You haven't been following the news, eh? The 360 'elite' that will be sold very soon has HDMI as one of it's main new features. The other is a larger hard drive.
Command line experience has not been a requirement for any user-land things in linux for 2 years or so now.
If you just want to browse the web, edit some files, draw in Inkscape, etc, sure. No command line stuff necessary. Heck, even some games will work in Wine without command line knowledge.
But if you want the absolute latest version of Wine (Ubuntu's repo has been a version behind for like a week now!) or want to install something that's not in the repositories, you'll have to break out the command line. Windows avoids this at all costs.
I personally prefer the command line and use it as much as I can, within reason, but I can definitely understand that my mother does not feel the same. That would be a nightmare for her, as I experienced when we had a Commodore 64. I still have nightmares about trying to teach her to use a word processor on that.
The loop ran from when power was applied to when it was removed. Simply placing it in the same field they were in would not have make the mold go through the cycles at that rate. It had to be different.
As for killing themselves: Watch the end again. I believe it was the last 10 or 15 minutes. They showed it several times, at least once by poison, and talked about how helpful it was to know your 'victim's' reactions for sure.
I could almost buy that explanation if they'd explained that AT ALL and they hadn't chosen real time as the basis. They were timing it to the minute anyhow, right? And it didn't matter if they got the exact microsecond correct, either. Anytime close was good enough.
Why not make it 8 times as fast as normal? Spend 1 hour lying there like an idiot instead of 8. Worst that could happen is you are 8 minutes off your prediction. Whoopee.
Or I might have understood it the first time. I read/watch a -lot- of Scifi books/movies. It takes some thing completely new and novel for me not to just understand what theory they are talking about. In fact, I even found flaws in their plot.
If the mold grows in a few minutes instead of a few months, why does it take 8 hours to go 8 hours back in time? Shouldn't it be more like 8 seconds? They never even -tried- to explain the apparent paradox of killing yourself. And assuming it's the parallel worlds theory, what GOOD did it do them to go back in time and try over and over again? They just left a string of worlds that were screwed up and only had 1 where things went okay. And for such a minor thing, too. Was it really worth weeks of their lives to fix that? What happens when the next 'bad' thing happens. Will they spend more weeks of their life to 'fix' a 5 minute problem?
No, the movie is quite a bit overrated by people who THINK they think deeply, but actually don't.
They seem to like to ignore the fact that it costs money to run the console. Anyone that has bought their own car understands that it costs money not only for the Gas to make it run (electricity for the console), but there's maintenance as well. The car needs new tires, brakes, and other parts that are in use. The console is not designed to run at 100% CPU 24/7 and will wear out quicker.
I would guess you could wear out a PS3 in a year by running it 24/7 on this, so that's $600/yr cost right there. I seriously doubt they plan to pay that much.
Even assuming the console would last forever, the electricity to run constantly it is apparently about $150/yr. http://ps3.ign.com/articles/776/776347p1.html This charts says the national average to run Folding@PS3 is $12.23/month, which is about $150/yr.
I don't think that they would even pay the $150 in straight cost you incur, let alone for the wear and tear on the console.
This is a great opportunity to contribute to a cause, but it's an awful idea as a way to make money in your home.
Okay, I'll admit that there's a few MP3s that have different ID3 tags but the actual audio is the same. A few. The large majority of duplicate songs are NOT the same audio data. It's been re-ripped, transcoded, or some other horrid thing done to it and is not the same data anymore.
Now, even assuming that there ARE tons of very-alike files out there, you'd have to write an intelligent comparer for each one so that it knew how to deal with the file and what information could be mixed without ruining the file.
At the end of the project, you've spent years on a project that'll never quite work right to save a bit of bandwidth for people that should have just gone and bought the song from iTunes in the first place if they wanted it that damned bad. And if they don't want it that bad, they aren't going to bother with some specialized P2P program that only has 1 advantage: It can tell some files are alike. (And probably has tons of disadvantages compared to the already-existing applications.)
I'll agree with you that maybe MS doesn't matter as much to Gates as it used to. But as for Gates mattering to MS... Nah. Every news story with his name is massive advertisement for free. Every time he goes to space, donates to charity, and takes pictures with Hooters girls, there's a reporter there and it seems to always make it to national level.
Everything Gates does is -wonderful- for Microsoft. Especially now that he's on to the 'spend the money' phase of his life.
You also make a good point about Gates having no rival. I have to wonder: How much harder would he have worked, and how much more advanced would things have been if he'd been truly challenged? I remember OS/2 giving Windows 3.1 a hard time. What if OS/2 had continued to develop, especially with its Windows compatibility? What if BeOS had managed to catch on? What if Linux had managed to challenge Windows 10 years ago?
"Couldn't some variant of this technology be used, where the actual PCB's don't get near the liquid, but the heat sinks are immersed in it?"
I've got this great idea! Let's put the liquid in TUBES and have pumps to circulate the liquid.
The answer is simple: That's already being done. This is only news because it sounds crazy and someone did it. It sounds crazy on the surface because 'everyone knows' that liquids and electronics don't mix. You've got to have a bit of knowledge about physics to overcome that stigma. It actually -is- crazy because it'd be a royal nightmare to swap out components, and any geek worth his salt swaps components often.
Joking aside, I wonder exactly what would change should Gates not make it back to the Earth?
Would his empire fall, or would his second-in-command just jump into his chair and everything continues as usual?
Would there be a slew of 'secret' things suddenly appear? Would these secrets hurt or help the business? I could see it going either way... Secret projects would probably boost the company as speculation about them flooded the news, but secrets about Gates' personal life would do the opposite, I think.
I'm pretty sure MS stock would plunge, so not much speculation there.
Personally, I think we'd be worse off as Gates is sort of held personally accountable for everything Microsoft does, and I think he has a conscience. But if someone else took his place, there would be less personal influence and it'd be the company rampaging out of control. Short term horror, at least... Long term, it'd tear the company apart and be a blessing. But then, everything dies in the long term.
I wonder about the monopoly issues involved with that. If they are the only ones who can approve software... That's a monopoly. I wonder if you could write a HDDVD player application and then sue because you were kept out of the market by unfair practices?
At the advice of a friend, I watched it. I went in with low expectations, and it was a decent movie.
The acting was great. Everything was spot-on. It looked like the director and editor did a great job, too.
Where it falls down is the page. The first 3/4 was too slow and the last 1/4 was way too fast. It's almost like they got almost done filming and said 'Oh crap, we gotta explain this!'
It's far from 'Best time travel movie ever' as 12 Monkeys and Millennium were both better. Heck, even Back to the Future was better.
The low budget definitely shows right from the beginning. It's not a major detractor, but it shows.
Worth watching? Yes, once. You won't get anything extra from watching it a second or third time, like you would with Memento and the like.
"The protection is supposed to keep your neighbor from putting a HD-DVD and a blank into a computer and getting a perfect copy half an hour later."
They were already there. So why do they keep working on it? The answer is simple: That's not the goal.
Seriously. You think my neighbor (or any of my family for that matter) could extract a volume key? I would need detailed instructions to do it. No, this already offers the minimal piracy protection that you think is the goal. And nothing short of 100% fool-proof protection could stop the eventual existance of a HDDVD-ripping program. If someone can extract the key and rip a movie, they can (and probably will) write a program to do it automatically. That's what programmers do, you see... We take things that are long and boring and automate them.
That's good to know, and is probably the one I was referring to, but just the fact that it's currently exploitable, and the rate at which we are finding new browser vulnerabilities, keeps me nervous now. I don't normally run to paranoia, but I think I'm going to make an exception for this.
They keep saying 'Wii homebrew' but it's not. It's GameCube homebrew, which the Wii will play because it's backwards compatible. It's kind of like taping a VCR to a DVD player and claiming your DVD player plays VHS tapes. From all I can see, you won't get a bit extra from the Wii's added power and it will be identical to just using a GameCube.
I avoided installing NoScript for a LONG time because it -is- truly a hassle. (Actually, I had it, and removed it within a few days.) I finally installed it the other day to stay because of the Ajax vulnerability found where sites could cross-site-script and view information from other sites that I'd logged into. The fact that this is not only possible, but possible on multiple browsers... That's scary. So NoScript stays now.
It's a heck of a lot easier than turning off JS altogether, which is the only acceptable alternative. In addition, it helps protect against future hacks that are found as well.
I think this is a -very- key point. I went to the store with 'I'm going to buy an HDTV' in my head and got to looking at the sets. After about 30 minutes of comparing, I decided it was not worth the difference.
About 6 months later, I decided I wanted the HD set even if it didn't look -that- much better, but this time because I wanted my console to display high def.
I would -never- go back.
TV and gaming are both -so- much better. My dad bought that CRT HDTV from me and I upgraded to an LCD. He now keeps asking when I'll sell that and buy a new one.
Just looking at it in the store is not enough to really see the difference. Maybe if they played The Boredom Channel... err... Discovery HD (TBC because the only reason to turn it on is if you're really bored, or you want to show off the HD) in the stores. It will blow your mind. Why do stores not have displays like this? But even that doesn't bring that 'holy cow, you can see every wrinkle on Bob's face!' that you get when just watching your normal TV shows.
# H.264 video support: Up to 15 Mbps, Baseline, Main, and High (up to level 4.1) Profiles with 2 channel AAC LC and Main Profiles. # Added MPEG-4 Part 2 video support: Up to 8 Mbps, Simple Profile with 2 channel AAC LC and Main Profiles.
The only mentions of streaming are for wmv protected content... The rest was already streamed, so I'm going to -assume- everything is streamable now.
There was already free transcode software out there, but that requires going into a submenu on the 360 and requesting the transcode, instead of just having it play. It also offloads the transcode to the PC, making it work as well as making the 360 decode and play it.
This is obviously much better, but doesn't actually make anything possible that wasn't before.
There's other updates that interest me, as well, though.
Windows Live Messenger: Why the fsck didn't they do this from the start? It just makes too much sense.
"A richer Achievement notification pop-up will showcase the name of the unlocked Achievement and the gamerscore value without needing to leave the game to check the Achievements list." Nice. I almost always went to check out what it was I'd done.
Terrible? I have no idea what you could mean by that analogy. It makes no sense at all.
Try this instead: Microsoft's Q&A department buys a PC. They decide they can't use it after all, and Development needs it instead. Because they are corporate, they can't just move the PC over. They have to account for it on the books, so the expense gets moved to Development's books and off of Q&A's books. Q&A just sold that PC to Development, but Microsoft actually owned it the whole time. This is not taxed.
Blizzard has the same situation. Player A sells item B to player C. Item B was owned by Blizzard the entire time. No taxes.
Yes, I've been paying attention. My statement suggests (maybe not strongly enough) that the shoe may be on the other foot, now. Maybe it benefits IBM to delay now, and hurts SCO.
SCO wanted delays because they believed it would give them time to find proof for their case. They haven't found any, and now the little bit of 'proof' they DID have has been completely unmasked as being horseshit. Further delays will probably not help them 1 bit and will cost them a lot of money.
Close, but not quite. Every step at -retail- that is changes hands. I don't get taxed when I sell my neighbor something, and resellers don't get taxed when they buy good to resell.
Putting a tax on virtual goods/money would mean that every NPC shop would have to charge tax and give it to the government, unless the player was registered as a reseller and was buying the goods to resell to someone else.
But that isn't even the beginning of the problem. The problem is that -nothing- changes hands. Players do -not- own the items that are on their character, or the 'money' either. In World of Warcraft, all of that, including the character, is owned by Blizzard, always has been, and always will be.
There's no place to tax it, unless you tax Blizzard.
Slashdot Mirror
You haven't been following the news, eh? The 360 'elite' that will be sold very soon has HDMI as one of it's main new features. The other is a larger hard drive.
What if ... What if we already did? Would explain a lot of things about Hollywood.
I think that needs some qualifications on it.
Command line experience has not been a requirement for any user-land things in linux for 2 years or so now.
If you just want to browse the web, edit some files, draw in Inkscape, etc, sure. No command line stuff necessary. Heck, even some games will work in Wine without command line knowledge.
But if you want the absolute latest version of Wine (Ubuntu's repo has been a version behind for like a week now!) or want to install something that's not in the repositories, you'll have to break out the command line. Windows avoids this at all costs.
I personally prefer the command line and use it as much as I can, within reason, but I can definitely understand that my mother does not feel the same. That would be a nightmare for her, as I experienced when we had a Commodore 64. I still have nightmares about trying to teach her to use a word processor on that.
The loop ran from when power was applied to when it was removed. Simply placing it in the same field they were in would not have make the mold go through the cycles at that rate. It had to be different.
As for killing themselves: Watch the end again. I believe it was the last 10 or 15 minutes. They showed it several times, at least once by poison, and talked about how helpful it was to know your 'victim's' reactions for sure.
I could almost buy that explanation if they'd explained that AT ALL and they hadn't chosen real time as the basis. They were timing it to the minute anyhow, right? And it didn't matter if they got the exact microsecond correct, either. Anytime close was good enough.
Why not make it 8 times as fast as normal? Spend 1 hour lying there like an idiot instead of 8. Worst that could happen is you are 8 minutes off your prediction. Whoopee.
Sorry, I just don't buy that.
Or I might have understood it the first time. I read/watch a -lot- of Scifi books/movies. It takes some thing completely new and novel for me not to just understand what theory they are talking about. In fact, I even found flaws in their plot.
If the mold grows in a few minutes instead of a few months, why does it take 8 hours to go 8 hours back in time? Shouldn't it be more like 8 seconds? They never even -tried- to explain the apparent paradox of killing yourself. And assuming it's the parallel worlds theory, what GOOD did it do them to go back in time and try over and over again? They just left a string of worlds that were screwed up and only had 1 where things went okay. And for such a minor thing, too. Was it really worth weeks of their lives to fix that? What happens when the next 'bad' thing happens. Will they spend more weeks of their life to 'fix' a 5 minute problem?
No, the movie is quite a bit overrated by people who THINK they think deeply, but actually don't.
They seem to like to ignore the fact that it costs money to run the console. Anyone that has bought their own car understands that it costs money not only for the Gas to make it run (electricity for the console), but there's maintenance as well. The car needs new tires, brakes, and other parts that are in use. The console is not designed to run at 100% CPU 24/7 and will wear out quicker.
I would guess you could wear out a PS3 in a year by running it 24/7 on this, so that's $600/yr cost right there. I seriously doubt they plan to pay that much.
Even assuming the console would last forever, the electricity to run constantly it is apparently about $150/yr. http://ps3.ign.com/articles/776/776347p1.html This charts says the national average to run Folding@PS3 is $12.23/month, which is about $150/yr.
I don't think that they would even pay the $150 in straight cost you incur, let alone for the wear and tear on the console.
This is a great opportunity to contribute to a cause, but it's an awful idea as a way to make money in your home.
No seriously, the coward is right. WTF?
Okay, I'll admit that there's a few MP3s that have different ID3 tags but the actual audio is the same. A few. The large majority of duplicate songs are NOT the same audio data. It's been re-ripped, transcoded, or some other horrid thing done to it and is not the same data anymore.
Now, even assuming that there ARE tons of very-alike files out there, you'd have to write an intelligent comparer for each one so that it knew how to deal with the file and what information could be mixed without ruining the file.
At the end of the project, you've spent years on a project that'll never quite work right to save a bit of bandwidth for people that should have just gone and bought the song from iTunes in the first place if they wanted it that damned bad. And if they don't want it that bad, they aren't going to bother with some specialized P2P program that only has 1 advantage: It can tell some files are alike. (And probably has tons of disadvantages compared to the already-existing applications.)
Webserver on Palm? Sorry, already been done.
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum45/81.htm
http://www.citi.umich.edu/u/rees/pilot/
I'll agree with you that maybe MS doesn't matter as much to Gates as it used to. But as for Gates mattering to MS... Nah. Every news story with his name is massive advertisement for free. Every time he goes to space, donates to charity, and takes pictures with Hooters girls, there's a reporter there and it seems to always make it to national level.
Everything Gates does is -wonderful- for Microsoft. Especially now that he's on to the 'spend the money' phase of his life.
You also make a good point about Gates having no rival. I have to wonder: How much harder would he have worked, and how much more advanced would things have been if he'd been truly challenged? I remember OS/2 giving Windows 3.1 a hard time. What if OS/2 had continued to develop, especially with its Windows compatibility? What if BeOS had managed to catch on? What if Linux had managed to challenge Windows 10 years ago?
It'd be quite a different world.
"Couldn't some variant of this technology be used, where the actual PCB's don't get near the liquid, but the heat sinks are immersed in it?"
I've got this great idea! Let's put the liquid in TUBES and have pumps to circulate the liquid.
The answer is simple: That's already being done. This is only news because it sounds crazy and someone did it. It sounds crazy on the surface because 'everyone knows' that liquids and electronics don't mix. You've got to have a bit of knowledge about physics to overcome that stigma. It actually -is- crazy because it'd be a royal nightmare to swap out components, and any geek worth his salt swaps components often.
Joking aside, I wonder exactly what would change should Gates not make it back to the Earth?
Would his empire fall, or would his second-in-command just jump into his chair and everything continues as usual?
Would there be a slew of 'secret' things suddenly appear? Would these secrets hurt or help the business? I could see it going either way... Secret projects would probably boost the company as speculation about them flooded the news, but secrets about Gates' personal life would do the opposite, I think.
I'm pretty sure MS stock would plunge, so not much speculation there.
Personally, I think we'd be worse off as Gates is sort of held personally accountable for everything Microsoft does, and I think he has a conscience. But if someone else took his place, there would be less personal influence and it'd be the company rampaging out of control. Short term horror, at least... Long term, it'd tear the company apart and be a blessing. But then, everything dies in the long term.
I wonder about the monopoly issues involved with that. If they are the only ones who can approve software... That's a monopoly. I wonder if you could write a HDDVD player application and then sue because you were kept out of the market by unfair practices?
At the advice of a friend, I watched it. I went in with low expectations, and it was a decent movie.
The acting was great. Everything was spot-on. It looked like the director and editor did a great job, too.
Where it falls down is the page. The first 3/4 was too slow and the last 1/4 was way too fast. It's almost like they got almost done filming and said 'Oh crap, we gotta explain this!'
It's far from 'Best time travel movie ever' as 12 Monkeys and Millennium were both better. Heck, even Back to the Future was better.
The low budget definitely shows right from the beginning. It's not a major detractor, but it shows.
Worth watching? Yes, once. You won't get anything extra from watching it a second or third time, like you would with Memento and the like.
"The protection is supposed to keep your neighbor from putting a HD-DVD and a blank into a computer and getting a perfect copy half an hour later."
They were already there. So why do they keep working on it? The answer is simple: That's not the goal.
Seriously. You think my neighbor (or any of my family for that matter) could extract a volume key? I would need detailed instructions to do it. No, this already offers the minimal piracy protection that you think is the goal. And nothing short of 100% fool-proof protection could stop the eventual existance of a HDDVD-ripping program. If someone can extract the key and rip a movie, they can (and probably will) write a program to do it automatically. That's what programmers do, you see... We take things that are long and boring and automate them.
That's good to know, and is probably the one I was referring to, but just the fact that it's currently exploitable, and the rate at which we are finding new browser vulnerabilities, keeps me nervous now. I don't normally run to paranoia, but I think I'm going to make an exception for this.
They keep saying 'Wii homebrew' but it's not. It's GameCube homebrew, which the Wii will play because it's backwards compatible. It's kind of like taping a VCR to a DVD player and claiming your DVD player plays VHS tapes. From all I can see, you won't get a bit extra from the Wii's added power and it will be identical to just using a GameCube.
I avoided installing NoScript for a LONG time because it -is- truly a hassle. (Actually, I had it, and removed it within a few days.) I finally installed it the other day to stay because of the Ajax vulnerability found where sites could cross-site-script and view information from other sites that I'd logged into. The fact that this is not only possible, but possible on multiple browsers... That's scary. So NoScript stays now.
It's a heck of a lot easier than turning off JS altogether, which is the only acceptable alternative. In addition, it helps protect against future hacks that are found as well.
I think this is a -very- key point. I went to the store with 'I'm going to buy an HDTV' in my head and got to looking at the sets. After about 30 minutes of comparing, I decided it was not worth the difference.
... err... Discovery HD (TBC because the only reason to turn it on is if you're really bored, or you want to show off the HD) in the stores. It will blow your mind. Why do stores not have displays like this? But even that doesn't bring that 'holy cow, you can see every wrinkle on Bob's face!' that you get when just watching your normal TV shows.
About 6 months later, I decided I wanted the HD set even if it didn't look -that- much better, but this time because I wanted my console to display high def.
I would -never- go back.
TV and gaming are both -so- much better. My dad bought that CRT HDTV from me and I upgraded to an LCD. He now keeps asking when I'll sell that and buy a new one.
Just looking at it in the store is not enough to really see the difference. Maybe if they played The Boredom Channel
I was unaware there was ANY way to stream from Linux to 360 at all. I thought you -had- to have Windows Media Center Edition.
# H.264 video support: Up to 15 Mbps, Baseline, Main, and High (up to level 4.1) Profiles with 2 channel AAC LC and Main Profiles.
# Added MPEG-4 Part 2 video support: Up to 8 Mbps, Simple Profile with 2 channel AAC LC and Main Profiles.
The only mentions of streaming are for wmv protected content... The rest was already streamed, so I'm going to -assume- everything is streamable now.
There was already free transcode software out there, but that requires going into a submenu on the 360 and requesting the transcode, instead of just having it play. It also offloads the transcode to the PC, making it work as well as making the 360 decode and play it.
This is obviously much better, but doesn't actually make anything possible that wasn't before.
There's other updates that interest me, as well, though.
Windows Live Messenger: Why the fsck didn't they do this from the start? It just makes too much sense.
"A richer Achievement notification pop-up will showcase the name of the unlocked Achievement and the gamerscore value without needing to leave the game to check the Achievements list." Nice. I almost always went to check out what it was I'd done.
Should be a nice update.
Terrible? I have no idea what you could mean by that analogy. It makes no sense at all.
Try this instead: Microsoft's Q&A department buys a PC. They decide they can't use it after all, and Development needs it instead. Because they are corporate, they can't just move the PC over. They have to account for it on the books, so the expense gets moved to Development's books and off of Q&A's books. Q&A just sold that PC to Development, but Microsoft actually owned it the whole time. This is not taxed.
Blizzard has the same situation. Player A sells item B to player C. Item B was owned by Blizzard the entire time. No taxes.
Yes, I've been paying attention. My statement suggests (maybe not strongly enough) that the shoe may be on the other foot, now. Maybe it benefits IBM to delay now, and hurts SCO.
SCO wanted delays because they believed it would give them time to find proof for their case. They haven't found any, and now the little bit of 'proof' they DID have has been completely unmasked as being horseshit. Further delays will probably not help them 1 bit and will cost them a lot of money.
Close, but not quite. Every step at -retail- that is changes hands. I don't get taxed when I sell my neighbor something, and resellers don't get taxed when they buy good to resell.
Putting a tax on virtual goods/money would mean that every NPC shop would have to charge tax and give it to the government, unless the player was registered as a reseller and was buying the goods to resell to someone else.
But that isn't even the beginning of the problem. The problem is that -nothing- changes hands. Players do -not- own the items that are on their character, or the 'money' either. In World of Warcraft, all of that, including the character, is owned by Blizzard, always has been, and always will be.
There's no place to tax it, unless you tax Blizzard.