That was exactly my reasoning for staying with Windows 2000 while Windows XP was being introduced. When I saw that I was right, and how bad XP really was, I decided to just move to Linux and have been happy ever since.
Previously my attempts to move to Linux had been unsuccessful because I had problems getting certain hardware working (video capture, RAID) and was concerned about what software would be available (certain emulators I had grown fond of, video codecs, VirtualDub and other transcoding software), but even Windows 2000 was giving me some problems, such as booting into a blue screen telling me my registry had become corrupt, and also actually getting infected by viruses such as Blaster.
I had everything up to date, all patched up, antivirus installed, etc, but still contracted the virus. A few reinstalls later and I just figured it wasn't worth it putting up with all the headaches.
When I started running Linux, I quickly saw the advantages... Installing software didn't require the usual "Next, Next, uncheck every checkbox, delete desktop and quicklaunch icons, uninstall additional software installed along with the software I actually wanted, check for hidden startup items, make sure program doesn't phone home", when I started my PC I wasn't greeted by millions of splash screens, applications that couldn't make a connection popping up and letting me know, I didn't have to readjust settings that kept resetting for some reason (volume levels, icon positions on the quicklaunch)... GNU/Linux is about using your PC and not just working around problems to get what you want... and then I realized that upon discovering all this I didn't even have to worry about viruses at all, and I had no problems with crashes at all! Even if programs didn't behave in a way I expected I found it simple to find solutions, the error messages meant something and I could see exceptions thrown if I launched an application from a terminal, etc...
The people in charge of putting the booth babes there in the first place were probably just the type of people impressed by that kind of thing in the first place. To me, if the games aren't impressive enough, you've already lost. I guess they hope that with chicks there nobody will notice? But what about the female audience/reporters? Are booth hunks next? Wtf...
It's like people who enjoy cars, they don't go to the car shows for the chicks. They're just there to keep your friends entertained while you're busy checking out specs etc. I guess this just shows how much of a consumer show E3 has become.
Where are the gritty, realistic, 0% cute, immersive, nonlinear (within reason) sci-fi RPGs?
RPGs always have sequels, whether they're direct like Xenosaga or indirect like Final Fantasy, so it's kind of tough to bring them up in this case. Anyway I don't think the audience for these games are so huge because of the nonlinearity aspect. People like an experience from beginning to end. Nonlinear games are so involving that 90% of the gamers that play them wouldn't see 90% of the game. Where is the incentive to produce these types of games?
Fuck it. With the huge steaming crock of garbage being the radio as-is, I don't even want to listen to it. Commercials everywhere, songs fading into each other or DJs talking over the song, or even just the song being cut off early. I don't want to listen to partial songs, I don't want to listen to annoying nagging people in between songs or overlapping songs. I don't want to listen to the shitty selection most stations play, especially considering that they only play singles and never any of the other tracks on an album. There are some great tracks that have never even been aired, probably, or at least 1% of the time when they're not recycling singles. But that's AM/FM radio.
So now, I have to pay for radio so I can hear it the way it's meant to be. But I can't even record some songs I like so I can hear them again? What about fair play?
See, it's just not even worth it. You might as well just be buying CDs because you actually get to control some of what you pay for. Control is key because then you can enjoy it when the mood strikes you and not have to work around something just to get your way. I don't care about the difference between buying something and licensing it. If I pay money, I expect SOMEthing to go my way. Anytime the distributors get involved with anything, they want to control it and get me to pay more than I would have for what I thought was fair and enjoy it on my terms. But somehow the distributors get uptight whenever things aren't on their terms. Is that what the artists want? Do they even care?
In the future, will there be such a thing as a commercial format with wide distribution that doesn't restrict the user in some way, preventing them from enjoying it on their terms? It seems to me that there won't, because if a user enjoys something on their terms, distributors can't start charging you when you want to do something else with it that you hadn't intended on at the point of purchase. Say you bought CDs, and after that you bought a portable digital audio jukebox. Naturally you want to put your fucking music on there and carry it around with you, but that won't be possible. This is garbage.
Just preview tracks online, through P2P or whatever, and then buy what you like. Am I really insane for doing this? Fuck the distributors. They're insane.
Yeah but that's my point, if it's not online and you need to use it, you're going to need the latest applications to stay compatible (Office 12, etc) which won't run on it because it won't install on that system or it will be way too slow.
If you're going to stay offline you're still better off with Linux because you'll be able to use recent applications. They will install and be relatively fast compared to the Windows alternatives. OSS applications such as AbiWord etc may still run on earlier versions of Windows, but if all you're going to be using is OSS, then you might as well use Linux and get a more stable and faster system than you would with Windows 98 etc.
Rather than hacking 98 up with 98Lite and installing a custom shell such as GeoShell or something, you can get a more stable and faster system with Linux... try DamnSmallLinux for example. I ran that on a Pentium 166MHz with 64MB RAM and got good performance -- when I was running off the LiveCD! Installed to the hard disk it would be even faster and would probably work great on a 486 compared to Windows.
A 486 running Windows has trouble playing MP3s in WinAMP without stuttering and has trouble catching up with video on my PCI ATI All-In-Wonder (My 486 motherboard supports PCI but more often than not they don't, but these are just examples). DMA is enabled on all storage devices. However when running Linux, these problems don't exist and I can even record video with my TV tuner!
Sure, the frame rate might be there in 1080i because of the interlacing the same way you can get 60fps out of 480i today by displaying half frames on alternate fields at 30 frames per second, and you will not notice the tearing as much since it is more detailed, but I guarantee that you will notice the annoying-ass flickering (jumping up and down on alternate fields) compared to 1080p. In the end, 1080p will be able to show you as high a degree of motion as 1080i, but because the frames are not interlaced, they will be able to retain the full detail of each frame without having to use more space to store interlaced video and remove the information from the video that causes the flickering by blurring adjascent fields together.
Interlacing may not look nearly as bad on LCD (or similar) as it does on CRT, but you still have the degraded image quality because of the necessity to reduce flicker and because of wasted storage space on interlacing instead of improving the quality of the image. Compression artifacts show up more easily on interlaced video because the algorithms to deal with compressing video are more beneficial when you're compressing data that is directly adjascent, as with progressive video, rather than data which is just supposed to match other data nearby, as with compressing fields individually in interlaced video.
In the end, no matter what, you will definitely have a higher perceived quality from watching non-interlaced video than interlaced
Even if you can install Windows 98 on a 486SX, it doesn't mean you can run Office 12. Also, add an antivirus and firewall and the system becomes even more unusable. Add in the fact that MS won't patch Windows 98 for the WMF problem (and others in the future) and you don't have a usable system.
Giving us more music, from a music company, as a penalty for exposing our personal information and personal property to intruder attack, seems more like they are giving us advertisement for their product rather than compensating us.
Under Networking, how about FileZilla? It's an excellent FTP client. It'd be great if it were ported to Linux, then I could dump gFTP which doesn't do so well with queues and is a bit of a pain to use...
The problem is it gives individuals who have very low self esteem a weapon to use against their fears. If they have very low self esteem and subconsciously desire to have high self esteem and command respect, to have people pay attention to their feelings, etc, they may even use these rules as a means for them to have power over others so they can put themselves in a position where people pay attention to their feelings (by fearing what the consequences would be to agitate someone like that, going on a power trip) and to command respect (although they are really only commanding the fear of others).
It allows individuals to perpetuate a culture of people who have low self esteem and use PC social taboos to manipulate others in a way that makes them feel better, but only because they have power over others and not because they are overcoming their own problems.
There's nothing really wrong with Ellen Degeneres. Sure she's kooky and you can only take so much of her seemingly one dimensional personality, but there's nothing really inherantly bad about her either. Why be negative for negativity's sake?
Anonymous Cowards filtered. If their words aren't worth so much as a nom de plume why should I value them any mor
If you ignore good information just because it comes from an anonymous source then you are only sabotaging yourself. There is no other outcome to the situation than you having a smaller pool of information to look at, so your view is narrower than that of others. You may think you are avoiding a lot of garbage but I guess you will never know if you completely block it out. You even need to understand the point of view of the enemy to win at war.
Also, didn't any of the original developers think of this when they wrote it or did they think the exploit was so remote, that it'll never happen?
I guess they thought the chances were remote, because when MS were doing their security review and subsequently made their GDI vulnerability detection tool available, it was not designed to pay attention to this vulnerability. I wonder if they have updated the tool?
From the article summary I thought they were asking in anger why the Mac Mini remote had 6 buttons and why the WinMCE one had 39... I thought they were getting angry about how elegant the Mac product would be compared to WinMCE etc...
Funny that that didn't turn out to be the case and they were actually boasting about 39 buttons and all their functions! I think the others replying to this article about how a grand PC in a box is less desirable when compared to something that just does what you want and follows the KISS rule are correct.
Also, one of the nicest things about KDE is the ability to set the 'theme sounds volume' accordingly, so that at normal they're a dull whisper, and when I turn up to hear my quiet DVD or VOIP conversation my speakers don't blow up at the next exclamation error sound... (hopefully this might be a Vista feature, as well?).
Vista will let you set per-application volumes, so you could just turn your DVD/Media player up, or something. On each window's title bar there will be a volume slider you can reveal.
This is great news because it means you can mute all browser windows so you don't have to listen to annoying Flash or other ads, and only turn it up when you want to watch a video.
while HD-DVD is a long way from being open, it is not nearly as horribly DRM-infested as Blu-ray is going to be and really is a better choice for the consumer.
I have to call bullshit here. Check this article out.
Sony gained Twentieth Century Fox just last week when the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) reportedly agreed to add watermarking technology to the spec. This has kicked off a round of sniping between Blu-ray and HD DVD proponents over which solution is more secure. The debate is a bit strange because the two solutions use largely the exact same core tech, namely the Advanced Access Content System (AACS).
Both sides are competing for attention by including as many copy prevention features as possible, and both are neck and neck at this point.
In Japan where you commonly see used versions of games for sale the day after said game was released, and that the difference between highest quality pristine condition games and one that has a tiny scratch on it is large enough to consider this problem serious as it devalues your investment. Since the XBox had the same problem, and this next console continues it and MS're still not taking it seriously, this would make the difference between someone buying the console or not.
online gaming CAN be and generally is far more engrossing
Not really. I've been playing Dragon Quest 8 and am deep into this game like no other. I really dislike multiplayer games, so I'm biased that way, but there are many others like me. Single and multiplayer are just different facets of gaming, but multiplayer doesn't work for every gameplay style, whereas almost everything else in gaming evolved from the single player side of things.
If people don't play games for social interaction, why is the chat screen constantly rolling on most multiplayer games?
Because it doesn't exist on single player games. Seriously, there's nothing wrong with single player games, and a lot of them are fun and about honing your skill at that game (Katamari Damacy) or completing a narrative (Final Fantasy) or exploration (Castlevania Symphony of the Night). These are all very popular and very single player... I urge you to re-think the idea that gaming is a social th ing.
The consumer doesn't care if they change the branding/etc.
It's just that after a certain point, consumers tune out all the advertisement because it hasn't reached them and they're tired of seeing it over and over for the last 10 years, it doesn't even phase them, they can tune it out like background noise.
Now if the company comes up with a new slogan that the consumer's not used to, they won't automatically tune it out because it's new and it hasn't faded into the background for them yet, so now they'll consider it more than they used to.
So this is the win for the company, just being able to snap their fingers and get everyone to take a quick second look and perhaps be drawn into a new campaign or something.
It's just like companies that come out with new wrappers for chocolate bars or new marshmallow shapes for cereals. It just gives them another excuse to change things up and maybe catch your attention again. It prevents you from automatically tuning all of these things out.
Theme packs that re-skin your blades run about 150 Points, and packs of icons for your GamerTag are about 50 Points. There are exceptions, of course. The Penny Arcade icon packs each have several icons to choose from, and cost 200 Points. Expensive, but Mr. Period was worth the $2.50.
This sounds just like cell phones (needing to purchase ringtones + backgrounds etc)... you probably can't import your own backgrounds + icons + sounds from a storage device (even though you can view them from your USB storage device) because then they wouldn't be able to sell you the same things over Live. Is that the case?
Even if it's still frames I can't stand 1080i on a CRT because of the flickering. On an LCD it would be impossible to tell on still frames, but I just don't want to have to put up with interlacing anywhere anymore!
It's not even about the display quality but also the movie format. Storing a film in an interlaced format takes a lot more storage space and degrades the picture far worse than storing it in progressive.
(no 1080p, but honestly where are you getting a 1080p signal from anyway?)
From people building support into their products like these people. Hopefully nobody will have the same attitude in thinking "What's the point, 1080p isn't so common" because I don't want to see another fucking interlaced display in my lifetime ever again! There is no reason we should have to put up with visual garbage such as interlacing. Holy crap, it's horrid. I'd rather watch 480p (or 720p) than 1080i, but I'm sure 1080i would be the most supported option just because it's the biggest number (notice how many don't support 720p and jump straight from 480p to 1080i).
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Previously my attempts to move to Linux had been unsuccessful because I had problems getting certain hardware working (video capture, RAID) and was concerned about what software would be available (certain emulators I had grown fond of, video codecs, VirtualDub and other transcoding software), but even Windows 2000 was giving me some problems, such as booting into a blue screen telling me my registry had become corrupt, and also actually getting infected by viruses such as Blaster.
I had everything up to date, all patched up, antivirus installed, etc, but still contracted the virus. A few reinstalls later and I just figured it wasn't worth it putting up with all the headaches.
When I started running Linux, I quickly saw the advantages... Installing software didn't require the usual "Next, Next, uncheck every checkbox, delete desktop and quicklaunch icons, uninstall additional software installed along with the software I actually wanted, check for hidden startup items, make sure program doesn't phone home", when I started my PC I wasn't greeted by millions of splash screens, applications that couldn't make a connection popping up and letting me know, I didn't have to readjust settings that kept resetting for some reason (volume levels, icon positions on the quicklaunch)... GNU/Linux is about using your PC and not just working around problems to get what you want... and then I realized that upon discovering all this I didn't even have to worry about viruses at all, and I had no problems with crashes at all! Even if programs didn't behave in a way I expected I found it simple to find solutions, the error messages meant something and I could see exceptions thrown if I launched an application from a terminal, etc...
Oh, that makes it better. Because when you put it that way, it's really non-obvious and I'm sure nobody ever thought of doing it before.
It's like people who enjoy cars, they don't go to the car shows for the chicks. They're just there to keep your friends entertained while you're busy checking out specs etc. I guess this just shows how much of a consumer show E3 has become.
RPGs always have sequels, whether they're direct like Xenosaga or indirect like Final Fantasy, so it's kind of tough to bring them up in this case. Anyway I don't think the audience for these games are so huge because of the nonlinearity aspect. People like an experience from beginning to end. Nonlinear games are so involving that 90% of the gamers that play them wouldn't see 90% of the game. Where is the incentive to produce these types of games?
So now, I have to pay for radio so I can hear it the way it's meant to be. But I can't even record some songs I like so I can hear them again? What about fair play?
See, it's just not even worth it. You might as well just be buying CDs because you actually get to control some of what you pay for. Control is key because then you can enjoy it when the mood strikes you and not have to work around something just to get your way. I don't care about the difference between buying something and licensing it. If I pay money, I expect SOMEthing to go my way. Anytime the distributors get involved with anything, they want to control it and get me to pay more than I would have for what I thought was fair and enjoy it on my terms. But somehow the distributors get uptight whenever things aren't on their terms. Is that what the artists want? Do they even care?
In the future, will there be such a thing as a commercial format with wide distribution that doesn't restrict the user in some way, preventing them from enjoying it on their terms? It seems to me that there won't, because if a user enjoys something on their terms, distributors can't start charging you when you want to do something else with it that you hadn't intended on at the point of purchase. Say you bought CDs, and after that you bought a portable digital audio jukebox. Naturally you want to put your fucking music on there and carry it around with you, but that won't be possible. This is garbage.
Just preview tracks online, through P2P or whatever, and then buy what you like. Am I really insane for doing this? Fuck the distributors. They're insane.
If you're going to stay offline you're still better off with Linux because you'll be able to use recent applications. They will install and be relatively fast compared to the Windows alternatives. OSS applications such as AbiWord etc may still run on earlier versions of Windows, but if all you're going to be using is OSS, then you might as well use Linux and get a more stable and faster system than you would with Windows 98 etc.
Rather than hacking 98 up with 98Lite and installing a custom shell such as GeoShell or something, you can get a more stable and faster system with Linux... try DamnSmallLinux for example. I ran that on a Pentium 166MHz with 64MB RAM and got good performance -- when I was running off the LiveCD! Installed to the hard disk it would be even faster and would probably work great on a 486 compared to Windows.
A 486 running Windows has trouble playing MP3s in WinAMP without stuttering and has trouble catching up with video on my PCI ATI All-In-Wonder (My 486 motherboard supports PCI but more often than not they don't, but these are just examples). DMA is enabled on all storage devices. However when running Linux, these problems don't exist and I can even record video with my TV tuner!
Interlacing may not look nearly as bad on LCD (or similar) as it does on CRT, but you still have the degraded image quality because of the necessity to reduce flicker and because of wasted storage space on interlacing instead of improving the quality of the image. Compression artifacts show up more easily on interlaced video because the algorithms to deal with compressing video are more beneficial when you're compressing data that is directly adjascent, as with progressive video, rather than data which is just supposed to match other data nearby, as with compressing fields individually in interlaced video.
In the end, no matter what, you will definitely have a higher perceived quality from watching non-interlaced video than interlaced
Even if you can install Windows 98 on a 486SX, it doesn't mean you can run Office 12. Also, add an antivirus and firewall and the system becomes even more unusable. Add in the fact that MS won't patch Windows 98 for the WMF problem (and others in the future) and you don't have a usable system.
Giving us more music, from a music company, as a penalty for exposing our personal information and personal property to intruder attack, seems more like they are giving us advertisement for their product rather than compensating us.
Under Networking, how about FileZilla? It's an excellent FTP client. It'd be great if it were ported to Linux, then I could dump gFTP which doesn't do so well with queues and is a bit of a pain to use...
It allows individuals to perpetuate a culture of people who have low self esteem and use PC social taboos to manipulate others in a way that makes them feel better, but only because they have power over others and not because they are overcoming their own problems.
There's nothing really wrong with Ellen Degeneres. Sure she's kooky and you can only take so much of her seemingly one dimensional personality, but there's nothing really inherantly bad about her either. Why be negative for negativity's sake?
If you ignore good information just because it comes from an anonymous source then you are only sabotaging yourself. There is no other outcome to the situation than you having a smaller pool of information to look at, so your view is narrower than that of others. You may think you are avoiding a lot of garbage but I guess you will never know if you completely block it out. You even need to understand the point of view of the enemy to win at war.
I guess they thought the chances were remote, because when MS were doing their security review and subsequently made their GDI vulnerability detection tool available, it was not designed to pay attention to this vulnerability. I wonder if they have updated the tool?
Funny that that didn't turn out to be the case and they were actually boasting about 39 buttons and all their functions! I think the others replying to this article about how a grand PC in a box is less desirable when compared to something that just does what you want and follows the KISS rule are correct.
Vista will let you set per-application volumes, so you could just turn your DVD/Media player up, or something. On each window's title bar there will be a volume slider you can reveal.
This is great news because it means you can mute all browser windows so you don't have to listen to annoying Flash or other ads, and only turn it up when you want to watch a video.
while HD-DVD is a long way from being open, it is not nearly as horribly DRM-infested as Blu-ray is going to be and really is a better choice for the consumer. I have to call bullshit here. Check this article out. Sony gained Twentieth Century Fox just last week when the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) reportedly agreed to add watermarking technology to the spec. This has kicked off a round of sniping between Blu-ray and HD DVD proponents over which solution is more secure. The debate is a bit strange because the two solutions use largely the exact same core tech, namely the Advanced Access Content System (AACS). Both sides are competing for attention by including as many copy prevention features as possible, and both are neck and neck at this point.
My portable CD and DVD players don't do this, and a console shouldn't either, I don't care what the compromise in redesign of the console would be.
In Japan where you commonly see used versions of games for sale the day after said game was released, and that the difference between highest quality pristine condition games and one that has a tiny scratch on it is large enough to consider this problem serious as it devalues your investment. Since the XBox had the same problem, and this next console continues it and MS're still not taking it seriously, this would make the difference between someone buying the console or not.
online gaming CAN be and generally is far more engrossing Not really. I've been playing Dragon Quest 8 and am deep into this game like no other. I really dislike multiplayer games, so I'm biased that way, but there are many others like me. Single and multiplayer are just different facets of gaming, but multiplayer doesn't work for every gameplay style, whereas almost everything else in gaming evolved from the single player side of things.
If people don't play games for social interaction, why is the chat screen constantly rolling on most multiplayer games? Because it doesn't exist on single player games. Seriously, there's nothing wrong with single player games, and a lot of them are fun and about honing your skill at that game (Katamari Damacy) or completing a narrative (Final Fantasy) or exploration (Castlevania Symphony of the Night). These are all very popular and very single player... I urge you to re-think the idea that gaming is a social th ing.
The consumer doesn't care if they change the branding/etc.
It's just that after a certain point, consumers tune out all the advertisement because it hasn't reached them and they're tired of seeing it over and over for the last 10 years, it doesn't even phase them, they can tune it out like background noise.
Now if the company comes up with a new slogan that the consumer's not used to, they won't automatically tune it out because it's new and it hasn't faded into the background for them yet, so now they'll consider it more than they used to.
So this is the win for the company, just being able to snap their fingers and get everyone to take a quick second look and perhaps be drawn into a new campaign or something.
It's just like companies that come out with new wrappers for chocolate bars or new marshmallow shapes for cereals. It just gives them another excuse to change things up and maybe catch your attention again. It prevents you from automatically tuning all of these things out.
This sounds just like cell phones (needing to purchase ringtones + backgrounds etc)... you probably can't import your own backgrounds + icons + sounds from a storage device (even though you can view them from your USB storage device) because then they wouldn't be able to sell you the same things over Live. Is that the case?
Even if it's still frames I can't stand 1080i on a CRT because of the flickering. On an LCD it would be impossible to tell on still frames, but I just don't want to have to put up with interlacing anywhere anymore! It's not even about the display quality but also the movie format. Storing a film in an interlaced format takes a lot more storage space and degrades the picture far worse than storing it in progressive.
From people building support into their products like these people. Hopefully nobody will have the same attitude in thinking "What's the point, 1080p isn't so common" because I don't want to see another fucking interlaced display in my lifetime ever again! There is no reason we should have to put up with visual garbage such as interlacing. Holy crap, it's horrid. I'd rather watch 480p (or 720p) than 1080i, but I'm sure 1080i would be the most supported option just because it's the biggest number (notice how many don't support 720p and jump straight from 480p to 1080i).