I don't know if you've ever used XP, but Windows considers even the most trivial hardware upgrades to be new computers. When I added ram, I had to reactivate. When I switched video cards, I had to reactivate. When I switched motherboard/cpu, I had to reactivate. Microsoft's policy (though considering how asinine this is, I doubt they'd really get away with it) means that anyone who ever upgrades their computer , after two upgrades needs to buy a new Vista license. This is, in fact, the most severe license I've ever seen. It's certainly understandable that they would restrict their software to one machine; most software vendors do this. However, forcing the purchasing of new version for hardware upgrades is completely asinine, and completely inexcusable.
These sort of arguments completely miss the point. The biggest problems with GM food are the companies behind it. Companies like Monsanto are known, finding that their seeds have contaminated a field neighboring one for which the seeds are licensed and subsequently sued the owner of the field, which was accidentally contaminated. And worse still, they've won. Monsanto and the other GM food companies patent all their gene splicings, and very aggresively enforce them. In addition, the license aggrements mandate that all new seeds must be purchased for each new harvest. As a result, GM food is completely out of the price range of any 3rd world farmers.
I agree completely. While Opera 9's (my main browser) adblock is nice, it lacks one critical feature of the firefox extension: iframe blocking. It can only block images and applets, which is limiting.
this sort of thing would be trivial to defeat. All a webmaster has to do is write a script that changes a single pixel in the image every time it's accessed, and it wouldn't hash the same. Criminals aren't idiots. I see this as unlikely to do much, whilst bringing up all sorts of civil liberties issues. In the end this appears more like yet another attempt to whittle away our civil liberties, to indoctrinate the principles of censorship into the internet under the guise of "protecting the children."
If the world heats up, yes, it is very bad for anyone living on the coast, as the warming melts glaciers and causes rising sea levels, destroying coastal cities.
You seem to be confusing natural with good. Perhaps it is normal for the planet to go through trends of warming and cooling, but a few people might complain about losing San Francisco and New York to rising water levels.
I wouldn't want the government to control the internet. I would rather see the consumer make a choice and go with whichever Broadband provider suits their own personal beliefs and politics.
I would rather see a more unreliable internet than see the US gov't decide what is considered "Neutral" or not. This guy seems to be more libertarian than most of the senate. I like him.
Yeah, while that's a great ideal, it's not the reality right now. Personally, I have two choices for broadband interent: Comcast cable, or SBC DSL. A duopoly hardly is a good environment for fostering consumer choices. While capitalism is great and all, it breaks down when there are monopolies (or duopolies; they don't really allows for much more competition than monopolies). As it does not make sense for multiple companies to hang wires all around the country, a monopoly is assured. In order to protect other services which might use the wires of that monopoly (wires which were, by the way, laid partially with public money) from the monopolies' own interests (i.e., other VoIP providers from the monopolies' own VoIP service), regulation is neccessary.
Put more simply, this has nothing to do with reliability. This is about a few companies controlling the internet.
Moreover, Blu-ray has unimaginable support by movie companies, because of the very same reason everyone hates Sony and everyone hates the MPAA. The Blu-ray format has more DRM and other copy-protection than HD-DVD does.
Yeah, because even though HD-DVD and Blueray use the exact same content protection system, blueray's drm is far more onerous.
I have to agree. The aluminium casing for the 12" powerbook is very nice, and it's a shame that you can't get an ultra-portable with it anymore. I have never liked the iBook casing; after a few weeks it gets horribly scratched up and looks terrible. I haven't seen a MacBook in person yet, so I'm still hoping that it's higher quality plastic than the iBook case.
A resonably comparable computer? What planet are you on (or rather, where do you shop--I want to go there)? The retail price for the video card alone is ~$400.
I have a nVidia 6800, bought for $300 a year ago, and it struggles with modern games. I've found that anything older than 6 months will not play modern games with all the eyecandy.
I wrote a essay on the subject a few months ago. I think that (while Apple may not do it) this is their chance to take serious market share, when microsoft is at its weakest.
According to Microsoft, these are the requirements for a 5 (and thus the ability to run aero glass):
1GB of memory
CPU score equivalent to a 4.4Ghz P4 or a 4400+ AMD K8 CPU
60FPS 1080i WM high definition glitch free capable
DVD optical drive
Memory bandwidth score of 4.0GB/sec
Glitch free high definition audio hardware
64-bit capable
1600 x 1200 capable graphics sub-system and monitor
Hard drive score of 70MB/sec aggregate
256MB of graphics memory
D3D Score of 130Efps
DX10 hardware
VDDM driver
CPU with SSE2 support
I wonder if anyone's ever told them that a 4.4 ghz P4 doesn't exist? That the highest is a measly 3.73GHZ?
That's completly untrue. These cards are able to be sold for cheaper because they don't need as high manufacturing standards as the top of the line cards. For those, every pipeline has to be perfect (or within an acceptable range of that) in order for it not to be thrown away. The brilliant thing about selling these kinds of cards, is that they don't have to just throw them away. Instead, they disable the faulty pipelines and sell them for cheaper. Thus they make $250 instead of nothing. Some people who buy them get lucky and get ones with mostly good pipelines. They can then renenable the pipelines, and get better performance. However, there will be problems like video corruption.
>> "It doesn't come cheap, ringing in at close to $150..."
Wow. Those $200 WalMart PC's have got everyone's value systems really fucked up.
That's a pretty idiotic comment. PSUs tend to cost about $50, so, yes one that costs three times that would be expensive. Similarly, if someone was charging $10 for a very good apple, one might comment that they didn't come cheap also. Value isn't some absolute: $100 isn't very expensive, but $500 is. It depends on the product in question.
I know it's fashionable and chic for Slashdotters to despise the president, but blindly believing the media just because you don't like the other side is pretty stupid.
In a murder case, should the judge always believe the suspect when he claims "not guilty"?
I don't know what decade he's in, but it's hard to find even a budget laptop that has only 30gb of hdd space. By the time the price of flash has shrunk, the files people will be using will be that much bigger, as will the harddrives. Without some major advance in the manufacture of flash, it will always be significantly more expensive per-gigabyte than hdd.
And the argument that 30gb ought to be enough for anyways (sound familiar?) is a fallacy. As disk space grows, so does the size of content and programs.
Also, flash memory is way too slow to be used as primary storage. Putting 512MB of MP3s on my SD card takes almost a three minutes. Drive to drive, that's under 10 seconds.
That's totally wrong. The whole point of using memory instead of a hdd is because of speed; the long time for your mp3 player to fill is due to the transfer rate of whatever you're hooking it up to (ie usb).
Microsoft is pro HD-DVD due to the DRM located within Blu-Ray. This is one isntance where we should take sides with the monopoly. HD-DVD's are the better solution for the customer.
You are very confused. I'm pretty sure Microsoft's decision has nothing to do with DRM, based on the fact that both format use the same DRM, the AACS (Advanced Access Content System.) Consumers lose with either one, but at least with blueray we get superior technology.
Why has everyone in the industry been recently bemoaning how expensive hd games are going to be? PC games have supported the equivelent (4:3) of 720p for years, and 1080p for at least a while. Nobody's complained about that. Why all the furor just because console gaming is finally getting something that PC gamers have had for years?
The site's dead, so I can't tell if this was on the list, but defintely everyone should consider donating to the eff. They have done so much good work protecting our digital rights and hopefully they'll be able to continue in the future.
The main problem I see that's keeping mass adoption is ease of installation of rails apps. PHP apps are extremely simple to install. Nearly all hosting providers support it, and installation is usually comprised of uploading some files to a directory and running an install script. For RoR apps, much special configuration is needed. Even at progressive hosts that have RoR installed, like dreamhost and textdrive, people are currently having immense difficulty getting RoR apps working (look at all of the topics in their respective forums.)
As a developer RoR is a godsend, and compared with PHP development is incredible. But developer hapiness doesn't drive user adoption. Unless some things majorly change, I can't really see RoR catch on as a consumer technology, rather like the situation with J2EE today. But I can see it usurping the place of technologies like J2EE and.Net in the enterprise.
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I don't know if you've ever used XP, but Windows considers even the most trivial hardware upgrades to be new computers. When I added ram, I had to reactivate. When I switched video cards, I had to reactivate. When I switched motherboard/cpu, I had to reactivate. Microsoft's policy (though considering how asinine this is, I doubt they'd really get away with it) means that anyone who ever upgrades their computer , after two upgrades needs to buy a new Vista license. This is, in fact, the most severe license I've ever seen. It's certainly understandable that they would restrict their software to one machine; most software vendors do this. However, forcing the purchasing of new version for hardware upgrades is completely asinine, and completely inexcusable.
These sort of arguments completely miss the point. The biggest problems with GM food are the companies behind it. Companies like Monsanto are known, finding that their seeds have contaminated a field neighboring one for which the seeds are licensed and subsequently sued the owner of the field, which was accidentally contaminated. And worse still, they've won. Monsanto and the other GM food companies patent all their gene splicings, and very aggresively enforce them. In addition, the license aggrements mandate that all new seeds must be purchased for each new harvest. As a result, GM food is completely out of the price range of any 3rd world farmers.
I agree completely. While Opera 9's (my main browser) adblock is nice, it lacks one critical feature of the firefox extension: iframe blocking. It can only block images and applets, which is limiting.
this sort of thing would be trivial to defeat. All a webmaster has to do is write a script that changes a single pixel in the image every time it's accessed, and it wouldn't hash the same. Criminals aren't idiots. I see this as unlikely to do much, whilst bringing up all sorts of civil liberties issues. In the end this appears more like yet another attempt to whittle away our civil liberties, to indoctrinate the principles of censorship into the internet under the guise of "protecting the children."
This got modded +5 insightful how?
If the world heats up, yes, it is very bad for anyone living on the coast, as the warming melts glaciers and causes rising sea levels, destroying coastal cities.
You seem to be confusing natural with good. Perhaps it is normal for the planet to go through trends of warming and cooling, but a few people might complain about losing San Francisco and New York to rising water levels.
Yeah, while that's a great ideal, it's not the reality right now. Personally, I have two choices for broadband interent: Comcast cable, or SBC DSL. A duopoly hardly is a good environment for fostering consumer choices. While capitalism is great and all, it breaks down when there are monopolies (or duopolies; they don't really allows for much more competition than monopolies). As it does not make sense for multiple companies to hang wires all around the country, a monopoly is assured. In order to protect other services which might use the wires of that monopoly (wires which were, by the way, laid partially with public money) from the monopolies' own interests (i.e., other VoIP providers from the monopolies' own VoIP service), regulation is neccessary.
Put more simply, this has nothing to do with reliability. This is about a few companies controlling the internet.
Yeah, because even though HD-DVD and Blueray use the exact same content protection system, blueray's drm is far more onerous.
The same thing happens in Opera, which is my browser of choice. After browsing /. for a few minutes the browser just crashes. Very anoying.
A one time pad is not just "pretty damn secure," it's provably unbreakable (assuming, of course, that the pad is truly random and is never reused).
I have to agree. The aluminium casing for the 12" powerbook is very nice, and it's a shame that you can't get an ultra-portable with it anymore. I have never liked the iBook casing; after a few weeks it gets horribly scratched up and looks terrible. I haven't seen a MacBook in person yet, so I'm still hoping that it's higher quality plastic than the iBook case.
A resonably comparable computer? What planet are you on (or rather, where do you shop--I want to go there)? The retail price for the video card alone is ~$400.
That's not true.
I have a nVidia 6800, bought for $300 a year ago, and it struggles with modern games. I've found that anything older than 6 months will not play modern games with all the eyecandy.
I wrote a essay on the subject a few months ago. I think that (while Apple may not do it) this is their chance to take serious market share, when microsoft is at its weakest.
That's completly untrue. These cards are able to be sold for cheaper because they don't need as high manufacturing standards as the top of the line cards. For those, every pipeline has to be perfect (or within an acceptable range of that) in order for it not to be thrown away. The brilliant thing about selling these kinds of cards, is that they don't have to just throw them away. Instead, they disable the faulty pipelines and sell them for cheaper. Thus they make $250 instead of nothing. Some people who buy them get lucky and get ones with mostly good pipelines. They can then renenable the pipelines, and get better performance. However, there will be problems like video corruption.
I don't know what decade he's in, but it's hard to find even a budget laptop that has only 30gb of hdd space. By the time the price of flash has shrunk, the files people will be using will be that much bigger, as will the harddrives. Without some major advance in the manufacture of flash, it will always be significantly more expensive per-gigabyte than hdd.
And the argument that 30gb ought to be enough for anyways (sound familiar?) is a fallacy. As disk space grows, so does the size of content and programs.
Also, flash memory is way too slow to be used as primary storage. Putting 512MB of MP3s on my SD card takes almost a three minutes. Drive to drive, that's under 10 seconds.
That's totally wrong. The whole point of using memory instead of a hdd is because of speed; the long time for your mp3 player to fill is due to the transfer rate of whatever you're hooking it up to (ie usb).
Microsoft is pro HD-DVD due to the DRM located within Blu-Ray. This is one isntance where we should take sides with the monopoly. HD-DVD's are the better solution for the customer.
You are very confused. I'm pretty sure Microsoft's decision has nothing to do with DRM, based on the fact that both format use the same DRM, the AACS (Advanced Access Content System.) Consumers lose with either one, but at least with blueray we get superior technology.
just create a law banning the sale of video games, marked rated M or Adult, from being sold.
They can't do that. That would be giving legislative powers to a non-governmental agency, which is illegal.
They have some pretty sweet prizes, too:
Why has everyone in the industry been recently bemoaning how expensive hd games are going to be? PC games have supported the equivelent (4:3) of 720p for years, and 1080p for at least a while. Nobody's complained about that. Why all the furor just because console gaming is finally getting something that PC gamers have had for years?
The site's dead, so I can't tell if this was on the list, but defintely everyone should consider donating to the eff. They have done so much good work protecting our digital rights and hopefully they'll be able to continue in the future.
The main problem I see that's keeping mass adoption is ease of installation of rails apps. PHP apps are extremely simple to install. Nearly all hosting providers support it, and installation is usually comprised of uploading some files to a directory and running an install script. For RoR apps, much special configuration is needed. Even at progressive hosts that have RoR installed, like dreamhost and textdrive, people are currently having immense difficulty getting RoR apps working (look at all of the topics in their respective forums.)
.Net in the enterprise.
As a developer RoR is a godsend, and compared with PHP development is incredible. But developer hapiness doesn't drive user adoption. Unless some things majorly change, I can't really see RoR catch on as a consumer technology, rather like the situation with J2EE today. But I can see it usurping the place of technologies like J2EE and