"The thing with steam DRM though is that you don't really even notice it is there"
Until, of course, your two kids each want to play a game that is tied to your account and you realise they can't be logged into Steam at the same time even if they want to play entirely different games.
Well, that is not necessarily an indication that the driver is crashing. The card could be faulty in one of its 3D rendering pipelines or some part only engaged in 3D mode. By using the vesa (2D) driver that faulty part is not engaged therefore the PC doesn't crash.
Golly, if someone had written something like that regarding Linux I'm sure we would have seen a torrent of "See, this is why people don't use Linux blah blah blah" posts following it.
Come to think of it, that already happened in this thread!
"I think they're pretty satisfied with how things have gone so far on the Blu-Ray front."
Yes, user adoption has been going through the roof. I myself am struggling to find stores that have more than a dozen or so old DVDs on a shelf and those are usually pushed into a dark corner to make room for the huge numbers of Blueray Discs that they rent/sell.
Well, those and all the PSP Movie Discs that is.
Yes, I'm sure they are well chuffed with how Blue Ray is going.
"This is the first concrete deployment of "trusted computing" type system, and the reality is that it is working"
OK, that may be true in a purely technical sense.
"The content industry has won this round"
Ummm, if by winning you mean "Blue Ray is a successful platform that has been widely adopted by a large number of paying customers" then you would be totally wrong. They may have won the battle, but the have not won the war.
", and will continue to win with ever more secure encryption and a legion of untrusting, internet connected players in peoples living rooms."
Only if they manage to force people to buy that stuff. or somehow manage to make stuff that does what you say and somehow manage to provide value for money and user satisfaction as well, which would be no mean feat I assure you.
P.S. Why is it that I now have to manually put in HTML break codes to insert blank lines between paragraphs now?
"It has no doubt happened several times this year which we will probably never know about, but to dismiss every pro-Microsoft article out-of-hand just because they say Android isn't technically mature enough yet is either naive or unfairly biased."
Not true. Considering that Microsoft have proven themselves to be fluent and prolific liars over the years then any prudent person would rightly suspect any future articles and claims regarding the greatness of their products as being equally likely to be disingenuous or exaggerated.
Microsoft products got where they are now on the back of tech folks copying them and using them at home. Those tech folks then took to helping friends and family by installing those same products for them. Nowadays, as MS becomes better and better at locking down their products with DRM and more and more tech folk start coming to grips with linux you will find that this will eventually trickle down to the non tech users.
Personally, I sick and tired of fixing malware infestations for my relatives. These days I just stick dual boot ubuntu on their PC's, show them how it works and tell them they can use the non infested ubuntu or their old broken Windows. It's their choice. So far most people are quite happy as long as they don't want to run games, which mostly they don't.
Most of them just want to browse the web, send emails and write simple documents and you don't need windows for that.
" c) Set download caps- [...] Personally, I'll gladly take c."
Spoken like someone who hasn't had the "thrill" of surfing the net and wondering at every click "golly, I hope this will be worth the download" only to discover you have just streamed 150Mb of utter crap which you will never get back again.
You'd be surprised how crappy the Internet gets when you start having to micromanage every little thing you do just to conserve your bandwidth.
I have to resort to downloading ubuntu updates at work and then fucking sneaker-netting them on a USB key just to save on downloading bits.
You can forget streaming MP3's from my home server to my girlfriends place over the net like any self respecting geek would do. No, we can't do that because arsehole ISP's don't know how to run their businesses properly and have oversubscribed their networks in the rush to snare more customers than the competition using lies and obfuscation about the services they can provide to said customers.
And what point is there in having a blistering fast ADSL2 connection that is capable of filling your monthly download quota in an afternoon session?
I mean FFS, this is the 21st century and we are talking about just shifting bits around here. How fucking hard can that be?
Today we have networking tech available to us that was not even imaginable by past generations yet I'm still operating like its the goddamn 1980's and shifting crap around in my pocket on the modern day equivalent of a floppy disk.
What the fuck is up with that?
Can you imagine paying for cable TV and being sold "157 Channels" but discovering later that you can only watch 4 programs a week or else you have to pay for the "extra content". Nope, nobody would go for that because it is a retarded idea. Yet we are letting ISP's get away with it. Why is that?
ISP's should sell download speeds. The fatter your pipe the more you pay. Period.
Other than that you should be able to do whatever you damn well like with that pipe. Anything less is downright con artistry and smoke 'n' mirrors marketing bullshit.
I actually think you are quite wrong. Didn't they just recently manage to bribe a standards body into ratifying their totally unimplementable document standard just so they could muddy the waters and try to fool people into thinking that MS cares about standards? Even though they themselves don't even have a working implementation of their own "standard"?
I hope most geeks have better memories than geekoid here for all our sakes.
"UAC basically changed Windows so that you weren't expected to run as an administrator by default"
Not really. Users still effectively run as Administrator, it's just that now UAC pops up with (on average) 17 "are you sure you want to do that?" messages every time the user clicks on something.
"They used to release as they patched, but that was even more problematic"
Translation: Admins were sick and tired of rebooting servers on a daily basis.
Rather than do the impossible and redesign their OS from the ground up to make the constant rebooting issue irrelevant, they did the only thing possible wh
Clump all their updates into bundles so that reboots were "scheduled" and admins got used to the cycle.
Slashdot Mirror
"The thing with steam DRM though is that you don't really even notice it is there"
Until, of course, your two kids each want to play a game that is tied to your account and you realise they can't be logged into Steam at the same time even if they want to play entirely different games.
That shit never happened in the olden days.
Well, maybe not Ballmer.
Please don't tell me that Gates is dumber than Monkey Boy, I don't think I could cope.
I'd go into some sort of "does not compute" meltdown like "vger" did on that Star Trek episode I'm sure.
Well, that is not necessarily an indication that the driver is crashing. The card could be faulty in one of its 3D rendering pipelines or some part only engaged in 3D mode. By using the vesa (2D) driver that faulty part is not engaged therefore the PC doesn't crash.
Ummm, I purchased Nero for Linux just a few weeks back.
Meet bullet
What a bunch of numpties
Sad but true.
For anyone who wants more details regarding the true story of the Evilness of Gates & MS see;
http://www.vanwensveen.nl/rants/microsoft/IhateMS_1.html
Golly, if someone had written something like that regarding Linux I'm sure we would have seen a torrent of "See, this is why people don't use Linux blah blah blah" posts following it.
Come to think of it, that already happened in this thread!
Right click what? The 1970's era "C: Drive" in My Computer? I think not.
Try again caveman.
If you are unable to browse the Synaptic package manager to install a program then you must be the worlds biggest fucking idiot.
Years in tech support and you still can't use a point and drool interface.
What a maroon.
Hmmm, I'm pretty sure the Jaunty install I did last week included that option.
As for wanting to format your primary hard drive, isn't that what Windows does?
At least Linux will configure your boot sector so that you can boot either OS. Windows just FUBARs everything to suit it's own agenda.
"I think they're pretty satisfied with how things have gone so far on the Blu-Ray front."
Yes, user adoption has been going through the roof. I myself am struggling to find stores that have more than a dozen or so old DVDs on a shelf and those are usually pushed into a dark corner to make room for the huge numbers of Blueray Discs that they rent/sell.
Well, those and all the PSP Movie Discs that is.
Yes, I'm sure they are well chuffed with how Blue Ray is going.
"This is the first concrete deployment of "trusted computing" type system, and the reality is that it is working"
OK, that may be true in a purely technical sense.
"The content industry has won this round"
Ummm, if by winning you mean "Blue Ray is a successful platform that has been widely adopted by a large number of paying customers" then you would be totally wrong. They may have won the battle, but the have not won the war.
", and will continue to win with ever more secure encryption and a legion of untrusting, internet connected players in peoples living rooms."
Only if they manage to force people to buy that stuff. or somehow manage to make stuff that does what you say and somehow manage to provide value for money and user satisfaction as well, which would be no mean feat I assure you.
P.S. Why is it that I now have to manually put in HTML break codes to insert blank lines between paragraphs now?
"Your program that uses JNI won't run on a machine with a different instruction set or a different operating system."
Ummm, doesn't that also apply to C/C++?
just askin'
"Are Zune sales that good? "
Hey, as long as nVidia gets a contract to sell X million units to Microsoft they couldn't care less about how well Zune sells.
"It has no doubt happened several times this year which we will probably never know about, but to dismiss every pro-Microsoft article out-of-hand just because they say Android isn't technically mature enough yet is either naive or unfairly biased."
Not true. Considering that Microsoft have proven themselves to be fluent and prolific liars over the years then any prudent person would rightly suspect any future articles and claims regarding the greatness of their products as being equally likely to be disingenuous or exaggerated.
Microsoft products got where they are now on the back of tech folks copying them and using them at home. Those tech folks then took to helping friends and family by installing those same products for them. Nowadays, as MS becomes better and better at locking down their products with DRM and more and more tech folk start coming to grips with linux you will find that this will eventually trickle down to the non tech users.
Personally, I sick and tired of fixing malware infestations for my relatives. These days I just stick dual boot ubuntu on their PC's, show them how it works and tell them they can use the non infested ubuntu or their old broken Windows. It's their choice. So far most people are quite happy as long as they don't want to run games, which mostly they don't.
Most of them just want to browse the web, send emails and write simple documents and you don't need windows for that.
" c) Set download caps- [...] Personally, I'll gladly take c."
Spoken like someone who hasn't had the "thrill" of surfing the net and wondering at every click "golly, I hope this will be worth the download" only to discover you have just streamed 150Mb of utter crap which you will never get back again.
You'd be surprised how crappy the Internet gets when you start having to micromanage every little thing you do just to conserve your bandwidth.
I have to resort to downloading ubuntu updates at work and then fucking sneaker-netting them on a USB key just to save on downloading bits.
You can forget streaming MP3's from my home server to my girlfriends place over the net like any self respecting geek would do. No, we can't do that because arsehole ISP's don't know how to run their businesses properly and have oversubscribed their networks in the rush to snare more customers than the competition using lies and obfuscation about the services they can provide to said customers.
And what point is there in having a blistering fast ADSL2 connection that is capable of filling your monthly download quota in an afternoon session?
I mean FFS, this is the 21st century and we are talking about just shifting bits around here. How fucking hard can that be?
Today we have networking tech available to us that was not even imaginable by past generations yet I'm still operating like its the goddamn 1980's and shifting crap around in my pocket on the modern day equivalent of a floppy disk.
What the fuck is up with that?
Can you imagine paying for cable TV and being sold "157 Channels" but discovering later that you can only watch 4 programs a week or else you have to pay for the "extra content". Nope, nobody would go for that because it is a retarded idea. Yet we are letting ISP's get away with it. Why is that?
ISP's should sell download speeds. The fatter your pipe the more you pay. Period.
Other than that you should be able to do whatever you damn well like with that pipe. Anything less is downright con artistry and smoke 'n' mirrors marketing bullshit.
Don't stand for it people.
"I actually think MS is changing"
I actually think you are quite wrong. Didn't they just recently manage to bribe a standards body into ratifying their totally unimplementable document standard just so they could muddy the waters and try to fool people into thinking that MS cares about standards? Even though they themselves don't even have a working implementation of their own "standard"?
I hope most geeks have better memories than geekoid here for all our sakes.
Cool. Given that slashdot readership is quite high, then the 5% of 'dotters who apparently do care will come out to be quite a large number.
Solr_Flare must be quite chuffed with that.
Well, firstly, I would think that the users of those applications would think "godamm this app is slow, maybe I'll go look for an alternative"
Hmmm, I may be wrong but I'm sure I recall MS suing camera makers for using FAT in their cameras and that was thrown out of court.
This is more about the long filename hack rather than FAT itself.
I'm sure it will end with the same result tho
"UAC basically changed Windows so that you weren't expected to run as an administrator by default"
Not really. Users still effectively run as Administrator, it's just that now UAC pops up with (on average) 17 "are you sure you want to do that?" messages every time the user clicks on something.
"Personally, I'm looking forward to desktop file sharing and synchronization, as it will mean I can stop running all these FTP servers everywhere."
Uh, FTP servers? For desktop syncing? Have you not heard of rsync?
The mind boggles.
Ummm, will you have my babies?
"They used to release as they patched, but that was even more problematic"
Translation: Admins were sick and tired of rebooting servers on a daily basis.
Rather than do the impossible and redesign their OS from the ground up to make the constant rebooting issue irrelevant, they did the only thing possible wh
Clump all their updates into bundles so that reboots were "scheduled" and admins got used to the cycle.