Wrong. They're trying to hide. Old DVD-to-AVI rip packs had ugly clunky crashy non-functioning GUIs to (randomly) set the (garbled) command-line options so as to (hopefully) launch DeCSS and mpeg2avi and such. Then some shady companies that would never make enough money or sell enough crashware to be suable copied those (free) packs and turned them into fisher-price-clunky, crashy, non-functioning "GUI-based" DVD ripping programs.
Then some new company thought that it would make much more money to sell software to lobotomized PowerPoint users, giving them a way to burn their ugly clunky fisher-price slideshows to DVD-Video. (Not that they would work, what with DVD+-Rs being waaaayyyy off the DVD Video standard and all.) And they used Free software to do Just That, well, good for them.
Now maybe they just don't think that Free software actually is defended by lawyers. Just wait until those future Lobbyists go tell Govt that Hobbyist are suing them out of their livelihood. "How's that I can't just take their code and resell it? I thought it was Free for anyone to use in any way whatsoever!"
Yes, they're morons, too. But they're evil morons. Will be worse if they ever get to become rich evil morons.
A good thing for this case would be that Microsoft bundle the ability to burn from PowerPoint to DVD without using GPL software... those companies supplying clueless lusers with crashware deserve to disappear.
(Note : crashware, not the GPL parts. I mean, if they're too stupid to rewrite software when they have a base source code, they're obviously too stupid to write good code over the GPL parts. Software like that runs on Windows only and crashes all the time, or is fantastically frustrating to use for various reasons of quirkiness, aberrant behaviour, disappearing data and formatting, input and output formats that don't exist in any other part of the known cyberspace, etc. etc.)
So what? At least MacOSX works. Vista does not. (In the sense that the only time I tried it, I couldn't even read a non-high-def DVD because of a lack of "protected content path". That, and the Cancel Or Allow Hell - how can ANYONE put up with that? I've installed MacOSX on my PC just to NEVER EVER have to install Vista and I need Adobe software so Linux is out of the equation forever because Adobe on Linux is never gonna happen, as in "a frozen Hell where the Pope, converted to Islam, is preaching to winged pigs".)
Hey, science is easy. Dead easy. The problem is that science is taught as a religion. "Remember things" is all we've ever asked to do. In the eight years it took me to get out of Secondary School Hell, I've never been given the occasion to actually TEST by the Scientific Method any idea I've had. There were answers to all my questions already, but I just might have remembered SOMEthing if I'd discovered it myself!
But teaching Science in that way would make kids learn that there are effects and causes to everything, and maybe even that they can all be discovered and modelled. That is very near critical thinking, thus dangerous. Not going to happen at this point in this world. Maybe later, but I'm not counting on that...
The news is about "The UK is going to lower its requirements regarding what science facts kids have to know before they can get unemployed." Big deal.
Replying here so that this post will be read eventually (not gonna bury it under 400 others and counting.) Not that that would count anyway since parent is about fuckin' Iran in a discussion about TorrentSpy.
So. Is everyone discussing here a complete moron or what? I can't believe I've read 200+ posts without anyone saying "fuck it, we all know the process involved in downloading a torrent, let's write to a disk log the adresses of everyone who SAVES A TORRENT and voilà, done." TorrentSpy doesn't want to do that, I don't want them to do it, you don't want it either - that's what the MPAA wants and the judge shills for. That "we don't want to" doesn't change the fact that LOGGING WHO DOWNLOADS WHAT IS TRIVIALLY EASY. Hell, I could LEARN how to do Just That alone in a week, including my first LAMP setup, building the server from parts, learning perl and get some apache module to log all downloads of all torrents and/or other resources. Click on a link to astalavista.box.sk? Logged. DL a torrent? Logged. Visit site? Counted, not logged.
"You CAN get it out of RAM and present it in readable form. Stop playing stupid."
I'm a happy pirate, what with my 100GB/month average. Not afraid in the least, everyone does it. Just like smoking pot. Who do I harm exactly? Pray tell.
Wait. This could not be more the moment for Apple to start selling MacOSX OTS? They've already have support from id and EA. If they Just Had Games, as they already have Office and at least two OpenOffices AND Adobe CSx, well, they'd kill Microsoft in one year.
So you show copyrighted material in front of an audience without a written permission from the copyright holders. That is illegal. ("screenings of various materials", yeah, like, only public domain and self-made? I'm so believing you.)
That would require marking batches of discs with identical watermark... but I think I remember a (patented) tech that did Just That ("press all different copies of some software disc and verify integrity by burning checksum on each disc and check on that in software" or something functionally equivalent)
Batches with thousands or at least hundreds of discs would be way more feasible though. But they would still 1) do nothing for current tech AND CDs actually are good enough that not enough people would cough up the $10,000 for the "next-gen" players (how many blu-rays do you own? And do you have a reader with a true (1080p) HDTV on the other end of the cable?) and 2)if we did that to current audio CDs, that would only enable tracking of what store it's been bought in and maybe lead to possible suspects in people who paid by credit card, or if it was sent from the studio before watermarking.
I might be in a small minority because I can discern a difference between a 128kbps MP3 and an original recording, but I'm in a fuckin'huge majority of people who get very angry when they hear ads in songs, or when songs are incompletely ripped, or when they pop, click and hiss (as if CDParanoia code had not been ported to Windows years ago.)
Watermarking audio? What for, anyway? Transcode once, lose watermark. Re-burn and re-rip, lose watermark. Transmission error, lose watermark. (Watermark in the sense that it can be batch-calculated on massive quantities of files. OF COURSE an human will recognize it.)
Apple derives a majority of their overall revenue from Mac sales. They already tried licensing the OS. It nearly killed them, because the competition selectively went after the high end where Apple profits the most from hardware sales. So 90's. Apple derives most profit not from Macs now, rather from iPhones, iPods, software (Final Cut costs $thousands),... Apple was dying in the 90s because they licensed their OS to install on their competition when they were making nothing but Macs, which is stupid.
For me the real problem here is that microsoft and apple are creating the expectation that computers are easy to use and simple to grasp , they are not , it takes time to learn anything , if you don't put in the time dont expect the rewards. No. Microsoft and Apple have made the promise to make and keep computers simple to use, like devices such as your mobile phone, TiVo, whatever. Apple has made good on it, Microsoft just pretended they did.
How is having four workspaces that can be locate using our primate brains' basic functions NOT an usability improvement? It's the best thing since the invention of hot water. And wobbly windows are Wow factor. (You go ask Apple about the importance of that...)
And, what about those experimental Java desktops? The most popular Java project is called Azureus and it's about as slow as a dead slug that overdosed on morphine, just like Eclipse. How on Earth did anyone think of developping a Java desktop... Sun? Yeah, I'd like a couple of Enterprise 10Ks just so that my Java(tm) word processor launches in under an hour.
As for what innovations in usability, look at individual apps, like Amarok. That one has three times more features than every other player, not one I left unused (except the store), and I found it more friendly than any other player I've ever tried.
Not to mention, in the context of this article, that compatibility list comprises a tiny, tiny fraction of all the PC hardware that's available out there... Depends on what you call "a tiny fraction". It supports all current graphics cards, mainboards, sound cards, about half of current webcams, all current USB video capture devices, most Ethernet and Wireless chipsets (Intel ones are work in progress), and so on....just to inform you. I should know, I'm still reading the hackintosh forums to try and get SpeedStep and the CPU temp monitor working... (the one thing that never ever works in Linux and seems to be just as hard in OSX)
Poeple would switch. Everyone whose needs don't include legacy custom software will, really. That means "everyone who uses Adobe CS, MS Office, Pro Tools and Final Cut" - that's a lot more small corps and independent jobs than you seem to account for. If all these market segments could buy OSX (all those not rich enough to buy a Mac), it would eat a large part of MS Windows' marketshare. Same thing for home users - they don't use custom software at all (else they're not home users, but hobbyist or professional developpers).
Please don't bother trying to point out the difference between a physical product and a copy, it just means you don't understand economics. Okay, you are a moron. If it can be copied at zero cost, then the marginal production cost of that copy is $0. Especially since any movie that does not recoup its costs in the first weekend in theaters is called a commercial failure - thus the thousands of people have BEEN ALREADY PAID for the work they've done. So, zero-cost copies hurt their sales? Fuck them. They're getting paid. I pay for movie tickets, I download what I want to keep. (And sometimes I buy a DVD on impulse, but it's pretty much guaranteed to be music and region-free.)
Well, the price means nothing on software. All it indicates is how many legit copies the publisher intends to sell : do you see a difference between Corel and Adobe Photoshop that justifies the tenfold increase in price? It means next to nothing on hardware too, because I fail to see how an nVidia 7900GS had its production cost divided by five in under a year. (Yeah, I know - "they're just selling their IP in a form that can not be copied at zero cost")
Now, when hardware breaks, you can't reinstall it. You have to buy a new copy. That may cost time, but it costs money, too. Reinstalling software costs only time. So if your hardware breaks, you're out of $200-$500 every time. If Windows breaks, you're in for a couple of hours of work every time.
I meant more as in "cut off their oxygen suppply". Microsoft is *powerless* if they can't force people to go to them by bundling whatever they think of into their OS; it has been a browser, then a media player, then a Web Services thing (Vista Search, anyone?)...
As for functionally equivalent Office : already there. I use MS Office 2004 every day, it's a *pleasure* compared to all the other versions I've used before. (Haven't tried 2K7 though.)
And yes, Microsoft could run without selling anything for several years. But then they'd still have their patent protfolios and such. They would become a highly dangerous IP troll... if you've ever thougth they're evil, now think of what they'd do if they ended up with only their IP rights left as a revenue stream.
Slashdot Mirror
If you mean "without any lag", then it is /required/.
Wrong. They're trying to hide. Old DVD-to-AVI rip packs had ugly clunky crashy non-functioning GUIs to (randomly) set the (garbled) command-line options so as to (hopefully) launch DeCSS and mpeg2avi and such. Then some shady companies that would never make enough money or sell enough crashware to be suable copied those (free) packs and turned them into fisher-price-clunky, crashy, non-functioning "GUI-based" DVD ripping programs.
Then some new company thought that it would make much more money to sell software to lobotomized PowerPoint users, giving them a way to burn their ugly clunky fisher-price slideshows to DVD-Video. (Not that they would work, what with DVD+-Rs being waaaayyyy off the DVD Video standard and all.) And they used Free software to do Just That, well, good for them.
Now maybe they just don't think that Free software actually is defended by lawyers. Just wait until those future Lobbyists go tell Govt that Hobbyist are suing them out of their livelihood. "How's that I can't just take their code and resell it? I thought it was Free for anyone to use in any way whatsoever!"
Yes, they're morons, too. But they're evil morons. Will be worse if they ever get to become rich evil morons.
A good thing for this case would be that Microsoft bundle the ability to burn from PowerPoint to DVD without using GPL software... those companies supplying clueless lusers with crashware deserve to disappear.
(Note : crashware, not the GPL parts. I mean, if they're too stupid to rewrite software when they have a base source code, they're obviously too stupid to write good code over the GPL parts. Software like that runs on Windows only and crashes all the time, or is fantastically frustrating to use for various reasons of quirkiness, aberrant behaviour, disappearing data and formatting, input and output formats that don't exist in any other part of the known cyberspace, etc. etc.)
Symmetrical? When I read tha, I thought "yeah, like, there is some central point, and a copy of myself at twice my distance to the center, from here".
That is exactly as brain-dead as the symmetrical time "theory". So, what is "symmetrical" ??
OK, I'll byte.
Work : 6G
Images (non-pr0n) : 8G
Software : 23G
Text : 25G
pr0n : 57G
Music : 181G
Videos (non-pr0n) : 240G
For a male? Are you one? If yes, you already know that every boy from 12 onwards thinks about sex for the whole of his waking time. Else, now you do.
Thank you. I was wondering how to hijack a higher thread to say just that.
Once more : Mod sites that charge money just want that, money. Age verification my ass.
So what? At least MacOSX works. Vista does not.
(In the sense that the only time I tried it, I couldn't even read a non-high-def DVD because of a lack of "protected content path". That, and the Cancel Or Allow Hell - how can ANYONE put up with that? I've installed MacOSX on my PC just to NEVER EVER have to install Vista and I need Adobe software so Linux is out of the equation forever because Adobe on Linux is never gonna happen, as in "a frozen Hell where the Pope, converted to Islam, is preaching to winged pigs".)
Hey, science is easy. Dead easy. The problem is that science is taught as a religion. "Remember things" is all we've ever asked to do. In the eight years it took me to get out of Secondary School Hell, I've never been given the occasion to actually TEST by the Scientific Method any idea I've had. There were answers to all my questions already, but I just might have remembered SOMEthing if I'd discovered it myself!
But teaching Science in that way would make kids learn that there are effects and causes to everything, and maybe even that they can all be discovered and modelled. That is very near critical thinking, thus dangerous. Not going to happen at this point in this world. Maybe later, but I'm not counting on that...
The news is about "The UK is going to lower its requirements regarding what science facts kids have to know before they can get unemployed." Big deal.
Replying here so that this post will be read eventually (not gonna bury it under 400 others and counting.) Not that that would count anyway since parent is about fuckin' Iran in a discussion about TorrentSpy.
So. Is everyone discussing here a complete moron or what? I can't believe I've read 200+ posts without anyone saying "fuck it, we all know the process involved in downloading a torrent, let's write to a disk log the adresses of everyone who SAVES A TORRENT and voilà, done." TorrentSpy doesn't want to do that, I don't want them to do it, you don't want it either - that's what the MPAA wants and the judge shills for. That "we don't want to" doesn't change the fact that LOGGING WHO DOWNLOADS WHAT IS TRIVIALLY EASY. Hell, I could LEARN how to do Just That alone in a week, including my first LAMP setup, building the server from parts, learning perl and get some apache module to log all downloads of all torrents and/or other resources. Click on a link to astalavista.box.sk? Logged. DL a torrent? Logged. Visit site? Counted, not logged.
"You CAN get it out of RAM and present it in readable form. Stop playing stupid."
I'm a happy pirate, what with my 100GB/month average. Not afraid in the least, everyone does it. Just like smoking pot. Who do I harm exactly? Pray tell.
In the light of the principles of evolution, the alternative is disappearance from this world, History and the gene pool.
Wait. This could not be more the moment for Apple to start selling MacOSX OTS? They've already have support from id and EA. If they Just Had Games, as they already have Office and at least two OpenOffices AND Adobe CSx, well, they'd kill Microsoft in one year.
... if ever ...
Still dreaming... but
In Soviet Russia, Capitalism destroys YOU!
Erm. Wait...
Darkseed, Darkseed II, Phantasmagoria, the cthulhu thing in ice I can't remember the name of, countless others.
/were/ you thinking? If it's not "puzzles on static screens" it's not "old-school adventure". And that's high tech compared to text dungeons.
Classic Adventure games. Static screens.
X-Files, Day of the Tentacle, Leisure Suit Larry. Lots of others. I haven't ever played much, let alone old-school adventure...
What
So you show copyrighted material in front of an audience without a written permission from the copyright holders. That is illegal. ("screenings of various materials", yeah, like, only public domain and self-made? I'm so believing you.)
That would require marking batches of discs with identical watermark... but I think I remember a (patented) tech that did Just That ("press all different copies of some software disc and verify integrity by burning checksum on each disc and check on that in software" or something functionally equivalent)
Batches with thousands or at least hundreds of discs would be way more feasible though. But they would still 1) do nothing for current tech AND CDs actually are good enough that not enough people would cough up the $10,000 for the "next-gen" players (how many blu-rays do you own? And do you have a reader with a true (1080p) HDTV on the other end of the cable?) and 2)if we did that to current audio CDs, that would only enable tracking of what store it's been bought in and maybe lead to possible suspects in people who paid by credit card, or if it was sent from the studio before watermarking.
I might be in a small minority because I can discern a difference between a 128kbps MP3 and an original recording, but I'm in a fuckin'huge majority of people who get very angry when they hear ads in songs, or when songs are incompletely ripped, or when they pop, click and hiss (as if CDParanoia code had not been ported to Windows years ago.)
Watermarking audio? What for, anyway? Transcode once, lose watermark. Re-burn and re-rip, lose watermark. Transmission error, lose watermark. (Watermark in the sense that it can be batch-calculated on massive quantities of files. OF COURSE an human will recognize it.)
How is having four workspaces that can be locate using our primate brains' basic functions NOT an usability improvement? It's the best thing since the invention of hot water. And wobbly windows are Wow factor. (You go ask Apple about the importance of that...)
And, what about those experimental Java desktops? The most popular Java project is called Azureus and it's about as slow as a dead slug that overdosed on morphine, just like Eclipse. How on Earth did anyone think of developping a Java desktop... Sun? Yeah, I'd like a couple of Enterprise 10Ks just so that my Java(tm) word processor launches in under an hour.
As for what innovations in usability, look at individual apps, like Amarok. That one has three times more features than every other player, not one I left unused (except the store), and I found it more friendly than any other player I've ever tried.
Poeple would switch. Everyone whose needs don't include legacy custom software will, really. That means "everyone who uses Adobe CS, MS Office, Pro Tools and Final Cut" - that's a lot more small corps and independent jobs than you seem to account for. If all these market segments could buy OSX (all those not rich enough to buy a Mac), it would eat a large part of MS Windows' marketshare. Same thing for home users - they don't use custom software at all (else they're not home users, but hobbyist or professional developpers).
Now if it would run games...
Why is that post modded 0? Someone make that +3 Funny, please :-)
(And sometimes I buy a DVD on impulse, but it's pretty much guaranteed to be music and region-free.)
Well, the price means nothing on software. All it indicates is how many legit copies the publisher intends to sell : do you see a difference between Corel and Adobe Photoshop that justifies the tenfold increase in price?
It means next to nothing on hardware too, because I fail to see how an nVidia 7900GS had its production cost divided by five in under a year. (Yeah, I know - "they're just selling their IP in a form that can not be copied at zero cost")
Now, when hardware breaks, you can't reinstall it. You have to buy a new copy. That may cost time, but it costs money, too. Reinstalling software costs only time. So if your hardware breaks, you're out of $200-$500 every time. If Windows breaks, you're in for a couple of hours of work every time.
I meant more as in "cut off their oxygen suppply". Microsoft is *powerless* if they can't force people to go to them by bundling whatever they think of into their OS; it has been a browser, then a media player, then a Web Services thing (Vista Search, anyone?)...
As for functionally equivalent Office : already there. I use MS Office 2004 every day, it's a *pleasure* compared to all the other versions I've used before. (Haven't tried 2K7 though.)
And yes, Microsoft could run without selling anything for several years. But then they'd still have their patent protfolios and such. They would become a highly dangerous IP troll... if you've ever thougth they're evil, now think of what they'd do if they ended up with only their IP rights left as a revenue stream.