I guess I wasn't clear: I was only talking about in the digital, nonconservative realm, where you can duplicate an object that's already been created with virtually no effort or energy expenditure (well, there is some, but it's trivial).
Let me guess. You also believe it's stupid for software makers to sell their software. Every video game you find in the store should be free (or maybe cost about 2 bucks to cover for the plastic)? After all, software and game companies are just selling the same object over and over.
In this realm, the copies have virtually no value; in time, their cost will drop down to the marginal production cost (which is very low). So it's silly to try to have a business model that revolves around amortizing the cost of production out over not-yet-sold copies.
Just because it doesn't cost anything to make a copy doesn't mean the copy has no value. Take any piece of commercial software (and those virtual items can also be considered pieces of software). If a company invests 10 million dollars to make the software ("creating something new" as you put it), it wants to recover those costs. According to you, that company should charge 10 million dollars to a single customer and let that one customer distribute free copies all over because copies have no value.
Which is the best business model? Trying to sell one copy at a price of $10,000,000, or trying to sell a hundred thousand copies at a price of $100? Selling the same bits over and over again is a viable business model, and it's the only reason the software industry, the movie industry and the music industry exist.
Nintendo has its core demographic, as does Sony. Sony's core demographic is a lot more profitable
Nintendo and Sony have different core demographics, but I wouldn't say Sony's is a lot more profitable. Nintendo's demographic bought Pokemon, Nintendogs and Brain Training.
Sometime in January, we'll see sales results and then someone can declare a "winner".
That won't even work, they won't even use the same "unit of measure". In January, Nintendo will have sold "5 million consoles" and will claim victory (although the big N really doesn't care about the fight, it's only the fanboys), while Sony will have sold "100% of their consoles" (which might as well be fewer than a million), so they'll claim victory too.
but Wii appears poised to finally bring Mario and Co. into the multiplayer arena.
That's strange, I remember playing Mario Kart in multiplayer mode, with friends, in the same living room. Oh, and I had Super-Smash-Brothers Melee too, multiplayer, same living room.
Heck, Nintendo has been making multiplayer games decades ago with Mario Bros.
Yep, your old games still work-Sony promises full backward compatibility with all PS1 and PS2 games
I am not an American, but enough already. I travel the the US a lot. There is no shortage of broadband in most areas if you want it. Not everyone wants it.
It's not about there being a shortage of broadband. It's about people in the US not wanting to get broadband because they charge way more for a much worse service. Any company could say "We'll provide broadband at any house that wants it, even if it's in the most rural area, at a price of $500 per month for a 1Mbps connection", people simply won't buy it. Why do people in metropolitan areas (think New York, San Francisco, Toronto, etc.) have to pay twice as much for 10% of the bandwidth, if not because "America is falling behind".
People want broadband, they just don't want the crappy service providers offer at the moment.
I'm sure that a study of "1000 shoppers" had to include mostly IE users.
Even when I'm using Firefox, I don't use tabs to shop online. Tabs are useful on slashdot, and to view online documentation, but not to shop. You can't open several tabs at the same time, one to view the description of the item, one to add the item to your cart, one to fill the shipping address, one to fill the credit card information, etc.
Online shopping is a linear process and tabs can't help that.
I have a BSIT degree with a 3.5 GPA, but without real world experience in an IT department, it's impossible for me to find anything in IT that pays above tech support!
Then get an IT job with a tech support pay, get experience, then renegociate the pay. A degree is useless without experience, and an IT graduate without experience is not worth more than tech support pay, no matter the GPA.
I'm tired of the chicken-egg thing. If I don't have experience I can't get the job. If I can't get the job, how am I supposed to get experience?
I'm tired of those new graduates that all go like "I have a degree, I deserve a high paying job right now even though I have no experience whatsoever". You *can* get the job, simply not at a senior-programmer salary.
I got my first experience in a lousy job (VBA... *shudders*), with a lousy pay, but that got me the required experience to prove my worth, and get a pretty good job later on. Not everybody gets to be lead programmer on a multi-million project as soon as they graduate.
I know it won't satisfy you, but you could slipstream those drivers in (think of it as recompiling your custom kernel with a driver.. like I had to do with my wireless usb adapter that wasn't recognised by the latest installer.
The problem with slipstreaming is that you need to install Windows XP before slipstreaming the drivers so you can install Windows XP, but you can't install Windows XP in the first place.
That's not true. The retail versions of XP now come with SP2 slipstreamed into them.
The retail CD I bought in 2002 doesn't have SP2. Why should I pay a second time to use the software I bought before?
You can also do it your self. The Service Pack installers provides the ability to slipstream it to an XP cd that you've copied to disc. You then burn this back to disc and viola, you have an XP install disc with SP2 already applied. Just Google for 'SP2 slipstream'. Here, I did it for you, http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/windowsxp_sp2 _slipstream.asp.
Hey, guess what, the "tutorial" you linked to requires Windows XP to be installed before you can slipstream SP2 to the CD. So the steps to install WinXP-SP2 on a PC are :
Install Windows XP pre-SP2 on secondary PC
Download SP2 on secondary PC
Slipstream SP2 to a CD
Uninstall Windows XP on secondary PC (remember, your license forces you to uninstall if you install on another machine)
Install Windows XP with slipstreamed SP2 on target PC
Talk about user-friendly. I hope you didn't have plans for the evening. And if you don't have the luxury of another PC hanging around for step 1, then you're shit out of luck, because you already can't install Windows XP on your current PC.
Also, if you are a Volumne license customer or have an MSDN subscription, you will get media and ISO downloads for XP with SP2 already applied.
Right... Uncle Fred most probably has an MSDN subscription... obviously... What kind of world do you live in?
There is an updated Windows available, it's called XP SP2. The OP just wasn't using it.
I paid real money to get a shiny plastic thing labeled "Windows XP" a couple of years ago. May I get a "XP SP2" CD without it costing me more money, or do I have to pay a second time for the same thing?
technically, the latest version of Microsoft's OS is XP SP2. If you use an install disc from 2001 (for *any* OS) it isn't going to recognise hard drive interfaces that were invented *after* 2001.
I do have a retail CD of Windows XP (pre-SP1) that I bought early 2002, and forked real money for. If I put it in my drive and it doesn't let me install "because I need SP2", pray tell me where I can download the ISO for the CD I need without having to pay more money.
Try a FC4 CD with a brand new raid card and see if it recognises it. What do you do when it doesn't?
I'll go to the Fedora website and get the latest installer for free.
Absolutely. Bad hardware support is entirely because the people writing code for Linux don't think they should bother with device drivers. It has nothing at all to do with the fact that hardware manufacturers won't give up enough information to do it correctly.
How about having a decent binary interface to the kernel so that the next time I update my kernel, I don't need to update all of my drivers with it? So much time and effort is spent on updating every driver for every version of the kernel, that could be better spent on actually making those drivers better.
Nothing is forcing anyone right now, but since the average non-IT user has no frame of reference to know if they should or shouldn't use it, they'll take Microsoft's word that "high priority" is the same thing as "must have".
I also heard that, when IE7 gets installed, it sets itself to be the default browser. All those people who had someone set Firefox as their default browser will suddenly be using another browser without even knowing why.
I can't verify that though, as all my machines are on some flavor of Linux. Anyone can confirm?
If we're talking total handheld units sold, that is true. Consoles, its not even remotely close. There's about 10x as many PS2s in the world as there are GameCubes.
A handheld gaming console is a gaming console is a console.
And considering the amount of PS2's that died after warranty, making people buy a new one, I don't trust Sony's number. Sure they sold a whole lot of millions of PS2, but not all of them are still in use/still usable.
If it is, then you imply they should have a good knowledge of every single field their decision making touches. Every single one - law, business economy, medicine, pharmaceutics, university research, child care, road planning, ship lane ice breaking, geology, hydrology, satellite communications, nutrition, animal husbandry, criminology, emergency veterinary care, time keeping, library organization, weapon systems development,
The Minister of Defense should have at least a basic knowledge of warfare strategies, of weapons and such.
The Minister of Finance should have at least a basic knowledge of economics
The Minister of Health should have at least a basic knowledge of biology, healthcare and pharmaceutics.
The Minister of Education should have at least a basic knowledge of science and library organization.
The Minister of Technology should have at least a basic knowledge of technology
From what I understand of the US politics, anybody can pass laws on any topic, and that is ridiculous. I don't expect every politician to be knowledgeable in every field, but I don't expect politicians to work on laws in fields they don't understand at all.
I'm quite sure the entire Fedora series has had "out of the box" support for cameras. I know Ubuntu has, from the start.
Unfortunately, all I've see so far, both from Fedora and Ubuntu, is "read-only" support for cameras. You can plug the camera in and transfer your pictures from the camera to the computer, but you can't transfer pictures from the computer to the camera (which is very useful when trying to fill up a flash card to bring to the store to have them printed). I never figured which device to mount to get write access to my camera.
Alcohol and driving are just slapped with an age limit so that only (theoretically) responsible adults will be drinking or driving. Why are drugs so different?
Because drugs are addictive? Something that harms you *and* chemically makes you want more of it should indeed be banned. And yes, I think cigarettes shouldn't be allowed either.
Governments and police are there to protect you from others, but also to protect you from yourself (which is why suicide is illegal, hard to enforce though).
When is the Fedora project going to start fixing its bugs instead of just pushing out bleeding edge packages?
The whole point of Fedora is to be bleeding edge, not to be 100% stable. Fedora introduces bleeding edge features, and Red Hat fixes the features, that's how it is, and that's how it is supposed to be. If you can't cope with bleeding edge features that are not guaranteed to be stable, then Fedora is simply not for you.
Ubuntu makes Fedora look like useless because those teams work hard on bug fixes.
Ubuntu aims for usability and stability, Fedora aims for bleeding edge. Different distros, different goals. Use the right tool for your job.
The guns aren't a risk, the guns are a right. Mostly to protect us from our own government.
From what I can see, it's not working. Your own government is raping you time and again, taking away your rights one at a time, and nobody lifts a finger.
Why don't you just admit that your guns are to shoot any redneck that trespasses on your property and stop with the hypocrisy. Let's make a tally of how many times a gun owned by a citizen was properly used to protect him from his own government in the past 100 years, and let's compare that to how many times a gun owned by a citizen was misused in order to kill or injure someone in the same period of time. I bet the ratio won't be very high.
I've been using XGL/Compiz/Beryl for a few months and it makes the desktop experience more fluid and natural.
I've used XGL/Compiz for a while too, and while it's fun and slick when moving windows and changing desktops, it just plain sucks when it comes to resizing a window. Funny how you never see a window being resized in any of those demo videos.
As long as it takes several seconds just to resize a window (which is a very, very basic task for a window manager, they could do that back in the 80's), I consider XGL to be unusable.
Whihc brings me to another question. What happens when the WGA cop is triggered. Your machine still functions right? you just can't get updates or fixes for vulnerabilities....
If I recall correctely, you have 30 days to authenticate or the WGA cop disables everything except IE. "Everything" probably includes the ability to be a spam-bot, but I'm still not sure.
Slashdot Mirror
Which is the best business model? Trying to sell one copy at a price of $10,000,000, or trying to sell a hundred thousand copies at a price of $100? Selling the same bits over and over again is a viable business model, and it's the only reason the software industry, the movie industry and the music industry exist.
That's strange, I remember playing Mario Kart in multiplayer mode, with friends, in the same living room. Oh, and I had Super-Smash-Brothers Melee too, multiplayer, same living room.
Heck, Nintendo has been making multiplayer games decades ago with Mario Bros.
Funny... that's not what I heard...It's not about there being a shortage of broadband. It's about people in the US not wanting to get broadband because they charge way more for a much worse service. Any company could say "We'll provide broadband at any house that wants it, even if it's in the most rural area, at a price of $500 per month for a 1Mbps connection", people simply won't buy it. Why do people in metropolitan areas (think New York, San Francisco, Toronto, etc.) have to pay twice as much for 10% of the bandwidth, if not because "America is falling behind".
People want broadband, they just don't want the crappy service providers offer at the moment.
Even when I'm using Firefox, I don't use tabs to shop online. Tabs are useful on slashdot, and to view online documentation, but not to shop. You can't open several tabs at the same time, one to view the description of the item, one to add the item to your cart, one to fill the shipping address, one to fill the credit card information, etc.
Online shopping is a linear process and tabs can't help that.
Then get an IT job with a tech support pay, get experience, then renegociate the pay. A degree is useless without experience, and an IT graduate without experience is not worth more than tech support pay, no matter the GPA.
I'm tired of the chicken-egg thing. If I don't have experience I can't get the job. If I can't get the job, how am I supposed to get experience?
I'm tired of those new graduates that all go like "I have a degree, I deserve a high paying job right now even though I have no experience whatsoever". You *can* get the job, simply not at a senior-programmer salary.
I got my first experience in a lousy job (VBA... *shudders*), with a lousy pay, but that got me the required experience to prove my worth, and get a pretty good job later on. Not everybody gets to be lead programmer on a multi-million project as soon as they graduate.
The problem with slipstreaming is that you need to install Windows XP before slipstreaming the drivers so you can install Windows XP, but you can't install Windows XP in the first place.
The retail CD I bought in 2002 doesn't have SP2. Why should I pay a second time to use the software I bought before?
You can also do it your self. The Service Pack installers provides the ability to slipstream it to an XP cd that you've copied to disc. You then burn this back to disc and viola, you have an XP install disc with SP2 already applied. Just Google for 'SP2 slipstream'. Here, I did it for you, http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/windowsxp_sp2 _slipstream.asp.
Hey, guess what, the "tutorial" you linked to requires Windows XP to be installed before you can slipstream SP2 to the CD. So the steps to install WinXP-SP2 on a PC are :
Talk about user-friendly. I hope you didn't have plans for the evening. And if you don't have the luxury of another PC hanging around for step 1, then you're shit out of luck, because you already can't install Windows XP on your current PC.
Also, if you are a Volumne license customer or have an MSDN subscription, you will get media and ISO downloads for XP with SP2 already applied.
Right... Uncle Fred most probably has an MSDN subscription... obviously... What kind of world do you live in?
I paid real money to get a shiny plastic thing labeled "Windows XP" a couple of years ago. May I get a "XP SP2" CD without it costing me more money, or do I have to pay a second time for the same thing?
I do have a retail CD of Windows XP (pre-SP1) that I bought early 2002, and forked real money for. If I put it in my drive and it doesn't let me install "because I need SP2", pray tell me where I can download the ISO for the CD I need without having to pay more money.
Try a FC4 CD with a brand new raid card and see if it recognises it. What do you do when it doesn't?
I'll go to the Fedora website and get the latest installer for free.
How about having a decent binary interface to the kernel so that the next time I update my kernel, I don't need to update all of my drivers with it? So much time and effort is spent on updating every driver for every version of the kernel, that could be better spent on actually making those drivers better.
Damn, that is nice. Thanks. Where did you get that info?
I also heard that, when IE7 gets installed, it sets itself to be the default browser. All those people who had someone set Firefox as their default browser will suddenly be using another browser without even knowing why.
I can't verify that though, as all my machines are on some flavor of Linux. Anyone can confirm?
A handheld gaming console is a gaming console is a console.
And considering the amount of PS2's that died after warranty, making people buy a new one, I don't trust Sony's number. Sure they sold a whole lot of millions of PS2, but not all of them are still in use/still usable.
The Minister of Defense should have at least a basic knowledge of warfare strategies, of weapons and such.
The Minister of Finance should have at least a basic knowledge of economics
The Minister of Health should have at least a basic knowledge of biology, healthcare and pharmaceutics.
The Minister of Education should have at least a basic knowledge of science and library organization.
The Minister of Technology should have at least a basic knowledge of technology
From what I understand of the US politics, anybody can pass laws on any topic, and that is ridiculous. I don't expect every politician to be knowledgeable in every field, but I don't expect politicians to work on laws in fields they don't understand at all.
Unfortunately, all I've see so far, both from Fedora and Ubuntu, is "read-only" support for cameras. You can plug the camera in and transfer your pictures from the camera to the computer, but you can't transfer pictures from the computer to the camera (which is very useful when trying to fill up a flash card to bring to the store to have them printed). I never figured which device to mount to get write access to my camera.
Because drugs are addictive? Something that harms you *and* chemically makes you want more of it should indeed be banned. And yes, I think cigarettes shouldn't be allowed either.
Governments and police are there to protect you from others, but also to protect you from yourself (which is why suicide is illegal, hard to enforce though).
There are places where it's actually illegal to drive if you're dangerously tired. If the US doesn't have such laws, then your laws really suck.
The whole point of Fedora is to be bleeding edge, not to be 100% stable. Fedora introduces bleeding edge features, and Red Hat fixes the features, that's how it is, and that's how it is supposed to be. If you can't cope with bleeding edge features that are not guaranteed to be stable, then Fedora is simply not for you.
Ubuntu makes Fedora look like useless because those teams work hard on bug fixes.
Ubuntu aims for usability and stability, Fedora aims for bleeding edge. Different distros, different goals. Use the right tool for your job.
From what I can see, it's not working. Your own government is raping you time and again, taking away your rights one at a time, and nobody lifts a finger.
Why don't you just admit that your guns are to shoot any redneck that trespasses on your property and stop with the hypocrisy. Let's make a tally of how many times a gun owned by a citizen was properly used to protect him from his own government in the past 100 years, and let's compare that to how many times a gun owned by a citizen was misused in order to kill or injure someone in the same period of time. I bet the ratio won't be very high.
I've used XGL/Compiz for a while too, and while it's fun and slick when moving windows and changing desktops, it just plain sucks when it comes to resizing a window. Funny how you never see a window being resized in any of those demo videos.
As long as it takes several seconds just to resize a window (which is a very, very basic task for a window manager, they could do that back in the 80's), I consider XGL to be unusable.
If I recall correctely, you have 30 days to authenticate or the WGA cop disables everything except IE. "Everything" probably includes the ability to be a spam-bot, but I'm still not sure.
Did you really misspell "poor" that way? Freudian slip?