I had nearly the same experience. Except during the first call to India, I had read through all the numbers to the "customer care representative" and was promptly disconnected. I had to call and run through the same crap a second time just to get my damn drivers installed.
I there wasn't already a bunch of technical software already installed (this machine interfaces to a GC/Mass Spec) I would have reinstalled from scratch with our VLK.
What really is the point of this? MPEG is hardly CPU intensive to decode these days. Even an XBOX can decode MPEG4 HDTV streams on it's CPU, a lowly Celeron 750MHz.
At full HiDef widescreen resolutions (1920x1440)it takes a lot of CPU to decode in real time. I bought a PC-HDTV card for an Athlon 1Ghz machine to run MythTV. Playback stutters on HiDef at 720p or better. I ended up replacing it with a Haupage 150 analog card. Mpeg2 software decoding is great on the Athlon at standard resolutions. I may grab one of these units for my HDTV card.
That's upgrade pricing - you can't buy OSX in the first place without buying a Mac. Comparatively, Windows XP Home Edition Upgrade is $99.99 - which is cheaper
And XP professional upgrade is $199. Are you saying Mac OSX is closer to XP Home than Professional?
Windows was the cheapest operating system. Taking into account inflation, it still is. Linux is only as cheap as it is because people work on it for free.
Sorry, but no... Apple OSX Tiger is $129 retail through the Apple store online. And I assume you don't remember the ones fallen by the wayside; Be, DOS, DR DOS, CP/M 86, GEM, OS/2 and a host of others. Microsoft has never been "cheap," just ubiquitous.
I would like to see a few more test groups added to this. How about the average pot smoking teenager, the girl putting makeup on, and my personal favorite that I saw recently... a woman brushing her teeth!
One morning as I was driving to work in a heavy fog, I noticed a semi truck in front of me weaving back and forth. I assumed he was having as much trouble as I was seeing the road. He began driving so erratic, I thought it prudent to pass him. As I passed on his left, I saw that he was reading a magazine perched on his steering wheel. I nearly shit a brick.
Motorists who talked on either handheld or hands-free cell phones drove slightly more slowly, were 9 percent slower to hit the brakes, and varied their speed more than undistracted drivers.
Hell, I could have told you that. If there is an asshole holding up traffic, driving twenty miles under the speed limit and weaving back and forth, when I pass I will invariably see him jabbering away like an excited chipmonk on some cell phone. I see it every day at 5:00.
But most people were still running DOS (I never heard about OS/2 until Warp 5). You apparently missed a good portion of the DOS pain that I am talking about.
Hardly... I worked computer support for a university with 4,000 employees and 17,000 students. There were plenty of DOS machines to support. Hell, I still support them for specialized applications.
...because those systems didn't have soundblaster or 3D video. If they had, the OS would have supported it because applications were generally not permitted to talk to the hardware directly.
And had DOS not been supplanted by Windows or OS/2, it would have native support for those too. Remeber VESA extensions? Do you remember when DOS had no support for fixed disk drives? DOS has as much kernel support for printing as Linux does today. LP, IPP, and CUPS are all userspace programs.
They were too concerned about getting access to memory above 1 megabyte to even begin to consider swapping some of it out to disk.
Again, your blame is misplaced. The majority of those problems could be placed squarely on the shoulders of users' love of TSR programs. When users tried to make DOS into a pseudo multitasking OS with no VMM support and limited addressing due to real mode operation, you can expect problems like that. Gobs of software worked just fine within those limitations. Your complaints were the exception, not the rule.
That is why I still maintain that Windows 3.0 and to a much greater extent, Windows 3.1 elimintated those problems. Window 3.1 ran in protected mode on a 286 or 386 addressing up to 16MB of memory. Nearly every 386 ever purchased at the university came with a copy of Windows. Once applications started showing up, 640K limitations went away. The biggest problem we had at that point was the enormous cost of DIP IC memory. (remeber those ISA Intel Aboveboard 386s and AST Rampages?)
DOS was easy in the same way that using a large stone as a hammer is easy. It'll probably get a nail into a board, but anything beyond that you have to make/buy your own tools.
Spoken like an individual who hasn't spent much time troubleshooting registry problems, DLL inconsistencies, viruses, spyware, and keyloggers. I'd much rather try to find extra conventional memory under DOS.
Parents of teen girls: Girls of that age are sexually aware. Most girls that age want a dude with a car.
It's sad that society is in such denial when it comes to teen sexuality. There is a twelve year old girl in our neighborhood who is pregnant by a thirteen year old boy. The teens engaging in sexual relations in our town claim to be "married" to each other. My 14 year old daughter (who we watch like a hawk) can identify the girls in her school that give blow jobs. And we live in a small town with only about 800 residents.
Problems with memory only near the end of the useful life of DOS? Are you kidding me? Unless you were running OS/2, DOS was the priamry OS on new 486's. Hell, DOS is *still* around in the form of utility/boot disks. Symantec Ghost still uess DOS boot disks, for example.
Actually, I did run OS/2. And the key word there was useful. Once Windows 3.1 was shipped, DOS' days were numbered. Windows 95 was the absolute end of DOS shortcomings (printer incompatibilities, sound capabilities, memory limitations) despite being the underpinning of Windows. The fact that you can still find DOS in niche areas such as tools and utilities stands testament to the value of a simple "file loader."
Yeah, Windows is annoying too, but at least it pretends to be a real OS intead of some minor extension to teh system BIOS like DOS is/was.
Is Unix not an real OS? What about VMS? What about MVS? None of these have support for Soundblaster or 3D video. None have built-in printer support unless you count line printers. At least most people that used to complain about DOS not supporting virtual memory and multitasking rather than sound.
Face facts. DOS is easier than Windows. It's just not as convenient. That convenience adds complexity.
Oh sure, DOS was easy to work with. Do you remember trying to free "conventional memory" so you could run a certain app? Or trying to get access to any RAM beyond 1M? Some programs used "extended memory." Some wanted "expanded memory." Some wouldn't run with EMM386 loaded. Some required it. It is a good thing that DOS 5.0 (I think) introduced multiple boot configurations, because I needed them. I had to reboot my computer differently depending on what I wanted to do with it that day. And talk about braindead shells..
You are complaining about hacks to work around specific hardware limitations of Intel CPUs running under real mode and these limitations only popped up near the end of the useful life of DOS (mostly due to code bloat). They are as much a Windows 1.0 and 2.0 problem as they are for DOS.
DOS was still easy compared to Windows. I'd much rather hack memory limitations than fix registry problems any day. Next time somebody drops a machine on your desk and complains that Windows blue screens on boot, remember how easy it was to fix a DOS machine.
But here is a question for all of you who think your liberties are threatened buy big business and DRM; when was the last time you baked your own bread or grew your own potatoes or made your own ketchup?
I bake my own bread all the time. I even make my own pizza dough. I also used to grow potatoes before we moved in 2004. And I don't make my own ketchup/catsup, but I do make my own barbecue sauce all the time. It's pretty good too...
Convenience will keep people coming back for more. I will buy my music in whatever format I find most convenient, and so will you.
No I won't. I last bought music in the summer of 2002. I paid nearly $40 for two CDs for my wife. Each CD had exactly one decent song on it. In fact, one CD was so bad that my wife asked me to rip the one good song and drop it on a mix disk and "get rid of the rest." I realized that no song was worth $20 and swore to never buy from the music industry again. The library is a great source for music CDs.
Feel free to spend your dollars on DRMed music, but I'll never do it.
Well it doesn't really matter, because the trademarks are governed by a contract between the companies. Apple Corp could do nothing and still hold Apple Computer to whatever they agreed to.
Agreed.
But does this give Apple Corps the right to broadly interpret the agreement to hobble Apple Inc. from participating in a market that nobody dreamed could even exist when the agreement was signed?
A couple years ago, Apple Corp released a "new" Beatles song that hit #1 in the charts. They might not be a particularlly active company, but they aren't defunct by any means.
I din't mean to insinuate that they are defunct. That being said, their sole business is to represent the interests of a recording group that is 50% deceased and hasn't recorded any new material in some thirty odd years. Since copyrights are not perpetual (yet) and they do not solicit new talent and appear to have no interest in soliciting new talent, they are a dead-end company. They will eventially only exist to defend a trademark with little to no economic value.
That is what I mean by not materially participating. Releasing a previously unreleased sing every five years even if that song goes to number one, does not change matters. They have a hard limit on total useable material (whatever that may be) and that material has an "eventual" hard time limit for viable commercial value. That time limit may even be shortened by the eventual passing of the 60's generation. Ask a teenager about the Beatles and they shrug their shoulders. Ask a teenager about iTunes and Ipods and they know it instantly.
Apple corps had some relevance in the market 15 years ago when they made a deal with Apple Computers.
Actually, they had relevance in 1978 when the first lawsuit was filed and Apple was still a minor startup company. They maintained sufficient relevance in 1981 to coerce Apple Inc. into signing the original agreement.
The only relevances they maintain now are historical and the force of law that remains with any agreements signed by Apple Inc. As I said before they do not participate materially in the marketplace and they have a trademark based on a generic word.
Unlike you, I am no Apple fan, and I do acknowledge their hypocracy. I do, however, believe that the correct party did prevail though.
Steve needs the money to make cool new things for whiney mac fanbois to play with. Ringo & Paul will just waste it (and are rich enough already).
I thought the whole point of this absurdity was dilution of trademark and confusion in the marketplace not to extort money. Maybe if Apple Corps had actually participated materially in the market in the last thirty years there would be confusion, but now it's a niche player and Apple Inc. owns "apple" mindshare.
And for all those Apple Corps apologists that suggest Apple Corps market a macintosh coat, how about Apple Inc creating a new "innovative" mouse design and calling it the new "Apple Beetle?"
I'm running a Freenet node on Ubuntu 5.1 with an old Athlon 850. I had uptime since February until I just updated yesterday. I had to reboot it since the kernel was just updated. It never goes down or crashes.
I take a pragmatic view here: I'm aware that the USA is, in effect, in an economic war with many other countries, and that our intellectual property is one of our biggest exports. If Disney hadn't gotten their way and Mickey Mouse were in the public domain right now, it would shift the profits on Mickey from Disney, to 10,000 Chinese companies.
You have my admiration for admitting what to me is obvious. The whole idea of modern copyright, patents, and "intellectual property" is all about US economic power. It has nothing at all to do with promoting the useful arts.
Your "musician hit by a bus" argument would be very hollow. As I said earlier, he is not likely to create anything else, so copyright is of little incentive. As for insurance and 401(k) plans, any musician, performer or other artist is more than welcome to engage any of these services. It they choose not, society can hardly be blamed. Artistic endeavor is not, nor should it be, an automatic guarantee of success.
But, we know that this doesn't happen very often, and it's unfair to resent the system in which artists are compensated based on a few rare examples. Likewise, it would not be fair to me to scream about how people in the computer industry are over-paid whiners using Larry Ellison as an example.
I think you miss the point. The point is not how much an individual earns off of a particular creative work, it is the exaggerated length of time that individual may retain exclusivity over that work. I don't care if you make $15 or $50 Billion on a hit single. Should you be able to deny the public domain those rights after you are dead?
In the U.S., copyright laws were supposed to be written to promote the useful arts, but I don't see the incentive for a dead man to create anything. In fact, if someone does manage to create that one lucky hit single and never has to work another day in his life because his copyright, what incentive does he have to create anything else? Copyright should be shortened to a reasonable period that allows artists to earn some measure of income from their works, but encourages them to keep creating. The public is more enriched by an artist that stays creative. And if an artist cannot continue to create, then I understand Wal Mart is looking for stockboys.
Finally, you don't want to judge the fairness of the system based on those rare lucky individuals, but the fact is that copyright laws are engineered specifically for those rare cases. The last extension of copyrights was purchased by Disney, not Joe Sixpack writing folk songs in his garage. Congress could give a shit about 99.9% of all musicians, but they listen religiously to the RIAA. Congress doesn't care about protecting my slashdot posts, but they will defend J.K. Rowling's books to the death.
I had a similar experience trying to resolve a problem with the original pwc webcam driver. I contacted the author with a problem that I had never seen before. I already had 4 setups running with his driver. He responded like I was a clueless idiot. I guess I should be happy I got any response, but I had to resolve the issue on my own. History eventually showed that he was jerk anyway when Kroah-Hartman removed his driver from the kernel.
Besides this one particular incident, I can name dozens where I was pointed in the right direction or given help freely and generously. I have had developers graciously send patches and fixes for problems I have discovered in their software. On the whole, I would say that the open source people are much easier to approach and way more generous with their time.
Try to get help from Microsoft to fix one of their problems some time. You better have a credit card in hand and be prepared for a long wait to talk to somebody. Oh yeah... Don't expect to actually resolve the problem, but at least you can count on being charged for it.
Recently, the vendor of a piece of $5,000 modelling software (Windows based) absolutely lied to my boss. I cost $200 and several hours work and the problem is still there. We proved his solution was crap. We "worked around" the problem with a clean XP install on VMWare.
I heard that Ghost was dropped in favor of Drive Image. We switched to Acronis anyway since it seems to understand the newer XP NTFS partitions way better than Ghost. Plus it works perfectly with EXT3.
I am serious. School districts who are stealing software are stealing.
Allow me to be the first to remind you that stealing software requires the perpetrator to actually take the software media and remove it from its former owner. I think you mean infringe on copyright.
Frantically waving your arms and yelling stealing does not make it theft. Now go back to your cube at the RIAA and troll somewhere else.
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Use a Haupage card with KnoppMyth. The newer versions even support the Windows Media Center USB Remotes out of the box. It's pretty easy.
I love my Myth unit. If Zap2it ever starts charging for listing data, I am gonna have to pay.
I had nearly the same experience. Except during the first call to India, I had read through all the numbers to the "customer care representative" and was promptly disconnected. I had to call and run through the same crap a second time just to get my damn drivers installed.
I there wasn't already a bunch of technical software already installed (this machine interfaces to a GC/Mass Spec) I would have reinstalled from scratch with our VLK.
After all. Who wants them poking along on the Internet, slowing everybody down with the left blinker on?
At full HiDef widescreen resolutions (1920x1440)it takes a lot of CPU to decode in real time. I bought a PC-HDTV card for an Athlon 1Ghz machine to run MythTV. Playback stutters on HiDef at 720p or better. I ended up replacing it with a Haupage 150 analog card. Mpeg2 software decoding is great on the Athlon at standard resolutions. I may grab one of these units for my HDTV card.
And XP professional upgrade is $199. Are you saying Mac OSX is closer to XP Home than Professional?
Sorry, but no... Apple OSX Tiger is $129 retail through the Apple store online. And I assume you don't remember the ones fallen by the wayside; Be, DOS, DR DOS, CP/M 86, GEM, OS/2 and a host of others. Microsoft has never been "cheap," just ubiquitous.
One morning as I was driving to work in a heavy fog, I noticed a semi truck in front of me weaving back and forth. I assumed he was having as much trouble as I was seeing the road. He began driving so erratic, I thought it prudent to pass him. As I passed on his left, I saw that he was reading a magazine perched on his steering wheel. I nearly shit a brick.
Hell, I could have told you that. If there is an asshole holding up traffic, driving twenty miles under the speed limit and weaving back and forth, when I pass I will invariably see him jabbering away like an excited chipmonk on some cell phone. I see it every day at 5:00.
Hardly... I worked computer support for a university with 4,000 employees and 17,000 students. There were plenty of DOS machines to support. Hell, I still support them for specialized applications.
And had DOS not been supplanted by Windows or OS/2, it would have native support for those too. Remeber VESA extensions? Do you remember when DOS had no support for fixed disk drives? DOS has as much kernel support for printing as Linux does today. LP, IPP, and CUPS are all userspace programs.
Again, your blame is misplaced. The majority of those problems could be placed squarely on the shoulders of users' love of TSR programs. When users tried to make DOS into a pseudo multitasking OS with no VMM support and limited addressing due to real mode operation, you can expect problems like that. Gobs of software worked just fine within those limitations. Your complaints were the exception, not the rule.
That is why I still maintain that Windows 3.0 and to a much greater extent, Windows 3.1 elimintated those problems. Window 3.1 ran in protected mode on a 286 or 386 addressing up to 16MB of memory. Nearly every 386 ever purchased at the university came with a copy of Windows. Once applications started showing up, 640K limitations went away. The biggest problem we had at that point was the enormous cost of DIP IC memory. (remeber those ISA Intel Aboveboard 386s and AST Rampages?)
Spoken like an individual who hasn't spent much time troubleshooting registry problems, DLL inconsistencies, viruses, spyware, and keyloggers. I'd much rather try to find extra conventional memory under DOS.
It's sad that society is in such denial when it comes to teen sexuality. There is a twelve year old girl in our neighborhood who is pregnant by a thirteen year old boy. The teens engaging in sexual relations in our town claim to be "married" to each other. My 14 year old daughter (who we watch like a hawk) can identify the girls in her school that give blow jobs. And we live in a small town with only about 800 residents.
Is Unix not an real OS? What about VMS? What about MVS? None of these have support for Soundblaster or 3D video. None have built-in printer support unless you count line printers. At least most people that used to complain about DOS not supporting virtual memory and multitasking rather than sound.
Face facts. DOS is easier than Windows. It's just not as convenient. That convenience adds complexity.
DOS was still easy compared to Windows. I'd much rather hack memory limitations than fix registry problems any day. Next time somebody drops a machine on your desk and complains that Windows blue screens on boot, remember how easy it was to fix a DOS machine.
No I won't. I last bought music in the summer of 2002. I paid nearly $40 for two CDs for my wife. Each CD had exactly one decent song on it. In fact, one CD was so bad that my wife asked me to rip the one good song and drop it on a mix disk and "get rid of the rest." I realized that no song was worth $20 and swore to never buy from the music industry again. The library is a great source for music CDs.
Feel free to spend your dollars on DRMed music, but I'll never do it.
But does this give Apple Corps the right to broadly interpret the agreement to hobble Apple Inc. from participating in a market that nobody dreamed could even exist when the agreement was signed?
That is what I mean by not materially participating. Releasing a previously unreleased sing every five years even if that song goes to number one, does not change matters. They have a hard limit on total useable material (whatever that may be) and that material has an "eventual" hard time limit for viable commercial value. That time limit may even be shortened by the eventual passing of the 60's generation. Ask a teenager about the Beatles and they shrug their shoulders. Ask a teenager about iTunes and Ipods and they know it instantly.
The only relevances they maintain now are historical and the force of law that remains with any agreements signed by Apple Inc. As I said before they do not participate materially in the marketplace and they have a trademark based on a generic word.
Unlike you, I am no Apple fan, and I do acknowledge their hypocracy. I do, however, believe that the correct party did prevail though.
And for all those Apple Corps apologists that suggest Apple Corps market a macintosh coat, how about Apple Inc creating a new "innovative" mouse design and calling it the new "Apple Beetle?"
I'm running a Freenet node on Ubuntu 5.1 with an old Athlon 850. I had uptime since February until I just updated yesterday. I had to reboot it since the kernel was just updated. It never goes down or crashes.
This has got to be the funniest thing ever posted to Slashdot.
Your "musician hit by a bus" argument would be very hollow. As I said earlier, he is not likely to create anything else, so copyright is of little incentive. As for insurance and 401(k) plans, any musician, performer or other artist is more than welcome to engage any of these services. It they choose not, society can hardly be blamed. Artistic endeavor is not, nor should it be, an automatic guarantee of success.
In the U.S., copyright laws were supposed to be written to promote the useful arts, but I don't see the incentive for a dead man to create anything. In fact, if someone does manage to create that one lucky hit single and never has to work another day in his life because his copyright, what incentive does he have to create anything else? Copyright should be shortened to a reasonable period that allows artists to earn some measure of income from their works, but encourages them to keep creating. The public is more enriched by an artist that stays creative. And if an artist cannot continue to create, then I understand Wal Mart is looking for stockboys.
Finally, you don't want to judge the fairness of the system based on those rare lucky individuals, but the fact is that copyright laws are engineered specifically for those rare cases. The last extension of copyrights was purchased by Disney, not Joe Sixpack writing folk songs in his garage. Congress could give a shit about 99.9% of all musicians, but they listen religiously to the RIAA. Congress doesn't care about protecting my slashdot posts, but they will defend J.K. Rowling's books to the death.
I had a similar experience trying to resolve a problem with the original pwc webcam driver. I contacted the author with a problem that I had never seen before. I already had 4 setups running with his driver. He responded like I was a clueless idiot. I guess I should be happy I got any response, but I had to resolve the issue on my own. History eventually showed that he was jerk anyway when Kroah-Hartman removed his driver from the kernel.
Besides this one particular incident, I can name dozens where I was pointed in the right direction or given help freely and generously. I have had developers graciously send patches and fixes for problems I have discovered in their software. On the whole, I would say that the open source people are much easier to approach and way more generous with their time.
Try to get help from Microsoft to fix one of their problems some time. You better have a credit card in hand and be prepared for a long wait to talk to somebody. Oh yeah... Don't expect to actually resolve the problem, but at least you can count on being charged for it.
Recently, the vendor of a piece of $5,000 modelling software (Windows based) absolutely lied to my boss. I cost $200 and several hours work and the problem is still there. We proved his solution was crap. We "worked around" the problem with a clean XP install on VMWare.
Frantically waving your arms and yelling stealing does not make it theft. Now go back to your cube at the RIAA and troll somewhere else.