Almost as bad as people that don't know about the situation at all - how many of you guys have heard people that think digital TV broadcasting only means that all channels will be broadcast in high-def? Even if people know "some sort of change is coming, things are going to be 'different' somehow!" it doesn't do a whole lot of good if they don't know what the hell those changes mean for them...
On a note to clarify my post, I'm not trying to offend anybody here, its merely that people seem to think that correcting the unjust actions and policies of a government are easy, or that everything will somehow magically be alright after they do make things right.
Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
-- Winston Churchill
The way I see it, if people see current democratic government(s) as corrupt, they should either take actions to right it, or come up with a new form of government. Now having said that, it's far easier said than done, as you've got to get people off their asses to actually get things done. Another point to think on is that if you can't right a corrupt democratic government to make it just, you've got to come up with a new form of government to replace it. Seeing as pure communism and Marxism, along with socialism tend to become more easily corrupted than other forms of government such as democracy, you're going to really have to do some thinking to come up with a new form of government.
While the current American government might not be the ideal democracy, I'd venture to say that it's quite a lot better than having a tyrant such as Stalin or any of the numerous dictators currently in power around the world today as the President of the United States... While I'm not saying that the US Government is currently perfect or anywhere even near perfect, I say count your blessings that there's been no major "ethnic cleansing" or some such within the US...
I think the GP is thinking about WinFS... I think MS meant to deceive here, because I had previously also thought that it was the actual file-system before reading the Wikipedia page just now, naturally having thought that WinFS would be the successor to NTFS... Instead, it turns out that it was only meant to be a database backend for things such as Outlook contacts or whatnot, usable by most applications - but knowing MS, it would only work for their programs.
I thought the name "OpenDocument Foundation" would imply their goal is to create a document standard that is open, and can easily enough be implemented in a document editor without having to understand how the universe works just to see what line of code leads to some other line? If thats the case, why the hell are they concerned with being compatible with something that isn't open?
Compatibility is a great bullet to have on your feature list, but I think that instead of trying to play catch-up and only be in second place, they should stick with ODF - or even if they do switch to some other format, that which-ever they go with they market by its own merits (being a truly open standard, for example) instead of trying to become a horrid beast created by a committe that wants to always chase MS (or somebody elses) tail...
Older DVD drives use RPC-1 firmware, which means the drive allows DVDs from any region to play. Newer drives use RPC-2 firmware, which enforces the DVD region coding at the hardware level. These drives can often be reflashed with hacked RPC-1 firmware, effectively making the drive region-free. However, this usually voids the warranty and can render the drive inoperable if something goes wrong.[14]
Some software can circumvent this protection by using special techniques.[15] See next section.
Software DVD players
Most freeware and open source DVD players ignore region coding. On the other hand, most commercial players are locked to a region code, but can be easily changed with software.
Other software, known as DVD region killers, transparently remove (or hide) the DVD region code from the software player. Some can also work around locked RPC-2 firmware.
While not exactly brand new, I still argue that the plot lines from Final Fantasy 10 and FEAR are extremely well thought out and is something to make you think a bit (not as much in FEAR, but at least a bit).
First, it depends on what you're looking for in a game - if you want a great story, but you've only ever played sports games and never picked up an RPG, you can't at all say that all new games suck if you aren't even looking enough or at all in the right genre.
Just because when you bought whatever console you bought (or if you bought into PC gaming) happened to have shitty games the majority of its life span (or entire life span) doesn't mean that _ALL_ new games suck. Some consoles are better for certain game genres than others. Personally, I suggest a PS2 - sports, shooters, RPG's, and a few puzzle/party games here and there. If the only thing you want is party games, go with something from Nintendo. If you like chatting with other people (read: squeaky 14 year olds) and playing games online, get an Xbox.
As a note on the 2 games I listed, if you disagree, in Final Fantasy 10, go talk the "Maechen" (the old scholar researching the world) in every area throughout the game and see why certain parties in the game are extremely hypocritical. As for FEAR, pick up every answering machine and laptop intel you can to help understand just how sick the plot is. That or just have somebody who's done that spoil it for you...
I would think that might be kinda hard, since they *just* introduced Vista with all of its new GUI effects and background services. To pull those out would make it look like they made a mistake with Vista. On the other hand, he said "optimizing the *kernel*" not all the other crap that bogs it down. Even if they made a brand new kernel that could run everything a "modern" kernel/core OS is expected to have, they'd somehow find unnecessary system services to bog it down...
But that fits a different need - the need for fast access times, low power, etc. This fits its own need - people that need extremely large amounts of storage space, no matter the access time or power usage tradeoffs. Also, while this'll be pretty expensive, keep in mind that SSD drives are still gonna be expensive as hell, and even assuming the price of SSD drives comes down, 500Gb is still gonna cost a pretty penny, while normal mechanical HDD's at that size will probably be no more than $50 dollars (since I can run down to local retail and pick up a 400Gb for about 120 right now).
While its pretty incomprehensible to use even a fraction of the mentioned 4Tb right now, I can see that with high-def video becoming more and more common, at the very least all the people pirating movies and tv shows will use these drives. Also, think about how more and more computers are being sold with TV tuners in them (granted most people will never use them). A few years from now, I can see that instead of regular TV tuners, HDTV capture devices will be much more common - thus people will actually use that space...
Thats what legal disclaimers stating something to the effect of "This device is in no way, shape, or form a replacement for actually looking out your window. If you still hit something, it's not our fault because of this paragraph." As long as they have that at least *somewhere* buried within the contract/manual/warranty/etc, any case against it with your hypothetical reason would get thrown out pretty quick...
I get those shitty mailing lists also, where idiots regularly abuse the "everybody in the district" list for stupid things like walkathons, hot-dogs, etc. But you know what? Thats what filters are for. I don't need the crap from the other campuses or from district, so everything from *.other_campus.college_mail.edu gets deleted. After that, it should leave you with a much more manageable amount of incoming crap-mail to deal with. Then if you're up to it, you can identify the people that abuse the mass mailing lists the most (its almost *always* the same people) and add those specifically to the list...
I'm much the same. I really prefer plain Debian compared to Ubuntu so far, and also use netinst. I've recently tried Ubuntu Desktop (7.04) on my laptops, and it seems to be good for them (due to having restricted drivers). For a server though, what would be the benefit? Does it have utilities that work better than other distro's in the way that Ubuntu Desktop tends to have Xorg configurators that are different and sometimes better than other distro's?
I haven't got a clue what I'm doing wrong, but every time I attempt configuring SAMBA with SWAT or system-config-samba on Fedora, or using Webmin, none of them seem capable of writing the smb.conf file correctly and I end up just editing it by hand (stupid things like make an option say yes, but commented out). Does the Ubuntu Server have utilities that actually write the crap correctly? Even on Ubuntu Desktop, the smb folder sharing widget seems to do it incorrectly...
Linux is easier for me to remotely administrate, and I don't have to deal with spyware.
You and I both know that Linux is easier than Windows in some areas, and at least as usable or getting there in the places it doesn't surpass Windows - but the average Joe might not.
tricking their users into using linux
While that can potentially work for the few people you could do that with, my arguement was that if Best Buy suddenly started selling PC's without an operating system already bundled on, a *LOT* of people would get tricked into the usual shit Best Buy and other stores like them always try to sell you off on. My argument continued that with any learning curve they would have getting used to their new system, they would think that "Well, after having them install it for me, spending a wad of cash on Geek Squad tech support, etc - I could have spent as much or possibly less (depending on tech support fees) to have bought Windows (probably ultra-low Vista Home edition) and it have worked fine!" These people would then tell their friends looking into buying a new computer that when they go choose their OS "Stay the hell away from that Linux!" and generally the word of mouth news that they are hearing about Vista right now...
Now its not that retail stores won't try selling tech support with Windows also, but that they'd probably load the odds against Linux by making the Linux tech support cost more than the Windows tech support. The other possibility is that people that are semi-comfortable with Windows or at least have "that nerdy kid down the street" to help them out with Windows - but don't feel so comfortable about switching to something new (Linux) and so go for the tech support...
I'm assuming here that the average idiot is too... well, idiotic to realize they can download a distro and install it themselves. Instead, they'll do what they always do and just spend cash to solve their problem by going to Best Buy or Radio Shack...
Also, driver problems in both Windows and Linux suddenly aren't accounted for...
While I really do love Linux (need to get round to trying the BSD's, etc), I can see that sort of situation being actually bad for Linux. "Oh, whats this 'Xandros/SuSE/RHEL/Linspire/etc' - its cheaper than that Windows software box over there, I'll get this instead!" They either pay the store something like $50 bucks to install it for them or are somehow able to do it themselves - "Oh wow, the interface is different!" and "Oh, shit. I can't figure out how to do what I want - Linux sucks, I should have just coughed up the change for Windows!"
Also, the retail stores might find a way to make all the Linux distros more expensive than Windows even before people get out of the store. $50 bucks for the distro itself, $50 to $75 for Geek Squad to install it for you, and another $50 to $100 for 3 years tech support over the phone. That doesn't even include people getting home and spending time (time=money) to re-learn how to use half the GUI (only because things aren't in the same place) or paying tech support a wad of cash to learn how. Anybody that goes through that will tell their friends that its not only cheaper but also easier to just buy Windows.
I don't see why its such a big deal. There are only 2 reasons I could see why backward compatibility would be a must. The first is that its convenient to use the same console for both PS2 and 3 games. The second is that with PS2-bc on a PS3 people owning those models could get the PS3 and then just go buy PS2 games.
However, the only people that would really want bc is people with sizable PS2 libraries - which are likely to either still have their PS2 or be willing to go buy a new one.
People bitched like all hell when the PS3 cost $500/$600 USD - so Sony goes and tries to make it cheaper to produce so that they can pass some of the savings to the customer - and what do people still do? They still bitch just as much if not more than before. I mean, how many people will/did buy a PS3 just for the PS2 games? If people only wanted a console that played PS2 games, they'd buy a damned PS2 - yet instead they buy a PS3...
Hell, I'll even take a wild guess and say that the majority of PS3 owners forget that the PS3 ever even had backward compatibility with the PS2...
First, at least this takes care of some of the problems (local spyware, etc) - freed from that, you could then easier go focus on what might be sniffing the data on your local network. Second, for the home user that is savvy enough and would pay for this sort of thing for the potential security benefits, they're at _home_ where they might have 2 or 3 other machines on the network, which should be decently easy enough to manage and make sure that they aren't totally compromised...
You guys might wanna check out Xming. It's a standalone X server compiled for Windows, so you'll still need to use something like PuTTY. I haven't tried it on Vista, but it hasn't crashed once on me in XP - it does at least claim Vista support, but again, I can't say about that. One of the good things I like about it is it doesn't have any Cygwin dependencies. The other thing I like about Xming is that unlike some of the commercial X servers for Win32 I looked through (Hummingbird Exceed, etc) is that this is free (as in beer, and AFAIK, speech)...
So, where do they obtain the source code from? I sure as hell doubt MS is going to license every line of their code to some random company, much less that the goal of the company is to keep a product alive that MS wants to let die off so the successor can take the throne.
br
And even if your hypothetical company managed to reverse engineer it themselves or obtain it from MS somehow, MS would instantly sue the living hell out of them - not so much for actually caring about their IP, but again, because it would keep Vista (or whatever comes after Vista) from being the dominant OS...
I remember when I first heard about the game I think in like early 2006 or late 2005 maybe - it was like "Holy crap this is gonna be good." And then EA bought 'em out, and I started thinking "Shit, this is gonna be just like every other action MMO." Then when I heard about the "optional" subscription, I knew there wasn't a chance in hell I'd play the game - personally I think its gonna end up being a situation like "Sure you can play without subscribing - but you'll never get any of the good items you'll need to kick ass or even beat the game."
Wow - sure sucks to be designing desktop icons and animated GIF's weighing in at 5KiB each right now - they must only get just over a MiB of total monthly bandwidth!
Slashdot Mirror
Why is it I never find anything to use mod-points on, yet when I find something hilarious like this, they've expired?
Almost as bad as people that don't know about the situation at all - how many of you guys have heard people that think digital TV broadcasting only means that all channels will be broadcast in high-def? Even if people know "some sort of change is coming, things are going to be 'different' somehow!" it doesn't do a whole lot of good if they don't know what the hell those changes mean for them...
The way I see it, if people see current democratic government(s) as corrupt, they should either take actions to right it, or come up with a new form of government. Now having said that, it's far easier said than done, as you've got to get people off their asses to actually get things done. Another point to think on is that if you can't right a corrupt democratic government to make it just, you've got to come up with a new form of government to replace it. Seeing as pure communism and Marxism, along with socialism tend to become more easily corrupted than other forms of government such as democracy, you're going to really have to do some thinking to come up with a new form of government.
While the current American government might not be the ideal democracy, I'd venture to say that it's quite a lot better than having a tyrant such as Stalin or any of the numerous dictators currently in power around the world today as the President of the United States... While I'm not saying that the US Government is currently perfect or anywhere even near perfect, I say count your blessings that there's been no major "ethnic cleansing" or some such within the US...
I think the GP is thinking about WinFS... I think MS meant to deceive here, because I had previously also thought that it was the actual file-system before reading the Wikipedia page just now, naturally having thought that WinFS would be the successor to NTFS... Instead, it turns out that it was only meant to be a database backend for things such as Outlook contacts or whatnot, usable by most applications - but knowing MS, it would only work for their programs.
Yes, but only *after* Google comes out with their "Open Lazy-boy launcher Beta" - this way MS can have a reason to fucking kill Google...
I thought the name "OpenDocument Foundation" would imply their goal is to create a document standard that is open, and can easily enough be implemented in a document editor without having to understand how the universe works just to see what line of code leads to some other line? If thats the case, why the hell are they concerned with being compatible with something that isn't open?
Compatibility is a great bullet to have on your feature list, but I think that instead of trying to play catch-up and only be in second place, they should stick with ODF - or even if they do switch to some other format, that which-ever they go with they market by its own merits (being a truly open standard, for example) instead of trying to become a horrid beast created by a committe that wants to always chase MS (or somebody elses) tail...
While not exactly brand new, I still argue that the plot lines from Final Fantasy 10 and FEAR are extremely well thought out and is something to make you think a bit (not as much in FEAR, but at least a bit).
First, it depends on what you're looking for in a game - if you want a great story, but you've only ever played sports games and never picked up an RPG, you can't at all say that all new games suck if you aren't even looking enough or at all in the right genre.
Just because when you bought whatever console you bought (or if you bought into PC gaming) happened to have shitty games the majority of its life span (or entire life span) doesn't mean that _ALL_ new games suck. Some consoles are better for certain game genres than others. Personally, I suggest a PS2 - sports, shooters, RPG's, and a few puzzle/party games here and there. If the only thing you want is party games, go with something from Nintendo. If you like chatting with other people (read: squeaky 14 year olds) and playing games online, get an Xbox.
As a note on the 2 games I listed, if you disagree, in Final Fantasy 10, go talk the "Maechen" (the old scholar researching the world) in every area throughout the game and see why certain parties in the game are extremely hypocritical. As for FEAR, pick up every answering machine and laptop intel you can to help understand just how sick the plot is. That or just have somebody who's done that spoil it for you...
I would think that might be kinda hard, since they *just* introduced Vista with all of its new GUI effects and background services. To pull those out would make it look like they made a mistake with Vista. On the other hand, he said "optimizing the *kernel*" not all the other crap that bogs it down. Even if they made a brand new kernel that could run everything a "modern" kernel/core OS is expected to have, they'd somehow find unnecessary system services to bog it down...
Were these counties all named things like Microsoft-land, Microsoft-world, Microsoftia and so on?
But that fits a different need - the need for fast access times, low power, etc. This fits its own need - people that need extremely large amounts of storage space, no matter the access time or power usage tradeoffs. Also, while this'll be pretty expensive, keep in mind that SSD drives are still gonna be expensive as hell, and even assuming the price of SSD drives comes down, 500Gb is still gonna cost a pretty penny, while normal mechanical HDD's at that size will probably be no more than $50 dollars (since I can run down to local retail and pick up a 400Gb for about 120 right now).
While its pretty incomprehensible to use even a fraction of the mentioned 4Tb right now, I can see that with high-def video becoming more and more common, at the very least all the people pirating movies and tv shows will use these drives. Also, think about how more and more computers are being sold with TV tuners in them (granted most people will never use them). A few years from now, I can see that instead of regular TV tuners, HDTV capture devices will be much more common - thus people will actually use that space...
I know most people think they don't need that much, but still, thats a helluva lot of porn!
Thats what legal disclaimers stating something to the effect of "This device is in no way, shape, or form a replacement for actually looking out your window. If you still hit something, it's not our fault because of this paragraph." As long as they have that at least *somewhere* buried within the contract/manual/warranty/etc, any case against it with your hypothetical reason would get thrown out pretty quick...
So then the faster you go, the more the camera zooms out?
I get those shitty mailing lists also, where idiots regularly abuse the "everybody in the district" list for stupid things like walkathons, hot-dogs, etc. But you know what? Thats what filters are for. I don't need the crap from the other campuses or from district, so everything from *.other_campus.college_mail.edu gets deleted. After that, it should leave you with a much more manageable amount of incoming crap-mail to deal with. Then if you're up to it, you can identify the people that abuse the mass mailing lists the most (its almost *always* the same people) and add those specifically to the list...
I'm much the same. I really prefer plain Debian compared to Ubuntu so far, and also use netinst. I've recently tried Ubuntu Desktop (7.04) on my laptops, and it seems to be good for them (due to having restricted drivers). For a server though, what would be the benefit? Does it have utilities that work better than other distro's in the way that Ubuntu Desktop tends to have Xorg configurators that are different and sometimes better than other distro's?
I haven't got a clue what I'm doing wrong, but every time I attempt configuring SAMBA with SWAT or system-config-samba on Fedora, or using Webmin, none of them seem capable of writing the smb.conf file correctly and I end up just editing it by hand (stupid things like make an option say yes, but commented out). Does the Ubuntu Server have utilities that actually write the crap correctly? Even on Ubuntu Desktop, the smb folder sharing widget seems to do it incorrectly...
Now its not that retail stores won't try selling tech support with Windows also, but that they'd probably load the odds against Linux by making the Linux tech support cost more than the Windows tech support. The other possibility is that people that are semi-comfortable with Windows or at least have "that nerdy kid down the street" to help them out with Windows - but don't feel so comfortable about switching to something new (Linux) and so go for the tech support...
I'm assuming here that the average idiot is too... well, idiotic to realize they can download a distro and install it themselves. Instead, they'll do what they always do and just spend cash to solve their problem by going to Best Buy or Radio Shack...
Also, driver problems in both Windows and Linux suddenly aren't accounted for...
While I really do love Linux (need to get round to trying the BSD's, etc), I can see that sort of situation being actually bad for Linux. "Oh, whats this 'Xandros/SuSE/RHEL/Linspire/etc' - its cheaper than that Windows software box over there, I'll get this instead!" They either pay the store something like $50 bucks to install it for them or are somehow able to do it themselves - "Oh wow, the interface is different!" and "Oh, shit. I can't figure out how to do what I want - Linux sucks, I should have just coughed up the change for Windows!"
Also, the retail stores might find a way to make all the Linux distros more expensive than Windows even before people get out of the store. $50 bucks for the distro itself, $50 to $75 for Geek Squad to install it for you, and another $50 to $100 for 3 years tech support over the phone. That doesn't even include people getting home and spending time (time=money) to re-learn how to use half the GUI (only because things aren't in the same place) or paying tech support a wad of cash to learn how. Anybody that goes through that will tell their friends that its not only cheaper but also easier to just buy Windows.
I don't see why its such a big deal. There are only 2 reasons I could see why backward compatibility would be a must. The first is that its convenient to use the same console for both PS2 and 3 games. The second is that with PS2-bc on a PS3 people owning those models could get the PS3 and then just go buy PS2 games.
However, the only people that would really want bc is people with sizable PS2 libraries - which are likely to either still have their PS2 or be willing to go buy a new one.
People bitched like all hell when the PS3 cost $500/$600 USD - so Sony goes and tries to make it cheaper to produce so that they can pass some of the savings to the customer - and what do people still do? They still bitch just as much if not more than before. I mean, how many people will/did buy a PS3 just for the PS2 games? If people only wanted a console that played PS2 games, they'd buy a damned PS2 - yet instead they buy a PS3...
Hell, I'll even take a wild guess and say that the majority of PS3 owners forget that the PS3 ever even had backward compatibility with the PS2...
First, at least this takes care of some of the problems (local spyware, etc) - freed from that, you could then easier go focus on what might be sniffing the data on your local network. Second, for the home user that is savvy enough and would pay for this sort of thing for the potential security benefits, they're at _home_ where they might have 2 or 3 other machines on the network, which should be decently easy enough to manage and make sure that they aren't totally compromised...
You guys might wanna check out Xming. It's a standalone X server compiled for Windows, so you'll still need to use something like PuTTY. I haven't tried it on Vista, but it hasn't crashed once on me in XP - it does at least claim Vista support, but again, I can't say about that. One of the good things I like about it is it doesn't have any Cygwin dependencies. The other thing I like about Xming is that unlike some of the commercial X servers for Win32 I looked through (Hummingbird Exceed, etc) is that this is free (as in beer, and AFAIK, speech)...
So, where do they obtain the source code from? I sure as hell doubt MS is going to license every line of their code to some random company, much less that the goal of the company is to keep a product alive that MS wants to let die off so the successor can take the throne.
br And even if your hypothetical company managed to reverse engineer it themselves or obtain it from MS somehow, MS would instantly sue the living hell out of them - not so much for actually caring about their IP, but again, because it would keep Vista (or whatever comes after Vista) from being the dominant OS...
I remember when I first heard about the game I think in like early 2006 or late 2005 maybe - it was like "Holy crap this is gonna be good." And then EA bought 'em out, and I started thinking "Shit, this is gonna be just like every other action MMO." Then when I heard about the "optional" subscription, I knew there wasn't a chance in hell I'd play the game - personally I think its gonna end up being a situation like "Sure you can play without subscribing - but you'll never get any of the good items you'll need to kick ass or even beat the game."
Wow - sure sucks to be designing desktop icons and animated GIF's weighing in at 5KiB each right now - they must only get just over a MiB of total monthly bandwidth!
So what MS is saying is that "If we hadn't sucked so bad you guys wouldn't be so great!"???