you had even cared to check before trolling, you would have turned up this link to the drivers:
Here if you can be bothered now, look. Or more likely just proceed with your sarcasm and baseless cynicism. Its not like I said it was perfect, I said it didn't have driver issues.
Besides, did you even read the BBC article? "When I bought it, my Dell Dimension 8200 was fairly state-of-the-art (a few stats for the experts: Pentium 4 processor running at 2GHz, 384MB of RAM, a 64MB graphics card, and a Creative SB Live audio card)." If you expect to run Vista on a 2+ year old Dell with 384mb ram and a 64mb graphics card, you need to take a reality check, admittedly its within the specs listed on the Vista box, but when was the last time you bought games, applications or a Microsoft OS that performed decently at minimum or even recommended specs?
Actually, user experience and performance aside.
Surprisingly driver and hardware compatibility issues for Vista are actually not that bad, I've installed it on 3 PCs so far, two older systems (1 1/2 and 2 years old) and one newer system (1 month old)
I've not had any hardware incompatibilities so far but YMMV. The closest I've gotten to driver incompatibilities was one of the motherboards had an onboard Creative SB Live 5.1 chip. But a visit to Creative's website solved that, though it took some digging.
There are many reasons to avoid Vista, but from my experiences so far, drivers surprisingly isn't one of them. The main reason I'd avoid Vista is the price and the loss in performance, though no new OS generally increases performance on the same hardware, especially in the case of MS. Many are beginning to compare Vista to ME, which may still be a valid comparison at this point, but the driver do work.
Borrow a disk from someone who has purchased a copy, and install it as a 30 day evaluation copy, you may not like the way it looks or performs but you'll be surprised at how much hardware in compatible out of the box. Some small consolation I guess.
Yeah there isn't really anything comparable here in Singapore.
Not much military surplus / decommissioning going on.
I'm assuming you've been to Sungei Road, and Kaichin Electronics on the 3rd Floor of Sim Lim Tower?
Not to be an MS Apologist, but Vista really doesn't seem all that bad. Its driver support is actually pretty decent.
I'm evaluating Vista Business on my office desktop atm, its been installed for 2 weeks, aside from it feeling a little bloated its working fine so far. (A64-3500+, 1 GB Ram, nforce 4 mobo, nVidia 6800GS)
I was quite surprised actually when I installed it on a slightly older PC last week, I was having serious problems getting the onboard RAID on the MSI K8N SLI Platinum to work properly with an additional drive. More likely an MSI problem than an XP Problem.
(1GB DDR400, A64-3000+ CPU, nVidia 6800GS)
XP just wouldn't recognize the additional drive, or the onboard SATA controller for the drive. I figured since the install was pretty much shot I'd try installing a copy of Vista business upgrade and see how much worse it could get. I was actually shocked when everything was detected on install, and its running fine (if a little slowly) now.
So in a sense it actually reduced my aggravation, though mainly because I'm not the one who has to use that PC.
I don't think its so much a problem with words or expressions not existing, or necessarily the popularity, part of the issue is English is spoken by such diverse cultures, with so many localized versions and expressions, that typically it is decanted down to essential words and phrases. Its too much of a global language.
With sufficient fluency, English also has many / all of the subtle nuances, sarcasm, cynicism, obfuscation that is available to the French, Chinese and Japanese languages for example.
Its just that with English, its often considered pretentious or excessive to be using many of the forms of words that have been relegated to antiquity.
I'd imagine though that learning Chinese, Russian or Japanese as a 2nd language is liable to be way more frustrating and difficult than French especially if seeking to attain native fluency.
IMO, FFT:A (Final Fantasy Tactics : Advance) on the DS is kinda tiring, the screen is too small, I found myself sticking the cart back into my GBA when playing FFT:A.
Having a blast replaying FF: Tactics on my 3.10OE-A' PSP though (and yes I own the original PSX game, multiple copies of it)
Why don't you log in on your slashID so we can identify you and refute your claims?
You have nothing to fear on Slashdot, there is much love for the DS and little for Sony here, some of us might be inclined to take you more seriously then.
Ignore the AC trolls, they seem to be flourishing these days.
I took a look at your project, and am intrigued by your ideas and would like the subscribe to your newsletter.
Arguably with MMOs the gap is closing.
Whilst still not PnP, Neverwinter nights came close.
"You're talking out of your ass."
Sure I'll bite, since AC trolls now get modded insightful.
Why don't you post your experiences to the contrary while logged in instead of AC?
Oh, you've got nothing to say?
I repair PCs for a living, and this is from my firsthand experiences of spyware ridden boxes, if you believe or have observed otherwise, do share.
There are a number of fairly organized malware purveyors from Canada as well, I think what separates the malware originating from North America, and the malware coming from the East is the purpose of the malware.
In NA, its mainly spyware or extortionware.
From the East a majority of them are keyloggers, dialers.
They're likely to hurt themselves more than tackling the problem of "piracy". More of the usual punishing of paying customers, its not like people will be more willing to pay for games if you put additional hassle into their experience. And its definately not like it won't be cracked eventually. So unless your game is approaching greatness I don't think this will help their sales much if at all.
I personally won't buy any game I know to be encumbered by additional DRM such as online verification. I don't even really mind the more intrusive on-disk protection schemes, Safedisk, Securom, Starforce as much. Though usually they lead to lower compatibility and more stability issues than games which are not as rigidly copy protected.
Starforce protected games used to be a total bitch, but its not as bad these days and IMO not near as bad as having to online verify/force update your games.
HL2 was a tremendous pain in the ass because of the pathetic bandwidth they have for the Steam service. (From outside the USA, it took me about five hours of downloading/updating/verification to get my retail copy validated and updated before I could play the game.
Steam updates still take a fair bit of time, the only upside is possibly that if you lose your media, you can redownload all the binaries if you've registered them under your steam account, not sure if there is still a DVD copy protection check though.
The biggest value add I'd imagine would be online play, and also the ability to run player mods, if it was compelling many more people would buy the game for the replayability.
DRM is no substitute for releasing a quality product.
"Real scientists don't bother to argue with religious people any more than they'd bother to argue with the guy on the corner talking to a leprechaun. You can't exactly reason or argue or even discuss with people who claim that they talk to invisible, omnipotent, omnipresent beings that live in the sky."
Flamebait modding of the parent just reinforces the point that religious fanatics (which are arguably a vast majority of the religious communities) cannot and will not engage in an argument or discussion that they do not think they can "win".
I had a several Sociology and Social Science Professors who maintained that: "Christianity (religion) is an incorrigible proposition" Which is to say whatever you assert / argue / say only serves to make their cases and convictions stronger.
The reason many "real scientists" will not argue with the religious, is they acutely realize (generally through prior experience or encounters) that it is a complete waste of their time, ultimately the argument on which the religion is based relies on no observable or provable fact or phenomena.
FWIW, I spent 3 years living in Tornado alley (Rural N.E. Missouri, town population 25,000) and I was on satellite provided by Dish Network at the time.
I only once had an outage, during one particularly severe thunderstorm. And this was in an area prone to thunderstorms, snowfall in excess of 6" and occasional golfball sized hail.
All in all I would say satellite is not a problem in rural areas, it wasn't exactly cheap, but compared to the crap cable provided by Cable One in the area, it was an excellent value.
There is one possibility, but its not cheap, and tops out at 4GB (you have to slot in DDR DIMM Modules)
If you really wanted to and could afford it, you could pick up a few and RAID them.
Gigabyte's I-Ram
"India happens to be the world's largest democracy, their voting system is simpler and more secure than what can be found in recent US elections."
In theory it is, in practice though, one has to question how much simpler and more secure it is. The lack of high level manipulation of the elections, Corporate lobbys, campaign contributions etc. Usually gives way to more grassroots friendly approaches to "vote purchasing" and vote rigging, stipends, developmental funds, basic infrastructure etc. Due largely to the great disparity in wealth between the middle and upper classes and the the vast majority dwelling between that and below the poverty line.