Seriously, what do you think we're doing? It may appear that we are sitting on our asses typing, but that's HOW you fight this. You can't make a bunch of signs and stand in front of some random government building and get -anything- done about this. You can't blow shit up. You can't even call Microsoft and get anything done. They'll just ignore you. (Yeah, that's back to step 1.)
You can: Show your boss, fellow employees, family and friends that you understand the situation and explain how it is FUD. Write in your blog and on Slashod that you understand, etc, etc. Set up dedicated websites to showing what FUD this is, or contribute to ones that exist.
Notice how all of that is 'fighting' without lifting a fist or even a lawyer? We -can- win this one Gandhi-style... In fact, it's probably the only way we can win it.
Totally off topic, but I met one of the people who bought a Zune yesterday. It went something like this:
Zuner: Hey, where's your Zune accessories? EB Clerk:... Huh? Zuner: Where's your Zune accessories? EB Clerk:... We don't have any. Zuner: You don't have any? EB Clerk: We don't have any. Zuner: I lost my cord. EB Clerk:... Me: Did you try Target? *points down the block* Zuner: Yeah. They don't have anything. Me: Ah. Good luck, man!
The '...' is a stunned silence. Most of the employees that work at that store are pretty together, but this guy is an exception.
So anyhow, the one guy who DID buy a Zune here got screwed because you can't get accessories for them. I have no idea how Microsoft plans to make it a serious audio player if they don't force the companies that sell the units to also sell accessories.
If all you want is Ep2, it's $30 through steam. If you only want Portal, it's $20.
Of course, if you want both, you're better off with the Orange Box. And you're also free to wait until the price comes down to something you feel is reasonable. Shouldn't be more than 6 months.
If I hadn't manage to get a used ps3 ultra-cheap, I'd agree with you. My ps2 is an -old- one and I tend to keep my consoles working for a long time. If the ps3 didn't have backwards compatibility, it wouldn't worry me too much... But it would degrade how much it's worth to me. While I would have paid $400 for a ps3 with back-compat, I think I'd only have been willing to pay $350 for one without.
It's a pretty nice media player, but it's got some funny limitations on what it'll stream... I spent this weekend playing with settings to figure out how to make ffmpeg trancode it properly. For anyone else trying to figure it out, this is what I use in a bash script:
If you leave out the framerate, you'll find it doesn't play because ffmpeg wants to see the old rate as '23.98' and that's not valid, apparently. I assume you can also use other valid rates like 24, 30 and 29.97, but I haven't tried them. Or maybe you just have to set it... I dunno, and now that it works, I'm happy enough. Since I had a heck of a time figuring each little piece out, I figured I'd share.
It's not all that unusual. I've been in a couple different betas that had short periods of open beta followed by short or medium periods of closed beta, over and over. It allows them to do some serious testing on major changes during the closed periods, and do general heavy-load testing (and free advertising, since they get so few bug reports from the 'testers') during the open betas.
I will admit that most companies don't do it that way, but it's not 'unusual.'
Ah, thanks for the reminder! I rented that one and always meant to buy it. Picked it up used for $16 on the way home... Such a shame that anyone would even sell that one back, yet there were 3 or 4 boxes on the shelf and they had a new one in stock, too.
Yes, there is. There are actually 2 chips in there. The EU PS3 that only does software PS2 emulation actually still has a second chip in there still. The new PS3 removes that chip as well, and they apparently have no plans to try to emulate it.
That doesn't mean they can't change their minds, but years of unofficial emulators has show how much work it is to emulate a chip with good speed, especially when the architecture is different. IIRC, you need 10x the CPU power to emulate a different architecture at full speed.
"One Lady asked a group of dedicated windows admins if they were considering a switch to Linux. They are Windows admins not Linux admins."
Who else would she ask? Linux admins aren't switching to Linux, they're already there. The question was to determine if Windows Admins were considering the switch, and probably why. Anyone that's half decent as a sysadmin is -always- considering the switch, but the answer is more often than not going to be 'not at this time' after they consider it. Ignoring the possibilities is -bad- and blindly switching is just as bad.
I agree with you except the elves... They WERE nasty and antagonistic things in the book. The books made it VERY clear that humans were not only unwelcome, but beneath them.
Do we honestly care if he directs them? I mean, we care that a bad director doesn't get to, but as long as it's a decent director, does it really matter who it is?
On the other hand, if he manages to get a script written for the 60 year time difference, and it's not 60 years of Gandolf riding around in grey and the hobbits having teaparties (since that's basically what happened), then I'm all for the new film and Jackson. I'm not real hopeful, though, since all the really interesting stuff happened in the books and the other years weren't covered because they simply weren't that interesting.
Or maybe someone can name some of the interesting things that supposedly happened in those 60 years? Gandolf was obviously out doing some sort of research, but I don't think anything specific was ever mentioned. And the hobbits were pretty clearly doing hobbit-like things in their little boring houses. They don't really even have politics, just a few that don't particulary care for each other from feuds that happened generations ago over silly things.
Think of the Chil... Wait, Terrorism? OH MY GOD. Which way is everyone else picking?
I hope that accurately summed up the sheeple's confusion on this one. Of course, in reality, children (especially 17 year old ones) that break the law should be prosecuted (maybe not quite as harshly as an adult would be) and terrorism should be stamped out, but this is -neither-. The 'kid' was probably just interested in what all the hubbub was about, and thought the book was the cool thing to have.
As far as I can tell, the 'material' he had was only the book, and the 'information' he had was also the book. Unless he was actually BUILDING a bomb, he hasn't done anything wrong. In fact, from a career standpoint, he's just prepping for a good military career as a demolitions expert. (Or other demolitions expert, for that matter.) The entire world is far too quick to jump on someone for possible terrorism when they are simply going about their daily lives.
I was thinking 'filter out viruses', but spam works as well. The answer is that all email providers 'read' your mail in this respect, but only Google displays ads based on the content. (That I know of.)
Do I care? Not a whit. As far as I know, the information gleaned from the 'read' isn't stored anywhere after the page is loaded (IE: it's only ever in RAM) and no human ever does the reading. If either of those things were happening, I'd care.
I think the point is not to get on for free, but to get on from anywhere they happen to be standing. If you share yours, and they share theirs, FON can make lots of money by having access points everywhere without paying a penny, and call it 'sharing' with each other.
I haven't used Vista yet, but that is the only compelling feature I've heard so far. I would -love- to control sound per-program. As a gamer, I'm used to having to adjust my sound levels for each game, and that's great. But for non-games, this features doesn't exist. Winamp (and other media players) has its own control, but quite often that control is just a shortcut to the main volume control, messing up the volume for other apps. If I want to classical music softly in the background, it can be a pain to get it all going.
Or perhaps I have a language tutor, and I want the volume higher than normal so I can hear it... Or maybe a phone app that I want to have higher... But everything else normal.
I can think of tons of problems that can only be solved by beating the app developer over the head with a crowbar or per-app volume control.
Again, Vista finally has a feature I want. I wonder how long until it exists in KDE now, so I can stop feeling like Vista might be the answer?
I don't think any of them actually expected it to get very far before it died. They were launching it straight up, unguided... That means it either disintegrates, or comes back down on top of them... I'd have been praying for the disintegration, personally.
Still, it 'flew' far enough that it was fun to watch. At least it didn't die 2 feet off the ground, like it could have.
I worked at a shop repairing PCs for years. I still have a Windows XP machine here at the house. I've installed every flavor of Windows (except Vista) enough that I call myself expert at it. (In other words, hundreds of installs ranging from reformats to completely new installations on hardware that I just put together.)
I've installed Linux about 8-10 times now over the past 5 or 6 years. When I first started, it -was- painful, even if you knew what you were doing. A couple years ago, I was running Slackware. The last few installs have all been Kubuntu. It is a breeze. Feisty is an absolute pleasure to work with compared to Windows. The hardest part is knowing how to find the software you want to install. Once you learn that, almost everything is in the repository and you just have to tell it to install. A Windows installation generally means I have to scour the internet for drivers and small utilities to bring the system up to usable level, including a decent video player and codecs, a decent text editor, and virus/adware software.
Granted, I don't install the last on Linux because it generally hasn't been necessary, but I know clamav is in the repository as well, so it's covered.
I think you owe it to yourself to try installing (K|X|Ed)Ubuntu and see what a difference a year or 2 has made. I'm not saying you should use the system (I use it, but I'm not trying to force it on others) but just so you know how much less painful the install is, I think you should try installing it.
Gutsy is even going to have Compiz included, and on this box with an Intel GPU, it's amazingly stable. I've only had it crash once in the last couple weeks, and that was when enabling the 'reflections' plugin. The cube flipping and window changing rivals OS X's eyecandy, and it's even got a thing like expose that shows you all the windows at once to pick from.
I'll bite: You don't know what the fuck you're talking about.
This may be an all-in-one board, but it's got something that no other all-in-one board has ever had: Linux on the chip. Geeks everywhere are already trying to figure out how to get one of these so they can tinker with the onboard Linux and build that little dream system they've been contemplating for years. The very fact that people have been posting (on THIS website) their hopes that this would happen is proof enough that price of the first version -does not matter-. And that's what this is, the first.
As for the other guy, he called you out because you said 'total flop'. Now you backpedal and claim you meant 'total flop with the slashdot crowd', which is -not- what you said at all. It doesn't matter though, because you're wrong on both accounts.
So what they're saying is that these crows are smarter than some humans?
I kid, I kid!
I find it fascinating that there are species that we thought would be completely unable to grasp the idea of tool use doing just that. It goes to show just how little we really know about how brains work, and how big they need to be to handle complex concepts.
When the crows start making little axes, I'd start to worry, though.
I think you are reading it wrong. I think he means that he doesn't want to spend that much on a proprietary solution. If it were open source, he'd be glad to spend it. Unless he's a complete idiot, he knows it'll cost more than that to write one from scratch. He's just willing to put more into a solution that helps others than he's willing to put into a solution that lines some fat-cat's pockets.
Personally, for what it does, and how reliable is has to be, $5k isn't bad for a full POS system. Actually finding a reliable one may be a different matter.
Programming take training, and writing a POS invlves understanging issues you haven't even thought of.
Even if he funds one, like he's saying, he'll still be the driving force for it, and all the specs will come from him. There are aspects to programming everything that seem simple from the user/admin point of view, but are anything but simple from the programming point of view.
What about the adding of old or futuristic electronics? Why is that not covered?
Professor X invents a Frammwizle. Patent Troll Y see that a Frammwizle can make many other past inventions more useful, and simply patents the use of the 2 together, just like is current dont with the Internet.
Since it's already happened, and this is meant to address that very situation, why should 'modern' be there at all?
Slashdot Mirror
Walk like a duck? Check.
;)
Quack like a duck? Check.
Hmm...
(Yes yes, I know it's a 'diver' etc etc.)
We are fighting. Sit down and enjoy the show.
Seriously, what do you think we're doing? It may appear that we are sitting on our asses typing, but that's HOW you fight this. You can't make a bunch of signs and stand in front of some random government building and get -anything- done about this. You can't blow shit up. You can't even call Microsoft and get anything done. They'll just ignore you. (Yeah, that's back to step 1.)
You can:
Show your boss, fellow employees, family and friends that you understand the situation and explain how it is FUD.
Write in your blog and on Slashod that you understand, etc, etc.
Set up dedicated websites to showing what FUD this is, or contribute to ones that exist.
Notice how all of that is 'fighting' without lifting a fist or even a lawyer? We -can- win this one Gandhi-style... In fact, it's probably the only way we can win it.
Totally off topic, but I met one of the people who bought a Zune yesterday. It went something like this:
... Huh? ... We don't have any. ...
Zuner: Hey, where's your Zune accessories?
EB Clerk:
Zuner: Where's your Zune accessories?
EB Clerk:
Zuner: You don't have any?
EB Clerk: We don't have any.
Zuner: I lost my cord.
EB Clerk:
Me: Did you try Target? *points down the block*
Zuner: Yeah. They don't have anything.
Me: Ah. Good luck, man!
The '...' is a stunned silence. Most of the employees that work at that store are pretty together, but this guy is an exception.
So anyhow, the one guy who DID buy a Zune here got screwed because you can't get accessories for them. I have no idea how Microsoft plans to make it a serious audio player if they don't force the companies that sell the units to also sell accessories.
First, those are all Windows solutions. I leave that box off unless I'm gaming.
Second, streaming it with transcoding on the fly doesn't let you fast forward, rewind, etc. Even pausing is problematic.
I used Nero Recode and TVersity for quite a while until I managed to get ffmpeg and MediaTomb to work. I'm -much- happier now.
If all you want is Ep2, it's $30 through steam. If you only want Portal, it's $20.
Of course, if you want both, you're better off with the Orange Box. And you're also free to wait until the price comes down to something you feel is reasonable. Shouldn't be more than 6 months.
If I hadn't manage to get a used ps3 ultra-cheap, I'd agree with you. My ps2 is an -old- one and I tend to keep my consoles working for a long time. If the ps3 didn't have backwards compatibility, it wouldn't worry me too much... But it would degrade how much it's worth to me. While I would have paid $400 for a ps3 with back-compat, I think I'd only have been willing to pay $350 for one without.
It's a pretty nice media player, but it's got some funny limitations on what it'll stream... I spent this weekend playing with settings to figure out how to make ffmpeg trancode it properly. For anyone else trying to figure it out, this is what I use in a bash script:
ffmpeg -i "$1" -acodec libfaac -vcodec libx264 -r 23.97 -profile aac_main -level 41 "$1".mp4
If you leave out the framerate, you'll find it doesn't play because ffmpeg wants to see the old rate as '23.98' and that's not valid, apparently. I assume you can also use other valid rates like 24, 30 and 29.97, but I haven't tried them. Or maybe you just have to set it... I dunno, and now that it works, I'm happy enough. Since I had a heck of a time figuring each little piece out, I figured I'd share.
It's not all that unusual. I've been in a couple different betas that had short periods of open beta followed by short or medium periods of closed beta, over and over. It allows them to do some serious testing on major changes during the closed periods, and do general heavy-load testing (and free advertising, since they get so few bug reports from the 'testers') during the open betas.
I will admit that most companies don't do it that way, but it's not 'unusual.'
Ah, thanks for the reminder! I rented that one and always meant to buy it. Picked it up used for $16 on the way home... Such a shame that anyone would even sell that one back, yet there were 3 or 4 boxes on the shelf and they had a new one in stock, too.
Looking forward to seeing it upscaled tonight.
Yes, there is. There are actually 2 chips in there. The EU PS3 that only does software PS2 emulation actually still has a second chip in there still. The new PS3 removes that chip as well, and they apparently have no plans to try to emulate it.
That doesn't mean they can't change their minds, but years of unofficial emulators has show how much work it is to emulate a chip with good speed, especially when the architecture is different. IIRC, you need 10x the CPU power to emulate a different architecture at full speed.
"One Lady asked a group of dedicated windows admins if they were considering a switch to Linux. They are Windows admins not Linux admins."
Who else would she ask? Linux admins aren't switching to Linux, they're already there. The question was to determine if Windows Admins were considering the switch, and probably why. Anyone that's half decent as a sysadmin is -always- considering the switch, but the answer is more often than not going to be 'not at this time' after they consider it. Ignoring the possibilities is -bad- and blindly switching is just as bad.
Yeah, it's a shame that nature didn't provide them with a couple of those by default. Intelligent Design my ass.
I agree with you except the elves... They WERE nasty and antagonistic things in the book. The books made it VERY clear that humans were not only unwelcome, but beneath them.
Do we honestly care if he directs them? I mean, we care that a bad director doesn't get to, but as long as it's a decent director, does it really matter who it is?
On the other hand, if he manages to get a script written for the 60 year time difference, and it's not 60 years of Gandolf riding around in grey and the hobbits having teaparties (since that's basically what happened), then I'm all for the new film and Jackson. I'm not real hopeful, though, since all the really interesting stuff happened in the books and the other years weren't covered because they simply weren't that interesting.
Or maybe someone can name some of the interesting things that supposedly happened in those 60 years? Gandolf was obviously out doing some sort of research, but I don't think anything specific was ever mentioned. And the hobbits were pretty clearly doing hobbit-like things in their little boring houses. They don't really even have politics, just a few that don't particulary care for each other from feuds that happened generations ago over silly things.
Think of the Chil... Wait, Terrorism? OH MY GOD. Which way is everyone else picking?
I hope that accurately summed up the sheeple's confusion on this one. Of course, in reality, children (especially 17 year old ones) that break the law should be prosecuted (maybe not quite as harshly as an adult would be) and terrorism should be stamped out, but this is -neither-. The 'kid' was probably just interested in what all the hubbub was about, and thought the book was the cool thing to have.
As far as I can tell, the 'material' he had was only the book, and the 'information' he had was also the book. Unless he was actually BUILDING a bomb, he hasn't done anything wrong. In fact, from a career standpoint, he's just prepping for a good military career as a demolitions expert. (Or other demolitions expert, for that matter.) The entire world is far too quick to jump on someone for possible terrorism when they are simply going about their daily lives.
I was thinking 'filter out viruses', but spam works as well. The answer is that all email providers 'read' your mail in this respect, but only Google displays ads based on the content. (That I know of.)
Do I care? Not a whit. As far as I know, the information gleaned from the 'read' isn't stored anywhere after the page is loaded (IE: it's only ever in RAM) and no human ever does the reading. If either of those things were happening, I'd care.
I think the point is not to get on for free, but to get on from anywhere they happen to be standing. If you share yours, and they share theirs, FON can make lots of money by having access points everywhere without paying a penny, and call it 'sharing' with each other.
I haven't used Vista yet, but that is the only compelling feature I've heard so far. I would -love- to control sound per-program. As a gamer, I'm used to having to adjust my sound levels for each game, and that's great. But for non-games, this features doesn't exist. Winamp (and other media players) has its own control, but quite often that control is just a shortcut to the main volume control, messing up the volume for other apps. If I want to classical music softly in the background, it can be a pain to get it all going.
Or perhaps I have a language tutor, and I want the volume higher than normal so I can hear it... Or maybe a phone app that I want to have higher... But everything else normal.
I can think of tons of problems that can only be solved by beating the app developer over the head with a crowbar or per-app volume control.
Again, Vista finally has a feature I want. I wonder how long until it exists in KDE now, so I can stop feeling like Vista might be the answer?
And American slang for 'fan-fiction with male-male relationships.' What's your point?
I don't think any of them actually expected it to get very far before it died. They were launching it straight up, unguided... That means it either disintegrates, or comes back down on top of them... I'd have been praying for the disintegration, personally.
Still, it 'flew' far enough that it was fun to watch. At least it didn't die 2 feet off the ground, like it could have.
I worked at a shop repairing PCs for years. I still have a Windows XP machine here at the house. I've installed every flavor of Windows (except Vista) enough that I call myself expert at it. (In other words, hundreds of installs ranging from reformats to completely new installations on hardware that I just put together.)
I've installed Linux about 8-10 times now over the past 5 or 6 years. When I first started, it -was- painful, even if you knew what you were doing. A couple years ago, I was running Slackware. The last few installs have all been Kubuntu. It is a breeze. Feisty is an absolute pleasure to work with compared to Windows. The hardest part is knowing how to find the software you want to install. Once you learn that, almost everything is in the repository and you just have to tell it to install. A Windows installation generally means I have to scour the internet for drivers and small utilities to bring the system up to usable level, including a decent video player and codecs, a decent text editor, and virus/adware software.
Granted, I don't install the last on Linux because it generally hasn't been necessary, but I know clamav is in the repository as well, so it's covered.
I think you owe it to yourself to try installing (K|X|Ed)Ubuntu and see what a difference a year or 2 has made. I'm not saying you should use the system (I use it, but I'm not trying to force it on others) but just so you know how much less painful the install is, I think you should try installing it.
Gutsy is even going to have Compiz included, and on this box with an Intel GPU, it's amazingly stable. I've only had it crash once in the last couple weeks, and that was when enabling the 'reflections' plugin. The cube flipping and window changing rivals OS X's eyecandy, and it's even got a thing like expose that shows you all the windows at once to pick from.
I'll bite: You don't know what the fuck you're talking about.
This may be an all-in-one board, but it's got something that no other all-in-one board has ever had: Linux on the chip. Geeks everywhere are already trying to figure out how to get one of these so they can tinker with the onboard Linux and build that little dream system they've been contemplating for years. The very fact that people have been posting (on THIS website) their hopes that this would happen is proof enough that price of the first version -does not matter-. And that's what this is, the first.
As for the other guy, he called you out because you said 'total flop'. Now you backpedal and claim you meant 'total flop with the slashdot crowd', which is -not- what you said at all. It doesn't matter though, because you're wrong on both accounts.
So what they're saying is that these crows are smarter than some humans?
I kid, I kid!
I find it fascinating that there are species that we thought would be completely unable to grasp the idea of tool use doing just that. It goes to show just how little we really know about how brains work, and how big they need to be to handle complex concepts.
When the crows start making little axes, I'd start to worry, though.
I think you are reading it wrong. I think he means that he doesn't want to spend that much on a proprietary solution. If it were open source, he'd be glad to spend it. Unless he's a complete idiot, he knows it'll cost more than that to write one from scratch. He's just willing to put more into a solution that helps others than he's willing to put into a solution that lines some fat-cat's pockets.
Personally, for what it does, and how reliable is has to be, $5k isn't bad for a full POS system. Actually finding a reliable one may be a different matter.
One correction:
Programming take training, and writing a POS invlves understanging issues you haven't even thought of.
Even if he funds one, like he's saying, he'll still be the driving force for it, and all the specs will come from him. There are aspects to programming everything that seem simple from the user/admin point of view, but are anything but simple from the programming point of view.
What about the adding of old or futuristic electronics? Why is that not covered?
Professor X invents a Frammwizle. Patent Troll Y see that a Frammwizle can make many other past inventions more useful, and simply patents the use of the 2 together, just like is current dont with the Internet.
Since it's already happened, and this is meant to address that very situation, why should 'modern' be there at all?