So which should we concentrate on fixing: 1. The oppressive govornment. 2. Ways to talk secretly under the oppressive govornment.
Don't say that fixing #2 is the solution to fixing #1 either. It ain't. You figure out how to communicate with absolute anonymity on the 'net and they'll just tap your phone, put a bug in your dog's butt, or something similar.
The real solution is fix #1 then you won't have to worry about #2.
First of all, who says anyone *should* make money off a media player? Does it take a lifetime of work to create one? Is it *really* that big of a deal? It's like making money from creating a simple text editor. I don't think Microsoft should really be making any money from one either (but they do - more about that stupidity in a sec.) The only people that should be making money are the artists that create the content.
Second, I don't use WMP. Sure I've got it installed (like every other XP user) and it pops up when Windows Media is played on my PC simply because it's a proprietary format. Whose fault is that? It's the dumb suckers who've been giving MS money to use the format. They could have used any number of open formats but they chose not to, their money, not mine.
Back to my original point though: I use Winamp. How can I use Winamp when WMP comes bundled on my PC and already does everything Winamp does???? That's incredible! Not really. See it doesn't matter that MS has a monopoly in operating systems, Winamp has a cool media player and I downloaded it. I didn't need the Supreme Court or RealAudio's lawyers to help me either. All it took was an innovative piece of software with relatively little added crap and I'm there. Now mysillyvideo.com (or some other such place) can pay MS to use windows media if they want but there is no law that says they have to give MS their money. WMP plays mpg just fine and so does Winamp.
If you want people to be able to make money with media players, be very careful what you ask for. Remember, the money they make is yours.
Look, you don't know who I am. I'm anonymous. I don't really want you knowing who I am because some of you are freaks (no offense). It works and it's all I really need.
Is this REAL anonymity? Not really. If I come on here and say I'm going to kill George Bush they'll find out who I am in a heartbeat. I don't really have a problem with that. Basically the only people who are not anonymous are criminals. This is simply because in the vast sea of people on the internet who really gives a crap who "Smilin" is unless he does something wrong. You don't like it? Don't pirate software and don't threaten dubya!
I WANT criminals to be tracked down by IP and prosecuted. It's just difficult enough to find out who someone is to stop most freaks (like you guys, no offense) but not difficult enough that law enforcement can't do it when they need to. I would rather things stay in this false illusion of anonymity state. Thank you very much.
P.S. For you secret service guys who just read this: No worries. You can all basically just go take naps anyway. No one is going to kill dubya while he has Cheney next in line for assasination insurance.
How hard is it to write a media player that outshines WMP? It's not that difficult at all. In fact it's been done already several times. The problem with all of them is that while they gripe about Microsoft's "greed" they get greedy themselves and resort to tactics that the user finds distasteful.
They force the media player to run some component as a startup item. They develop their own proprietary format (that in most cases is inferior to Windows Media). They refuse to share the format with competitors. They bombard the user with splash screens, registration and upgrade prompts. They cram enough advertising into the players that it reaches the point of user punishment so that they can have further reason for an upgrade. They add components that intrude into areas outside of music playing such as video and web whether the user asks for it or not. They forcibly run some sort of agent that constantly checks for or prompts for upgrades.
Now with all this why would I want some third party media player? All I asked for is to listen to some music. I think in the year 2004 that my computer should be able to do it easily the moment I plug it in. My Apple can do it. My Linux box can do it. Shouldn't my XP box be able to do it? Why would you ask Microsoft to unbundled WMP from Windows? If you want me to use your media player instead just do one simple thing: write a better one and don't make me swallow a bunch of crap with it. No one seems to be able to do this so instead of trying they go cry to their lawyer and the next thing you know my PC can no longer play media when I take it out of the box.
People whine too much about Microsoft being unfair and having a monopoly. They also gripe about the inferiority of their products. Well guess what? You can't have it both ways. If they are so inferior why don't you just beat them? Probably because you suck. Look at Firefox. Do you see them whining? Do you see them suffering from Microsoft's monopoly? No. They just STFU and wrote a better product. Somehow they managed to do it without cramming a bunch of unwanted crap in with it; AMAZING!!
So stop litigating instead of innovating. Stop being greedy and you might get what you're after. MS isn't that hard to beat you just have to stop whining and suing long enough to do it.
Position based on next-gen GPS and other sources (sensed road reflectors, INS etc), Speed, proposed route (base on driver navigation input), other nearby vehicles (based on forward and rearward collision sensors), road conditions, traffic conditions, accidents (airbag deployments etc.).
If you get ALL the cars on a particular road or tollway to participate as nodes on such a network and get each node to be intelligent enough you could finally do automated driving. Nodes would have to cooperate to relay information, make group decisions and weed out malfunctioning nodes.
Imagine a row of cars: Car 1&2 transmit an airbag deployment, car 3 transmits a collision warning of stopped vehicles ahead of it, cars 3-10 simultaneously brake while the odd ones go left and the even ones go right. For miles in each direction the navigation information gets updated and everyone starts choosing alternate routes.
Oh the suckage! You'll wish you were never born by the time you reach 50.
Another way to fix all this: 1. Make 364 days in a year (just whack another one out of February or something). 2. Make a second = 1.003434 seconds (plus some digits). 3. Done. No Day vs Date shift, no leap years.
You'll only need to rebuild every timekeeping device on the planet to account for the different second but the only people who will really care is the poor bastards that have a Monday birthday! All of us with Saturday birthdays are happy as ducks in a puddle.
I would actually just settle for getting rid of daylight savings time. Talk about stupidity. "Daylight savings????" I promise you that hassling with the retardedness of changing your clock will NOT alter the tilt of the earth for a few months thereby giving you more hours of daylight.
As they say in the army: "If it's stupid but it works, it's not stupid."
Man that is a stupid quote.:P No offence.
If something is stupid but works it's simply something stupid that works. By "army" logic this would be a good idea once I got it to work: Train a bunch of monkeys to hold an abacus and jot down the data I input to them. Introduce additional monkeys to hold the same data and act as parity so I could automatically correct when one monkey of many decided to pick a flea instead of store his current input.
IBM has come up with MANY great ideas (they've held the record for the most patents per year for a number of years). This one just happens to be stupid. The idea may work just fine but so does a clariion from EMC or a cheap promise IDE RAID controller. NASA spent untold dollars inventing a pen that would work in zero-G. The Russian's used a pencil.
The biggest gripe I have with the idea is, "Yeah, but WHY??" The interconnects are really clever for instance but wouldn't some (parallel obviously) variation of a 30 year old headphone jack work just as well?
Why even bother with the whole 3D "cube" idea if you have to slide cooling plates in-between? Stick with a 2D approach. Better yet, just apply your liquid cooling plates idea to existing technology!
Why add a CPU and cache for every "block" of data storage that you add? Cost obviously isn't the reason. The aerospace industry used to add additional jet engines to planes for redundancy (and power of course) until they found out that each added redundant engine also introduced about 1 million extra things that could break.
I could go on but I'll just "keep it simple" and say it's stupid. No offense to you or IBM as a whole I hope.
This comes from a research lab where people have too much money and too many signs everywhere that say, "Think of a new idea." Current storage solutions aren't so broken that they need this kind of fix. If you want to be so frickin clever why don't you work on some high density, cost effective way to eliminate moving parts from storage.
Yes, I was thinking this same thing. I clicked on it and wondered, "Gawd, what is that infernal clicking sound?" as it spasmed and tried to produce a new window. I was thinking maybe it didn't load right so I hit ctrl-N to get a new copy and it loaded paypal just as the address bar said.
You can make retards patch their IE. You can make retards switch to Firefox. You can put a warning label on a retards tube of super glue.
None of these things will truly help. A retard will still somehow end up smiling proudly with a stinky phish super glued to himself.
Your taking a commonly used phrase ("There's no comparison") and trying to attack the literal interpretation instead of the intended (and heavily implied) interpretation. That's fine if you want to look foolish. Most people (at least in the US) who understand English know that this phrase simply means "The two things being compared are vastly different". If you are from outside the US, or maybe do not speak English, then I apologize, if not, stop trying to be such a idiotic jackass.
Very Nice. Very mature. I'm sure you're a great parent. I am not attacking the literal interpretation of your statement. I am saying I disagree with you and that (to use your words) the two are NOT vastly different.
I also used a six year old as an example to illustrate just how very similar the two are. Do you think the six year old can tell the difference between murdering a guard in an Eastern European city or one on a secret martian base? A 12 year old? 14? What age does it not become murder?
Since you obviously fall into personal attacks and insults when some sarcastic criticism of your point puts you on the defense, let me just state my point very clearly and we'll go from there:
To a child both Doom 3 AND Half Life 2 are too violent. One may be more violent than the other by a small or great margin but both are too violent to be played without a parent's judgement.
Do you disagree?
If you can't be civil at least try not to hurt yourself (or your credibility) when you fly off the handle this time.
After you've flunked for only finding 2 of your 10 security holes, take it up with the administration. Explain to them that you discovered your professor tricked you and there aren't 8 additional security holes. When the professor says there are, simply say, "Yeah? Let's see them."
At least if you flunk, you get to watch the monkey dig through code for the next six months to avoid losing his job.
I bet the math professors don't pull that crap with the next ten prime numbers.
I think Open Source is great but sometimes the rantings of the Linux crowd and chest beating about the evils of Microsoft can get pretty old.
I happen to dig Open Office (for example). I could give a crap about whether using it somehow betters mankind. The developers did an awesome job and I just like it. If you decide that because it is Open Source it must be Linux only then fine; I'll switch back to MS Office and be done with it.
If you are able to get all the other things I "do" on my computer to work under both Linux and Windows then I may consider a transition to Linux.
It makes it easier for Microsoft to "shut the door" on you if you refuse to work with them. This may sound like a troll but suck it up and face it for the reality it is: This is still a Microsoft world. If you want to win you're going to have to play their game and beat them at it. For me, Open Office has done this. Linux hasn't.
Linux "depends" on the applications that can run on it. You need to get applications that people like and use and then everyone will naturally transition to it. It's just that simple. The best way to get people to like your software is to write better software. The best way to get people to use it is to put it on the OS that people are using. Once you hit a critical mass of applications that exist on both then there is no reason NOT to transition from Windows to Linux.
One way to get people to never consider Linux is to thumb your elitist noses at them for running Open Source software on a "sell out" proprietary OS.
Maybe Real will launch a new "petition" website to get Apple to refund the 49 cents that everyone paid Real to get a song that will no longer play.
hehe.
Actually they are already working on a version of RealOne player that steals your file associations, makes your car run on leaded-only gasoline, refuses to uninstall from your dog and turns your iPod into a web banner.
Slashdot Mirror
Simply promise him you'll remove all of his forked code from your original if he removes all of the original code from the fork.
:)
Problem solved!
Quite true.
So which should we concentrate on fixing:
1. The oppressive govornment.
2. Ways to talk secretly under the oppressive govornment.
Don't say that fixing #2 is the solution to fixing #1 either. It ain't. You figure out how to communicate with absolute anonymity on the 'net and they'll just tap your phone, put a bug in your dog's butt, or something similar.
The real solution is fix #1 then you won't have to worry about #2.
Ah there it is..
How will they make any money?
First of all, who says anyone *should* make money off a media player? Does it take a lifetime of work to create one? Is it *really* that big of a deal? It's like making money from creating a simple text editor. I don't think Microsoft should really be making any money from one either (but they do - more about that stupidity in a sec.) The only people that should be making money are the artists that create the content.
Second, I don't use WMP. Sure I've got it installed (like every other XP user) and it pops up when Windows Media is played on my PC simply because it's a proprietary format. Whose fault is that? It's the dumb suckers who've been giving MS money to use the format. They could have used any number of open formats but they chose not to, their money, not mine.
Back to my original point though: I use Winamp. How can I use Winamp when WMP comes bundled on my PC and already does everything Winamp does???? That's incredible! Not really. See it doesn't matter that MS has a monopoly in operating systems, Winamp has a cool media player and I downloaded it. I didn't need the Supreme Court or RealAudio's lawyers to help me either. All it took was an innovative piece of software with relatively little added crap and I'm there. Now mysillyvideo.com (or some other such place) can pay MS to use windows media if they want but there is no law that says they have to give MS their money. WMP plays mpg just fine and so does Winamp.
If you want people to be able to make money with media players, be very careful what you ask for. Remember, the money they make is yours.
Look, you don't know who I am. I'm anonymous. I don't really want you knowing who I am because some of you are freaks (no offense). It works and it's all I really need.
Is this REAL anonymity? Not really. If I come on here and say I'm going to kill George Bush they'll find out who I am in a heartbeat. I don't really have a problem with that. Basically the only people who are not anonymous are criminals. This is simply because in the vast sea of people on the internet who really gives a crap who "Smilin" is unless he does something wrong. You don't like it? Don't pirate software and don't threaten dubya!
I WANT criminals to be tracked down by IP and prosecuted. It's just difficult enough to find out who someone is to stop most freaks (like you guys, no offense) but not difficult enough that law enforcement can't do it when they need to. I would rather things stay in this false illusion of anonymity state. Thank you very much.
P.S. For you secret service guys who just read this: No worries. You can all basically just go take naps anyway. No one is going to kill dubya while he has Cheney next in line for assasination insurance.
How hard is it to write a media player that outshines WMP? It's not that difficult at all. In fact it's been done already several times. The problem with all of them is that while they gripe about Microsoft's "greed" they get greedy themselves and resort to tactics that the user finds distasteful.
They force the media player to run some component as a startup item. They develop their own proprietary format (that in most cases is inferior to Windows Media). They refuse to share the format with competitors. They bombard the user with splash screens, registration and upgrade prompts. They cram enough advertising into the players that it reaches the point of user punishment so that they can have further reason for an upgrade. They add components that intrude into areas outside of music playing such as video and web whether the user asks for it or not. They forcibly run some sort of agent that constantly checks for or prompts for upgrades.
Now with all this why would I want some third party media player? All I asked for is to listen to some music. I think in the year 2004 that my computer should be able to do it easily the moment I plug it in. My Apple can do it. My Linux box can do it. Shouldn't my XP box be able to do it? Why would you ask Microsoft to unbundled WMP from Windows? If you want me to use your media player instead just do one simple thing: write a better one and don't make me swallow a bunch of crap with it. No one seems to be able to do this so instead of trying they go cry to their lawyer and the next thing you know my PC can no longer play media when I take it out of the box.
People whine too much about Microsoft being unfair and having a monopoly. They also gripe about the inferiority of their products. Well guess what? You can't have it both ways. If they are so inferior why don't you just beat them? Probably because you suck. Look at Firefox. Do you see them whining? Do you see them suffering from Microsoft's monopoly? No. They just STFU and wrote a better product. Somehow they managed to do it without cramming a bunch of unwanted crap in with it; AMAZING!!
So stop litigating instead of innovating. Stop being greedy and you might get what you're after. MS isn't that hard to beat you just have to stop whining and suing long enough to do it.
I've been waiting on this for years.
Imagine cars sharing the following telemetry:
Position based on next-gen GPS and other sources (sensed road reflectors, INS etc), Speed, proposed route (base on driver navigation input), other nearby vehicles (based on forward and rearward collision sensors), road conditions, traffic conditions, accidents (airbag deployments etc.).
If you get ALL the cars on a particular road or tollway to participate as nodes on such a network and get each node to be intelligent enough you could finally do automated driving. Nodes would have to cooperate to relay information, make group decisions and weed out malfunctioning nodes.
Imagine a row of cars: Car 1&2 transmit an airbag deployment, car 3 transmits a collision warning of stopped vehicles ahead of it, cars 3-10 simultaneously brake while the odd ones go left and the even ones go right. For miles in each direction the navigation information gets updated and everyone starts choosing alternate routes.
Imagine having your birthday on a Monday.
Forever.
Oh the suckage! You'll wish you were never born by the time you reach 50.
Another way to fix all this:
1. Make 364 days in a year (just whack another one out of February or something).
2. Make a second = 1.003434 seconds (plus some digits).
3. Done. No Day vs Date shift, no leap years.
You'll only need to rebuild every timekeeping device on the planet to account for the different second but the only people who will really care is the poor bastards that have a Monday birthday! All of us with Saturday birthdays are happy as ducks in a puddle.
I would actually just settle for getting rid of daylight savings time. Talk about stupidity. "Daylight savings????" I promise you that hassling with the retardedness of changing your clock will NOT alter the tilt of the earth for a few months thereby giving you more hours of daylight.
One of several standard responses?
As they say in the army: "If it's stupid but it works, it's not stupid."
:P No offence.
Man that is a stupid quote.
If something is stupid but works it's simply something stupid that works. By "army" logic this would be a good idea once I got it to work: Train a bunch of monkeys to hold an abacus and jot down the data I input to them. Introduce additional monkeys to hold the same data and act as parity so I could automatically correct when one monkey of many decided to pick a flea instead of store his current input.
IBM has come up with MANY great ideas (they've held the record for the most patents per year for a number of years). This one just happens to be stupid. The idea may work just fine but so does a clariion from EMC or a cheap promise IDE RAID controller. NASA spent untold dollars inventing a pen that would work in zero-G. The Russian's used a pencil.
The biggest gripe I have with the idea is, "Yeah, but WHY??" The interconnects are really clever for instance but wouldn't some (parallel obviously) variation of a 30 year old headphone jack work just as well?
Why even bother with the whole 3D "cube" idea if you have to slide cooling plates in-between? Stick with a 2D approach. Better yet, just apply your liquid cooling plates idea to existing technology!
Why add a CPU and cache for every "block" of data storage that you add? Cost obviously isn't the reason. The aerospace industry used to add additional jet engines to planes for redundancy (and power of course) until they found out that each added redundant engine also introduced about 1 million extra things that could break.
I could go on but I'll just "keep it simple" and say it's stupid. No offense to you or IBM as a whole I hope.
This is stupid.
This comes from a research lab where people have too much money and too many signs everywhere that say, "Think of a new idea." Current storage solutions aren't so broken that they need this kind of fix. If you want to be so frickin clever why don't you work on some high density, cost effective way to eliminate moving parts from storage.
ROFL
Yes, I was thinking this same thing. I clicked on it and wondered, "Gawd, what is that infernal clicking sound?" as it spasmed and tried to produce a new window. I was thinking maybe it didn't load right so I hit ctrl-N to get a new copy and it loaded paypal just as the address bar said.
You can make retards patch their IE. You can make retards switch to Firefox. You can put a warning label on a retards tube of super glue.
None of these things will truly help. A retard will still somehow end up smiling proudly with a stinky phish super glued to himself.
Your taking a commonly used phrase ("There's no comparison") and trying to attack the literal interpretation instead of the intended (and heavily implied) interpretation. That's fine if you want to look foolish. Most people (at least in the US) who understand English know that this phrase simply means "The two things being compared are vastly different". If you are from outside the US, or maybe do not speak English, then I apologize, if not, stop trying to be such a idiotic jackass.
Very Nice. Very mature. I'm sure you're a great parent. I am not attacking the literal interpretation of your statement. I am saying I disagree with you and that (to use your words) the two are NOT vastly different.
I also used a six year old as an example to illustrate just how very similar the two are. Do you think the six year old can tell the difference between murdering a guard in an Eastern European city or one on a secret martian base? A 12 year old? 14? What age does it not become murder?
Since you obviously fall into personal attacks and insults when some sarcastic criticism of your point puts you on the defense, let me just state my point very clearly and we'll go from there:
To a child both Doom 3 AND Half Life 2 are too violent. One may be more violent than the other by a small or great margin but both are too violent to be played without a parent's judgement.
Do you disagree?
If you can't be civil at least try not to hurt yourself (or your credibility) when you fly off the handle this time.
None whatsoever?
So there is no violence in Half Life 2 then right?
Six year olds should definately be allowed to play it without parental consent then huh?
I think you've become numb.
Do you know how many times "The Daily Show" has clowned Donald Rumsfeld in 2004 according to Yahoo! Video Search?
Once.
Search on: "daily show" rumsfeld
Is it inevitable that the door will hit you in the ass or will you be moving quicker?
After you've flunked for only finding 2 of your 10 security holes, take it up with the administration. Explain to them that you discovered your professor tricked you and there aren't 8 additional security holes. When the professor says there are, simply say, "Yeah? Let's see them."
At least if you flunk, you get to watch the monkey dig through code for the next six months to avoid losing his job.
I bet the math professors don't pull that crap with the next ten prime numbers.
I think Open Source is great but sometimes the rantings of the Linux crowd and chest beating about the evils of Microsoft can get pretty old.
I happen to dig Open Office (for example). I could give a crap about whether using it somehow betters mankind. The developers did an awesome job and I just like it. If you decide that because it is Open Source it must be Linux only then fine; I'll switch back to MS Office and be done with it.
If you are able to get all the other things I "do" on my computer to work under both Linux and Windows then I may consider a transition to Linux.
It makes it easier for Microsoft to "shut the door" on you if you refuse to work with them. This may sound like a troll but suck it up and face it for the reality it is: This is still a Microsoft world. If you want to win you're going to have to play their game and beat them at it. For me, Open Office has done this. Linux hasn't.
Linux "depends" on the applications that can run on it. You need to get applications that people like and use and then everyone will naturally transition to it. It's just that simple. The best way to get people to like your software is to write better software. The best way to get people to use it is to put it on the OS that people are using. Once you hit a critical mass of applications that exist on both then there is no reason NOT to transition from Windows to Linux.
One way to get people to never consider Linux is to thumb your elitist noses at them for running Open Source software on a "sell out" proprietary OS.
Maybe Real will launch a new "petition" website to get Apple to refund the 49 cents that everyone paid Real to get a song that will no longer play. hehe. Actually they are already working on a version of RealOne player that steals your file associations, makes your car run on leaded-only gasoline, refuses to uninstall from your dog and turns your iPod into a web banner.