Yes, well the problem with this is that MBSA is only available to people who have already used Microsofts WGA tools to convince MS that they have a genuine copy of windows.
"Doesn't the life of the unborn child come from both the mother and the father?"
Yes, but like everything else in this world the only rights that anybody seems to care about are womens.
Babies can die and men can get screwed till the cows come home just as long as mommy gets to kill the baby if it is inconvenient to her or have "daddy" pay the bills for her if it isn't.
" I just thought of a way this might be made useful. It depends on sensing the location of the user's head. It would work so that a user could tilt his head like he's trying to see 'around' to the other side of the spherical interface and the window manager would rotate in the windows/information from that side. So if you are looking at a text editor and need to check out a document momentarily you could crane your neck (I'm talking a slight gesture, not really craning, but the same motion) and the web browser that is pushed off to the side would slide back in. "
And the first thing a new user would do would be to get on the internet to find out how they can turn that goddamn crap off.
Sheesh. The last thing I want to do when using a PC is to have to ensure that I remain absolutely motionless lest my GUI start flipping windows all over the place.
I suggest you pitch that idea to the folks at Redmond ASAP. It might be just what we need to start turning people away from their Windows boxen in droves.
No, a loss leader is entirely different to product dumping.
Loss leaders are (still) used by supermarket chains to get you in the door. All those ads you see for half price margarine at Safeway are intended to get you to go to Safeway and presumably buy the rest of your groceries at the same time, at regular prices. They are trying to "lead" you to their store.
Dumping is when you sell your goods at below cost to wipe out your smaller regional competitors.
For example, in Australia there are two main liquor chains and a bunch of small independants.
When one of the dominant brands wants to open a new store in a particular suburb they will scout the area to see where the local competitors are. Having established that much they will then monitor the prices of the competitor stores and price their entire range at a point lowest than the independant locals. The prices they set are quite lower than what their other stores (in the same chain) charges for the same products. Eventually the independant local loses all its clientel, closes their doors at which point the chain liquor store returns their prices to parity with the rest of their stores.
It is unethical, immoral and illegal but they seem to get away with it amyway.
"everyone is comparing the cost of a CD to the cost of buying the same on iTMS. On iTMS you can buy just the tracks you want. So instead of getting maybe $6 revenue for the CD sale, they might be getting $2 or $3 for sale of just certain tracks. I can see this changing the whole dimensions of music distribution."
Yes, all of a sudden artists are no longer able to get away with releasing a CD with three worthwhile tracks and bunch of filler crap.
OMG, people only want to pay for the songs they like! The horror! The horror!
John Lennon & Yoko Ono had a track on their "Life With the Lions" album that was called "Two Minutes Silence" and thats all it was. Two minutes of silence so you could say that this 1.3 minutes of silence is just an incomplete rip-off of that track and is therefore a blatent copyright breach.
"No, the *TRUE* geeks wrote to the company, and received the free Tseng ET4000 Graphics Controller Data Book, with timing diagrams, register descriptions, etc, for programming."
yeah, I have a ET6000 still in use as well. What you say about the RAM is correct, they were very fast, reliable and gave a really crisp clear 2D image.
One of the reasons that they were underrated was because Tseng had some sort of fued going with MS and MS refused to include ET4000 drivers for windows. This was way back when most people just used the drivers that shipped with windows because that was all that was required (games for the most part didn't run under windows and 3D was non-existant). Also they were more expensive, so all the must-have-the-cheapest-possible-PC dingbats didn't buy them. I remember they used to cost something like AU$25 at a time when a Trident could be had for AU$5. Personally I thought an extra 20 bucks on a PC that was costing me a coupla grand was nothing because the alternatives (mainly Tridents and S3's) were quite crappy and the others you mention (plus "Paradise", remember them?) were all considerably more than the ET4000, so the Tseng was a pretty good compromise.
" OH yeah, the tridents werre like the standard back then.. I think we had mostly t8900's, ISA, and a 1meg card was like golden."
True, those crappy Tridents did come as standard in most of the crappy clones of the time. They were after all the cheapest cards you could get. You could buy them for less than it would cost you to buy a happy meal at McDonalds.
The true geeks of the period had Tseng Labs ET4000 cards.
" Wow, they went from 0% of the market to 27% of the market."
I have an xbox. If MS do what it looks like they're gonna do with xb2, kill backwards compatibility with xb1 software, then I sure won't be helping them maintain their 27% status. I'm pretty sure I won't be Robinson Crusoe in that respect.
If I'm gonna lose the ability to play my old games anyway, I'm gonna switch over to the PS3. Sony are a prick of a company in many ways, but at least they don't kill off their customers software investments with every new generation.
Having said that, if MS are able to pull an emulated rabbit out of their hat and manage to reliably emulate the old xbox so that games run as well as they do on native hardware then all this will be moot.
"MicroChannel wasn't proprietary either; IBM successfully licensed it to other companies."
I am forced to wonder what the hell "proprietary" means in your world.
In my world, if you have to pay a licence fee to use something then it is "proprietary".
Indeed, the Holy Grail of producing proprietary technology is to have it accepted as a defacto standard which effectively forces all your competitors to pay you a licence fee.
This is what IBM attempted to do with MCA.
Fast forward to the current day and you will see that this is exactly what Microsoft are busily attempting to do with their proprietary WMA+DRM codec. If they could only convince all the punters out there to start using WMA instead of MP3 then they would be able to charge licence fees to every personal music player manufacturer on the planet.
1) Produce proprietary technology 2) ???? 3) Attain overwhelming market dominance and defacto standard status 4) Charge licence fees to every device manufacturer on the planet 5) Profit $$$
"The reason they don't allow this, of course, is that allowing the return of software would obliterate all profit in the retail arena. My girlfriend worked in clothing retail at a fairly upscale store, and the number of people that would buy something, wear it, and return it was staggering. With software, though, I could buy it, copy it, and return it, so I have my money AND the product. Allowing the return of copyable goods just doesn't make business sense."
Quite frankly, I don't give a damn. If software and other content providers are going to insist on providing a legal contract (EULA) that a purchaser is unable to view before the sale takes place then they can damn well expect to wear the costs involved when people buy their products, read their EULAs, decline to accept said EULAs and then return their products.
"All you need to do is a slight file format transforamtion (just uuencode and then zip) will mask the watermarks."
You are quite correct that this will defeat the watermarking.
There would be significant side affect though. You could say goodbye to downloading a single file from multiple sources because if we were to use your proposed solution then every copy of "The Matrix" on the P2P network would be unique, therefore you would not have the advantage of pulling in all the "parts" from disparate sources.
I run X/KDE on a SMP machine and I have to tell you that X/KDE is still horribly sluggish compared to Windows is, even on much slower single CPU PCs, although I suppose that this could be caused by KDE rather than X.
"You're not allowed to transfer content from one medium to another without the copyright owner's permission."
The funny thing is, that for most (PC) games, you are required to copy the content to another medium. This is generally known as "installing" the game. Obviously you have the owners implicit permission to do so, but that is not the point.
The question then becomes are you allowed to modify the copy that you have legally made of the software? Or does the copyright owner own the copyright to the copy that resides on your computer? I'd say they probably do.
So what about programs running concurrently in RAM? Just say I make a mod that doesn't require actually altering any of the files on my hard disk. Just say this program can be run after the main game is loaded and it is cable of swapping out parts of memory pertaining to the game and replacing the contensts with something else. Something like nude skins for a beach volleyball game for instance?
I have not modified the game at all, I have simply run a totally seperate app that manipulates the contents of the RAM in my computer.
Is this still illegal? I seriously doubt it would stand up in court if someone were silly enough to try it on.
"Won't this cut the throughput of your application server?"
Well, from TFA:
"I intend using it to store MP3s, images and video, and will stream music to various places around the house."
Does one really need a 1.X GHz CPU to accomplish that?
The answer is, of course, "no".
We are talking 100Mbit ethernet (wired) or 11/55Mbit (wireless) here. Any pentium class PC is more than capable of serving media files to ethernet at the rate of 100Mbit per second.
The truth is, this moron spent a thousand bucks on something he could have done for less than two hundred, and wrecked a really nice piece of equipment in the process.
He would have been far better off if he had have bought himself a pentium box to make a media server out of and used his Mini Mac as the media player in his living room.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, well the problem with this is that MBSA is only available to people who have already used Microsofts WGA tools to convince MS that they have a genuine copy of windows.
Mine does!
"Doesn't the life of the unborn child come from both the mother and the father?"
Yes, but like everything else in this world the only rights that anybody seems to care about are womens.
Babies can die and men can get screwed till the cows come home just as long as mommy gets to kill the baby if it is inconvenient to her or have "daddy" pay the bills for her if it isn't.
" I just thought of a way this might be made useful. It depends on sensing the location of the user's head. It would work so that a user could tilt his head like he's trying to see 'around' to the other side of the spherical interface and the window manager would rotate in the windows/information from that side. So if you are looking at a text editor and need to check out a document momentarily you could crane your neck (I'm talking a slight gesture, not really craning, but the same motion) and the web browser that is pushed off to the side would slide back in. "
And the first thing a new user would do would be to get on the internet to find out how they can turn that goddamn crap off.
Sheesh. The last thing I want to do when using a PC is to have to ensure that I remain absolutely motionless lest my GUI start flipping windows all over the place.
I suggest you pitch that idea to the folks at Redmond ASAP. It might be just what we need to start turning people away from their Windows boxen in droves.
No, a loss leader is entirely different to product dumping.
Loss leaders are (still) used by supermarket chains to get you in the door. All those ads you see for half price margarine at Safeway are intended to get you to go to Safeway and presumably buy the rest of your groceries at the same time, at regular prices. They are trying to "lead" you to their store.
Dumping is when you sell your goods at below cost to wipe out your smaller regional competitors.
For example, in Australia there are two main liquor chains and a bunch of small independants.
When one of the dominant brands wants to open a new store in a particular suburb they will scout the area to see where the local competitors are. Having established that much they will then monitor the prices of the competitor stores and price their entire range at a point lowest than the independant locals. The prices they set are quite lower than what their other stores (in the same chain) charges for the same products. Eventually the independant local loses all its clientel, closes their doors at which point the chain liquor store returns their prices to parity with the rest of their stores.
It is unethical, immoral and illegal but they seem to get away with it amyway.
"everyone is comparing the cost of a CD to the cost of buying the same on iTMS. On iTMS you can buy just the tracks you want. So instead of getting maybe $6 revenue for the CD sale, they might be getting $2 or $3 for sale of just certain tracks. I can see this changing the whole dimensions of music distribution."
Yes, all of a sudden artists are no longer able to get away with releasing a CD with three worthwhile tracks and bunch of filler crap.
OMG, people only want to pay for the songs they like! The horror! The horror!
"It's easier to just have a machine of each type... or to run VMWare (which I do a lot).",/i>
Yep, I use a combo of Vmware and multiple PC's with a KVM.
Dual boot is way too much of a pain to bother with.
A sniveling ANONYMOUS COWARD wrote
"No, the sheep are the ones admiringly looking on at such ineffectual dilattante windmill-tilting."
Yeah, anybody who values their privacy must be a fucking hippy or something.
Nobody sane would want to do that. Privacy is for assholes who have something to hide.
John Lennon & Yoko Ono had a track on their "Life With the Lions" album that was called "Two Minutes Silence" and thats all it was. Two minutes of silence so you could say that this 1.3 minutes of silence is just an incomplete rip-off of that track and is therefore a blatent copyright breach.
"No, the *TRUE* geeks wrote to the company, and received the free Tseng ET4000 Graphics Controller Data Book, with timing diagrams, register descriptions, etc, for programming."
I stand corrected sir!
yeah, I have a ET6000 still in use as well. What you say about the RAM is correct, they were very fast, reliable and gave a really crisp clear 2D image.
One of the reasons that they were underrated was because Tseng had some sort of fued going with MS and MS refused to include ET4000 drivers for windows. This was way back when most people just used the drivers that shipped with windows because that was all that was required (games for the most part didn't run under windows and 3D was non-existant). Also they were more expensive, so all the must-have-the-cheapest-possible-PC dingbats didn't buy them. I remember they used to cost something like AU$25 at a time when a Trident could be had for AU$5. Personally I thought an extra 20 bucks on a PC that was costing me a coupla grand was nothing because the alternatives (mainly Tridents and S3's) were quite crappy and the others you mention (plus "Paradise", remember them?) were all considerably more than the ET4000, so the Tseng was a pretty good compromise.
"3. use the graphic card cpu for all processing"
I sure hope that was a joke or else it is the single most retarded thing I've seen on Slashdot today.
No wonder it was posted as an AC.
" OH yeah, the tridents werre like the standard back then.. I think we had mostly t8900's, ISA, and a 1meg card was like golden."
True, those crappy Tridents did come as standard in most of the crappy clones of the time. They were after all the cheapest cards you could get. You could buy them for less than it would cost you to buy a happy meal at McDonalds.
The true geeks of the period had Tseng Labs ET4000 cards.
That "Mike" sure is a funny guy, huh?
" Wow, they went from 0% of the market to 27% of the market."
I have an xbox. If MS do what it looks like they're gonna do with xb2, kill backwards compatibility with xb1 software, then I sure won't be helping them maintain their 27% status. I'm pretty sure I won't be Robinson Crusoe in that respect.
If I'm gonna lose the ability to play my old games anyway, I'm gonna switch over to the PS3. Sony are a prick of a company in many ways, but at least they don't kill off their customers software investments with every new generation.
Having said that, if MS are able to pull an emulated rabbit out of their hat and manage to reliably emulate the old xbox so that games run as well as they do on native hardware then all this will be moot.
"I consider smart phones to be extentions of PDAs, so it's one direction. A smartphone is still a PDA, it just also does a little bit more..."
The problem with that statement is that the smartphones are being made mostly by phone manufacturers and not PDA manufacturers.
Smartphones are basically phones after a few years of feature creep
"MicroChannel wasn't proprietary either; IBM successfully licensed it to other companies."
I am forced to wonder what the hell "proprietary" means in your world.
In my world, if you have to pay a licence fee to use something then it is "proprietary".
Indeed, the Holy Grail of producing proprietary technology is to have it accepted as a defacto standard which effectively forces all your competitors to pay you a licence fee.
This is what IBM attempted to do with MCA.
Fast forward to the current day and you will see that this is exactly what Microsoft are busily attempting to do with their proprietary WMA+DRM codec. If they could only convince all the punters out there to start using WMA instead of MP3 then they would be able to charge licence fees to every personal music player manufacturer on the planet.
1) Produce proprietary technology
2) ????
3) Attain overwhelming market dominance and defacto standard status
4) Charge licence fees to every device manufacturer on the planet
5) Profit $$$
"The reason they don't allow this, of course, is that allowing the return of software would obliterate all profit in the retail arena. My girlfriend worked in clothing retail at a fairly upscale store, and the number of people that would buy something, wear it, and return it was staggering. With software, though, I could buy it, copy it, and return it, so I have my money AND the product. Allowing the return of copyable goods just doesn't make business sense."
Quite frankly, I don't give a damn. If software and other content providers are going to insist on providing a legal contract (EULA) that a purchaser is unable to view before the sale takes place then they can damn well expect to wear the costs involved when people buy their products, read their EULAs, decline to accept said EULAs and then return their products.
If they don't like it, too bad, so sad.
Cheesy sfx aside, it will be hard pressed to better the BBC TV adaptation from the 80's.
I'm a fan of DA and Hitchikers Guide but I'll probably give this a miss unless I have a chance to see it out of convenience, ie an inflight movie etc
"All you need to do is a slight file format transforamtion (just uuencode and then zip) will mask the watermarks."
You are quite correct that this will defeat the watermarking.
There would be significant side affect though. You could say goodbye to downloading a single file from multiple sources because if we were to use your proposed solution then every copy of "The Matrix" on the P2P network would be unique, therefore you would not have the advantage of pulling in all the "parts" from disparate sources.
Shouldn't that be "ka-boom"?
I run X/KDE on a SMP machine and I have to tell you that X/KDE is still horribly sluggish compared to Windows is, even on much slower single CPU PCs, although I suppose that this could be caused by KDE rather than X.
" OpenOffice.org is used because OpenOffice it trademarked (by someone other than OpenOffice.org)"
That is totally ridiculous. If you disagree then I would suggest you go and try registering microsoft.org and see how far you get.
Sheesh
"You're not allowed to transfer content from one medium to another without the copyright owner's permission."
The funny thing is, that for most (PC) games, you are required to copy the content to another medium. This is generally known as "installing" the game. Obviously you have the owners implicit permission to do so, but that is not the point.
The question then becomes are you allowed to modify the copy that you have legally made of the software? Or does the copyright owner own the copyright to the copy that resides on your computer? I'd say they probably do.
So what about programs running concurrently in RAM? Just say I make a mod that doesn't require actually altering any of the files on my hard disk. Just say this program can be run after the main game is loaded and it is cable of swapping out parts of memory pertaining to the game and replacing the contensts with something else. Something like nude skins for a beach volleyball game for instance?
I have not modified the game at all, I have simply run a totally seperate app that manipulates the contents of the RAM in my computer.
Is this still illegal? I seriously doubt it would stand up in court if someone were silly enough to try it on.
"Won't this cut the throughput of your application server?"
Well, from TFA:
"I intend using it to store MP3s, images and video, and will stream music to various places around the house."
Does one really need a 1.X GHz CPU to accomplish that?
The answer is, of course, "no".
We are talking 100Mbit ethernet (wired) or 11/55Mbit (wireless) here. Any pentium class PC is more than capable of serving media files to ethernet at the rate of 100Mbit per second.
The truth is, this moron spent a thousand bucks on something he could have done for less than two hundred, and wrecked a really nice piece of equipment in the process.
He would have been far better off if he had have bought himself a pentium box to make a media server out of and used his Mini Mac as the media player in his living room.