Uhhh...did you ever stop to think that making the net another cable channel was THE POINT there Chuck? never before in our history has people been able to be heard by the masses without kissing the ring, they've owned radio and print and TV for decades but with the tubes and net radio and a bazillion other outlets the gatekeepers of media can't assrape the artist and enslave them like they used to. And BTW enslaved is a VERY perfect word, because despite "artists" like Metalicock thinking their are making tons they are getting less of a percentage now than the artists did in the 50s! they also lose their digital rights, songwriting royalties in many cases, the modern artist contract is the most one sided POS you've ever seen.
So i don't think it has a damned thing to do with piracy, that is just a smokescreen and fringe benefit at best. No what is for is to shut down all alternative channels so that big media can continue to control access to the masses and only those that sell everything get a chance at making a living being an artist, the rest can starve.
Notice how many of the ACs are posting variations on "eat shit and die softie"? kinda sad that/. has become infested with batshit crazies. I don't know why but it seems like lately FOSS attracts the batshit. First it was OS/2, then Windows during 9x, then Apple when jobs returned, now its FOSS that have the batshit. I mean its bad when I'm on a Linux forum and say "There needs to be a stronger consumer focus and more integration when it comes to GUIs" and get told, completely seriously mind you as i read the guy's history and he was being honest, "What do you need GUIs for? How would you write a GUI to make 'for' loops?" because the guy honestly believed little Suzy the checkout girl and grandma were writing if then else statements on their holidays, now THAT is batshit!
Now as for the WinPhone no matter what your thoughts on MSFT, and personally i think Ballmer gives the Pepsi guy a run for his money on the "shitty CEO with no direction" count, but one thing you DO have to give the man credit for is his focus on developers, because without developers you don't have apps, and without apps you don't have users. Now can MSFT catch up to Android? that I honestly don't know, the WinPhone has a nice UI but Android has the buzz and momentum. I mean even my 71 year old dad who don't know shit about OSes wanted me to go with him to look at Android phones which he knew by name and THAT is a hell of a lot of buzz. Apple will probably keep a lock on the top end, that is where they have always been the strongest so i doubt WinPhone has a hope in hell of changing that. the big question is will they be able to capture the middle and low end where Android is currently king and that i honestly don't know.
I DO think though in the end we'll probably see MSFT buy Nokia and try to come out with their own custom line as they've seen with Apple not only is that where the money is at but you have MUCH better control over the user experience. i mean we've seen great Android devices and some I wouldn't use to play frisbee with my dog but frankly since jobs came back and focused the company on the consumer market you really haven't seen a shitty device come out with iOS. Having control of the hardware they can make sure the device purrs like a kitten and runs as smooth as a Swiss watch and customers LIKE that level of smooth control and functionality.
But whether MSFT can pull it off or not in my mind comes down to three key things since I believe the parts are all there its whether they can put them together and make a solid whole from them. 1.-Smooth integration with AD and GPO to take the corporate market that was once held by RIM, 2.-Integration with XBLA to attract the young and the gamers, and 3.- making it along with Skype all work seamless with Windows so its all easy peasy plug and play goodness. The parts are all there, as others have noted its easy as hell to write new apps for which will not only appeal to hobbyists and those that want to make a few bucks off the market but to corporate for rolling out custom business apps, the only real question in my mind is can they pull it off with a shitty CEO like Ballmer at the helm. looking and playing with Win 8 my gut says no, Ballmer is a follower with no follow through and he'll screw the pooch trying to rip off OSX and Android and miss the boat again. In mobile you really need to get ahead of the curve, RIM found that out the hard way when they waited and put out a bad Android clone at the last minute but to get ahead you have to not only have a good idea but STICK WITH IT. Ballmer has shown that he doesn't tough things out, he folds. But time will tell but so far i haven't seen anything that would make me think ballmer can rally the troops and pull it off.
Because many don't understand GPL and think because V3 is out that makes V2 moot? I've seen it in action friend where companies threw out perfectly functional software because version Y is out so version X MUST be bad. And any company that asked a lawyer about GPL V3 is probably gonna be told to run and if the new one isn't any good why would they think the old one would be better? Best to stay safe and just wash your hands of the whole thing, that's what corps will say. Finally Stallman really is a bad role model for FOSS, between his toe cheese eating video (WTF was he thinking? who does that in private much less on stage in the middle of a lecture?) to his hugging Chavez and gushing about how wonderful he was Stallman has really put a bad face to GPL as of late and when companies start to inquire and see you have this fracture with some going V2 and some going V3 and large companies avoiding V3 like the plague you can see what would make them spooked.
That is why in the end just as has happened every other time when a single person has tried to force the masses into a direction they didn't want to go in FOSS I think the winner will be a fork, of what I can't tell you for sure but if i had to take a guess I'd say an offshoot of Apache or MPL since both are seen as business friendly and used by many. I think someone will come along and making one of those two more protective of the users while still being friendly to companies then BAM! Suddenly all these projects start adopting it instead of GPL and that will be that. I mean look at the post above me that thought my kids should be groped by the TSA for me daring not to follow the "One true way", its THAT kind of crazy batshit attitude that frankly scares businesses off. you just don't see that kind of fanaticism with Apache and MPL ONLY with regards to GPL and i think that is Stallman's influence and the way he tries to paint everything as a "war between light and dark" which give me a fucking break, its a software license not the force, okay?
But as you've seen above you get some real venom from FOSSies which is why I strictly separate them from FOSS users and developers who are generally a nice bunch. But its the batshit that are attracted to Stallman, like Moonies in their devotion which is why i call them FOSSies, that hurt the cause more than anything. A nice bland license like Apache or MPL that doesn't cause militants to flock to it could be just what we need to get many businesses currently on the fence to take a second look at FOSS. But the reason i think its affected GPL V2 as well is the reasons above along with stallman simply leaving a bad taste in everyone's mouth. the older he gets the more militant he gets and i think the tiVo trolling simply pushed him too far and he overreacted and that overreaction is what is gonna ultimately leave GPL a niche license used only by "followers of the one true way" while the rest of the world does as i said above. That's just the way FOSS works, like the net it routes around damage.
He'd be shocking animals to death with the new lightbulbs, suing Westinghouse and Tesla and everyone else, and in general acting like any other a$$hole - because that's what he was, and that's what he did, as well as cheating Tesla out of $$$ - all putting the "Con" in "Con Edison."
Uhhh...how EXACTLY is that flamebait? doesn't anyone know their history anymore? it was Edison that was frying animals and pushing for the electric chair because he was sure it would discredit Tesla and AC power and since he had DC patented up the ass he stood to make a fortune if he pulled it off. its pretty common knowledge that even after it was proven that with the tech of the time DC just wouldn't scale Edison was pushing for "neighborhood generators' belching out coal smoke to power a couple of blocks rather than admit while DC had its uses it wasn't gonna work long distance.
Sorry to burst anyone's bubbles but while Edison was a brilliant man he was also as ruthless as they come and had NO problem with deep roasting animals and people just to try to ruin a competitor. Hell Gates and Jobs didn't have nothing on Edison as i can't really picture Jobs having someone bashed to death with an IBM PC to "prove" they were unsafe.
Not to mention you and the other poster missed the important part when it comes to the masses...simple. Try Tipard DVD Ripper sometime as its literally "push button to get movie" and defaults to a bog standard DivX 5 that just about everything will read from your $30 Wally World DVD Player on up. With TPB you have to be able to tell the good from the fake, hope you don't fuck up and pick a poisoned.WMV (You might not fall for that but I've seen plenty of customers that have and gotten their machines pwned) and frankly most torrent software is designed by geeks and is NOT user friendly. Now compare that to "push button to get movie" and you'll see why all my customers are ripping. Finally add in the DVD collections they already own and as you pointed out the huge bins of movies at places like Walmart and Fred's (I just got my dad 4 westerns at Fred's on DVD for $5, why torrent at that price?) and you can see why ripping wins, its the path of least resistance and knowledge.
BTW if it was just me how can anyone explain Nbox and WDTV? After all legally there isn't a single way to actually use those devices, they don't stream and ripping is against the DCMA yet they often sell out of both and I've seen both machines at big box retailers. I'd argue its because ripping DVD is so damned easy and these devices just go along with that. BTW if you haven't tried one an Nbox is nice, the base model plays 720p for $30 and the high end does.MKV and 1080p for around $60. Add a 200-400Gb HDD in an enclosure and you have a dirt cheap movie station for the kiddies that is simple enough a 6 year old works it with ease.
Oh I agree completely with everything you said i'm just pointing out with the maze of laws we have if the *.A.A wanted to be pricks they could royally fuck your world up quite easily as copyright laws are this horrible maze of conflicting rulings and laws. To me what makes it sad is how much of our history is going right down the shitter and by the time the copyrights end will be gone. its common knowledge that many studios have movies decaying right now because they can't figure out a way to monetize them and won't let go the copyrights so somebody else can save them.
I found out first hand when me and a programmer pal came up with the idea of "DOSBox...on a stick" which would be we'd take all the old funky games that weren't sold anywhere anymore, the cheesy shooters, funky platformers, all those off the beaten track games you'd get on shareware discs and make it so the kids today could see how it was back then. he was gonna write the backend and me the GUI and marketing but then we tried actually getting a hold of these companies. I'd say about 45% of the games of the late 80s/early 90s are gone forever and those that are left are owned by douchebags that want more for a 30 year old piece of shareware than you'd get for a triple AAA title! I offered percentages, i offered to even let them have ads, most wanted us to sign over ALL our rights to the code in return for blessing us with a 30 year old game, not even the source code mind you, just what we could get on abandonware ring!
The sad part, and why I believe America is fucked, is that I was told by a contact that i could get it done in China or India no problem and no questions asked. But silly me i actually wanted to hire my fellow Americans so I just let it go, I didn't want to go into the minefield and deal with douches. but I can tell you contacting these people most of the source code is already lost forever and the games themselves are in legal limbo for eternity, all thanks to Valenti and the MPAA, may they rot in hell.
But the flipside is this: Piracy often helps software companies. look at MSFT and Adobe that keep people using their products because the kid that pirates grows up having the skills to use their software which the employer buys. MSFT made Windows 7 so damned easy to pirate its even easier than XP and miles easier than Vista (with 7 they don't even need a key) which means when you look at website stats unlike the lousy Vista numbers (because pirates skipped it I'm convinced) the numbers for Win 7 shot through the roof which helped them sell it to OEMs and to businesses.
Nobody is saying they shouldn't get paid for their work, at least i'm not, we're saying the draconian laws and judgements are way the fuck out of line with what is going on. When somebody copies a couple of dozen shitty dance tunes and gets hit with a judgement higher than what hurt locker did at the box office? something is seriously fucked up. I think you're close though, somewhere between two and five licenses depending on the software would be more correct.
Actually I think his snide remark was more placed at the fact that "interestingfella" and " InsightIn140Bytes" are actually sock puppets of one guy, ala old twitter. Personally I LIKE Windows 7 and this is from a person that fricking hated the Mickey mouse UI of XP and thought Vista was more like XP with a black themepack. breadcrumbs? Rock. Taskbar jumplists? How in the hell did we live without those? it makes jumping to the folder i was working on yesterday as easy as 'right click and launch".
as for TFA I doubt you'll find anybody but a troll that won't admit Apple has always had top notch designers. i may not like Apple's prices or policies but i'll be the first to give credit where credit is due and Apple under Steve ALWAYS had top notch designs. Funny how you could tell just by looking at the things when Steve wasn't head of Apple huh? I mean does anybody remember the fugly as hell crap put out under the Pepsi guy? You won't be seeing any of those things being placed in museums under great design. hell I have an Apple B&W G3 with Panther on it given to me that won't work with my PS2 KVM but I just don't have the heart to throw it out because its just so damned nice to look at. Apple may go a little TOO far for fashion occasionally (The Apple unit you had to drop to reseat the chips because Jobs hated fan noise and the Cube come to mind) but give 'em credit they always looked damned nice.
There have been a lot of articles specifically about Microsoft and Apple pushing the ESA to back off SOPA. There may be some dissension in the ranks.
Don't know about Apple but you can understand why with MSFT as piracy is their bestest friend! just look at how quick they backed off that reduced functionality mode on Vista when it looked like the pirates would stay on XP, having the number of websites reporting MSFT OSes having no way to distinguish pirate versions from legit gives MSFT higher numbers which helps them sell more copies to OEMs. Can you imagine how quickly someone would invest in Linux to come up with a version that worked for the masses if Windows piracy was ended tomorrow and everyone had to pay retail? Hell Windows 7 is easier to pirate than XP and Vista ever was!
These companies are starting to realize that SOPA is a good way to shoot themselves in the head because the one that is a pirate now ends up being a paying customer later with the knowledge to use their software, just ask adobe with PhotoShop. i bet every Photoshop customer was a one time kid that pirated the thing and by the time they got out into the world the had PS skills which meant more customers for Adobe. Wasn't it Gates that said "If they are gonna pirate i want them to pirate from us"? I know I saw Ballmer a few years ago give an interview where he said flat footed to the effect "I couldn't care less about some kid passing a copy of XP around the dorm room, i care about the boat coming from Manila with pirate copies that are so good i can't tell them apart" because he knew that piracy keeps people using MSFT software!
I just wish Ballmer wasn't such a dipshit as he had literally tripped over a way to end Windows piracy in the west and let it slip away. That $50 Win 7 HP upgrade which would install on a clean drive frankly was amazing, I saw guys who had NEVER owned a legit Windows suddenly all running legal copies of Windows. Its just a damned shame these companies can't see what Valve saw years ago, which is the trick is not to ruin the web with draconian laws trying to end piracy but to get the pirates switched over into paying users. I'd love to see what kind of money they made off the Xmas sale this year as i bet it was truly insane because by making their service cheap and easy it literally is easier to buy from Steam than pirate anymore. Too bad the others like the MPAA can't seem to catch that clue.
Can you produce receipts? Have every single disc and can produce them on demand? you see THAT is where they get you, they have managed to have their cake and eat it to as copyrights are the ONLY thing I know of where they can on one hand say you are only buying a license and on the other hand say you are only buying the physical media which will have to be replaced if lost or stolen. great scam they have going there, BTW don't forget your friends at the RIAA are lobbying to make ripping illegal for music as it is for video, don't forget. Look up what i put about ripping being illegal and you'll see the head of I believe Sony already trying to get the spin started just as they have turned copyright infringement into piracy.
Just remember what YOU think is logical and legal doesn't necessarily correlate to the crazy fucked up laws they end up bribing their way onto the books. After all logic would dictate if I buy a movie I should be able to watch that movie in whatever format that is convenient for me, no different than ripping the CD onto an iPod, but thanks to DMCA that's illegal. Might as well cue the Ayn Rand quote about criminals because I've actually got to see the law books for state and federal and frankly you could crush a man to death just by knocking the state books onto him, the federal could crush you into paste. I'm sure there are several contradictory laws they could whip off that if their lawyers pressed it would turn your life to shit for...ohh about 2 to 5 years worth of courtroom misery. Sad but true friend, sad but true.
Or they could just, you know, go around the whole thing. For an example I bet a lot of guys here have seen spam lately coming from the Yahoo accounts of old friends and are wondering WTF? I can answer that, the malware guys have figured out a way around the XSS protection in FF and whenever your friend looks at a porn "free videos!" site in FF it loads a hidden iFrame and then gets FF to autocomplete and loads the Yahoo email addresses and spams the shit out of them with driveby malware links. Don't ask me how they got out the sandbox as i'm not a browser security expert, fucked if i know, what I CAN tell you is that it works in FF but not Chrome based or IE, and it works in yahoo but not Gmail or Hotmail. Haven't tried it with FF 9 as I'm on vacation but it worked with FF 8. I'm sure there is enough guys off on the holidays I'll know if it still works if I start getting yahoo spam again.
And this is just one nasty and not counting hacking the website itself, which we have seen everything from governments to kernel.org get pwned this year so his little system probably wouldn't work too good if just two of the sites he goes to gets pwned so they can compare. Personally if he wants to go through all that work more power to 'em i say, everybody needs a hobby, but I'd just rather not have data worth giving a crap about on most sites and the few where i spend money at have a really solid password based on the serial along with make and model of one of my basses. i know my basses by heart so whipping that off is easy and the combo of letters numbers and symbols is nice and long and won't show up on a dictionary attack with me capitalizing all vowels. Easy for me to use, easy to remember, hard to hack.
You wanna feel young again? My first "PC" didn't even have an OS, just a BASIC interpreter! Look up the specs on a Commodore VIC sometime and be amazed anybody could do anything with the thing, hell a $1 watch at Fred's has more power than the VIC had.
This is why I say everyone should take the time and just be amazed at what we have. I mean my fricking netbook has dual cores, 80 stream processors, 8Gb of RAM and a 320Gb HDD and I paid less for it than I did for the VIC minus the tape drive! The desktop I'm typing this on has SIX cores, 8Gb of RAM, 3 fricking Tb of HDD space, 800 stream processors for video, a 1600x900 widescreen and cost less than the 386SX with a lousy 20Mb HDD which was my first IBM PC compatible! Hell you could easily fit my first 5 HDDs into the RAM I have on EITHER system!
So I think as we are about to send another year into the pass folks ought to just take a minute and be amazed at what Moore's Law has given us. I mean when even my 71 year old dad is running a quad, I have a dual core in the closet for a spare "just in case' and even my kid's hand me downs have truly insane levels of graphics power you really need to stop a minute and just be amazed at how far we've come in terms of power in such a short time. I mean when i started out a "laptop" would have been the Osbourne or Commodore Portables and they would have busted your knees if you tried setting them 20 pounders on your lap, not to mention the need for a REALLY long extension cord if you wanted to go anywhere with it and i hope you had great eyesight for that 3 inch screen, now I enjoy 6 hours of HD video on a charge on a machine that just weighs 3 pounds and only cost $350? that's nuts!
I have a really simple system called....I really don't care. Most of the sites i go to have total bullshit data about me, hence bullshit passwords. if a place is bullshit, why should I care? The few things that are NOT bullshit have a decent password which is simple to remember, its the make and model and serial to one of my favorite basses with all of the vowels capitalized. that gives me a nice looong password with letters numbers caps and symbols that nobody is guessing.
For those that have trouble with passwords just remember you have excellent passwords all around you. Everybody has stuff they hang onto year after year, for me its my basses, for others some family heirlooms, there is ALWAYS something. Just use the make model and serial and you have a nice huge password which if you forget you can just flip the thing over. or you can use the "I don't care" system and just have bullshit data on the majority of BS sites you go to and call it a day, your call.
Jesus I know we humans are getting lazy but...damned just....damn. is it REALLY that hard to just take a picture of the box and type it into Google later? Maybe i'm spoiled because i have a GF that can text faster than i can type on a full size keyboard so if I want something quick I just point at the box and say 'Honey do your thing" and watch the thumbs fly.
But the thing i don't get is why would you want to go to a corporate website? i mean according to the corporate website Kane&Lynch II is a "gritty urban drama with edge of your seat action!" and Duke Nukem Forever is a "Sassy and irreverent action fest with the classic one liners you love!" which of course is bullshit so deep you could fertilize the Sahara with it. Maybe its just me, I don't know, but frankly I've never seen a damned thing on a corporate website that wasn't completely useless marketing drone speak. I mean if all I wanted to do was hear some huckster try to sell me a product that is what commercials are for and I try to avoid those like STDs. Me I'd just rather Google or Amazon the thing and read some first hand exp with the product in question to find out if its a "gritty urban drama with edge of your seat action!" or "ZOMFG my eyes! The goggles they do nothing!" but maybe I'm just weird that way.
BTW I actually bought K&L II for a dollar figuring i could MST3K it and guess what? it isn't even worth a dollar for MST laughs. For MST ragging I recommend "You are empty" which has 30 foot mutant attack chickens and one of the bad guys is an old coot that goes "oooga booga!" while shooting at you with a double barrel, now THAT is funny!
Ya see pmontra you are falling for the same trap that has me bash my head against the wall with Linux zealots that just can't seem to grasp why "You can't just teach your customers to like CLI" because the simple fact is this...you are thinking like a geek. Ya see consumers are NOT geeks and are strange and curious creatures indeed and as someone who has been building and selling to them since 1983 I am probably one of a unique few that has insight into their strange and maddening habits.
For the example you gave, the cell phone. For YOU its a computer that makes calls but that is NOT what a consumer sees it as you see. its a "disposable phone with buttons that lets me Google" so they simply don't look at it in your light and frankly doesn't give a shit WHAT the carriers do as they'll just can it and get another when the contract is up. That is a completely different beast from say netbooks, which why ARM will never sell on them is because while YOU look at it as a "mobile computing device" THEY see it as a "cute baby laptop" and expect it to run anything a regular laptop does only slower, because its a baby you see and babies aren't as strong as grownups.
And it is THIS curious way of thinking that will doom locking down the PC and why ChromeOS isn't going anywhere, because on "cute baby laptops" and on desktops they expect and it damned well better run THEIR software, which could be any one of a bazillion and one damned apps going back 20+ years. Hell I have one customers I have to keep a NOS 2GHz desktop running for even though he has a nice new triple i built for him, why? Because his "must always have" software is Macromedia Xres which hasn't been supported since 1999 and refuses to run on modern CPUs and HDDs, even with VMS. So I had to set up a KVM switch and build a NOS 2GHz box just so he could have that ONE program. I have other customers that have ancient printers or music softare or any number of different 'must have" apps and if that don't run? Guess who is NOT buying.
so you see you really have to stop thinking like a geek and think like one of them to get a grasp on the way their minds work. cell phones aren't computers, they're phones with buttons and Google you throw away when the contract is up. they think of that like a computer like you would expect to play MP3s on your toaster, the thought simply never crosses their minds. But you tell them they can't run their software on their cute baby laptops (which despite all the doom and gloom certain OEMs are pushing I've found to still be VERY popular, especially among the females who love having a "cute baby laptop" they can stick in their purse) or desktop and watch the screaming bitchfit. I should know friend, i deal with them 6 days a week and sometimes on Sundays.
And the music loaded on them is...survey says...pirated! You DO realize it would cost something like $64,000 to load an iPod full of RIAA approved music, yes? After all they say ripping to your iPod is illegal and you should have to cut them a check per song (I'm not shitting you, look up "industry says ripping to your iPod is illegal" in Google) but nobody is actually paying attention to their asses are they? And Apple TV is DOA for precisely THAT reason, its all iStore and no easy way to run home ripped media.
In the end for a media device or home appliance to be a hit with regards to media it needs to be easy, cheap, and convenient and the MPAA haven't grasped that yet which is why so far every attempt they've made has bombed. When they want $3 an episode for TV shows with DRM piled on and more restrictions than you can name VS a user just going to TPB or ripping the thing? they WILL use TPB. It isn't like the old days where only someone with skillz could rip, try something like Tipard DVD Ripper where it is literally "push button to get movie" and even has Streams and CUDA support built in to speed ripping and you'll see why MPAA approved methods are full of fail. There is NO reason why my dad shouldn't be able to buy a DVD player with built in ripper that rips to a 1Tb HDD and makes loading movies off a flash as simple as drag and drop. the tech is there already, its the MPAA that is holding technology hostage.
But the simple fact you can walk into a big box retailer or Amazon and pick up an Nbox or WDTV (which there is no actual legal way to load media on according to the *.A.A and DMCA) means their bullshit isn't selling on their wouldn't be a big enough market to warrant these devices. Hell my 71 year old dad has sent me over a dozen customers simply by raving about how "My boy got me this Nbox thingie and now all my movies are just a click away!" and his friends (and even his nurse at the doctor's office) ask him "You wouldn't happen to have his number handy, would you?" because ultimately that is what the consumer WANTS, they want "push button and movie goes" and the MPAA isn't giving it to them so TPB is. Like Gabe at Valve said "Piracy is someone else offering a better product" and its true, you get nasty with price and DRM and folks WILL go elsewhere. Look at how much game companies make off Steam, it has just enough DRM that Joey isn't passing his purchase to all his buddies while making it beyond simple and cheap to buy. Make it easy, cheap, and convenient and they WILL buy because humans are lazy creatures and will go with the path of least resistance wherever possible. Make it an expensive royal PITA and then piracy is the easier route, simple really.
Most people interpret Moores Law as "quick, lets invent more pointless bling!".
I still remember running Unix on a 2MHz VAX. I believe it supported 64 users theoretically, and about 20 in practice. (No GUI, of course).
Hear Hear Anne! I remember surfing the web on a 233MHz with a stripped down Win98 running on 64Mb and frankly it was nice...until Geocities came out! Then it was OC the hell out of that Celeron and if you're lucky the silicon won't melt when the page you visit ends up making a comet Cursor pocketwatch hang from your mouse cursor like a string of snot!
Website developers are the absolute WORST when it comes to loading on the bling! Anyone else remember when a page that was 100Kb was considered bloated shit? We used to have frankly VERY usable websites on a third of that because they didn't go nuts with piling on the bling, now even on the fastest connections you can watch as the crap from all over the web is called and the bloat piles on up and that is WITHOUT flash! Now picture that on a 366Mhz mobile device where its doubtful they'll have ABP to block the 3 pages worth of ads for every page worth of content not to mention all that ultra heavy JavaScript and HTML...eeek! if they think a 1.5GHz mobile will be usable in 3 years much less 6 they haven't hung around any website designers obviously because by that time anything under 3GHz dual cores will be like that 366MHz is today, just a horribly painful experience. I'm all for saving money but there is a floor where you go below it and you've made the device nothing but a worthless toy and I think TFA has reached that floor and then tunneled under a couple of feet.
And whose fault would that be? why that would be YOU who voted in Congressman Kickbackus and Senator Porkman who promised to "bring home the bacon!" and had the shuttle, which frankly was a bad joke from the Nixon administration which failed ALL of the goals it had set out for, to be spread like a shotgun blast all over the country and thanks to all that pork made it damned near impossible to kill.
I'm sorry but there is a damned good reason why private industry has to do space now, and that is because BOTH parties don't even pretend to give a fuck about anything but their own pockets anymore. Just look at how you can get funding for any crazy military weapon system but our soldiers are paid so damned shitty their families are on food stamps, why? Kinda hard to get kickbacks and bring home the bacon with soldier pay, damned easy with a multibillion dollar weapon system.
We simply can't build good systems with government involvement anymore because the corruption is just too deep. nobody thinks about the good of the people or the country, just the good of the party and their own wallets. We should have shitcanned the shuttle in the 80s and man-rated either Atlas or Delta but since those systems were already established that would have meant Porkman and Kickbackus couldn't have shotgunned the build all over the country and got to feed at the trough so here we are, having to depend on private industry because the piggies can't quit feeding long enough to think about the country as a whole.
That would be true IF there weren't several already rock solid bases to build off of, but that isn't the case. you have Android, MeeGo, and several Linux embedded versions you could easily build off of and roll your own for a hell of a lot less than a billion because most of the hard work is already done and you could concentrate on customizing it to your platform and needs. That is why when ms Noyes at LinuxInsider asked me what i thought the next big OS would be I said there answe was simple, there won't be any. Those that want to stay proprietary will stick with MSFT and Apple and once they sign the NDAs will be able to customize to their needs and those that want the community to help or want more control will simply go Linux or BSD based.
There really isn't a point in reinventing the wheel anymore like there was in the old days when OS/2 and NeXT and WinNT were born because the old models had fundamental flaws, frankly all the real nasty problems have been pretty much solved and any of the above could be a solid base for a product easily. Why do you think Google used the Linux kernel instead of writing one from scratch? its not like they couldn't afford to, it was just kinda pointless when there was already one there that did what they needed with a Linux they could live with. they could have just as easily signed an NDA and had the entire WinMo source code if that would have been their wish but by going with a FOSS kernel they could see what the community cooks up and roll the best ideas into their own product easily.
So I doubt we'll suddenly see some completely new OS pop up on the scene and I was stunned when they announced how much HP was gonna pay for Palm. I had to double check to make sure it wasn't the first of April because i thought surely nobody would be THAT stupid, but I guess it just shows that the old HP is long gone and if the current HP board had a sensible thought between them their heads would probably explode. Personally i bet even being opened up as FOSS won't save WebOS as there is already too many familiar with Android and the ecosystem for it is too highly developed. As MSFT is learning its the apps stupid and having a truly great mobile OS don't mean dick if all the apps folks want isn't already there and waiting.
Well I think a lot of that was caused by Linux developers and advocates being frankly stupidly low with regards to system requirements. How many "Dumpster dive a great Linux box!" and "Save a PC from the dump, just use Linux!" articles have we seen? Well by putting their system reqs at frankly ludicrously low levels what you ended up with is OEMs slapping Linux on machines that frankly would have had trouble running Win98 without hanging and gave Linux a worse view from those that don't know about specs and just look at price. i mean a 366Mhz CPU? Geez we were throwing out faster chips than that a decade ago! It reminds me of those junkers Walmart used to sell with Linux that had worse specs than what you'd find in a dumpster.
Sure its nice that you can run Linux on some POS that used to run Win95 but that doesn't mean its gonna be a pleasant experience with the modern web. This thing might be fine for an ebook reader but i shudder to think what trying to surf the bling bling heavy web will be like, even without flash but just dealing with all the heavy JavaScript out there with a 366Mhz CPU, I bet its like trying to load modern web pages on a 300 baud modern...eek! of course many will just say its because Android or Linux sucks and hurt the rep when its just the OS is being squeezed into woefully underpowered hardware.
Exactly. Both AMD and Intel probably sell a dozen server chips for every desktop, both have embedded chips in the C/E series and Atom respectively and while these chips are used in appliances there are also used in everything from camera control setups for businesses to micro desktops. There is just too much money in general purpose computing for either company to slit their own throats for what is essentially a bit player in the wide scheme of thing because despite all their bluster the MPAA really is a small fish compared to the worldwide computing market. this of course is only counting X86 and isn't even counting the Via chips that are used in car computing nor the myriad of ARM and MIPS chips used all over the damned place, to expect them ALL to kiss the ring is frankly the height of insanity.
Finally as we all know thanks to Citizens united our laws are written by he who has the most cash and on their best day the MPAA lobbyists couldn't touch a consortium that had Intel, AMD, all the ARM and MIPS manufacturers and MSFT and Apple all joined together and join together they would because ALL of the above make boatloads of money on general purpose computing. The chip manufacturers sell more chips, and the software houses like Apple and MSFT make money off the appstore and getting people to use Visual studio to enhance their Windows platform respectively so the amount of money they'd stand to lose would frankly be staggering and for what? So a company doesn't have to wake up and smell the present and can instead still pretend like its 1983 and broadband doesn't exist?
In the end the MPAA will be dragged kicking and screaming into the present just like the music companies were and then will find out shock, gasp! That there is plenty of money to be made if you actually give customers what they want, which is cheap, easy and convenient access to anything they want. there is no damned reason in this day and age i just can't go to amazon and whip out my CC and buy an.AVI or.MP4 or whatever format i want movie just like i buy an MP3 or buy a game off of Steam or GOG except the MPAA is just too damned stupid to sell it to me. eventually they'll figure out what Valve did years ago and that is you'll never kill piracy but if you make it cheap and easy enough the majority simply won't bother because the legal version will be easier. I mean compare what it takes to load a movie onto an Nbox or WDTV now, you can 1.-go buy a disc, 2.-get the disc home, 3.-rip the disc to the HDD, 4.-convert it to the right format, 5.-drag it to the device, or you can just 1.-go to TPB and download the movie in the correct format and 2.- put it on the device. Which takes less steps? Now compare that to say Steam 1.-Pick game and push button to either keep or give to friend/family member, 2.-there is no step two. Make it simple, cheap and easy and people WILL buy, make it a royal PITA where the pirate gets less hassle than the guy that gives you money and watch the piracy soar, duh!
Here's what I don't get, maybe someone can tell me what i missed: What EXACTLY do you want or need the QR codes for anyway? Is there someone going "ZOFG I must go to a company's bullshit PR website NOW dammit!"? I mean with every damned smartphone on the planet having Google what is the point? Hell at my local Wally world they even have a couple of display units hooked up to Google so if they don't know the answer to a question they'll help you Google the damned answer and at least that way you'll get an honest answer and not PR BS like you get on corp websites.
So maybe its just me but I haven't ever seen anything on a corp website I'd frankly believe, if they told me it was raining i'd want a second opinion, so to me these QR codes make about as much sense as the Cuecat. If you need to know about a product why not just Google the damned thing or check the reviews on Amazon? What benefit does this QR code stuff give you that negates the risks in TFA AND the likelihood that everything you read will be spin?
Actually you really shouldn't blame the judge as he WAS trying to keep people out of jail and with repeat offenders your options are pretty limited. he would basically give them the choice of going into narconon or doing the time because he really believed that treatment was best and sadly thanks to the government cutting the living hell out of money for treatment the few in house treatment facilities are so overcrowded that you'll never get in. did you know the average wait to get in house treatment for heroin is 2 years and the average survival time is a year and a half?
So don't be too hard on the judges, I can tell you from personal knowledge a lot of them are good men who have seen first hand through families what drug and alcohol addiction does and are just trying to do their best with what they've got. Would you suggest they throw them in prison? I sadly know someone I went to HS with that is doing 15 years for armed robbery because HE WANTED TO GO TO PRISON because he couldn't get his drug of choice during a local drug drought and he knew he could always score in the joint. When you are faced with people THAT addicted your options become severely limited especially when you are looking at a 2 year plus waiting list for beds in my area for treatment. After my little talk he personally got a hold of the local AA chapter and made sure they'd be willing to attempt to help the drug addicts and now he gives them a choice of AA or jail because really, what other choices does he have?
Uhhh...because unlike you I'm not a militant FOSSie which like a Moonie treats software as a religion? I mean when you equate a software license to be groped by the TSA? Step away from the keyboard little FOSSie for you are coming off as more than a little batshit.
By the way FOSSie, where do you think software comes from? Magic fairies shit it out like that bunny shitting jelly beans? Newsflash the VAST majority of software INCLUDING FOSS is PAID FOR BY COMPANIES. Companies that got a Goatse in their inbox from RMS so naturally they ain't too keen in jumping aboard his little communist utopia. Kinda funny that a guy that is a self proclaimed "squatter from MIT" garners so much batshit loyalty but the rest of us just can't squat on a campus without getting hauled away in cuffs. We have bills to pay and families to feed and there are many companies that will happily pay for code, even FOSS, if they don't feel like they are getting backed into a corner.
But there is a simple way to tell if its you or i that is right, every year Slashdot should have an article called "The state of GPL V3" and show how the numbers are coming along. Personally i think GPL is gonna continue to nosedive because even Torvalds won't touch it because its too restrictive. And if companies were so damned evil how do you explain apache? How do you explain Red hat or all the other companies making money with GPL? Hell apache is practically THE Internet now and i don't see them sitting on street corners with a cup and a cardboard sign and their license is one of the most permissive around.
In the end I truly believe RMS got trolled by TiVo and like most that get trolled completely overreacted and screwed himself and the GPL in the process. The numbers don't lie and as we saw here on Slashdot not too long ago GPL is declining like a rock rolling downhill, every month since GPL V3 the numbers have gotten WORSE not better. A logical person would sit down with developers and say "What EXACTLY is it you hate about GPL V3?" and work with them to come up with a license all could live with, but RMS is a militant and as we've seen time and time again militants NEVER compromise, its their way or the highway. Given that choice i believe the developers of the world will choose the highway and there will be an offshoot of MPL or AGPL or Apache crafted that will be what GPL V3 SHOULD have been, a license that does its best to protect the users while still giving companies an incentive to keep paying FOSS developers.
But you go right on comparing those that don't drink the koolaid with facists, hell i'm shocked you didn't just go for full troll and call me a Nazi. Its this kind of foaming at the mouth "all that don't follow the 'one true way' are evil and burn babies!" bullshit that gives FOSS a bad name and is why I separate FOSS users and developers, which are generally a smart and reasonable bunch, with FOSSies like you that think all those that don't worship RMS dirty sandals are nazi baby killers. Frankly you should work for MSFT because between guys like you and videos like this you make it too damned easy for any company to label FOSS as a bunch of nutters.
Let us not forget what is REALLY gonna drive this, which is families with kids. i have several customers that have gone HTPC and put little Nbox players in the kid's bedroom, why? Because DVD rippers have gotten to the point it is "Push button to output.AVI" which is beyond easy peasy and NOBODY wants to deal with little Annie crying because her little sister managed to scratch her favorite Dora video. With a 200Gb hard drive and a $30 Nbox you have a system that is simple enough a 6 year old can work it (no exaggeration there, I've actually watched a 6 year old work an nbox) with NO discs to scratch and NO boxes to deal with or to get lost, you can just store them into the closet and if the HDD dies whip another.AVI off or do as my customers do and just back up 4 or 5 onto a blank DVD and call it a day.
Then you have the parents which after seeing how easy it works for the kiddies goes "Hey how come I can't have it that easy?" and end up looking at one of my customer's HTPCs and have me build them one. the new remotes are beyond simple for those that are used to texting (I recommend the Lenovo HTPC remote, fits the hand nicely) and then they can plug in wireless gaming controllers or a full wireless keyboard and mouse when they need to do some real work on the thing. The prices are frankly INSANELY cheap if you stick with AMD, which since i'm an AMD only shop isn't a problem, and you can get an E-350 based setup dirt cheap if all you want is a media center, but most of my customers end up kicking the the few extra bucks to get a triple core that will let them game as well. Before the flood you could build a frankly crazy powerful HTPC that would game for around $500 and that box will last you probably a good decade by simply changing out the GPU occasionally, hell even after the flood if you shop around you can build a 1Tb system for around $600 that will play just about any game in 1080p. you wanna talk about an easy sale, just show them how easy Windows media Center makes dealing with a library of media and then fire up batman:AA or Just Cause II and let them drool on the graphics, cha ching!
So ultimately its families and word of mouth which i think will kill all this BS, just as it did with music. Folks want easy, simple, and cheap and HTPCs frankly fit all three of those conditions now, its the MPAA dragging their heels and making us feed discs like it was 1988 with VCRs. But there are plenty of people with more growing everyday that are tired of feeding discs and just want to "push a button and its all there" and little shops like mine are happy to oblige. All it takes is ONE person in a neighborhood getting an HTPC and soon the word is out and all those around them are going "Hey can you get me a thing like what he's got?" and there it goes.
Slashdot Mirror
Uhhh...did you ever stop to think that making the net another cable channel was THE POINT there Chuck? never before in our history has people been able to be heard by the masses without kissing the ring, they've owned radio and print and TV for decades but with the tubes and net radio and a bazillion other outlets the gatekeepers of media can't assrape the artist and enslave them like they used to. And BTW enslaved is a VERY perfect word, because despite "artists" like Metalicock thinking their are making tons they are getting less of a percentage now than the artists did in the 50s! they also lose their digital rights, songwriting royalties in many cases, the modern artist contract is the most one sided POS you've ever seen.
So i don't think it has a damned thing to do with piracy, that is just a smokescreen and fringe benefit at best. No what is for is to shut down all alternative channels so that big media can continue to control access to the masses and only those that sell everything get a chance at making a living being an artist, the rest can starve.
Notice how many of the ACs are posting variations on "eat shit and die softie"? kinda sad that /. has become infested with batshit crazies. I don't know why but it seems like lately FOSS attracts the batshit. First it was OS/2, then Windows during 9x, then Apple when jobs returned, now its FOSS that have the batshit. I mean its bad when I'm on a Linux forum and say "There needs to be a stronger consumer focus and more integration when it comes to GUIs" and get told, completely seriously mind you as i read the guy's history and he was being honest, "What do you need GUIs for? How would you write a GUI to make 'for' loops?" because the guy honestly believed little Suzy the checkout girl and grandma were writing if then else statements on their holidays, now THAT is batshit!
Now as for the WinPhone no matter what your thoughts on MSFT, and personally i think Ballmer gives the Pepsi guy a run for his money on the "shitty CEO with no direction" count, but one thing you DO have to give the man credit for is his focus on developers, because without developers you don't have apps, and without apps you don't have users. Now can MSFT catch up to Android? that I honestly don't know, the WinPhone has a nice UI but Android has the buzz and momentum. I mean even my 71 year old dad who don't know shit about OSes wanted me to go with him to look at Android phones which he knew by name and THAT is a hell of a lot of buzz. Apple will probably keep a lock on the top end, that is where they have always been the strongest so i doubt WinPhone has a hope in hell of changing that. the big question is will they be able to capture the middle and low end where Android is currently king and that i honestly don't know.
I DO think though in the end we'll probably see MSFT buy Nokia and try to come out with their own custom line as they've seen with Apple not only is that where the money is at but you have MUCH better control over the user experience. i mean we've seen great Android devices and some I wouldn't use to play frisbee with my dog but frankly since jobs came back and focused the company on the consumer market you really haven't seen a shitty device come out with iOS. Having control of the hardware they can make sure the device purrs like a kitten and runs as smooth as a Swiss watch and customers LIKE that level of smooth control and functionality.
But whether MSFT can pull it off or not in my mind comes down to three key things since I believe the parts are all there its whether they can put them together and make a solid whole from them. 1.-Smooth integration with AD and GPO to take the corporate market that was once held by RIM, 2.-Integration with XBLA to attract the young and the gamers, and 3.- making it along with Skype all work seamless with Windows so its all easy peasy plug and play goodness. The parts are all there, as others have noted its easy as hell to write new apps for which will not only appeal to hobbyists and those that want to make a few bucks off the market but to corporate for rolling out custom business apps, the only real question in my mind is can they pull it off with a shitty CEO like Ballmer at the helm. looking and playing with Win 8 my gut says no, Ballmer is a follower with no follow through and he'll screw the pooch trying to rip off OSX and Android and miss the boat again. In mobile you really need to get ahead of the curve, RIM found that out the hard way when they waited and put out a bad Android clone at the last minute but to get ahead you have to not only have a good idea but STICK WITH IT. Ballmer has shown that he doesn't tough things out, he folds. But time will tell but so far i haven't seen anything that would make me think ballmer can rally the troops and pull it off.
Because many don't understand GPL and think because V3 is out that makes V2 moot? I've seen it in action friend where companies threw out perfectly functional software because version Y is out so version X MUST be bad. And any company that asked a lawyer about GPL V3 is probably gonna be told to run and if the new one isn't any good why would they think the old one would be better? Best to stay safe and just wash your hands of the whole thing, that's what corps will say. Finally Stallman really is a bad role model for FOSS, between his toe cheese eating video (WTF was he thinking? who does that in private much less on stage in the middle of a lecture?) to his hugging Chavez and gushing about how wonderful he was Stallman has really put a bad face to GPL as of late and when companies start to inquire and see you have this fracture with some going V2 and some going V3 and large companies avoiding V3 like the plague you can see what would make them spooked.
That is why in the end just as has happened every other time when a single person has tried to force the masses into a direction they didn't want to go in FOSS I think the winner will be a fork, of what I can't tell you for sure but if i had to take a guess I'd say an offshoot of Apache or MPL since both are seen as business friendly and used by many. I think someone will come along and making one of those two more protective of the users while still being friendly to companies then BAM! Suddenly all these projects start adopting it instead of GPL and that will be that. I mean look at the post above me that thought my kids should be groped by the TSA for me daring not to follow the "One true way", its THAT kind of crazy batshit attitude that frankly scares businesses off. you just don't see that kind of fanaticism with Apache and MPL ONLY with regards to GPL and i think that is Stallman's influence and the way he tries to paint everything as a "war between light and dark" which give me a fucking break, its a software license not the force, okay?
But as you've seen above you get some real venom from FOSSies which is why I strictly separate them from FOSS users and developers who are generally a nice bunch. But its the batshit that are attracted to Stallman, like Moonies in their devotion which is why i call them FOSSies, that hurt the cause more than anything. A nice bland license like Apache or MPL that doesn't cause militants to flock to it could be just what we need to get many businesses currently on the fence to take a second look at FOSS. But the reason i think its affected GPL V2 as well is the reasons above along with stallman simply leaving a bad taste in everyone's mouth. the older he gets the more militant he gets and i think the tiVo trolling simply pushed him too far and he overreacted and that overreaction is what is gonna ultimately leave GPL a niche license used only by "followers of the one true way" while the rest of the world does as i said above. That's just the way FOSS works, like the net it routes around damage.
He'd be shocking animals to death with the new lightbulbs, suing Westinghouse and Tesla and everyone else, and in general acting like any other a$$hole - because that's what he was, and that's what he did, as well as cheating Tesla out of $$$ - all putting the "Con" in "Con Edison."
Uhhh...how EXACTLY is that flamebait? doesn't anyone know their history anymore? it was Edison that was frying animals and pushing for the electric chair because he was sure it would discredit Tesla and AC power and since he had DC patented up the ass he stood to make a fortune if he pulled it off. its pretty common knowledge that even after it was proven that with the tech of the time DC just wouldn't scale Edison was pushing for "neighborhood generators' belching out coal smoke to power a couple of blocks rather than admit while DC had its uses it wasn't gonna work long distance.
Sorry to burst anyone's bubbles but while Edison was a brilliant man he was also as ruthless as they come and had NO problem with deep roasting animals and people just to try to ruin a competitor. Hell Gates and Jobs didn't have nothing on Edison as i can't really picture Jobs having someone bashed to death with an IBM PC to "prove" they were unsafe.
Not to mention you and the other poster missed the important part when it comes to the masses...simple. Try Tipard DVD Ripper sometime as its literally "push button to get movie" and defaults to a bog standard DivX 5 that just about everything will read from your $30 Wally World DVD Player on up. With TPB you have to be able to tell the good from the fake, hope you don't fuck up and pick a poisoned .WMV (You might not fall for that but I've seen plenty of customers that have and gotten their machines pwned) and frankly most torrent software is designed by geeks and is NOT user friendly. Now compare that to "push button to get movie" and you'll see why all my customers are ripping. Finally add in the DVD collections they already own and as you pointed out the huge bins of movies at places like Walmart and Fred's (I just got my dad 4 westerns at Fred's on DVD for $5, why torrent at that price?) and you can see why ripping wins, its the path of least resistance and knowledge.
BTW if it was just me how can anyone explain Nbox and WDTV? After all legally there isn't a single way to actually use those devices, they don't stream and ripping is against the DCMA yet they often sell out of both and I've seen both machines at big box retailers. I'd argue its because ripping DVD is so damned easy and these devices just go along with that. BTW if you haven't tried one an Nbox is nice, the base model plays 720p for $30 and the high end does .MKV and 1080p for around $60. Add a 200-400Gb HDD in an enclosure and you have a dirt cheap movie station for the kiddies that is simple enough a 6 year old works it with ease.
Oh I agree completely with everything you said i'm just pointing out with the maze of laws we have if the *.A.A wanted to be pricks they could royally fuck your world up quite easily as copyright laws are this horrible maze of conflicting rulings and laws. To me what makes it sad is how much of our history is going right down the shitter and by the time the copyrights end will be gone. its common knowledge that many studios have movies decaying right now because they can't figure out a way to monetize them and won't let go the copyrights so somebody else can save them.
I found out first hand when me and a programmer pal came up with the idea of "DOSBox...on a stick" which would be we'd take all the old funky games that weren't sold anywhere anymore, the cheesy shooters, funky platformers, all those off the beaten track games you'd get on shareware discs and make it so the kids today could see how it was back then. he was gonna write the backend and me the GUI and marketing but then we tried actually getting a hold of these companies. I'd say about 45% of the games of the late 80s/early 90s are gone forever and those that are left are owned by douchebags that want more for a 30 year old piece of shareware than you'd get for a triple AAA title! I offered percentages, i offered to even let them have ads, most wanted us to sign over ALL our rights to the code in return for blessing us with a 30 year old game, not even the source code mind you, just what we could get on abandonware ring!
The sad part, and why I believe America is fucked, is that I was told by a contact that i could get it done in China or India no problem and no questions asked. But silly me i actually wanted to hire my fellow Americans so I just let it go, I didn't want to go into the minefield and deal with douches. but I can tell you contacting these people most of the source code is already lost forever and the games themselves are in legal limbo for eternity, all thanks to Valenti and the MPAA, may they rot in hell.
But the flipside is this: Piracy often helps software companies. look at MSFT and Adobe that keep people using their products because the kid that pirates grows up having the skills to use their software which the employer buys. MSFT made Windows 7 so damned easy to pirate its even easier than XP and miles easier than Vista (with 7 they don't even need a key) which means when you look at website stats unlike the lousy Vista numbers (because pirates skipped it I'm convinced) the numbers for Win 7 shot through the roof which helped them sell it to OEMs and to businesses.
Nobody is saying they shouldn't get paid for their work, at least i'm not, we're saying the draconian laws and judgements are way the fuck out of line with what is going on. When somebody copies a couple of dozen shitty dance tunes and gets hit with a judgement higher than what hurt locker did at the box office? something is seriously fucked up. I think you're close though, somewhere between two and five licenses depending on the software would be more correct.
Actually I think his snide remark was more placed at the fact that "interestingfella" and " InsightIn140Bytes" are actually sock puppets of one guy, ala old twitter. Personally I LIKE Windows 7 and this is from a person that fricking hated the Mickey mouse UI of XP and thought Vista was more like XP with a black themepack. breadcrumbs? Rock. Taskbar jumplists? How in the hell did we live without those? it makes jumping to the folder i was working on yesterday as easy as 'right click and launch".
as for TFA I doubt you'll find anybody but a troll that won't admit Apple has always had top notch designers. i may not like Apple's prices or policies but i'll be the first to give credit where credit is due and Apple under Steve ALWAYS had top notch designs. Funny how you could tell just by looking at the things when Steve wasn't head of Apple huh? I mean does anybody remember the fugly as hell crap put out under the Pepsi guy? You won't be seeing any of those things being placed in museums under great design. hell I have an Apple B&W G3 with Panther on it given to me that won't work with my PS2 KVM but I just don't have the heart to throw it out because its just so damned nice to look at. Apple may go a little TOO far for fashion occasionally (The Apple unit you had to drop to reseat the chips because Jobs hated fan noise and the Cube come to mind) but give 'em credit they always looked damned nice.
There have been a lot of articles specifically about Microsoft and Apple pushing the ESA to back off SOPA. There may be some dissension in the ranks.
Don't know about Apple but you can understand why with MSFT as piracy is their bestest friend! just look at how quick they backed off that reduced functionality mode on Vista when it looked like the pirates would stay on XP, having the number of websites reporting MSFT OSes having no way to distinguish pirate versions from legit gives MSFT higher numbers which helps them sell more copies to OEMs. Can you imagine how quickly someone would invest in Linux to come up with a version that worked for the masses if Windows piracy was ended tomorrow and everyone had to pay retail? Hell Windows 7 is easier to pirate than XP and Vista ever was!
These companies are starting to realize that SOPA is a good way to shoot themselves in the head because the one that is a pirate now ends up being a paying customer later with the knowledge to use their software, just ask adobe with PhotoShop. i bet every Photoshop customer was a one time kid that pirated the thing and by the time they got out into the world the had PS skills which meant more customers for Adobe. Wasn't it Gates that said "If they are gonna pirate i want them to pirate from us"? I know I saw Ballmer a few years ago give an interview where he said flat footed to the effect "I couldn't care less about some kid passing a copy of XP around the dorm room, i care about the boat coming from Manila with pirate copies that are so good i can't tell them apart" because he knew that piracy keeps people using MSFT software!
I just wish Ballmer wasn't such a dipshit as he had literally tripped over a way to end Windows piracy in the west and let it slip away. That $50 Win 7 HP upgrade which would install on a clean drive frankly was amazing, I saw guys who had NEVER owned a legit Windows suddenly all running legal copies of Windows. Its just a damned shame these companies can't see what Valve saw years ago, which is the trick is not to ruin the web with draconian laws trying to end piracy but to get the pirates switched over into paying users. I'd love to see what kind of money they made off the Xmas sale this year as i bet it was truly insane because by making their service cheap and easy it literally is easier to buy from Steam than pirate anymore. Too bad the others like the MPAA can't seem to catch that clue.
Can you produce receipts? Have every single disc and can produce them on demand? you see THAT is where they get you, they have managed to have their cake and eat it to as copyrights are the ONLY thing I know of where they can on one hand say you are only buying a license and on the other hand say you are only buying the physical media which will have to be replaced if lost or stolen. great scam they have going there, BTW don't forget your friends at the RIAA are lobbying to make ripping illegal for music as it is for video, don't forget. Look up what i put about ripping being illegal and you'll see the head of I believe Sony already trying to get the spin started just as they have turned copyright infringement into piracy.
Just remember what YOU think is logical and legal doesn't necessarily correlate to the crazy fucked up laws they end up bribing their way onto the books. After all logic would dictate if I buy a movie I should be able to watch that movie in whatever format that is convenient for me, no different than ripping the CD onto an iPod, but thanks to DMCA that's illegal. Might as well cue the Ayn Rand quote about criminals because I've actually got to see the law books for state and federal and frankly you could crush a man to death just by knocking the state books onto him, the federal could crush you into paste. I'm sure there are several contradictory laws they could whip off that if their lawyers pressed it would turn your life to shit for...ohh about 2 to 5 years worth of courtroom misery. Sad but true friend, sad but true.
Or they could just, you know, go around the whole thing. For an example I bet a lot of guys here have seen spam lately coming from the Yahoo accounts of old friends and are wondering WTF? I can answer that, the malware guys have figured out a way around the XSS protection in FF and whenever your friend looks at a porn "free videos!" site in FF it loads a hidden iFrame and then gets FF to autocomplete and loads the Yahoo email addresses and spams the shit out of them with driveby malware links. Don't ask me how they got out the sandbox as i'm not a browser security expert, fucked if i know, what I CAN tell you is that it works in FF but not Chrome based or IE, and it works in yahoo but not Gmail or Hotmail. Haven't tried it with FF 9 as I'm on vacation but it worked with FF 8. I'm sure there is enough guys off on the holidays I'll know if it still works if I start getting yahoo spam again.
And this is just one nasty and not counting hacking the website itself, which we have seen everything from governments to kernel.org get pwned this year so his little system probably wouldn't work too good if just two of the sites he goes to gets pwned so they can compare. Personally if he wants to go through all that work more power to 'em i say, everybody needs a hobby, but I'd just rather not have data worth giving a crap about on most sites and the few where i spend money at have a really solid password based on the serial along with make and model of one of my basses. i know my basses by heart so whipping that off is easy and the combo of letters numbers and symbols is nice and long and won't show up on a dictionary attack with me capitalizing all vowels. Easy for me to use, easy to remember, hard to hack.
You wanna feel young again? My first "PC" didn't even have an OS, just a BASIC interpreter! Look up the specs on a Commodore VIC sometime and be amazed anybody could do anything with the thing, hell a $1 watch at Fred's has more power than the VIC had.
This is why I say everyone should take the time and just be amazed at what we have. I mean my fricking netbook has dual cores, 80 stream processors, 8Gb of RAM and a 320Gb HDD and I paid less for it than I did for the VIC minus the tape drive! The desktop I'm typing this on has SIX cores, 8Gb of RAM, 3 fricking Tb of HDD space, 800 stream processors for video, a 1600x900 widescreen and cost less than the 386SX with a lousy 20Mb HDD which was my first IBM PC compatible! Hell you could easily fit my first 5 HDDs into the RAM I have on EITHER system!
So I think as we are about to send another year into the pass folks ought to just take a minute and be amazed at what Moore's Law has given us. I mean when even my 71 year old dad is running a quad, I have a dual core in the closet for a spare "just in case' and even my kid's hand me downs have truly insane levels of graphics power you really need to stop a minute and just be amazed at how far we've come in terms of power in such a short time. I mean when i started out a "laptop" would have been the Osbourne or Commodore Portables and they would have busted your knees if you tried setting them 20 pounders on your lap, not to mention the need for a REALLY long extension cord if you wanted to go anywhere with it and i hope you had great eyesight for that 3 inch screen, now I enjoy 6 hours of HD video on a charge on a machine that just weighs 3 pounds and only cost $350? that's nuts!
I have a really simple system called....I really don't care. Most of the sites i go to have total bullshit data about me, hence bullshit passwords. if a place is bullshit, why should I care? The few things that are NOT bullshit have a decent password which is simple to remember, its the make and model and serial to one of my favorite basses with all of the vowels capitalized. that gives me a nice looong password with letters numbers caps and symbols that nobody is guessing.
For those that have trouble with passwords just remember you have excellent passwords all around you. Everybody has stuff they hang onto year after year, for me its my basses, for others some family heirlooms, there is ALWAYS something. Just use the make model and serial and you have a nice huge password which if you forget you can just flip the thing over. or you can use the "I don't care" system and just have bullshit data on the majority of BS sites you go to and call it a day, your call.
Jesus I know we humans are getting lazy but...damned just....damn. is it REALLY that hard to just take a picture of the box and type it into Google later? Maybe i'm spoiled because i have a GF that can text faster than i can type on a full size keyboard so if I want something quick I just point at the box and say 'Honey do your thing" and watch the thumbs fly.
But the thing i don't get is why would you want to go to a corporate website? i mean according to the corporate website Kane&Lynch II is a "gritty urban drama with edge of your seat action!" and Duke Nukem Forever is a "Sassy and irreverent action fest with the classic one liners you love!" which of course is bullshit so deep you could fertilize the Sahara with it. Maybe its just me, I don't know, but frankly I've never seen a damned thing on a corporate website that wasn't completely useless marketing drone speak. I mean if all I wanted to do was hear some huckster try to sell me a product that is what commercials are for and I try to avoid those like STDs. Me I'd just rather Google or Amazon the thing and read some first hand exp with the product in question to find out if its a "gritty urban drama with edge of your seat action!" or "ZOMFG my eyes! The goggles they do nothing!" but maybe I'm just weird that way.
BTW I actually bought K&L II for a dollar figuring i could MST3K it and guess what? it isn't even worth a dollar for MST laughs. For MST ragging I recommend "You are empty" which has 30 foot mutant attack chickens and one of the bad guys is an old coot that goes "oooga booga!" while shooting at you with a double barrel, now THAT is funny!
Ya see pmontra you are falling for the same trap that has me bash my head against the wall with Linux zealots that just can't seem to grasp why "You can't just teach your customers to like CLI" because the simple fact is this...you are thinking like a geek. Ya see consumers are NOT geeks and are strange and curious creatures indeed and as someone who has been building and selling to them since 1983 I am probably one of a unique few that has insight into their strange and maddening habits.
For the example you gave, the cell phone. For YOU its a computer that makes calls but that is NOT what a consumer sees it as you see. its a "disposable phone with buttons that lets me Google" so they simply don't look at it in your light and frankly doesn't give a shit WHAT the carriers do as they'll just can it and get another when the contract is up. That is a completely different beast from say netbooks, which why ARM will never sell on them is because while YOU look at it as a "mobile computing device" THEY see it as a "cute baby laptop" and expect it to run anything a regular laptop does only slower, because its a baby you see and babies aren't as strong as grownups.
And it is THIS curious way of thinking that will doom locking down the PC and why ChromeOS isn't going anywhere, because on "cute baby laptops" and on desktops they expect and it damned well better run THEIR software, which could be any one of a bazillion and one damned apps going back 20+ years. Hell I have one customers I have to keep a NOS 2GHz desktop running for even though he has a nice new triple i built for him, why? Because his "must always have" software is Macromedia Xres which hasn't been supported since 1999 and refuses to run on modern CPUs and HDDs, even with VMS. So I had to set up a KVM switch and build a NOS 2GHz box just so he could have that ONE program. I have other customers that have ancient printers or music softare or any number of different 'must have" apps and if that don't run? Guess who is NOT buying.
so you see you really have to stop thinking like a geek and think like one of them to get a grasp on the way their minds work. cell phones aren't computers, they're phones with buttons and Google you throw away when the contract is up. they think of that like a computer like you would expect to play MP3s on your toaster, the thought simply never crosses their minds. But you tell them they can't run their software on their cute baby laptops (which despite all the doom and gloom certain OEMs are pushing I've found to still be VERY popular, especially among the females who love having a "cute baby laptop" they can stick in their purse) or desktop and watch the screaming bitchfit. I should know friend, i deal with them 6 days a week and sometimes on Sundays.
And the music loaded on them is...survey says...pirated! You DO realize it would cost something like $64,000 to load an iPod full of RIAA approved music, yes? After all they say ripping to your iPod is illegal and you should have to cut them a check per song (I'm not shitting you, look up "industry says ripping to your iPod is illegal" in Google) but nobody is actually paying attention to their asses are they? And Apple TV is DOA for precisely THAT reason, its all iStore and no easy way to run home ripped media.
In the end for a media device or home appliance to be a hit with regards to media it needs to be easy, cheap, and convenient and the MPAA haven't grasped that yet which is why so far every attempt they've made has bombed. When they want $3 an episode for TV shows with DRM piled on and more restrictions than you can name VS a user just going to TPB or ripping the thing? they WILL use TPB. It isn't like the old days where only someone with skillz could rip, try something like Tipard DVD Ripper where it is literally "push button to get movie" and even has Streams and CUDA support built in to speed ripping and you'll see why MPAA approved methods are full of fail. There is NO reason why my dad shouldn't be able to buy a DVD player with built in ripper that rips to a 1Tb HDD and makes loading movies off a flash as simple as drag and drop. the tech is there already, its the MPAA that is holding technology hostage.
But the simple fact you can walk into a big box retailer or Amazon and pick up an Nbox or WDTV (which there is no actual legal way to load media on according to the *.A.A and DMCA) means their bullshit isn't selling on their wouldn't be a big enough market to warrant these devices. Hell my 71 year old dad has sent me over a dozen customers simply by raving about how "My boy got me this Nbox thingie and now all my movies are just a click away!" and his friends (and even his nurse at the doctor's office) ask him "You wouldn't happen to have his number handy, would you?" because ultimately that is what the consumer WANTS, they want "push button and movie goes" and the MPAA isn't giving it to them so TPB is. Like Gabe at Valve said "Piracy is someone else offering a better product" and its true, you get nasty with price and DRM and folks WILL go elsewhere. Look at how much game companies make off Steam, it has just enough DRM that Joey isn't passing his purchase to all his buddies while making it beyond simple and cheap to buy. Make it easy, cheap, and convenient and they WILL buy because humans are lazy creatures and will go with the path of least resistance wherever possible. Make it an expensive royal PITA and then piracy is the easier route, simple really.
Most people interpret Moores Law as "quick, lets invent more pointless bling!".
I still remember running Unix on a 2MHz VAX. I believe it supported 64 users theoretically, and about 20 in practice. (No GUI, of course).
Hear Hear Anne! I remember surfing the web on a 233MHz with a stripped down Win98 running on 64Mb and frankly it was nice...until Geocities came out! Then it was OC the hell out of that Celeron and if you're lucky the silicon won't melt when the page you visit ends up making a comet Cursor pocketwatch hang from your mouse cursor like a string of snot!
Website developers are the absolute WORST when it comes to loading on the bling! Anyone else remember when a page that was 100Kb was considered bloated shit? We used to have frankly VERY usable websites on a third of that because they didn't go nuts with piling on the bling, now even on the fastest connections you can watch as the crap from all over the web is called and the bloat piles on up and that is WITHOUT flash! Now picture that on a 366Mhz mobile device where its doubtful they'll have ABP to block the 3 pages worth of ads for every page worth of content not to mention all that ultra heavy JavaScript and HTML...eeek! if they think a 1.5GHz mobile will be usable in 3 years much less 6 they haven't hung around any website designers obviously because by that time anything under 3GHz dual cores will be like that 366MHz is today, just a horribly painful experience. I'm all for saving money but there is a floor where you go below it and you've made the device nothing but a worthless toy and I think TFA has reached that floor and then tunneled under a couple of feet.
And whose fault would that be? why that would be YOU who voted in Congressman Kickbackus and Senator Porkman who promised to "bring home the bacon!" and had the shuttle, which frankly was a bad joke from the Nixon administration which failed ALL of the goals it had set out for, to be spread like a shotgun blast all over the country and thanks to all that pork made it damned near impossible to kill.
I'm sorry but there is a damned good reason why private industry has to do space now, and that is because BOTH parties don't even pretend to give a fuck about anything but their own pockets anymore. Just look at how you can get funding for any crazy military weapon system but our soldiers are paid so damned shitty their families are on food stamps, why? Kinda hard to get kickbacks and bring home the bacon with soldier pay, damned easy with a multibillion dollar weapon system.
We simply can't build good systems with government involvement anymore because the corruption is just too deep. nobody thinks about the good of the people or the country, just the good of the party and their own wallets. We should have shitcanned the shuttle in the 80s and man-rated either Atlas or Delta but since those systems were already established that would have meant Porkman and Kickbackus couldn't have shotgunned the build all over the country and got to feed at the trough so here we are, having to depend on private industry because the piggies can't quit feeding long enough to think about the country as a whole.
That would be true IF there weren't several already rock solid bases to build off of, but that isn't the case. you have Android, MeeGo, and several Linux embedded versions you could easily build off of and roll your own for a hell of a lot less than a billion because most of the hard work is already done and you could concentrate on customizing it to your platform and needs. That is why when ms Noyes at LinuxInsider asked me what i thought the next big OS would be I said there answe was simple, there won't be any. Those that want to stay proprietary will stick with MSFT and Apple and once they sign the NDAs will be able to customize to their needs and those that want the community to help or want more control will simply go Linux or BSD based.
There really isn't a point in reinventing the wheel anymore like there was in the old days when OS/2 and NeXT and WinNT were born because the old models had fundamental flaws, frankly all the real nasty problems have been pretty much solved and any of the above could be a solid base for a product easily. Why do you think Google used the Linux kernel instead of writing one from scratch? its not like they couldn't afford to, it was just kinda pointless when there was already one there that did what they needed with a Linux they could live with. they could have just as easily signed an NDA and had the entire WinMo source code if that would have been their wish but by going with a FOSS kernel they could see what the community cooks up and roll the best ideas into their own product easily.
So I doubt we'll suddenly see some completely new OS pop up on the scene and I was stunned when they announced how much HP was gonna pay for Palm. I had to double check to make sure it wasn't the first of April because i thought surely nobody would be THAT stupid, but I guess it just shows that the old HP is long gone and if the current HP board had a sensible thought between them their heads would probably explode. Personally i bet even being opened up as FOSS won't save WebOS as there is already too many familiar with Android and the ecosystem for it is too highly developed. As MSFT is learning its the apps stupid and having a truly great mobile OS don't mean dick if all the apps folks want isn't already there and waiting.
Well I think a lot of that was caused by Linux developers and advocates being frankly stupidly low with regards to system requirements. How many "Dumpster dive a great Linux box!" and "Save a PC from the dump, just use Linux!" articles have we seen? Well by putting their system reqs at frankly ludicrously low levels what you ended up with is OEMs slapping Linux on machines that frankly would have had trouble running Win98 without hanging and gave Linux a worse view from those that don't know about specs and just look at price. i mean a 366Mhz CPU? Geez we were throwing out faster chips than that a decade ago! It reminds me of those junkers Walmart used to sell with Linux that had worse specs than what you'd find in a dumpster.
Sure its nice that you can run Linux on some POS that used to run Win95 but that doesn't mean its gonna be a pleasant experience with the modern web. This thing might be fine for an ebook reader but i shudder to think what trying to surf the bling bling heavy web will be like, even without flash but just dealing with all the heavy JavaScript out there with a 366Mhz CPU, I bet its like trying to load modern web pages on a 300 baud modern...eek! of course many will just say its because Android or Linux sucks and hurt the rep when its just the OS is being squeezed into woefully underpowered hardware.
Exactly. Both AMD and Intel probably sell a dozen server chips for every desktop, both have embedded chips in the C/E series and Atom respectively and while these chips are used in appliances there are also used in everything from camera control setups for businesses to micro desktops. There is just too much money in general purpose computing for either company to slit their own throats for what is essentially a bit player in the wide scheme of thing because despite all their bluster the MPAA really is a small fish compared to the worldwide computing market. this of course is only counting X86 and isn't even counting the Via chips that are used in car computing nor the myriad of ARM and MIPS chips used all over the damned place, to expect them ALL to kiss the ring is frankly the height of insanity.
Finally as we all know thanks to Citizens united our laws are written by he who has the most cash and on their best day the MPAA lobbyists couldn't touch a consortium that had Intel, AMD, all the ARM and MIPS manufacturers and MSFT and Apple all joined together and join together they would because ALL of the above make boatloads of money on general purpose computing. The chip manufacturers sell more chips, and the software houses like Apple and MSFT make money off the appstore and getting people to use Visual studio to enhance their Windows platform respectively so the amount of money they'd stand to lose would frankly be staggering and for what? So a company doesn't have to wake up and smell the present and can instead still pretend like its 1983 and broadband doesn't exist?
In the end the MPAA will be dragged kicking and screaming into the present just like the music companies were and then will find out shock, gasp! That there is plenty of money to be made if you actually give customers what they want, which is cheap, easy and convenient access to anything they want. there is no damned reason in this day and age i just can't go to amazon and whip out my CC and buy an .AVI or .MP4 or whatever format i want movie just like i buy an MP3 or buy a game off of Steam or GOG except the MPAA is just too damned stupid to sell it to me. eventually they'll figure out what Valve did years ago and that is you'll never kill piracy but if you make it cheap and easy enough the majority simply won't bother because the legal version will be easier. I mean compare what it takes to load a movie onto an Nbox or WDTV now, you can 1.-go buy a disc, 2.-get the disc home, 3.-rip the disc to the HDD, 4.-convert it to the right format, 5.-drag it to the device, or you can just 1.-go to TPB and download the movie in the correct format and 2.- put it on the device. Which takes less steps? Now compare that to say Steam 1.-Pick game and push button to either keep or give to friend/family member, 2.-there is no step two. Make it simple, cheap and easy and people WILL buy, make it a royal PITA where the pirate gets less hassle than the guy that gives you money and watch the piracy soar, duh!
Here's what I don't get, maybe someone can tell me what i missed: What EXACTLY do you want or need the QR codes for anyway? Is there someone going "ZOFG I must go to a company's bullshit PR website NOW dammit!"? I mean with every damned smartphone on the planet having Google what is the point? Hell at my local Wally world they even have a couple of display units hooked up to Google so if they don't know the answer to a question they'll help you Google the damned answer and at least that way you'll get an honest answer and not PR BS like you get on corp websites.
So maybe its just me but I haven't ever seen anything on a corp website I'd frankly believe, if they told me it was raining i'd want a second opinion, so to me these QR codes make about as much sense as the Cuecat. If you need to know about a product why not just Google the damned thing or check the reviews on Amazon? What benefit does this QR code stuff give you that negates the risks in TFA AND the likelihood that everything you read will be spin?
Actually you really shouldn't blame the judge as he WAS trying to keep people out of jail and with repeat offenders your options are pretty limited. he would basically give them the choice of going into narconon or doing the time because he really believed that treatment was best and sadly thanks to the government cutting the living hell out of money for treatment the few in house treatment facilities are so overcrowded that you'll never get in. did you know the average wait to get in house treatment for heroin is 2 years and the average survival time is a year and a half?
So don't be too hard on the judges, I can tell you from personal knowledge a lot of them are good men who have seen first hand through families what drug and alcohol addiction does and are just trying to do their best with what they've got. Would you suggest they throw them in prison? I sadly know someone I went to HS with that is doing 15 years for armed robbery because HE WANTED TO GO TO PRISON because he couldn't get his drug of choice during a local drug drought and he knew he could always score in the joint. When you are faced with people THAT addicted your options become severely limited especially when you are looking at a 2 year plus waiting list for beds in my area for treatment. After my little talk he personally got a hold of the local AA chapter and made sure they'd be willing to attempt to help the drug addicts and now he gives them a choice of AA or jail because really, what other choices does he have?
Uhhh...because unlike you I'm not a militant FOSSie which like a Moonie treats software as a religion? I mean when you equate a software license to be groped by the TSA? Step away from the keyboard little FOSSie for you are coming off as more than a little batshit.
By the way FOSSie, where do you think software comes from? Magic fairies shit it out like that bunny shitting jelly beans? Newsflash the VAST majority of software INCLUDING FOSS is PAID FOR BY COMPANIES. Companies that got a Goatse in their inbox from RMS so naturally they ain't too keen in jumping aboard his little communist utopia. Kinda funny that a guy that is a self proclaimed "squatter from MIT" garners so much batshit loyalty but the rest of us just can't squat on a campus without getting hauled away in cuffs. We have bills to pay and families to feed and there are many companies that will happily pay for code, even FOSS, if they don't feel like they are getting backed into a corner.
But there is a simple way to tell if its you or i that is right, every year Slashdot should have an article called "The state of GPL V3" and show how the numbers are coming along. Personally i think GPL is gonna continue to nosedive because even Torvalds won't touch it because its too restrictive. And if companies were so damned evil how do you explain apache? How do you explain Red hat or all the other companies making money with GPL? Hell apache is practically THE Internet now and i don't see them sitting on street corners with a cup and a cardboard sign and their license is one of the most permissive around.
In the end I truly believe RMS got trolled by TiVo and like most that get trolled completely overreacted and screwed himself and the GPL in the process. The numbers don't lie and as we saw here on Slashdot not too long ago GPL is declining like a rock rolling downhill, every month since GPL V3 the numbers have gotten WORSE not better. A logical person would sit down with developers and say "What EXACTLY is it you hate about GPL V3?" and work with them to come up with a license all could live with, but RMS is a militant and as we've seen time and time again militants NEVER compromise, its their way or the highway. Given that choice i believe the developers of the world will choose the highway and there will be an offshoot of MPL or AGPL or Apache crafted that will be what GPL V3 SHOULD have been, a license that does its best to protect the users while still giving companies an incentive to keep paying FOSS developers.
But you go right on comparing those that don't drink the koolaid with facists, hell i'm shocked you didn't just go for full troll and call me a Nazi. Its this kind of foaming at the mouth "all that don't follow the 'one true way' are evil and burn babies!" bullshit that gives FOSS a bad name and is why I separate FOSS users and developers, which are generally a smart and reasonable bunch, with FOSSies like you that think all those that don't worship RMS dirty sandals are nazi baby killers. Frankly you should work for MSFT because between guys like you and videos like this you make it too damned easy for any company to label FOSS as a bunch of nutters.
Let us not forget what is REALLY gonna drive this, which is families with kids. i have several customers that have gone HTPC and put little Nbox players in the kid's bedroom, why? Because DVD rippers have gotten to the point it is "Push button to output .AVI" which is beyond easy peasy and NOBODY wants to deal with little Annie crying because her little sister managed to scratch her favorite Dora video. With a 200Gb hard drive and a $30 Nbox you have a system that is simple enough a 6 year old can work it (no exaggeration there, I've actually watched a 6 year old work an nbox) with NO discs to scratch and NO boxes to deal with or to get lost, you can just store them into the closet and if the HDD dies whip another .AVI off or do as my customers do and just back up 4 or 5 onto a blank DVD and call it a day.
Then you have the parents which after seeing how easy it works for the kiddies goes "Hey how come I can't have it that easy?" and end up looking at one of my customer's HTPCs and have me build them one. the new remotes are beyond simple for those that are used to texting (I recommend the Lenovo HTPC remote, fits the hand nicely) and then they can plug in wireless gaming controllers or a full wireless keyboard and mouse when they need to do some real work on the thing. The prices are frankly INSANELY cheap if you stick with AMD, which since i'm an AMD only shop isn't a problem, and you can get an E-350 based setup dirt cheap if all you want is a media center, but most of my customers end up kicking the the few extra bucks to get a triple core that will let them game as well. Before the flood you could build a frankly crazy powerful HTPC that would game for around $500 and that box will last you probably a good decade by simply changing out the GPU occasionally, hell even after the flood if you shop around you can build a 1Tb system for around $600 that will play just about any game in 1080p. you wanna talk about an easy sale, just show them how easy Windows media Center makes dealing with a library of media and then fire up batman:AA or Just Cause II and let them drool on the graphics, cha ching!
So ultimately its families and word of mouth which i think will kill all this BS, just as it did with music. Folks want easy, simple, and cheap and HTPCs frankly fit all three of those conditions now, its the MPAA dragging their heels and making us feed discs like it was 1988 with VCRs. But there are plenty of people with more growing everyday that are tired of feeding discs and just want to "push a button and its all there" and little shops like mine are happy to oblige. All it takes is ONE person in a neighborhood getting an HTPC and soon the word is out and all those around them are going "Hey can you get me a thing like what he's got?" and there it goes.