The parent supposed that if the studios lowered the price of the films and dropped the DRM, they would end up with higher overall revenues and profits. You know, sell each unit for a little less, spend less on DRM, and sell a whole lot more units = higher profits.
Blackboard (the software) would be the equivalent of a blackboard (the one with chalk) but where the chalk breaks 95% of the time, the erasers don't work, and the board falls off of the wall every other day. Oh, and the chalk has little metal flecks embedded in it that make that awful screeching noise whenever one writes.
1. It works well. 2. It will install into my kernel. 3. It is updated and maintained to work with reasonably current libraries/kernels/etc. 4. It is always offered as a download somewhere- the driver can't just dissapear from the net someday, leaving me with a paperweight.
Of course, making binary drivers is not preferable to real open-sourced ones as the OSS ones are in the kernel tree and can't be taken down some day. but when faced with no Linux support or a binary blob...I'll take the blob any day. I have no less than 3 blobs in my system as we speak: one is my ATi display drivers (can't complain much, except for the known AMD64 XVideo X11 segfault bug) another is VMware's kernel modules (with the any-any-update, they work fine) and the last is HighPoint's binary drivers for my RocketRAID 2310 drive controller (actually patches into the kernel menuconfig, even.) I can't complain too much.
To tell the truth, working with either system or both is not that big of a task. Almost every laboratory deals solely in metric, even those in the U.S. Engineering calculations are done sometimes in metric, sometimes in standard, and few really seem to care as the formulas and end results are the same. The same goes for machines- one machine might have metric-sized fasteners on it and another has SAE-sized ones. Once one has both sets of tools, it ceases to matter what you're working on as you have the correct tool. A 25mm wrench and fastener is no better or worse than a 1" wrench and fastener, so there's really no advantage to either method. There is a bit of a cost to change from one to the other, and thus many Americans don't want to go through the trouble for basically no gain. That's why the U.S. is not on the metric system.
95 might have been bad by today's standards, but it wasn't when it came out. It was a huge leap ahead from Windows 3.1 and DOS with things like a taskbar, integrated network stack, and other improvements to usability. The Mac might have been better at the time, but Apple knew this and charged an arm and a leg for them. I guess one could have used a UNIX variant or Windows NT, all of which were technically superior, but NT was in its teething stages in 1995 and so was Linux and the BSDs. Only the old-line UNIXes were really around in full force then.
Now Me...Me was a dog when it came out and everybody knew it. Fortunately for MS, it was introduced alongside what is arguable Microsoft's best OS to date, Windows 2000.
I fully understand that and have seen MS Office programs totally goof up font formatting on different computers with the same version of MS Office installed. I work around that by simply saving everything as PDF as a PDF always looks exactly the same everywhere (and it's super-easy to do in OpenOffice or MS Office + a Ghostscript print-to-PDF option.) I have had very few complaints with simply using PDFs instead of the original files.
There's a big difference between "little c" conservatives and "big C" Conservatives. The "little c" conservatives are probably more like libertarians in this regard and don't want the government to tell people what to do. The "big C" conservatives are socially conservative and not afraid to grow the government to enforce that. In that regard, there's little difference between the big-C Conservatives and liberals. Both spend like drunken sailors and want to legislate behavior. In the case of the liberals, it's the government knows best, for the Conservatives, it's they want to save you from religious damnation.
Well, I did see that coming, didn't I? (Okay, well, it was actually modded "troll" and not "flamebait," but it's pretty much the same.) My guess is their parents provide everything for them, including the basement they live in, so they have no personal responsibilities.
At the risk of being modded "flamebait" I will answer the question. The school of thought where everything can be blamed on something external arose from modern social liberalism. The premise of it is that an individual is stupid and not capable of taking care of themselves and making their decisions, so the government must be everybody's nanny as it knows better. But since the individual is deemed not capable of taking care of themselves and making their own decisions, then anything that they do can't possibly have been from their own thinking...so it gets blamed on something else. The targets are often things that do not mesh well with the current social liberal view of what's good, namely non-social behavior like individual transportation (cars), things that can cause social disruption (weapons and views opposite to the entrenched government), and not sharing your resources with the rest of the people (wealth.)
Many high-level and powerful politicians abuse their power for personal gain and it makes not one lick of difference what party they're from. Clinton had the whole Watergate escapade and Kofi Annan (not a U.S. president, but still a notable public figure) was corrupt as hell with the Oil for Food scandal. The names and faces might change, but it's the same old story from when the first tribes elected the first leaders.
I'd agree with the rest of the Slashdotters and say Ubuntu, but almost any Debian derivative will work well for you and be pretty easy to admin and set up. I personally use Gentoo as it's extremely powerful and configurable, but it along with FreeBSD (which Gentoo more or less resembles) are not really for new users unless they are willing to start all the way at the bottom of a somewhat steep learning curve.
Oh, and Juergen whats-his-name from OpenSUSE.org had possibly hinted that they'd fork if the Novell-MS thing screws with OpenSUSE. I'd not feel dirty using OpenSUSE as it is an excellent distribution, but I would keep a sharp eye on what happens with Novell.
Actually, how easy or not it is for them to "break into a male dominated industry" largely depends on the people that they work with. If it's normal people, they will have no problems. If it's old chauvinists, then sure. But the chauvinists have almost all been neutered by the threat of lawsuits. And for anybody who says that few women are interested in technical fields, my engineering classes are >50% female, just like the entire rest of the school (roughly upper 50%s female/ lower 40%s male.)
I'd actually say that men going into a largely female line of work are MUCH more disadvantaged than women going into typically male occupations. How many male nurses do you see? Or male small-animal vets? Or elementary-school teachers? In fact, in some cases, men are flatly discriminated against. Show me very many school districts that will hire a man to teach anything less than about 5th grade. They all worry about pedohilia (even though the news has had several women who behave likewise lately...) so they just won't hire men. They can get away with it due to the non-discrimination laws specifically NOT putting males in the protected class in any sex-based lawsuit, as well as anybody under 40 can't be considered discriminated against in age-based suits (thank you AARP, you lousy old bastards!) and whites also cannot claim racism against them. Me thinks that a change in those laws are in order in order to protect *everybody* equally.
Bingo. Corporations with MS support contracts and yearly fees do commonly upgrade existing machines. The university that I go to upgraded >1000 machines of various vintage (ranging from PII/233 boxes to 3.0 GHz Pentium 4s) to Windows XP Professional from Windows 2000 two years ago.
I assemble my own machines because even in the case of the component-cost-plus-$50 type stores (they exist here too) I'd rather do it myself and save the $50. I'll work for $50 an hour, won't you?
Most people who buy a computer as a Christmas present are not the kind of people that build their own units. I totally agree that building your own is the way to go, but most people are (for no good reason) scared or unwilling to do so.
Well, I have two machines that are set up differently. The first is my desktop, which has two 1600x1200 LCDs attached to it. I generally have e-mail open, a web browser window (and a few tabs in it) a file manager window (also with tabs, I use Konqueror) and then whatever apps I am using. Usually that is a word processor and a spreadsheet or OpenOffice Impress and the GIMP and a picture viewer. I tend to prefer tabs rather than multiple windows, so each app has just one window and I'll have 3-6 windows open.
When I'm using my laptop, I'll have the e-mail and file manager open again (same OS as the desktop- Gentoo) and whatever I'm working on. Since the laptop does not have all that big of a screen, I set up AIGLX and Beryl to have the spinning cube deal.
If swapping out brands of video cards does trigger a need to reactivate, then it's limited to OEM and general-public versions of the OS. Corporate versions don't have this restriction because I've done just that and I haven't gotten so much as a whimper.
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The parent supposed that if the studios lowered the price of the films and dropped the DRM, they would end up with higher overall revenues and profits. You know, sell each unit for a little less, spend less on DRM, and sell a whole lot more units = higher profits.
I see that you slept through Econ 101...
Blackboard (the software) would be the equivalent of a blackboard (the one with chalk) but where the chalk breaks 95% of the time, the erasers don't work, and the board falls off of the wall every other day. Oh, and the chalk has little metal flecks embedded in it that make that awful screeching noise whenever one writes.
That would be a equivalent.
I don't care where is comes from, as long as:
1. It works well.
2. It will install into my kernel.
3. It is updated and maintained to work with reasonably current libraries/kernels/etc.
4. It is always offered as a download somewhere- the driver can't just dissapear from the net someday, leaving me with a paperweight.
Of course, making binary drivers is not preferable to real open-sourced ones as the OSS ones are in the kernel tree and can't be taken down some day. but when faced with no Linux support or a binary blob...I'll take the blob any day. I have no less than 3 blobs in my system as we speak: one is my ATi display drivers (can't complain much, except for the known AMD64 XVideo X11 segfault bug) another is VMware's kernel modules (with the any-any-update, they work fine) and the last is HighPoint's binary drivers for my RocketRAID 2310 drive controller (actually patches into the kernel menuconfig, even.) I can't complain too much.
To tell the truth, working with either system or both is not that big of a task. Almost every laboratory deals solely in metric, even those in the U.S. Engineering calculations are done sometimes in metric, sometimes in standard, and few really seem to care as the formulas and end results are the same. The same goes for machines- one machine might have metric-sized fasteners on it and another has SAE-sized ones. Once one has both sets of tools, it ceases to matter what you're working on as you have the correct tool. A 25mm wrench and fastener is no better or worse than a 1" wrench and fastener, so there's really no advantage to either method. There is a bit of a cost to change from one to the other, and thus many Americans don't want to go through the trouble for basically no gain. That's why the U.S. is not on the metric system.
The only "fine points" that they understand would be the decimal points in their campaign contribution checks.
Didn't NT4 come out in 1996, not 1995?
95 might have been bad by today's standards, but it wasn't when it came out. It was a huge leap ahead from Windows 3.1 and DOS with things like a taskbar, integrated network stack, and other improvements to usability. The Mac might have been better at the time, but Apple knew this and charged an arm and a leg for them. I guess one could have used a UNIX variant or Windows NT, all of which were technically superior, but NT was in its teething stages in 1995 and so was Linux and the BSDs. Only the old-line UNIXes were really around in full force then.
Now Me...Me was a dog when it came out and everybody knew it. Fortunately for MS, it was introduced alongside what is arguable Microsoft's best OS to date, Windows 2000.
I fully understand that and have seen MS Office programs totally goof up font formatting on different computers with the same version of MS Office installed. I work around that by simply saving everything as PDF as a PDF always looks exactly the same everywhere (and it's super-easy to do in OpenOffice or MS Office + a Ghostscript print-to-PDF option.) I have had very few complaints with simply using PDFs instead of the original files.
They did a good job in labeling things like local, multicast, loopback, and VPN addresses, but they forgot to note 169 as such.
There's a big difference between "little c" conservatives and "big C" Conservatives. The "little c" conservatives are probably more like libertarians in this regard and don't want the government to tell people what to do. The "big C" conservatives are socially conservative and not afraid to grow the government to enforce that. In that regard, there's little difference between the big-C Conservatives and liberals. Both spend like drunken sailors and want to legislate behavior. In the case of the liberals, it's the government knows best, for the Conservatives, it's they want to save you from religious damnation.
Well, I did see that coming, didn't I? (Okay, well, it was actually modded "troll" and not "flamebait," but it's pretty much the same.) My guess is their parents provide everything for them, including the basement they live in, so they have no personal responsibilities.
At the risk of being modded "flamebait" I will answer the question. The school of thought where everything can be blamed on something external arose from modern social liberalism. The premise of it is that an individual is stupid and not capable of taking care of themselves and making their decisions, so the government must be everybody's nanny as it knows better. But since the individual is deemed not capable of taking care of themselves and making their own decisions, then anything that they do can't possibly have been from their own thinking...so it gets blamed on something else. The targets are often things that do not mesh well with the current social liberal view of what's good, namely non-social behavior like individual transportation (cars), things that can cause social disruption (weapons and views opposite to the entrenched government), and not sharing your resources with the rest of the people (wealth.)
Then how much money do you give to those poor people that you talk about?
Microsoft did get it right as it is an advantage- to them, of course. Who else matters?
Many high-level and powerful politicians abuse their power for personal gain and it makes not one lick of difference what party they're from. Clinton had the whole Watergate escapade and Kofi Annan (not a U.S. president, but still a notable public figure) was corrupt as hell with the Oil for Food scandal. The names and faces might change, but it's the same old story from when the first tribes elected the first leaders.
I'd agree with the rest of the Slashdotters and say Ubuntu, but almost any Debian derivative will work well for you and be pretty easy to admin and set up. I personally use Gentoo as it's extremely powerful and configurable, but it along with FreeBSD (which Gentoo more or less resembles) are not really for new users unless they are willing to start all the way at the bottom of a somewhat steep learning curve.
Oh, and Juergen whats-his-name from OpenSUSE.org had possibly hinted that they'd fork if the Novell-MS thing screws with OpenSUSE. I'd not feel dirty using OpenSUSE as it is an excellent distribution, but I would keep a sharp eye on what happens with Novell.
Actually, how easy or not it is for them to "break into a male dominated industry" largely depends on the people that they work with. If it's normal people, they will have no problems. If it's old chauvinists, then sure. But the chauvinists have almost all been neutered by the threat of lawsuits. And for anybody who says that few women are interested in technical fields, my engineering classes are >50% female, just like the entire rest of the school (roughly upper 50%s female/ lower 40%s male.)
I'd actually say that men going into a largely female line of work are MUCH more disadvantaged than women going into typically male occupations. How many male nurses do you see? Or male small-animal vets? Or elementary-school teachers? In fact, in some cases, men are flatly discriminated against. Show me very many school districts that will hire a man to teach anything less than about 5th grade. They all worry about pedohilia (even though the news has had several women who behave likewise lately...) so they just won't hire men. They can get away with it due to the non-discrimination laws specifically NOT putting males in the protected class in any sex-based lawsuit, as well as anybody under 40 can't be considered discriminated against in age-based suits (thank you AARP, you lousy old bastards!) and whites also cannot claim racism against them. Me thinks that a change in those laws are in order in order to protect *everybody* equally.
What about things like forest fires and volcanoes? Those operate independently of man and spew out a lot of carbon dioxide.
Bingo. Corporations with MS support contracts and yearly fees do commonly upgrade existing machines. The university that I go to upgraded >1000 machines of various vintage (ranging from PII/233 boxes to 3.0 GHz Pentium 4s) to Windows XP Professional from Windows 2000 two years ago.
You forgot Facebook and MySpace- the two most widely-viewed websites on colleges.
I assemble my own machines because even in the case of the component-cost-plus-$50 type stores (they exist here too) I'd rather do it myself and save the $50. I'll work for $50 an hour, won't you?
Most people who buy a computer as a Christmas present are not the kind of people that build their own units. I totally agree that building your own is the way to go, but most people are (for no good reason) scared or unwilling to do so.
Well, I have two machines that are set up differently. The first is my desktop, which has two 1600x1200 LCDs attached to it. I generally have e-mail open, a web browser window (and a few tabs in it) a file manager window (also with tabs, I use Konqueror) and then whatever apps I am using. Usually that is a word processor and a spreadsheet or OpenOffice Impress and the GIMP and a picture viewer. I tend to prefer tabs rather than multiple windows, so each app has just one window and I'll have 3-6 windows open.
When I'm using my laptop, I'll have the e-mail and file manager open again (same OS as the desktop- Gentoo) and whatever I'm working on. Since the laptop does not have all that big of a screen, I set up AIGLX and Beryl to have the spinning cube deal.
...unless those four are ace shooters and have semi-automatic 12-gauges pointed at your head.
If swapping out brands of video cards does trigger a need to reactivate, then it's limited to OEM and general-public versions of the OS. Corporate versions don't have this restriction because I've done just that and I haven't gotten so much as a whimper.