Where I work, we routinely send out lots and lots demonstration software. A lot of them turn into sales.
However, our method is the reverse of yours. You can download all the binaries whenever you want, any time, all the time. Transfer interrputed? Go ahead, download again. Downloaded it, but lost it? Download again. Got corrupted? Download again. These are the real things, not crippled evaluation versions.
What we do is liberally give out demo licenses via email, that expires after a short time. Provided you're not an asshole, you can renew your demo licenses.
Of course, the downside to this it could be cracked and warez'd out. I don't know the company stance and don't pretend to speak for it, but I don't care. Piracy is part of doing business in software, and the less you piss off your customers, IMHO, the better. So, while I don't like people pirating our software, I'm still against the recent stupid-ass (c'mon, you all know the words!) laws that seem to have festered recently in this area.
Perhaps this works better, I don't know why. Maybe it's psychological: people download the binary first and then feel they need to try it out to justify the time spent. Or something like that.
That's the sorriest ass MIDI I ever heard, with about as much musical sensibility as a jackhammer. And it's also missing one voice, which in a four-voice song is 25% of the harmony.
When some moron sends me dual-encoded HTML/text mail, let me prefer to show the text version. If they sent HTML-only mail, convert it to text. I never want to see HTML. Ever!
I am sick of getting HTML spam that automatically starts banging on my net connection, even before I get chance to blacklist the appropriate site through Junkbuster.
(And no, I don't want to use a text-mode client. That's throwing the baby out with the bath water.)
I use Pendragon Browser. It runs entirely on the client, so you never have to worry about silly corporations indirectly trying to make a buck off your web browsing. (I haven't tried the other ones listed here just yet, maybe it's time to take another pass.)
With it, the main website I visit just happens to be Slashdot, processed for PDA consumption by AvantSlash
The only downside is that there is no specialized content available for it, like AvantGo: it only knows how to read plain web pages. Hence, ocasionally, you'll need a preprocessor (like AvantSlash) to put the web pages on a diet.
Ah, good memories. I used to be a theater manager/projectionist while in college.
Folks, you have to complain to the theater management when this happens. Yes, management, not the kid who is scraping cardboard-flavored popcorn out of the bin.
If it's slightly out of frame, complain. If there are scratches on the film, complain. If it's out of focus, complain. If there's fuzz in the projector, complain. A real manager will gladly take the cue and go fix the problem.
The last thing they want to do is watch every playing of every movie to check for flaws.
For example, if the picture seems slightly out of frame, it might be slipping the rollers a bit. It's a lot easier to tap the film back into track, then wait until it slips fully and breaks. Then it spews about 1000 feet of film on the floor in a big pile of black spaghetti. You have to stop the system, pick up the film off the floor, splice it, put it back on the platter, rethread the projector, and start up again. Guess which the projectionist would rather do?
Even worse, sometimes it will slip a roller and not break. That typically causes the entire film to get scratched- a giant veritcal slice from top to bottom. It's expensive to return the film and get a new one, but they'll never do it if they think you don't notice. I bet if you did notice one and alerted them, you'd at least get a free pass. I know I gave out lots.
When the theater gets a film from the distributor, it comes in five or six cannisters. Most modern projection facilities have a platter-based system, so the projectionist has to splice all the pieces together before showing it. The film sits on a giant six-foot platter which it is spooled off from. Of course, that means they should really "proof" their splices by watching the movie before opening night. (You quickly learn that you'll get burned if you don't. It's no fun to write out free passes to a packed theater.)
Compare with the older setups where you'd alternate between two different reels. In that case, you just mount the second reel on the second projector while the first is running. At the right time, you throw a switch to change projectors. That's what those little black/white dots in the corner of the screen are- a cue to the projectionist to get ready to change reels. (That's why the music never crosses through such a break.) Unfortunately, since each reel is about 1/2 hours long, it means you have to babysit the projectors a lot more.
How is this different from using third party software and code on any other platform?
Simple. Windows comes with a huge default set things you're allowed to link against. Somewhere, it says: "you can link against all this stuff for no royalty". If I go out and buy a copy of Windows and write a Windows apps, then I dynamically link against all libraries in Windows. I sell my app. Done.
Imagine if a Windows developer had to review every single DLL inside of c:\windows\system to check for licenses. It takes time. Some licenses are written such that only a lawyer can figure out what they mean. "Oh, yes, Mr. Lawyer, please read these 423 licenses and tell me which one I can use. What, that will only cost $35,000 for your time? Nevermind!"
If I got out and buy a copy of Foo linux, it has 500,000 libraries on it, each with a different license. Each time I link in a different one I have stop and read to see if I'm allowed to do so.
Now here's the kicker: to get anything non-trivial done in Linux, you need to link against the libraries. But you can't link in a GPL library unless you plan to give away your software.
So, if you want to sell something, you have to roll your own. THAT is what's slowing down progress on Linux.
I think it is 100% retarded to write a low-level library and release it under the GPL instead of the LGPL. (And yes, I write both free and propietary software. I have no paranoid delusions about one destroying the other.)
Uh, you don't have to go a Certified Ford Dealer to buy Ford gas for your Ford. That means:
If Ford goes out of business, you can still drive your car.
There is competition for gas that brings the price down to a reasonable level.
Ford can't decide that you don't really need a stereo in your car anymore (a feature that you bought the car for) and secretly take it out while filling it up.
If I buy a tivo with service, and then later on they decide they don't like to provide the service anymore, I have a $600 paperweight that's no better than my VCR.
Don't get me wrong, they should sell service and make money off it. But you should be able to get the data from a variety of different places. Legally.
Re:Worse than running something as root
on
Linux Virus Alert
·
· Score: 2
Yeah, but you might run it as root, and probably not. Most of the stuff you run as root are not apps, but the stuff that comes pre-compiled with your system. You also have much less people running as root, than as regular users.
Whereas if the trojan is in the installer, and you run that as root, you will definitely run it as root.
So, staying out of root during an install decreases your chances of activating said trojan.
Pushing the odds in your favor is the name of the game. What, you thought security procedures were absolute and provide perfect protection?
Re:Worse than running something as root
on
Linux Virus Alert
·
· Score: 2
Most programs have to be installed as root, and that's all that is needed.
Hee hee! No, they don't, not if you know what you're doing. Most programs need to be installed as the same user ID that owns the directory where you binaries are. That doesn't have to be, and should not be, root.
chown -R bin:bin/usr/local
Now, when you install something, su to bin, not root. Much better.
Once in a great while, some programs require to be root (setuid-root) to run. Stuff that accesses privileged ports, usually, and most of them are very careful to switch away from root once they've accessed the resource they need.
That doesn't prove it's talking to the hardware directly. It only proves it's not transmittnig on the network. The two are quite different.
I would assume that the kernel is smart enough, when connecting to localhost, to not generate network traffic. E.g., what do you see when you telnet to localhost? However, the data is still serialized into a protocol, and goes through sockets from the client to the server.
Even if X doesn't go through TCP and uses a more efficient mechanism, it *still* uses a socket to talk to the X server. Do a netstat sometime and you'll see the Unix-domain sockets that it uses. So, to talk through a socket stream, has to take all the graphics commands, package them up into discrete messages, send the message to a different process (the X server is in a different address space, remember?), context switch to sever, server grabs the message, hands it off to the kernel, context switch, and then send it to the hardware.
Compare that to a Windows graphics driver that runs with no protection at kernel level: the application makes a graphics call, context switch to kernel, kernel dumps it to the hardware.
In order for X to be as fast as Windows, it would have to has a special Xlib.dll that, when in localhost mode, completely avoids all protcol serialization and talks to directly the hardware. The server would have to be linked into the same address space as the client!
Also, there are a lot of other X servers in the world besides XFree86.
DRI in XFree86 may improve things, but I don't quite know how that works. I do know it's not in all X servers yet.;)
Good point. Win9x has a ton of assembly code, tuned over the years exclusively for the x86. It also has the best driver support, so Windows GDI calls turn right into hardware calls to the videocard. It also can access the hardware directly because it doesn't do network-transparent graphics.
The typical X implementation is quite different. It has a portable codebase that runs on just about everything, so there much less hand-tuned assembly. It's not as popular, and has far less driver support, so lots of drawing primitives need to be done in software. Being network transparent, it has to serialize everything into a protocol messages.
Add all these up, X is slower. However, a good X implementation could avert all these problems. It's most typical implementations don't. Especially if you got it for free.
That's why a *good* CS department teaches theory rather than practice.
s/rather/and/;
I've interviewed Ph.D.s in CS, when applying for engineering positions. Many have never coded anything significant or at all, and those types tend look down on it as a niggling, trivial detail not worthy of their attention.
...and that's why great ones teach a lot of theory and some applied practice.
Got theory only? Great, the only thing you'll be able to do is uh, teach theory or get one of a very few CS research jobs. Applied only? You'll be writing VB crud for the rest of your life. Get a bit of both, make the connections between the two in your brain, and spend a lifetime of building, planning, and inventing cool stuff.
Did I say she accepted the cards? No. Did I say it was okay for everyone to rip off credit card companies? No.
What I did mean is that credit card companies do so much irresponsible fringe lending fully well knowing they can't be paid back. In many of those cases, when they get stiffed, they deserve it. They even know it's going to happen, expect it to happen, and profit off it when it does.
Please, tell me, at what point did I say she fell into the poor house? Or even accept the credit cards? Your childish extrapolation was completely incorrect. So, before you resort to insults against my family, consider getting your facts straight.
I used the example because I witnessed banks heavily marketing to her in a situation that could have been bad. Please tell me how a person with no income can afford to repay $10000 of credit card debt at 20% APR? What, they can't? Well, that's predatory lending by the lender. Some people I knew in college fell into the trap; namely, her roomate.
Do I think her roomate is blameless? No. Do I think it should be illegal? No. I'm just saying there's quite frequently irresponsible behavior on both sides of the equation. My heart doesn't bleed for the credit card companies who suffer bankruptcy losses because of their terrible lending policies, but neither does it for people who get themselves into that situation. As far as I'm concerned, they both get what they deserve.
If a drug dealer gives away samples for free to an unsuspecting child, is it completely the child's fault they get hooked on drugs and ruin their life? If a credit card companies loan sharks out to 18-year olds, who have never paid their way yet and can't possibly afford the loan they're given, is it completely the kid's fault if they get up to their ears in debt for the rest of their life?
I'm all for being responsible for your own actions-- don't get me wrong-- but knowing what dirty tricks some companies are up to is the best way to defend yourself. That's the big picture I'm talking about.
Where I went to college there were countless students who had no problem ripping off credit card companies to get stuff they wanted.
You sound as if credit card companies have halos over their head. Where I went to college, I saw my girlfriend indundanted with pre-approved credit card offers with huge limits that, if she even put them halfway to their limit, would not be even able to pay the minimum. This, to a person with no credit and no job- just because she was female. I had already spent my teen years building up credit the old fashioned way; slowly, and learning responsibility along the way.
I'm sure they did this to everyone else. Credit card companies have some evil people working for them, willing to destroy people's financial lives or force them to be wage slaves just so some execs can get gold trim on their ridiculously overpriced luxury car.
It's not right to steal from credit card companies, but let's remember that there are no innocents here: it's screw or be screwed. At least the big companies can jigger the laws to their taste.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. Let's use some common sense here. Something which always seems to be missing in law.
No one but a brainless turd is going to confuse Lindows with Windows. Isn't the legalese for determining this "confusingly similar"? They are not confusingly similar.
Panasoanic is easily confused with Panasonic because the name is long, it's not a recogizable generic English word, the extra "a" is buried. If Panasoanic was instead called Lanasonic, no one would confuse them. Even if they did make crappy radios.
I remember being in one of those cruddy electronics stores that rips of tourists in Times Square, NYC when I discovered the Alphine and Panasoanic brands of fiiiine electronic yummy goodness. At first glance, I simply didn't notice. That's because that how humans read: your brain automatically does auto-completion on everything and skipping the rest, for the sake of speed. (Really. Ask Doug Hofstadter.)
Similarly, if Lindows was called Windoews, then people might fall for it, and the case might hold water. But it's not.
It's distressingly clear that the intent of Lindows is not to dupe people into thinking it's windows, but to merge the two words Linux and Windows.
Good points. They're improving things though. I installed Win2K and was sure to create different accounts for everybody. I also made each person a non-power user, so that any exploit can do (theoretically) limited damage. (Though I'm probably deluding myself.)
To my pleasant surprise, some applications will recognize that you need to be an Admin to install. They'll post a dialog box that essentially does a "su". Enter the admin password, install, and be done. Not bad.
To my disgust, most applications don't, and most applications (grumbleQUICKENgrrrRIOgrmblPALMgrrr) decide they need unfettered write access all over the place. It takes some hunting and pecking, granting write access to the four or five files (usually log files) that it wants to write to.
If MS would change their default setup such that users did not have "power" or "admin" privileges, watch how fast software would change to actually install correctly.
The second would literally destroy the way that television content is paid for and profitable. Nuts, but true.
That's pure bullshit. It might do this, not would, if almost everyone who watches TV bought that exact unit and time-shifted 100% of their TV viewing. That's a big honking, un-fscking-likely IF.
First, I doubt Sonic Blue has the capacity to provide a unit for all the TVs in the world. Second, not everyone wants to spend $600-$2000 per TV when you can get a VCR and TV for $100.
My wife and I are avid time-shifters, and even we only shift maybe 40% of the shows we watch. It goes like this- if we happen to be home when it's on, we usually watch it. But that doesn't always happen!
How about when you're over a friend's house, watching TV? We see the commercials.
How about when I'm watching TV in a public area, like sitting in the hospital waiting room? I see the commercials.
How about all the people who buy the unit who can't find the knob to turn off commericals, or simply don't care to turn it on? (Don't laugh, how many of you know people who can't set the VCR clock? It's a lot of people.)
How about when nothing compelling is on, and I'm channel surfing? I'm not watching anything in particular, it's unplanned viewing. I see the commercials.
Or when it's a premiere that you just can't want to wait to see, so you watch it live.
If you think about it, even if this unit is smashing success and "everybody" has it, there still will be PLENTY of ads seen by all. It wouldn't make a single stinking difference in the money the networks make.
The 5 largest? By what? Population? Area? Density? Number of breweries? Sorted? Can you name the five largest US states, sorted by population? Gimme a break.
Can I name 5 large cities in Canada? Sure. Quebec, Toronto, Ottawa, Winnipeg, Montreal.
Slashdot Mirror
However, our method is the reverse of yours. You can download all the binaries whenever you want, any time, all the time. Transfer interrputed? Go ahead, download again. Downloaded it, but lost it? Download again. Got corrupted? Download again. These are the real things, not crippled evaluation versions.
What we do is liberally give out demo licenses via email, that expires after a short time. Provided you're not an asshole, you can renew your demo licenses.
Of course, the downside to this it could be cracked and warez'd out. I don't know the company stance and don't pretend to speak for it, but I don't care. Piracy is part of doing business in software, and the less you piss off your customers, IMHO, the better. So, while I don't like people pirating our software, I'm still against the recent stupid-ass (c'mon, you all know the words!) laws that seem to have festered recently in this area.
Perhaps this works better, I don't know why. Maybe it's psychological: people download the binary first and then feel they need to try it out to justify the time spent. Or something like that.
That's the sorriest ass MIDI I ever heard, with about as much musical sensibility as a jackhammer. And it's also missing one voice, which in a four-voice song is 25% of the harmony.
Try this one instead.
When some moron sends me dual-encoded HTML/text mail, let me prefer to show the text version. If they sent HTML-only mail, convert it to text. I never want to see HTML. Ever!
I am sick of getting HTML spam that automatically starts banging on my net connection, even before I get chance to blacklist the appropriate site through Junkbuster.
(And no, I don't want to use a text-mode client. That's throwing the baby out with the bath water.)
You, Too, Can Be Slashdotted!
i ASP.asp, line 83
Microsoft VBScript runtime error '800a000d'
Type mismatch: 'CInt'
E:\INETPUB\WEBSITES\YIL\COLUMNS\../ssi/ss
I think the only alternate movie soundtrack I'd care to listen is would be Filthy's take on it.
With it, the main website I visit just happens to be Slashdot, processed for PDA consumption by AvantSlash
The only downside is that there is no specialized content available for it, like AvantGo: it only knows how to read plain web pages. Hence, ocasionally, you'll need a preprocessor (like AvantSlash) to put the web pages on a diet.
Folks, you have to complain to the theater management when this happens. Yes, management, not the kid who is scraping cardboard-flavored popcorn out of the bin.
If it's slightly out of frame, complain. If there are scratches on the film, complain. If it's out of focus, complain. If there's fuzz in the projector, complain. A real manager will gladly take the cue and go fix the problem. The last thing they want to do is watch every playing of every movie to check for flaws.
For example, if the picture seems slightly out of frame, it might be slipping the rollers a bit. It's a lot easier to tap the film back into track, then wait until it slips fully and breaks. Then it spews about 1000 feet of film on the floor in a big pile of black spaghetti. You have to stop the system, pick up the film off the floor, splice it, put it back on the platter, rethread the projector, and start up again. Guess which the projectionist would rather do?
Even worse, sometimes it will slip a roller and not break. That typically causes the entire film to get scratched- a giant veritcal slice from top to bottom. It's expensive to return the film and get a new one, but they'll never do it if they think you don't notice. I bet if you did notice one and alerted them, you'd at least get a free pass. I know I gave out lots.
When the theater gets a film from the distributor, it comes in five or six cannisters. Most modern projection facilities have a platter-based system, so the projectionist has to splice all the pieces together before showing it. The film sits on a giant six-foot platter which it is spooled off from. Of course, that means they should really "proof" their splices by watching the movie before opening night. (You quickly learn that you'll get burned if you don't. It's no fun to write out free passes to a packed theater.)
Compare with the older setups where you'd alternate between two different reels. In that case, you just mount the second reel on the second projector while the first is running. At the right time, you throw a switch to change projectors. That's what those little black/white dots in the corner of the screen are- a cue to the projectionist to get ready to change reels. (That's why the music never crosses through such a break.) Unfortunately, since each reel is about 1/2 hours long, it means you have to babysit the projectors a lot more.
Simple. Windows comes with a huge default set things you're allowed to link against. Somewhere, it says: "you can link against all this stuff for no royalty". If I go out and buy a copy of Windows and write a Windows apps, then I dynamically link against all libraries in Windows. I sell my app. Done.
Imagine if a Windows developer had to review every single DLL inside of c:\windows\system to check for licenses. It takes time. Some licenses are written such that only a lawyer can figure out what they mean. "Oh, yes, Mr. Lawyer, please read these 423 licenses and tell me which one I can use. What, that will only cost $35,000 for your time? Nevermind!"
If I got out and buy a copy of Foo linux, it has 500,000 libraries on it, each with a different license. Each time I link in a different one I have stop and read to see if I'm allowed to do so.
Now here's the kicker: to get anything non-trivial done in Linux, you need to link against the libraries. But you can't link in a GPL library unless you plan to give away your software.
So, if you want to sell something, you have to roll your own. THAT is what's slowing down progress on Linux.
I think it is 100% retarded to write a low-level library and release it under the GPL instead of the LGPL. (And yes, I write both free and propietary software. I have no paranoid delusions about one destroying the other.)
- If Ford goes out of business, you can still drive your car.
- There is competition for gas that brings the price down to a reasonable level.
- Ford can't decide that you don't really need a stereo in your car anymore (a feature that you bought the car for) and secretly take it out while filling it up.
If I buy a tivo with service, and then later on they decide they don't like to provide the service anymore, I have a $600 paperweight that's no better than my VCR.Don't get me wrong, they should sell service and make money off it. But you should be able to get the data from a variety of different places. Legally.
Whereas if the trojan is in the installer, and you run that as root, you will definitely run it as root.
So, staying out of root during an install decreases your chances of activating said trojan.
Pushing the odds in your favor is the name of the game. What, you thought security procedures were absolute and provide perfect protection?
Hee hee! No, they don't, not if you know what you're doing. Most programs need to be installed as the same user ID that owns the directory where you binaries are. That doesn't have to be, and should not be, root.
chown -R bin:bin /usr/local
Now, when you install something, su to bin, not root. Much better.
Once in a great while, some programs require to be root (setuid-root) to run. Stuff that accesses privileged ports, usually, and most of them are very careful to switch away from root once they've accessed the resource they need.
I would assume that the kernel is smart enough, when connecting to localhost, to not generate network traffic. E.g., what do you see when you telnet to localhost? However, the data is still serialized into a protocol, and goes through sockets from the client to the server.
Even if X doesn't go through TCP and uses a more efficient mechanism, it *still* uses a socket to talk to the X server. Do a netstat sometime and you'll see the Unix-domain sockets that it uses. So, to talk through a socket stream, has to take all the graphics commands, package them up into discrete messages, send the message to a different process (the X server is in a different address space, remember?), context switch to sever, server grabs the message, hands it off to the kernel, context switch, and then send it to the hardware.
Compare that to a Windows graphics driver that runs with no protection at kernel level: the application makes a graphics call, context switch to kernel, kernel dumps it to the hardware.
In order for X to be as fast as Windows, it would have to has a special Xlib.dll that, when in localhost mode, completely avoids all protcol serialization and talks to directly the hardware. The server would have to be linked into the same address space as the client!
Also, there are a lot of other X servers in the world besides XFree86.
DRI in XFree86 may improve things, but I don't quite know how that works. I do know it's not in all X servers yet. ;)
The typical X implementation is quite different. It has a portable codebase that runs on just about everything, so there much less hand-tuned assembly. It's not as popular, and has far less driver support, so lots of drawing primitives need to be done in software. Being network transparent, it has to serialize everything into a protocol messages.
Add all these up, X is slower. However, a good X implementation could avert all these problems. It's most typical implementations don't. Especially if you got it for free.
s/rather/and/;
I've interviewed Ph.D.s in CS, when applying for engineering positions. Many have never coded anything significant or at all, and those types tend look down on it as a niggling, trivial detail not worthy of their attention.
Got theory only? Great, the only thing you'll be able to do is uh, teach theory or get one of a very few CS research jobs. Applied only? You'll be writing VB crud for the rest of your life. Get a bit of both, make the connections between the two in your brain, and spend a lifetime of building, planning, and inventing cool stuff.
Did I say she accepted the cards? No. Did I say it was okay for everyone to rip off credit card companies? No.
What I did mean is that credit card companies do so much irresponsible fringe lending fully well knowing they can't be paid back. In many of those cases, when they get stiffed, they deserve it. They even know it's going to happen, expect it to happen, and profit off it when it does.
I used the example because I witnessed banks heavily marketing to her in a situation that could have been bad. Please tell me how a person with no income can afford to repay $10000 of credit card debt at 20% APR? What, they can't? Well, that's predatory lending by the lender. Some people I knew in college fell into the trap; namely, her roomate.
Do I think her roomate is blameless? No. Do I think it should be illegal? No. I'm just saying there's quite frequently irresponsible behavior on both sides of the equation. My heart doesn't bleed for the credit card companies who suffer bankruptcy losses because of their terrible lending policies, but neither does it for people who get themselves into that situation. As far as I'm concerned, they both get what they deserve.
If a drug dealer gives away samples for free to an unsuspecting child, is it completely the child's fault they get hooked on drugs and ruin their life? If a credit card companies loan sharks out to 18-year olds, who have never paid their way yet and can't possibly afford the loan they're given, is it completely the kid's fault if they get up to their ears in debt for the rest of their life?
I'm all for being responsible for your own actions-- don't get me wrong-- but knowing what dirty tricks some companies are up to is the best way to defend yourself. That's the big picture I'm talking about.
You sound as if credit card companies have halos over their head. Where I went to college, I saw my girlfriend indundanted with pre-approved credit card offers with huge limits that, if she even put them halfway to their limit, would not be even able to pay the minimum. This, to a person with no credit and no job- just because she was female. I had already spent my teen years building up credit the old fashioned way; slowly, and learning responsibility along the way.
I'm sure they did this to everyone else. Credit card companies have some evil people working for them, willing to destroy people's financial lives or force them to be wage slaves just so some execs can get gold trim on their ridiculously overpriced luxury car.
It's not right to steal from credit card companies, but let's remember that there are no innocents here: it's screw or be screwed. At least the big companies can jigger the laws to their taste.
No one but a brainless turd is going to confuse Lindows with Windows. Isn't the legalese for determining this "confusingly similar"? They are not confusingly similar.
Panasoanic is easily confused with Panasonic because the name is long, it's not a recogizable generic English word, the extra "a" is buried. If Panasoanic was instead called Lanasonic, no one would confuse them. Even if they did make crappy radios.
I remember being in one of those cruddy electronics stores that rips of tourists in Times Square, NYC when I discovered the Alphine and Panasoanic brands of fiiiine electronic yummy goodness. At first glance, I simply didn't notice. That's because that how humans read: your brain automatically does auto-completion on everything and skipping the rest, for the sake of speed. (Really. Ask Doug Hofstadter.)
Similarly, if Lindows was called Windoews, then people might fall for it, and the case might hold water. But it's not.
It's distressingly clear that the intent of Lindows is not to dupe people into thinking it's windows, but to merge the two words Linux and Windows.
To my pleasant surprise, some applications will recognize that you need to be an Admin to install. They'll post a dialog box that essentially does a "su". Enter the admin password, install, and be done. Not bad.
To my disgust, most applications don't, and most applications (grumbleQUICKENgrrrRIOgrmblPALMgrrr) decide they need unfettered write access all over the place. It takes some hunting and pecking, granting write access to the four or five files (usually log files) that it wants to write to.
If MS would change their default setup such that users did not have "power" or "admin" privileges, watch how fast software would change to actually install correctly.
No, it would be like making Capt. Hazelwood the Secretary of Transportation.
(Uh, he was in charge of an oil tanker.)
Either on crack, or a typo, or maybe they came up with these stupid TLDs last year.
And the question is...
"What was the most useless development in computers in the year 2000?"
Correct!
I'd like "Stupid Shit" for $500, Alex.
That's pure bullshit. It might do this, not would, if almost everyone who watches TV bought that exact unit and time-shifted 100% of their TV viewing. That's a big honking, un-fscking-likely IF.
First, I doubt Sonic Blue has the capacity to provide a unit for all the TVs in the world. Second, not everyone wants to spend $600-$2000 per TV when you can get a VCR and TV for $100.
My wife and I are avid time-shifters, and even we only shift maybe 40% of the shows we watch. It goes like this- if we happen to be home when it's on, we usually watch it. But that doesn't always happen!
How about when you're over a friend's house, watching TV? We see the commercials.
How about when I'm watching TV in a public area, like sitting in the hospital waiting room? I see the commercials.
How about all the people who buy the unit who can't find the knob to turn off commericals, or simply don't care to turn it on? (Don't laugh, how many of you know people who can't set the VCR clock? It's a lot of people.)
How about when nothing compelling is on, and I'm channel surfing? I'm not watching anything in particular, it's unplanned viewing. I see the commercials.
Or when it's a premiere that you just can't want to wait to see, so you watch it live.
If you think about it, even if this unit is smashing success and "everybody" has it, there still will be PLENTY of ads seen by all. It wouldn't make a single stinking difference in the money the networks make.
Yeh, 100% transparent would be best.
Did someone forget to demoronise their MS-HTML? Or are you really that unsure of yourself?
Can I name 5 large cities in Canada? Sure. Quebec, Toronto, Ottawa, Winnipeg, Montreal.
Oh wait, I went to college near Canada. Guess I'm disqualified.