Isn't that true of all critics, though? They just share an opinion, and if they're good, back it up with some information. If you're stupid, you just listen to your favorite critic like the sheep you are. If you're intelligent, you listen, you process, you get more information, further process, and come out with your own opinion.
Personally speaking, Card's not too far off from my own opinion. Star Trek could use a face lift it needs to continue, otherwise, I really won't (read: haven't for years) miss it. If that enrages you, hey, fine. I'll just be over here enjoying something outside the limited scope Trek had for Sci-Fi.
I highly doubt it would be profitable to spend 1.75 billion dollars on a company and then not offer Windows machines. As much as we all like Linux, in a corporate sales environment, it's just fighting an uphill battle, and not a wise choice from a risk management perspective.
Unless they really REALLY hate Microsoft, they'll continue to offer Windows, and just offer Linux as an alternative.
Honestly, I don't think this matters much. Thinkpads are about the only IBM PCs I've ever seen used in the past 10 years. We had an old IBM PC back in High School that was donated because it simply didn't hold up. We ended up trashing it because it kept eating video cards like they were candy, and the computer lab didn't have many to spare for it. It did resist that sledgehammer well, but that doesn't have much to do with the computer itself.
So in the end, this really doesn't effect anyone I know of unless you really want a Thinkpad...
I have to disagree with this perception as it is limited in scope and application.
If I put my child on a chair and have them sit there, undaunting, for several minutes, this act in and of itself is meaningless, and somewhat cruel. If you step out a bit and see that this is a punishment, or a response to a wrong-doing of the child, it seems less cruel, if not totally benevolent. Or maybe it is cruel. Cruel, after all, is an opinion, of which you cannot define an absolute, but I digress.
In another example, I am speeding. I am therefor doing something wrong. However, if you look at a slightly larger scope, you see I am rushing a dying orphan to the hospital in an Ambulance, it seems less wrong. If you step out again and see that I've stolen the Ambulance, it seems more wrong, or perhaps more noble, depending on your interpretation. Either way, the original assumption that my speeding was the wrong, is not wholly correct, if correct at all.
The same is with all things you might consider tragedy. Perhaps the simple act of causing a child to starve to death is a cruel thing, but stepping out further and further, it seems less and less like what you originally anticipated it as. Perhaps the death of the child was the only thing that made a negligent father to raise the other children correctly to become people that profoundly effected society for the better. Or perhaps it drove them all into depression and they all eventually died as well. Regardless, religion aside, omnipotence would lend itself to a grander purpose or at least a different perspective than the one you offered, and if you're omnipotent, you can essentially do no incorrect things, because you set the rules by which right and wrong are judged, so this gets bigger and bigger until we're at square one again and both of our points become less and less valid.
Besides, Utopian societies are not happy because they have nothing to compare it to anyway. Philosophy 101 stuff. Contrasting perspectives create more prominent impressions, etc etc etc
Endless and immeasurable. Not only do your repeat sales customers have the possibility of always purchasing at the same time (stand in line with yourself, and yourself, and yourself...) but when you make your accounting projections/statements, what time period do you use? A good CPA would just say "What time period do you WANT to use" and for once, that isn't shady!
Are you serious? You really think Star Trek fans can be "oversaturated" with something Star Trek? I mean, have you even heard of the horrors of a Star Trek convention?
If there's one thing that Enterprise has proven it is that it is the contrary that is true. There's simply not ENOUGH Star Trek to keep fans "saturated" to the point they wish to be. [insert obligatory joke about fans not having lives and needing Star Trek for validation or something]
Honestly, if they'd just get some actual content up there, even if it weren't ON THE TV it would be huge with the fan-base.
I mean no offense, but when you use words like "unfunny" in your critiques (and that's really what your post is, as it's not a serious question), I don't think your opinion is looked upon with a higher validity than if it were, say, in actual language. If you really want to express your disgust and further your cause of "this is film does not look entertaining" you might consider writing something people want to hear, rather than something that just sounds you're whining in your illiteracy.
That's not to say I think you should have perfect English. That's really not the point at all. I'm just saying presentation is half the message, and you might want to consider that in future tirades.
What does the "movie-first" experience have to offer that the "book-first" does not? Or is this movie really just for the geeks that are already in love with the tale, and my wife will just think it's another of my quirks?
Yes, but the article doesn't encroach upon the fact that it won't last forever. (When's the last time you really needed a full fledged printer cable?) It simply states that if you're innovating, fine, but it's really a waste of time if you don't take into account mercantability. Mercantability, in this case, involves paying homage to standards, or backwards compatability, or realistic deployability of your product/standard. If you want to rewrite a standard, or even improve it, you have to take into account basic economic factors.
That really has nothing to do with the fact that your standard will eventually die out and be replaced anyway, but for it to have a decent run so that end-of-life isn't, oh, tomorrow.
This really is something that everyone in this community should be taking to heart. This is why Linux has had difficulty breaking into heavy usage, why hundreds of projects (including open source software projects) have failed, and why we haven't moved to better architectures in the computing world.
In practice, a word processor that can't read Microsoft® Word documents is an economic dead end. I think that's probably one of the most important statements in the article. If every reader who plans on writing any code, coming up with a piece of hardware, or decides to rethink Support conventions were to take the heart of that message and put it into their plans, we'd really start making headway in the real world with real innovation.
In summary: Your idea may be good, but that doesn't mean squat in the market. What DOES matter is: How much of a headache is your solution to X going to give me versus what I already have? Yet I STILL get asked by my co-worker why we aren't using Linux for our desktop PCs...
A company I work for supports some software that has some pretty strict requirements to run. Their minimum requirements are relatively low for hardware, but we always say it will run slow and might cause other specific issues.
Despite the minimum of requiring Windows XP/2000, we still get a lot of people running windows 98 and NT. They don't even have service packs.
If you're looking for a way to get your company/organization to update their software, you should look elsewhere than minimum system requirements or suggestions from tech experts. It's just too easily disavowed with an/enlightened/ thought to the effect of "Well, it worked before."
Right along those lines, one man's "opression" is another man's "civilization." Just because the censorship or what have you of another country isn't something you agree with doesn't make it the world's largest concentration camp. They're a different culture, and we should respect the wishes of the country as a whole. If they're happy (and most of them are) it's not our place to judge based on our own contrived opinions of civilized government.
I live in Utah. Orem, specifically. They say I'll have Utopia in the next couple months. For anyone that's not in the know, that's 100mbits up and down bandwidth. However, even though I could take some data to work an hour away, or want to send something to my friend in New York, it would still be faster and more reliable to just put the data on a DVD (if it's large) and ship it to them. Then the DVD is always there for them, as well.
I still see DVD being much more used than this guy thinks for a couple years. Then when BlueRay or something else replaces it, it will probably die down then. Physical media will always have its uses.
Why is there no mention of the additions that using a PC for this sort of thing can bring? I setup a MythTV box not just so i could record DRM free TV captures, and organize my DVD collection on a hard drive. I built the thing because I can use it as a dozen other things. I can dual-boot into Windows and play games on it. I can check my email and browse the web. I can share the media on this machine to my entire network so I can watch an already recorded show on my comp while my wife watches something on LiveTV. Seriously, for the same cost as a Tivo subscription after a year, I have 10 times the flexibility and performance, in a nice customizable package. Where the heck are the drawbacks in this? MythTV/Freevo (or heck, MCE) is WAY more flexible than Tivo or any other PVR.
You're assuming that all 1000 bits of data are relevant to the request made by the accessing system. In a HD situation, that's not always true, even if it's 4 heads. In this situation, I can't imagine getting more than 50% average return per seek.
Potential is fine, but realistically, you're right, a lot of work has to be done, and this doesn't look like the solution to end all solutions, especially if HDs can match this "potential" performance within the next 3-5 years or whenever this matures enough for productions
In reality, the solution to better storage will probably come out of some creative whiz's mind and won't be publicized well until just before it's ready for production, and even then only because the VCs in charge of funding the production will push it through due diligence. We should be looking in garages and cubicles for pet projects of quiet geniuses, not half-baked publicity stunts from articles that can't produce any details.
A question that comes to mind is whether the seller fulfilled all three parts of the Termination clause, section 5 of the EULA. If the seller failed to notify Blizzard of intention to terminate, it could be argued that the seller's licenses remain in effect and thus new license could not be given to the buyer of the used game. But one would hope Blizzard's customer service would at least make this clear to the buyer.
This is a bad idea. Section 5 talks about how to TERMINATE THE LICENSE AGREEMENT, not transfer the License Agreement, which is what's trying to be transferred here. In particular the Destroying of the game would not facilitate the other part of the EULA where it talks about fully transferring the property and terms relating to the License Agreement.
In Essence, he want to take the contract from the other guy, not the account. The account is not what the License Agreement is about, in all honesty. There's little mention of the account itself in the first place, and the places it does mention it, it is always the account attached to the Licensee, not the Agreement itself.
Should Monsanto bring us designer maples that don't shed leaves? Would you buy designer grass that grows two inches and stops?
Yes, and um, yes. Please even. While they're at it, lets get some trees that make more oxygen so I can stop feeling bad for cutting down the rain forest. I'd also like a dog that doesn't have to eat or poop, ferns for the house that I don't need to water so often, and a gerbil that can power my PC as long as I give it some sugar every now and then.
Hop on Newegg or and look at their cases. If you look at all their Micro-ATX Desktop cases, many are meant to be home theatre boxes, and are made for flexible uses.
I'm sure there's entire sites devoted to this sort of hardware, so google may also be your friend (as is always). I haven't looked, but this is, after all, the internet.
It's definitely possible to have them both installed and playing happily on the same box. I don't think you could have them both running at the same time doing the same thing in all cases, and it really depends on your setup as to how you'd do this.
As far as meta-data goes, you'd be hard pressed to get them both playing nicely without modifying one or both. Where one uses and SQL backend, and the other flat-files, the different schools of thinking would be a bit of work to get to play nicely. They could both play the same media files, though. It's just reading them from the hard drive anyway.
Still, when all is said and done, I personally don't think it would be worth it. It's a lot of work to get a few extra features from one to the other, and even if you got them going, you're still most likely going to choose to use one over the other most of the time. You're better off picking one and modifying that one to include features it didn't have that you wanted. That's kind of the whole point behind them both, and open source in general. Modify it to fit your needs.
I don't know that formatting freely available information into a medium that's useful to a different audience is a horrible practice...
If nothing else, the entire news industry is based off of reporting other people's news and presenting it in a different format to fit the audience intended. Heck, that's all Slashdot is...
All this controversy of "MythTV vs Freevo" is kinda silly. I mean, we're all geeks, right? Are we so lost in our preferences to realize that they're designed with different priorities and functionality?
For instance, Freevo will appeal to a market that has more of a "I want it simple" market because of it's clean development and ease of install/maintenance. Does this make it better than MythTV? Heck no.
MythTV appeals to an audience that wants to do more out-of-box and doesn't care about the simplicity value. This is the camp that thinks of using more than for video playback or music playing. They want to play games, rip DVDs, run torrents off shows they're automatically re-encoding, etc. Does this make it better than Freevo? Again, not at all.
Take my situation for instance: I'm a father of 3 young children. I want my $800 Theatre box to do as much as possible, and I have needs of simplicity in interface for the kids to be able to get to their movies/shows on the occasion that they are allowed to do so. Backing up DVDs is a priority.
It's important to note that NONE of these things necessarily apply to why YOU are setting up a Linux Home Theatre box, and your choice is going to be different. Freevo and MythTV are different. One's not less stable than the other, or a horrid interface compared to the other, or whatever your argument may be. They're just designed with different priorities in mind.
I think the thing they're missing here is that sure, anonymity and surrealism make people do things they normally wouldn't, but that doesn't mean it's necessarily a bad thing. Drinking alcohol literally makes one less inhibited, but everyone knows several people that are intelligent enough to drink responsibly.
I'm relatively sure the ratio of responsible drinkers to irresponsible ones is much lower than the ratio of responsible internet users to irresponsible ones. This is just a look at the losers that give the whole medium a bad name.
Density is another interesting one, I think. Relatively new, but some interesting ideas. Of cours, it's php, not Java, but php is not exactly a high learning curve.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't that true of all critics, though? They just share an opinion, and if they're good, back it up with some information. If you're stupid, you just listen to your favorite critic like the sheep you are. If you're intelligent, you listen, you process, you get more information, further process, and come out with your own opinion.
Personally speaking, Card's not too far off from my own opinion. Star Trek could use a face lift it needs to continue, otherwise, I really won't (read: haven't for years) miss it. If that enrages you, hey, fine. I'll just be over here enjoying something outside the limited scope Trek had for Sci-Fi.
I highly doubt it would be profitable to spend 1.75 billion dollars on a company and then not offer Windows machines. As much as we all like Linux, in a corporate sales environment, it's just fighting an uphill battle, and not a wise choice from a risk management perspective.
Unless they really REALLY hate Microsoft, they'll continue to offer Windows, and just offer Linux as an alternative.
Honestly, I don't think this matters much. Thinkpads are about the only IBM PCs I've ever seen used in the past 10 years. We had an old IBM PC back in High School that was donated because it simply didn't hold up. We ended up trashing it because it kept eating video cards like they were candy, and the computer lab didn't have many to spare for it. It did resist that sledgehammer well, but that doesn't have much to do with the computer itself.
So in the end, this really doesn't effect anyone I know of unless you really want a Thinkpad...
I have to disagree with this perception as it is limited in scope and application.
If I put my child on a chair and have them sit there, undaunting, for several minutes, this act in and of itself is meaningless, and somewhat cruel. If you step out a bit and see that this is a punishment, or a response to a wrong-doing of the child, it seems less cruel, if not totally benevolent. Or maybe it is cruel. Cruel, after all, is an opinion, of which you cannot define an absolute, but I digress.
In another example, I am speeding. I am therefor doing something wrong. However, if you look at a slightly larger scope, you see I am rushing a dying orphan to the hospital in an Ambulance, it seems less wrong. If you step out again and see that I've stolen the Ambulance, it seems more wrong, or perhaps more noble, depending on your interpretation. Either way, the original assumption that my speeding was the wrong, is not wholly correct, if correct at all.
The same is with all things you might consider tragedy. Perhaps the simple act of causing a child to starve to death is a cruel thing, but stepping out further and further, it seems less and less like what you originally anticipated it as. Perhaps the death of the child was the only thing that made a negligent father to raise the other children correctly to become people that profoundly effected society for the better. Or perhaps it drove them all into depression and they all eventually died as well. Regardless, religion aside, omnipotence would lend itself to a grander purpose or at least a different perspective than the one you offered, and if you're omnipotent, you can essentially do no incorrect things, because you set the rules by which right and wrong are judged, so this gets bigger and bigger until we're at square one again and both of our points become less and less valid.
Besides, Utopian societies are not happy because they have nothing to compare it to anyway. Philosophy 101 stuff. Contrasting perspectives create more prominent impressions, etc etc etc
Endless and immeasurable. Not only do your repeat sales customers have the possibility of always purchasing at the same time (stand in line with yourself, and yourself, and yourself...) but when you make your accounting projections/statements, what time period do you use? A good CPA would just say "What time period do you WANT to use" and for once, that isn't shady!
Are you serious? You really think Star Trek fans can be "oversaturated" with something Star Trek? I mean, have you even heard of the horrors of a Star Trek convention?
If there's one thing that Enterprise has proven it is that it is the contrary that is true. There's simply not ENOUGH Star Trek to keep fans "saturated" to the point they wish to be. [insert obligatory joke about fans not having lives and needing Star Trek for validation or something]
Honestly, if they'd just get some actual content up there, even if it weren't ON THE TV it would be huge with the fan-base.
I mean no offense, but when you use words like "unfunny" in your critiques (and that's really what your post is, as it's not a serious question), I don't think your opinion is looked upon with a higher validity than if it were, say, in actual language. If you really want to express your disgust and further your cause of "this is film does not look entertaining" you might consider writing something people want to hear, rather than something that just sounds you're whining in your illiteracy.
That's not to say I think you should have perfect English. That's really not the point at all. I'm just saying presentation is half the message, and you might want to consider that in future tirades.
What does the "movie-first" experience have to offer that the "book-first" does not? Or is this movie really just for the geeks that are already in love with the tale, and my wife will just think it's another of my quirks?
Yes, but the article doesn't encroach upon the fact that it won't last forever. (When's the last time you really needed a full fledged printer cable?) It simply states that if you're innovating, fine, but it's really a waste of time if you don't take into account mercantability. Mercantability, in this case, involves paying homage to standards, or backwards compatability, or realistic deployability of your product/standard. If you want to rewrite a standard, or even improve it, you have to take into account basic economic factors.
That really has nothing to do with the fact that your standard will eventually die out and be replaced anyway, but for it to have a decent run so that end-of-life isn't, oh, tomorrow.
This really is something that everyone in this community should be taking to heart. This is why Linux has had difficulty breaking into heavy usage, why hundreds of projects (including open source software projects) have failed, and why we haven't moved to better architectures in the computing world.
In practice, a word processor that can't read Microsoft® Word documents is an economic dead end.
I think that's probably one of the most important statements in the article. If every reader who plans on writing any code, coming up with a piece of hardware, or decides to rethink Support conventions were to take the heart of that message and put it into their plans, we'd really start making headway in the real world with real innovation.
In summary: Your idea may be good, but that doesn't mean squat in the market. What DOES matter is: How much of a headache is your solution to X going to give me versus what I already have? Yet I STILL get asked by my co-worker why we aren't using Linux for our desktop PCs...
I'm surprised I haven't seen a modded post about this mistake. In the list, the Photoshop CS website is listed as http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/main.html but it goes somewhere Completely different.
What concoction do you have to drink in order to mix those two up? There's not even anything from bitdefender on the list...
A company I work for supports some software that has some pretty strict requirements to run. Their minimum requirements are relatively low for hardware, but we always say it will run slow and might cause other specific issues.
Despite the minimum of requiring Windows XP/2000, we still get a lot of people running windows 98 and NT. They don't even have service packs.
If you're looking for a way to get your company/organization to update their software, you should look elsewhere than minimum system requirements or suggestions from tech experts. It's just too easily disavowed with an /enlightened/ thought to the effect of "Well, it worked before."
Right along those lines, one man's "opression" is another man's "civilization." Just because the censorship or what have you of another country isn't something you agree with doesn't make it the world's largest concentration camp. They're a different culture, and we should respect the wishes of the country as a whole. If they're happy (and most of them are) it's not our place to judge based on our own contrived opinions of civilized government.
I live in Utah. Orem, specifically. They say I'll have Utopia in the next couple months. For anyone that's not in the know, that's 100mbits up and down bandwidth. However, even though I could take some data to work an hour away, or want to send something to my friend in New York, it would still be faster and more reliable to just put the data on a DVD (if it's large) and ship it to them. Then the DVD is always there for them, as well.
I still see DVD being much more used than this guy thinks for a couple years. Then when BlueRay or something else replaces it, it will probably die down then. Physical media will always have its uses.
Why is there no mention of the additions that using a PC for this sort of thing can bring? I setup a MythTV box not just so i could record DRM free TV captures, and organize my DVD collection on a hard drive. I built the thing because I can use it as a dozen other things. I can dual-boot into Windows and play games on it. I can check my email and browse the web. I can share the media on this machine to my entire network so I can watch an already recorded show on my comp while my wife watches something on LiveTV. Seriously, for the same cost as a Tivo subscription after a year, I have 10 times the flexibility and performance, in a nice customizable package. Where the heck are the drawbacks in this? MythTV/Freevo (or heck, MCE) is WAY more flexible than Tivo or any other PVR.
Two words: Pentium M.
You're assuming that all 1000 bits of data are relevant to the request made by the accessing system. In a HD situation, that's not always true, even if it's 4 heads. In this situation, I can't imagine getting more than 50% average return per seek.
Potential is fine, but realistically, you're right, a lot of work has to be done, and this doesn't look like the solution to end all solutions, especially if HDs can match this "potential" performance within the next 3-5 years or whenever this matures enough for productions
In reality, the solution to better storage will probably come out of some creative whiz's mind and won't be publicized well until just before it's ready for production, and even then only because the VCs in charge of funding the production will push it through due diligence. We should be looking in garages and cubicles for pet projects of quiet geniuses, not half-baked publicity stunts from articles that can't produce any details.
A question that comes to mind is whether the seller fulfilled all three parts of the Termination clause, section 5 of the EULA. If the seller failed to notify Blizzard of intention to terminate, it could be argued that the seller's licenses remain in effect and thus new license could not be given to the buyer of the used game. But one would hope Blizzard's customer service would at least make this clear to the buyer.
This is a bad idea. Section 5 talks about how to TERMINATE THE LICENSE AGREEMENT, not transfer the License Agreement, which is what's trying to be transferred here. In particular the Destroying of the game would not facilitate the other part of the EULA where it talks about fully transferring the property and terms relating to the License Agreement.
In Essence, he want to take the contract from the other guy, not the account. The account is not what the License Agreement is about, in all honesty. There's little mention of the account itself in the first place, and the places it does mention it, it is always the account attached to the Licensee, not the Agreement itself.
Should Monsanto bring us designer maples that don't shed leaves? Would you buy designer grass that grows two inches and stops?
Yes, and um, yes. Please even. While they're at it, lets get some trees that make more oxygen so I can stop feeling bad for cutting down the rain forest. I'd also like a dog that doesn't have to eat or poop, ferns for the house that I don't need to water so often, and a gerbil that can power my PC as long as I give it some sugar every now and then.
Hop on Newegg or and look at their cases. If you look at all their Micro-ATX Desktop cases, many are meant to be home theatre boxes, and are made for flexible uses.
I'm sure there's entire sites devoted to this sort of hardware, so google may also be your friend (as is always). I haven't looked, but this is, after all, the internet.
It's definitely possible to have them both installed and playing happily on the same box. I don't think you could have them both running at the same time doing the same thing in all cases, and it really depends on your setup as to how you'd do this.
As far as meta-data goes, you'd be hard pressed to get them both playing nicely without modifying one or both. Where one uses and SQL backend, and the other flat-files, the different schools of thinking would be a bit of work to get to play nicely. They could both play the same media files, though. It's just reading them from the hard drive anyway.
Still, when all is said and done, I personally don't think it would be worth it. It's a lot of work to get a few extra features from one to the other, and even if you got them going, you're still most likely going to choose to use one over the other most of the time. You're better off picking one and modifying that one to include features it didn't have that you wanted. That's kind of the whole point behind them both, and open source in general. Modify it to fit your needs.
I don't know that formatting freely available information into a medium that's useful to a different audience is a horrible practice...
If nothing else, the entire news industry is based off of reporting other people's news and presenting it in a different format to fit the audience intended. Heck, that's all Slashdot is...All this controversy of "MythTV vs Freevo" is kinda silly. I mean, we're all geeks, right? Are we so lost in our preferences to realize that they're designed with different priorities and functionality? For instance, Freevo will appeal to a market that has more of a "I want it simple" market because of it's clean development and ease of install/maintenance. Does this make it better than MythTV? Heck no. MythTV appeals to an audience that wants to do more out-of-box and doesn't care about the simplicity value. This is the camp that thinks of using more than for video playback or music playing. They want to play games, rip DVDs, run torrents off shows they're automatically re-encoding, etc. Does this make it better than Freevo? Again, not at all. Take my situation for instance: I'm a father of 3 young children. I want my $800 Theatre box to do as much as possible, and I have needs of simplicity in interface for the kids to be able to get to their movies/shows on the occasion that they are allowed to do so. Backing up DVDs is a priority. It's important to note that NONE of these things necessarily apply to why YOU are setting up a Linux Home Theatre box, and your choice is going to be different. Freevo and MythTV are different. One's not less stable than the other, or a horrid interface compared to the other, or whatever your argument may be. They're just designed with different priorities in mind.
I think the thing they're missing here is that sure, anonymity and surrealism make people do things they normally wouldn't, but that doesn't mean it's necessarily a bad thing. Drinking alcohol literally makes one less inhibited, but everyone knows several people that are intelligent enough to drink responsibly. I'm relatively sure the ratio of responsible drinkers to irresponsible ones is much lower than the ratio of responsible internet users to irresponsible ones. This is just a look at the losers that give the whole medium a bad name.
Density is another interesting one, I think. Relatively new, but some interesting ideas. Of cours, it's php, not Java, but php is not exactly a high learning curve.