SCI-Fi already has 3 high cost original series currently in production, as well as their schlock-tastic "creature feature" movies to pay for.
How is this a reason for not funding another series? They spend money to make those things because they're PROFITABLE.
Of course I'm personally not a Firefly fan. I never saw the show. But I do dig that Battlestar Galactica, and looking at the clips from the Firefly show, it doesn't look anywhere as good. Now that they're gonna show it on TV again, I might actually check it out out of curiosity.
On a completely unrelated note, I think it's pretty obvious that unless you watched the TV show, none of these Serenity trailers look at all interesting. They actually seem to have the same sort of aura around them that the Chronicles of Riddick trailers did (though I didn't see that movie either), minus any sense of galactic scope or general excitement. Which is pretty damn pathetic for a trailer that is trying to advertise a sci-fi space opera. Oh well. If it works for you Firefly fans and you guys buy your movie tickets to enjoy your movie, more power to ya. It just offers absolutely NOTHING for outsiders.
I don't think that a Schützenfest is what you think it is. It's a festival, also held in other German-speaking countries, that was originally rooted in archery and shooting competitions, but is now just a big celebration for the whole family. It involves fair-type games, parades, concerts, and other tourist-enticing activities.
I don't know why I expected one of your arguments to be "PC has better games". I guess I was just giving people like you too much credit to think like that.
As far as console controllers are concerned, there are about half a dozen different companies making licensed and fully-compatible controllers, each promising to be more ergonomic and easy to use than the next. They cost no more than your mouse/keyboard set-up did. Just because you're unwilling to improve your gaming experience (at very little cost) doesn't mean that PC gaming is to be "preferred".
What a ridiculous comment. If you REALLY want to turn to a TV channel and watch music videos, guess what, these channels EXIST! Check your cable company's channel lineup and find "FUSE", for example. There are several others, too, but this is the one I'm most familiar with. The philosophy behind these channels is that they want to be what MTV was in the 80s. And guess what, you've just proven that people either don't know or don't care that these cable networks exist! And do you want to know why? Because 24 hours of music videos is BORING! It wasn't boring in the 80s when it was a novelty-type thing, but now it is. And nobody cares, not even people (like you) who actually LIKE music videos.
People love whining and complaining that MTV doesn't show music videos, but if they devote any air time to that, the same people who whined don't watch. Even when the music videos have nothing to do with boy bands or rap, people still don't watch.
This is one of the oddest things I've ever read. You convinced your wife not to watch something she may or may not enjoy based solely on the companies that sponsor that show? I realize that MTV is, in fact, targetted at teenage girls who shop at Aberzombie and Bitch, but what if a particular show is something that's actually ENTERTAINING to watch? You'd actually have second thoughts about watching it only because, during the commercial breaks, you see the sorts of advertisements which you mentioned?
What consumers do you expect will start these complaints? The 14 year old girl posting on LiveJournal, or her recipe-searching mother? The only people I can think of are those in the corporate world, which again goes back to Linux being a business operating system with some extra support and features for home use.
However, here's how I look at the whole issue:
Think of Linux as a consumer DVD player. It's put out there on the shelves as a finished product, fully featured, capable of doing more than the competition. Websites for the player advertise it as a complete solution to all your DVD-playing needs (though they seem to focus on industrial uses of this player). Die-hard users of the product and the people who created it are both trying to convince everyone to buy it. BUT, there's a catch. You see, you may or may not know it yet, but once you buy the player you realize that it only works with Panasonic TV's. You go to scour the web for help getting it to work on YOUR TV, and find several pages listing detailed instructions on how to make it work, each one involving taking the case apart and welding some wires and circuit boards. Of course, once you do this job it works (no guarantees!) or you buy a Panasonic TV instead and voila, you got the world's most awesome DVD player.
So, obviously this DVD player is a weird product, right? Who should the consumer complain to? The reason the DVD player doesn't support your Sony TV, for example, is because Sony didn't tell the people who made the player how to make it compatible. So here are the choices: Should the consumer complain to Sony and every other TV maker for not cooperating in the design of the DVD player? Should the consumer complain to the makers of the DVD player for advertising a product they said would work? Should the consumer buy the less-featured DVD player that DOES work with every TV out there instead?
I don't care. As a user, that's not my problem. If the developers can't get it done, no matter WHY they can't get it done, then their product loses it's worth.
Progress? It has nothing to do with how many distributions there are. It just has to do with some incredibly simple things:
1) Target the home user, not the corporate decision makers. Why is no one noticing that the "major" distros have websites almost entirely tailored for the corporate world? Is it just because that's how "free software" developers earn their money? Or is there a reason I'm not seeing here for why nobody seems to give a crap about every-day consumers? Normal people don't see a computer as a working environment, stop advertising it as such.
2) Forget all the garbage about "difficulty" in installing the operating system, this is hardly an issue anymore. Instead, concentrate on the real issue of installing SOFTWARE of any kind, be that applications or hardware drivers. The only easy way to do this, right now, is to A) only install software that the distribution's built-in installation managers already know about, and/or B) only install software made by large firms that can invest in a fully functional stand-alone installer (Netscape, Opera, etc). If you want to install random Googled-for software, you're shit out of luck.
3) If your distribution does not support every single hardware component my computer has out of the box and doesn't provide for a simple (couple of mouse clicks, NOT couple of pages worth of instructions) way to fix the problem, you can GTFO and STFU. Your product is a beta. I don't care how hard it is to make this work. Until you CAN make it work, get the hell out of my sight and stop advertising yourself as a finished product.
4) Actually SPEND THE TIME developing GOOD user interfaces. Cut the minimalistic bullshit. A computer desktop is a place where people spend HOURS of their daily lives. It's like a second home. When you walk into a house, do you want to be greeted by a Soviet-style utilitarian kitchen, a functional (yet nasty) toilet and a matress? While these things may serve their purpose and allow you to get your desired task done, it's UGLY and I do NOT want to spend any time in such a cold, nasty place.
"...there is no reason that there can't be a track..."
I can think of one very good reason: The movie producers wouldn't want to waste time and money to encode such a trivial feature, and the hardware makers wouldn't want to waste time and money building the capability into their device.
Aside from your own comment, this is the first time I've ever heard of anyone requesting a feature like this.
The whole reason it's called "pan and scan" is because an actual human editor sat down and editted the letterboxed film by PANNING across the frame to the parts of it that are the most "important" (based on the specific shot) and throw out everything else. It's not just a matter of zooming in on the center of the frame (which DVD players and most widescreen TVs can already accomplish).
It's for this reason that you can't have an "automatic" system that pans and scans the frame to make it full screen, unless you can convince all the directors of the world to not fill the sides of the frame with anything important.
What in the hell are you talking about? The hell is your point? That poor people own a hundred thousand dollars worth of electronics equipment? What the hell?
Why are you hesitant to name the restaurant? Give us the name, and we'll research on our own whether it's true or not. I'm pretty sure that a restaurant selling 1,000 pounds of rat meat to their customers per week would be thoroughly covered by the mainstream (if not international) press.
Slashdot is as much a news-gathering website as it is a discussion website. I'd say a lot more emphasis is actually placed on discussions, though. News submissions therefore serve the purpose of giving links to places with the "full" story on a particular issue AS WELL AS generating discussions for said story. That's the reason the articles ask us readers to discuss the issues involved. If you just want tech/geek news without any conversation, you might want to look into The Register.
Instead of complaining to me, maybe you should complain to Optimum Online, since apparently you're getting screwed over. Perhaps your ethernet card is crappy? Optimum's website clearly says it offers speeds "up to 10,000 kbps", hence their whole "We're way faster than Verizon DSL" campaign.
Dude... just... stop, ok? This has already been responded to several times before you posted this. Check elsewhere in this thread. I'm getting annoyed here.
Heh, umm, no. When I said 1 MB/sec, I wasn't using my ISP's terminology, I was just saying that because that's a much simpler term to understand for most people than using the term "megabit". I do in fact max out at ONE MEGABYTE PER SECOND for downloads and at approximately 128 KILOBYTES PER SECOND for uploads. And you're wrong about 1Mbps being common for cable. That's DSL's standard speed, and DSL is usually offered at much slower rates than cable.
I can download 5 different torrents SIMULTANEOUSLY, each one going at about 150 KB/sec. Or I can download 1 torrent going at about 150 KB/sec. Very rarely does this speed ever go any higher than that.
And, just to repeat, whenever I say kilobytes and megabytes, that's exactly what I mean. I know perfectly well the difference between a bit and a byte.
Heh, no, I'm not impatient. I'm just downloading at 1/10th my capacity over a protocol which people claim is the fastest way to download.
And yeah, I do have over 8 megabit (1 megaBYTE) down and about 1 megabit (128 KB) up. It's "Optimum Online" in New York, it's their standard speed package. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's Comcast's standard speed, too, and virtually every other major cable provider I've ever heard of. Unless you have DSL (which you do), there's no reason why your provider would offer you anything less than 8 megabits downstream.
I doubt my ISP is interfering in any way, especially since BitTorrent is the one and only protocol through which it's impossible for me to download at faster speeds than what I mentioned previously. Bottom line is that, to high-speed cable broadband users like me, BitTorrent is far from the most efficient download protocol. If Microsoft's method would give me 30% improvement, I'm all for that.
Either you're exagerating the part about maxing out your broadband connection, or your bandwidth is considerably smaller than most people's and therefore it does not take much to reach the limit.
I have a 1 MB/sec downstream connection (which I believe is very common for home cable modem users). I have never once encountered a single BitTorrent download where my download speed went over 250 KB/sec, and I can count on one hand the number of times it even got up that high. The vast majority of my BitTorrent downloads max out at approximately 100-150 KB/sec. Therefore, I'm assuming you have a download limit of something like 128 KB/sec. Is that correct? Or, perhaps, something close to one of the slower DSL hookups?
If I'm wrong, please enlighten me on how it is possible for you to get torrent download speeds so much faster than mine. To me, downloading a torrent is only worthwhile when the file I want is on a server under a massive amount of stress or if it's just not available through any other means. Direct downloads, for me, are still MUCH faster than torrents. Even non-torrent P2P clients, like Shareaza and Ares, are considerably faster than torrents.
The mouse was invented as a visual user-interface tool for a new sort of visual GUI in computers. You're clearly confusing using a mouse for operating system functionalities and using it for application functionalities. I doubt that the original creators of the mouse cared as much about interfacing with the underlying operating system as they did about giving users a new way to interact with never-before-seen visual applications that a computer would be used for. And, thanks to their foresight, that's exactly why most of us enjoy this tool.
Yeah, because that's all we do when we use the computer... search around menus and look for commands... Did you also find that Etch-a-Sketch an was awesome art tool and artists who work with paint brushes are "dummies"?
El Al is a government owned airline in a country that spends a significantly higher portion of it's budget on defense than even the United States. Additionally, El Al operates a fleet of only a few dozen airplanes. The American aviation industry has hundreds of planes belonging to dozens of private companies with variable budgets.
Let us not forget that to board an El Al flight, you must go through a thorough screening process, including interviews with counter-terrorism experts, to determine your psychological state and to interrogate you about whether or not you are who you say you are. How can they afford to do all this? Once again, because they have a small number of planes and because they are funded by a wealthy government. El Al doesn't exist to make money, it exists to protect the lives of traveling Israeli nationals and visitors.
I just briefly used Netscape 8, so I'll write up my impressions.
The interface is very cluttered with "potentially" useful information, like movie theater show times, weather, news, etc. If you prefer Yahoo's front page portal to the simplicity of Google's front page, this browser is made for you. Otherwise, stick with Firefox.
The browser renders all "unknown" sites as Firefox, which was annoying to me because the only purpose for me trying this out was to test out some IE-only web pages. Luckily, it took little effort to set most of them to display in IE.
The rendering engine switch is very fast and seamless. I thought speed would be a major issue here, but it is not and issue at all.
This pretty much sums up any immediately noticable differences between this browser and Firefox. I uninstalled it because, for my normal browsing, Firefox works well and is un-cluttered. If I use Netscape 8 just because it has IE rendering, it would be no different than what I do now when I just open up an IE window whenever I need to view a banking website or things of that nature that are not compatible with Firefox.
Also, upon installation, the Import Wizard crashed, but that didn't matter much to me since I wasn't going to use the thing as my default browser anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
SCI-Fi already has 3 high cost original series currently in production, as well as their schlock-tastic "creature feature" movies to pay for.
How is this a reason for not funding another series? They spend money to make those things because they're PROFITABLE.
Of course I'm personally not a Firefly fan. I never saw the show. But I do dig that Battlestar Galactica, and looking at the clips from the Firefly show, it doesn't look anywhere as good. Now that they're gonna show it on TV again, I might actually check it out out of curiosity.
On a completely unrelated note, I think it's pretty obvious that unless you watched the TV show, none of these Serenity trailers look at all interesting. They actually seem to have the same sort of aura around them that the Chronicles of Riddick trailers did (though I didn't see that movie either), minus any sense of galactic scope or general excitement. Which is pretty damn pathetic for a trailer that is trying to advertise a sci-fi space opera. Oh well. If it works for you Firefly fans and you guys buy your movie tickets to enjoy your movie, more power to ya. It just offers absolutely NOTHING for outsiders.
I don't think that a Schützenfest is what you think it is. It's a festival, also held in other German-speaking countries, that was originally rooted in archery and shooting competitions, but is now just a big celebration for the whole family. It involves fair-type games, parades, concerts, and other tourist-enticing activities.
I don't know why I expected one of your arguments to be "PC has better games". I guess I was just giving people like you too much credit to think like that.
As far as console controllers are concerned, there are about half a dozen different companies making licensed and fully-compatible controllers, each promising to be more ergonomic and easy to use than the next. They cost no more than your mouse/keyboard set-up did. Just because you're unwilling to improve your gaming experience (at very little cost) doesn't mean that PC gaming is to be "preferred".
Last I checked, the search engine business is still highly competitive.
What a ridiculous comment. If you REALLY want to turn to a TV channel and watch music videos, guess what, these channels EXIST! Check your cable company's channel lineup and find "FUSE", for example. There are several others, too, but this is the one I'm most familiar with. The philosophy behind these channels is that they want to be what MTV was in the 80s. And guess what, you've just proven that people either don't know or don't care that these cable networks exist! And do you want to know why? Because 24 hours of music videos is BORING! It wasn't boring in the 80s when it was a novelty-type thing, but now it is. And nobody cares, not even people (like you) who actually LIKE music videos.
People love whining and complaining that MTV doesn't show music videos, but if they devote any air time to that, the same people who whined don't watch. Even when the music videos have nothing to do with boy bands or rap, people still don't watch.
This is one of the oddest things I've ever read. You convinced your wife not to watch something she may or may not enjoy based solely on the companies that sponsor that show? I realize that MTV is, in fact, targetted at teenage girls who shop at Aberzombie and Bitch, but what if a particular show is something that's actually ENTERTAINING to watch? You'd actually have second thoughts about watching it only because, during the commercial breaks, you see the sorts of advertisements which you mentioned?
What consumers do you expect will start these complaints? The 14 year old girl posting on LiveJournal, or her recipe-searching mother? The only people I can think of are those in the corporate world, which again goes back to Linux being a business operating system with some extra support and features for home use.
However, here's how I look at the whole issue:
Think of Linux as a consumer DVD player. It's put out there on the shelves as a finished product, fully featured, capable of doing more than the competition. Websites for the player advertise it as a complete solution to all your DVD-playing needs (though they seem to focus on industrial uses of this player). Die-hard users of the product and the people who created it are both trying to convince everyone to buy it. BUT, there's a catch. You see, you may or may not know it yet, but once you buy the player you realize that it only works with Panasonic TV's. You go to scour the web for help getting it to work on YOUR TV, and find several pages listing detailed instructions on how to make it work, each one involving taking the case apart and welding some wires and circuit boards. Of course, once you do this job it works (no guarantees!) or you buy a Panasonic TV instead and voila, you got the world's most awesome DVD player.
So, obviously this DVD player is a weird product, right? Who should the consumer complain to? The reason the DVD player doesn't support your Sony TV, for example, is because Sony didn't tell the people who made the player how to make it compatible. So here are the choices: Should the consumer complain to Sony and every other TV maker for not cooperating in the design of the DVD player? Should the consumer complain to the makers of the DVD player for advertising a product they said would work? Should the consumer buy the less-featured DVD player that DOES work with every TV out there instead?
I don't care. As a user, that's not my problem. If the developers can't get it done, no matter WHY they can't get it done, then their product loses it's worth.
Yeah, we knew it was coming because in the video he says that line in Professor Farnsworth's voice.
Progress? It has nothing to do with how many distributions there are. It just has to do with some incredibly simple things:
1) Target the home user, not the corporate decision makers. Why is no one noticing that the "major" distros have websites almost entirely tailored for the corporate world? Is it just because that's how "free software" developers earn their money? Or is there a reason I'm not seeing here for why nobody seems to give a crap about every-day consumers? Normal people don't see a computer as a working environment, stop advertising it as such.
2) Forget all the garbage about "difficulty" in installing the operating system, this is hardly an issue anymore. Instead, concentrate on the real issue of installing SOFTWARE of any kind, be that applications or hardware drivers. The only easy way to do this, right now, is to A) only install software that the distribution's built-in installation managers already know about, and/or B) only install software made by large firms that can invest in a fully functional stand-alone installer (Netscape, Opera, etc). If you want to install random Googled-for software, you're shit out of luck.
3) If your distribution does not support every single hardware component my computer has out of the box and doesn't provide for a simple (couple of mouse clicks, NOT couple of pages worth of instructions) way to fix the problem, you can GTFO and STFU. Your product is a beta. I don't care how hard it is to make this work. Until you CAN make it work, get the hell out of my sight and stop advertising yourself as a finished product.
4) Actually SPEND THE TIME developing GOOD user interfaces. Cut the minimalistic bullshit. A computer desktop is a place where people spend HOURS of their daily lives. It's like a second home. When you walk into a house, do you want to be greeted by a Soviet-style utilitarian kitchen, a functional (yet nasty) toilet and a matress? While these things may serve their purpose and allow you to get your desired task done, it's UGLY and I do NOT want to spend any time in such a cold, nasty place.
"...there is no reason that there can't be a track..."
I can think of one very good reason: The movie producers wouldn't want to waste time and money to encode such a trivial feature, and the hardware makers wouldn't want to waste time and money building the capability into their device.
Aside from your own comment, this is the first time I've ever heard of anyone requesting a feature like this.
The whole reason it's called "pan and scan" is because an actual human editor sat down and editted the letterboxed film by PANNING across the frame to the parts of it that are the most "important" (based on the specific shot) and throw out everything else. It's not just a matter of zooming in on the center of the frame (which DVD players and most widescreen TVs can already accomplish).
It's for this reason that you can't have an "automatic" system that pans and scans the frame to make it full screen, unless you can convince all the directors of the world to not fill the sides of the frame with anything important.
What in the hell are you talking about? The hell is your point? That poor people own a hundred thousand dollars worth of electronics equipment? What the hell?
Why are you hesitant to name the restaurant? Give us the name, and we'll research on our own whether it's true or not. I'm pretty sure that a restaurant selling 1,000 pounds of rat meat to their customers per week would be thoroughly covered by the mainstream (if not international) press.
Slashdot is as much a news-gathering website as it is a discussion website. I'd say a lot more emphasis is actually placed on discussions, though. News submissions therefore serve the purpose of giving links to places with the "full" story on a particular issue AS WELL AS generating discussions for said story. That's the reason the articles ask us readers to discuss the issues involved. If you just want tech/geek news without any conversation, you might want to look into The Register.
Instead of complaining to me, maybe you should complain to Optimum Online, since apparently you're getting screwed over. Perhaps your ethernet card is crappy? Optimum's website clearly says it offers speeds "up to 10,000 kbps", hence their whole "We're way faster than Verizon DSL" campaign.
*sigh*
Dude... just... stop, ok? This has already been responded to several times before you posted this. Check elsewhere in this thread. I'm getting annoyed here.
Optimum Online
Heh, umm, no. When I said 1 MB/sec, I wasn't using my ISP's terminology, I was just saying that because that's a much simpler term to understand for most people than using the term "megabit". I do in fact max out at ONE MEGABYTE PER SECOND for downloads and at approximately 128 KILOBYTES PER SECOND for uploads. And you're wrong about 1Mbps being common for cable. That's DSL's standard speed, and DSL is usually offered at much slower rates than cable.
I can download 5 different torrents SIMULTANEOUSLY, each one going at about 150 KB/sec. Or I can download 1 torrent going at about 150 KB/sec. Very rarely does this speed ever go any higher than that.
And, just to repeat, whenever I say kilobytes and megabytes, that's exactly what I mean. I know perfectly well the difference between a bit and a byte.
Heh, no, I'm not impatient. I'm just downloading at 1/10th my capacity over a protocol which people claim is the fastest way to download.
And yeah, I do have over 8 megabit (1 megaBYTE) down and about 1 megabit (128 KB) up. It's "Optimum Online" in New York, it's their standard speed package. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's Comcast's standard speed, too, and virtually every other major cable provider I've ever heard of. Unless you have DSL (which you do), there's no reason why your provider would offer you anything less than 8 megabits downstream.
I doubt my ISP is interfering in any way, especially since BitTorrent is the one and only protocol through which it's impossible for me to download at faster speeds than what I mentioned previously. Bottom line is that, to high-speed cable broadband users like me, BitTorrent is far from the most efficient download protocol. If Microsoft's method would give me 30% improvement, I'm all for that.
Either you're exagerating the part about maxing out your broadband connection, or your bandwidth is considerably smaller than most people's and therefore it does not take much to reach the limit.
I have a 1 MB/sec downstream connection (which I believe is very common for home cable modem users). I have never once encountered a single BitTorrent download where my download speed went over 250 KB/sec, and I can count on one hand the number of times it even got up that high. The vast majority of my BitTorrent downloads max out at approximately 100-150 KB/sec. Therefore, I'm assuming you have a download limit of something like 128 KB/sec. Is that correct? Or, perhaps, something close to one of the slower DSL hookups?
If I'm wrong, please enlighten me on how it is possible for you to get torrent download speeds so much faster than mine. To me, downloading a torrent is only worthwhile when the file I want is on a server under a massive amount of stress or if it's just not available through any other means. Direct downloads, for me, are still MUCH faster than torrents. Even non-torrent P2P clients, like Shareaza and Ares, are considerably faster than torrents.
The mouse was invented as a visual user-interface tool for a new sort of visual GUI in computers. You're clearly confusing using a mouse for operating system functionalities and using it for application functionalities. I doubt that the original creators of the mouse cared as much about interfacing with the underlying operating system as they did about giving users a new way to interact with never-before-seen visual applications that a computer would be used for. And, thanks to their foresight, that's exactly why most of us enjoy this tool.
Yeah, because that's all we do when we use the computer... search around menus and look for commands... Did you also find that Etch-a-Sketch an was awesome art tool and artists who work with paint brushes are "dummies"?
El Al is a government owned airline in a country that spends a significantly higher portion of it's budget on defense than even the United States. Additionally, El Al operates a fleet of only a few dozen airplanes. The American aviation industry has hundreds of planes belonging to dozens of private companies with variable budgets.
Let us not forget that to board an El Al flight, you must go through a thorough screening process, including interviews with counter-terrorism experts, to determine your psychological state and to interrogate you about whether or not you are who you say you are. How can they afford to do all this? Once again, because they have a small number of planes and because they are funded by a wealthy government. El Al doesn't exist to make money, it exists to protect the lives of traveling Israeli nationals and visitors.
I just briefly used Netscape 8, so I'll write up my impressions.
The interface is very cluttered with "potentially" useful information, like movie theater show times, weather, news, etc. If you prefer Yahoo's front page portal to the simplicity of Google's front page, this browser is made for you. Otherwise, stick with Firefox.
The browser renders all "unknown" sites as Firefox, which was annoying to me because the only purpose for me trying this out was to test out some IE-only web pages. Luckily, it took little effort to set most of them to display in IE.
The rendering engine switch is very fast and seamless. I thought speed would be a major issue here, but it is not and issue at all.
This pretty much sums up any immediately noticable differences between this browser and Firefox. I uninstalled it because, for my normal browsing, Firefox works well and is un-cluttered. If I use Netscape 8 just because it has IE rendering, it would be no different than what I do now when I just open up an IE window whenever I need to view a banking website or things of that nature that are not compatible with Firefox.
Also, upon installation, the Import Wizard crashed, but that didn't matter much to me since I wasn't going to use the thing as my default browser anyway.