Unlike Windows XP, which was a significant upgrade, and replaced an OS (98/Me!) that many consumers were unhappy with, people are generally still happy with XP. For the most part, all of the complaints people had with 98/Me were solved by XP.
Interesting analog in the audio/video arena:
MC/VHS is like Windows 98 CD/DVD is like Windows XP HDDVD/BluRay/DVDA is like Windows Vista
I don't use Vista and wouldn't recommend most people would, at least until hardware catches up, and Vista SP2.
However, lots of FUD has spread about Vista:
If my system is running DRM, it uses more CPU power when I do anything with video. So i use Win2k on my render machines.
First of all DRM takes a toll on your HDMI enabled hardware, and less so on your CPU. You buy more expensive hardware for the extra chip and protection to do the crypting.
But there's no DRM applied to plain video. It's simply not, never was (can't say never will).
Second, rendering video is even less relevant to playback of DRM-ed video. DRM in Vista means absolutely nothing for your rendering machines.
I also like to play games. The less bullshit my computer has to deal with in the way of DRM, non-needed glitz & glow, the better it will run games. So I use Win2k for games, and sometimes run them on my Windows XP MCE laptop.
Again DRM, no DRM is applied from Vista on *games*. DirectX adds new shader capabilities which game producers may opt to use or not use. If they use them it's to make games look better.
Or you'll tell me now you prefer games look same as in the pre-DirectX days.
Essentially, unless you have a 64-bit processor or an older "Hyper-threading" CPU, you will be better off running Windows 2000 than XP or Vista; your system will be able to work better and will give you less problems.
XP is just a minor revision of 2000. Is the skin that makes you feel bad about XP? It can be completely disabled. I run XP and it's disabled. It looks like Windows 2000.
Maybe if you have old processor Windows 2000 is suitable, but Windows 2000 has no proper hyper-threading or multi-core support. XP supports multicore systems properly.
Windows 2000 also doesn't support ClearType, which may or may not be important to you (as a TFT monitor user, it's quite important to me).
either XP nor vista out of the box is more secure than Win2ksp4 running a free copy of Tiny Personal Firewall & Spybot, and every other new "feature" that it has either hurts your performance or cripples fair use.
XP SP2 has a number of security advantages over Win2000. Vista has a number of security advantages over XP (ASLR, Limited Privileges IE mode, User Account Control, Network Access Protection, improved Firewall, Windows Service Hardening, etc.)
This is to be objective. I like being objective you know? It services the discussion better than bias.
But I said above I don't recommend Vista. Why? High hardware requirements, poor driver availability/stability yet, poor software back compat in many cases, worse laptop battery life, and no killer apps/features that can, as of now, outweight the listed issues.
Why should I bother. I have access to your bank account in minutes, I just directly wire money overseas and start laundering them. There's no even time to start stealing "identities" as it's understood in the classical sense.
That assumes human beings have infinite solidarity towards other human beings.
It'd be like those "fake eyes" pattern butterflies actually thinking "hey wait, those are not eyes, I can't be cheating it's not fair and dropping their camouflage.
Reality is, most people, at least most smart people weight the pros and cons of going against someone's rules to get better value. Solidarity is there, but it's not paramount.
Do you think corporations have much higher % of legal software licenses because they feel bad for piracy? They do it since they're more vulnerable if they don't buy.
Your average consumer is not so vulnerable to this kind of threat. If pirated Windows works better, he'll try and use it instead.
With such a high level of success and greater corporate participation (on both the consumer and provider fronts) will the spirit of freedom and idealism remain true or will the ever-present corporate bottom line eventually take over?
Hehehe, that's very telling. For Linux to succeed those two need to work together. And corporations want to work together with the OSS community, but the community thinks they lead some sort of epic battle against them.
We need less hippies in OSS and more pragmatical approach at this point. The wild west time of Linux are over.
60GHz signals do not travel through walls or anything else. You can't set up a central transmitter in your house and watch HD movies elsewhere. This is nice technology to 'beam' signals across a street or to prevent wiring mess in an ad-hoc meeting room, but it won't be a real WiFi replacement
Checkout my idea:
We know power lines can carry data. So, you buy little transformer-like devices that take this wireless video signal, transform it and beam the data in the power network.
Then you take another such transformer, and plug it in any socket at all in your house, or house around you even, which beams the data back to 60 GB wireless signal which hits your laptop, tv, console etc.
Achieved benefits:
1. no wires 2. works through walls 3. gigabits of bandwidth for your video and net 4. potentially getting brain cancer and dying young, but that's not important.
Well, what do you think? Can we file a patent here or what?
Or in the words of Mythbuster's Jamie: "This may look like a salami, it may smell like a salami, it may even taste like a salami, but it's rocket fuel."
If it has gotten to the point that ads are expected and feel 'right' in a video game, then the marketeers have won.
ADs are not 'right' in any context, especially when you are paying for the product.
They have won what. They had to put fake ads in the subways anyway to make it look like a real subway, why not put real ads. As long as it's not out of context and not obtrusive, it's ok. Ads make sense in many sports games as well.
Like it or not, ads are part of the pop culture now. If you take them away from places we expect them to be, it WILL feel wrong.
When I played Doom3 there were lots of "ads" inside the game but they were all manufactured from ID and advertised imaginary military agencies, corporations, and "punch the turkey" games (homage to Doom 1/2).
So, even when it's not about money, ads can enhance the experience in certain situations.
Don't be so stubborn. We have some guy up the thread wanting to astroturf buy and return the game multiple times. Then some guy worrying this means online multiplayer will suck.
Knee-jerk reactions happen, but usually a second later I realize I moved my knee despite no actual reason for it. Over here we see knee-jerk reactions raised to a culture on their own, and praised to heaven and back.
Second question: Anyone know how much this kind of live uploading of advertisements would affect online performance?
Online gaming: low traffic, low latency. Advertisements: big latency, big traffic.
They don't step into each other's territory, and you could guess the ads will be cached, and can have lower priority than the multiplayer traffic.
As for the included adware/spyware/drm/rootkits, that has become customary for PC games. Never again would I let a game installer come near my production PC.
I guess that's one reason PC games sell in so low volumes compared to consoles.
Buy it, wait a week or so, and return it. Then buy it somewhere else, wait a week or so, and return it. If just 5000 people were to do this 5 times each, it could destroy the percieved marketability, and it would be attributed to targeting issue. Enough people wasting enough time of enough computer stores, and computer stores would be best off not carrying it.
Two things:
1. Astroturf does not feel like real grass. Hell, it doesn't look like real grass. Don't Astroturf.
2. You forgot something: denial. Hell, it can't be the ads, right? It must be the game is bad, despite all those gamers craving to see the targeted ads.
If he didn't have the annoying tendency to be right all the damn time, I think I might care about his footwear.
You may not, but you'll be surprised how odd certain other people (with power nonetheless) may see his behavior.
It's the world we live in. If you're sexy, you have a better chance at becoming the president of the USA.
I'm not saying Stallman should be sexy, but if he'll be pulling off such tricks, many people who could make a difference will just see him for the hippy he is and dismiss what he has to say and his entire movement.
I, at least, have to do presentations here and there to be moving my business, and realize that if you want people to figure out your message, you don't want to distract them with your odd persona, and follow basic etiquette, unless your odd persona is part of your product. And I'm not sure being barefooted is requirement for being against DRM.
Therein lies another insight into the self-effacing brilliance of RMS. He doesn't need a suit. He's proved his worth by making his vision work, not by using the usual tricks of the trade and flim-flamming with long words, suits and "presence".
Imagine I have a solution to global warming. So we meet to talk about this epic problem, but I have a little deformed third hand sticking out my neck.
You know I may have something important to say, and you know the number of my hands isn't related to it, but you keep staring uneasily at the third arm sticking out my neck, waving at your general direction.
You go home and need to start planning how to implement my solution to global warming, but all you can remember is "what the hack was that thing on his neck?!" and don't remember anything else.
Well, culture is like that, if Stallman wanted people to concentrate on his speech, he'd dress appropriately, even if cheap. I doubt pair of socks and trousers are something excessive to put on.
He's just plain weird, let's face it. Part trying to make us feel pitty about him and donate to his organisation, part "look me, I'm so unconventional, I'll shock you by coming bare footer, boooyaa!"
I don't understand why the site is being taken down. The publisher's demands would be satisfied by removing the scores still under copyright in the EU. As I understand it, the copyright status of these scores is noted, so presumably it wouldn't be a difficult job to identify and remove those just those scores.
Reasons:
1. If they don't act immediately, it could be argued later in court they acted in bad faith delaying taking down the offending materials. The site will be off temporarily until all offending material is removed, and then put back up.
2. The site owner(s) is/are understandably pissed off, and taking the entire site off allows them for better publicity and press coverage. It's a statement of a sort.
I just changed the type of column "content" on my blog from "text" to "mediumtext". I'm ready to give a press conference as to the reason behind my decision to all interested.
should read the story of these two amazing machines. There's a lot that's wrong with NASA but there's so much that's right, too -- and this is proof positive.
I agree wholeheartedly, but most of the "regular" people giving NASA bad rap do it since they are conspiracy freaks. One of my buddies here is such a freak and he constantly keeps bugging me with various suitable entangled plots about how NASA hid a UFO or lied about the rovers or whatever.
The latest thing is that some photo is floating around that apparently makes one of the panels appear is if it has no dust, while the others have. The conspiracy interpretation? Someone on the Mars "set" cleaned *one* of the panels, forgot to clean the other ones, shot it like that, didn't notice only one of the panels is clean, and released the photos like this.
I've not seen the photo but even like that I gave the dude about 10 more likely explanations (the panel was at a different angle, so not reflecting light, so the dust is less visible, or the panel was in a shadow, or behind a part, etc. etc.), but can someone point me to the said photo so I can shut this guy up once and for all.
I like to watch what they're working on, and even shed the occasional tear in astonishment about what humanity has achieved as a whole thanks to them and people like them:P... Ok I'm sentimental like that about science and space exploration...
Talk is abandoned? News to many people I am sure that use it constantly.
Right, many people. Approximately 44 thousand. That's less than 1% of the market compared to ICQ/MSN/Yahoo/AIM. There are over 14 million people that use Windows 98 constantly as of yet too, do you take this as a sign MS is very enthusiastic about their Win98 support?
Google Talk still has audio issue on certain machines (confirmed on two of my machines, where Skype worked great), and a bunch of other bugs, like "100% CPU stalling" bug during long conversations. Guess if Google cared, they'd smooth those up by now.
Look at what Google Talk users do:
Google Talk also has several "hacks" or things you can use to enhance your communicational experience. They include making your words italic and bold. Also, many users have found out a way to log in with multiple logins by changing the target of the shortcut.
Huh? Why should people hack Talk to emulate text formatting and multiple profiles.
> We are trying a couple things differently with this application, and it is still in beta, but...
What of Google's isn't in beta?
They lack direction. Their direction used to be better search, now it's just "more ad clicks in more places". The rest of their portfolio appears truly random to me, which it may very well be, as it consists mostly of "20% off time" projects left in the labs, or as early beta, or late beta.
Looks like the 20% time has side effects. Microsoft has been bashed here regularly for its strategy of entering in all markets it possibly can and observing "what sticks", but now Google is in the same situation, even more so.
Some random Google projects, which were abandoned while stuck in perpetual beta status:
Google Gears (the page say "early beta") Google Video (looks like they recycled some of the tech in YouTube and left the rest stagnate) Google Talk (what happened to this thing? They virtually abandoned it, and there are some known issues still not fixed in it) Google Pack (they did an update some time ago, that rips off the look of Vista gadgets, and seems it staled) Google Accelerator (the ill-received internet accelerator that will cache your password protected pages and share them out). Google Product Search (former Froogle, now seems quite downplayed, and no development is happening in it. Of course, it's "beta") Orkut, Picassa, Blogger, SketchUp: what's going on with those, they just bought them/except Orkut/ and sit on them, no development or updates.
Also I always wondered why they work on various improvements in the Labs, like Google Suggest, only to then never push them on the main site (oddly enough the Google search field in Firefox uses Google Suggest).
His piece is titled: "Leopard's Release Date a Serious Mistake"
But it closes with the line: "did Apple make a serious mistake by delaying Leopard's release until October? I don't think so."
So what does it all mean? To me, it means that "OS Weakly" has nothing of substance to say.
I checked few random articles in OS Weekly and they suffer from a similar problem:
GIMPShop Review: GIMP Made Friendly..... GIMP's Fine, Why Do I Need This? Personally, I completely agree. GIMPShop wouldn't change much of anything about the app.
Wall Street Journal Unfairly Reviews Ubuntu..... Mossberg experienced this when using Ubuntu... this is not an opinion that he expressed here - it's a fact, the applet crashed.
Apple is entering a market (handhelds) that is likely to be a much larger market than laptops/desktops over the next few years. The iPhone stands a good chance of becoming the market leader in a particular segment. OS X will still be (mostly) a niche player. I hope to see adoption of mac's increase - after all, I own one.
I agree with your entire post, and just wanted to mention one of the more often forgot effects of devices like iPhone and iPod: they can complement your Windows PC (hence not as "scary" for PC users) and introduce those users to the idea behind the Apple experience.
I bet iPod has done far more to drive Mac adoption than we realize. This will be even more so with iPhone.
According to an article on OSWeekly.com, Apple missed a big opportunity by not releasing Leopard soon. They could've taken advantage of Vista's losing streak and one upped Microsoft, the author suggests.
OSWeekly sounds as if Leopard is the first OS Apple is about to release. Tiger is for most practical purposes just as good OS as Leopard. Leopard is a gradual improvement.
Plus it only is starting to become obvious in the recent 2-3 months how many problems Vista (still) has. The announcement of XP SP3, the oddly early Vista SP1 in Q1 2008, the extended OEM XP support period, the Vista-to-XP downgrade new policy.
And Leopard is here right for the holidays. I'd say, timing is as good as it could be. Perfect-storm-like good.
OSWeekly is just trolling for visits, and we're suckers for it.
In 20 years, the RIAA will have been completely replaced by a set of publicists. These publicists won't own the copyright to anything--they'll be paid, on salary, to hook the musicians up with venues, hire web designers for band websites, and in some cases find places to record.
They'll have a professional organization, but no lobbyists and no power. They'll be more or less fungible--Home Managers, parallel to Road Managers. Some will even do both.
Unless time started spinning backwards that won't happen. There's always consolidation and incorporation of any business that lasts more than 5-10 years in the industry.
You're right: labels will lose a LOT of their power, similar to how movie studios lost their business with exclusive contracts with actors in the 70-80 period. Also some of the big labels will go away, and some will adapt to the new business model.
Where you're wrong is that those alternatives won't grow and become big companies and have their own lobbies.
The same will happen with the publishers that will replace TV channels like MTV. Look at one emerging publisher: YouTube. Is it some tiny player with no power? No. Even before Google bought them, they had influence since they had a big community going on. And with big community, comes Google, or Microsoft, or Yahoo, and buys them. Consolidation.
Clarification: consolidation is not necessarily bad.
http://www.free-codecs.com/download/Real_Alternative.htm [free-codecs.com] Now I just have to worry about unpatched holes in Windows Media Player!
Actually "Real Alternative" and "QuickTime Alternative" uses ripped off binary libraries straight off the official apps. It's quite likely you're vulnerable as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Unlike Windows XP, which was a significant upgrade, and replaced an OS (98/Me!) that many consumers were unhappy with, people are generally still happy with XP. For the most part, all of the complaints people had with 98/Me were solved by XP.
Interesting analog in the audio/video arena:
MC/VHS is like Windows 98
CD/DVD is like Windows XP
HDDVD/BluRay/DVDA is like Windows Vista
I don't use Vista and wouldn't recommend most people would, at least until hardware catches up, and Vista SP2.
However, lots of FUD has spread about Vista:
If my system is running DRM, it uses more CPU power when I do anything with video. So i use Win2k on my render machines.
First of all DRM takes a toll on your HDMI enabled hardware, and less so on your CPU. You buy more expensive hardware for the extra chip and protection to do the crypting.
But there's no DRM applied to plain video. It's simply not, never was (can't say never will).
Second, rendering video is even less relevant to playback of DRM-ed video. DRM in Vista means absolutely nothing for your rendering machines.
I also like to play games. The less bullshit my computer has to deal with in the way of DRM, non-needed glitz & glow, the better it will run games. So I use Win2k for games, and sometimes run them on my Windows XP MCE laptop.
Again DRM, no DRM is applied from Vista on *games*. DirectX adds new shader capabilities which game producers may opt to use or not use. If they use them it's to make games look better.
Or you'll tell me now you prefer games look same as in the pre-DirectX days.
Essentially, unless you have a 64-bit processor or an older "Hyper-threading" CPU, you will be better off running Windows 2000 than XP or Vista; your system will be able to work better and will give you less problems.
XP is just a minor revision of 2000. Is the skin that makes you feel bad about XP? It can be completely disabled. I run XP and it's disabled. It looks like Windows 2000.
Maybe if you have old processor Windows 2000 is suitable, but Windows 2000 has no proper hyper-threading or multi-core support. XP supports multicore systems properly.
Windows 2000 also doesn't support ClearType, which may or may not be important to you (as a TFT monitor user, it's quite important to me).
either XP nor vista out of the box is more secure than Win2ksp4 running a free copy of Tiny Personal Firewall & Spybot, and every other new "feature" that it has either hurts your performance or cripples fair use.
XP SP2 has a number of security advantages over Win2000. Vista has a number of security advantages over XP (ASLR, Limited Privileges IE mode, User Account Control, Network Access Protection, improved Firewall, Windows Service Hardening, etc.)
This is to be objective. I like being objective you know? It services the discussion better than bias.
But I said above I don't recommend Vista. Why? High hardware requirements, poor driver availability/stability yet, poor software back compat in many cases, worse laptop battery life, and no killer apps/features that can, as of now, outweight the listed issues.
IANAA (I am not an astrophysicist)
Don't you think people the utility of abbreviations is kinda lost when you have to put the full thing in parens immediately following?
Why should I bother. I have access to your bank account in minutes, I just directly wire money overseas and start laundering them.
There's no even time to start stealing "identities" as it's understood in the classical sense.
"Seriously, why let them set the rules?"
Because it's their product? You have choices.
That assumes human beings have infinite solidarity towards other human beings.
It'd be like those "fake eyes" pattern butterflies actually thinking "hey wait, those are not eyes, I can't be cheating it's not fair and dropping their camouflage.
Reality is, most people, at least most smart people weight the pros and cons of going against someone's rules to get better value. Solidarity is there, but it's not paramount.
Do you think corporations have much higher % of legal software licenses because they feel bad for piracy? They do it since they're more vulnerable if they don't buy.
Your average consumer is not so vulnerable to this kind of threat. If pirated Windows works better, he'll try and use it instead.
With such a high level of success and greater corporate participation (on both the consumer and provider fronts) will the spirit of freedom and idealism remain true or will the ever-present corporate bottom line eventually take over?
Hehehe, that's very telling. For Linux to succeed those two need to work together. And corporations want to work together with the OSS community, but the community thinks they lead some sort of epic battle against them.
We need less hippies in OSS and more pragmatical approach at this point. The wild west time of Linux are over.
60GHz signals do not travel through walls or anything else. You can't set up a central transmitter in your house and watch HD movies elsewhere. This is nice technology to 'beam' signals across a street or to prevent wiring mess in an ad-hoc meeting room, but it won't be a real WiFi replacement
Checkout my idea:
We know power lines can carry data. So, you buy little transformer-like devices that take this wireless video signal, transform it and beam the data in the power network.
Then you take another such transformer, and plug it in any socket at all in your house, or house around you even, which beams the data back to 60 GB wireless signal which hits your laptop, tv, console etc.
Achieved benefits:
1. no wires
2. works through walls
3. gigabits of bandwidth for your video and net
4. potentially getting brain cancer and dying young, but that's not important.
Well, what do you think? Can we file a patent here or what?
But of course: it's salami.
Or in the words of Mythbuster's Jamie: "This may look like a salami, it may smell like a salami, it may even taste like a salami, but it's rocket fuel."
If it has gotten to the point that ads are expected and feel 'right' in a video game, then the marketeers have won.
ADs are not 'right' in any context, especially when you are paying for the product.
They have won what. They had to put fake ads in the subways anyway to make it look like a real subway, why not put real ads. As long as it's not out of context and not obtrusive, it's ok. Ads make sense in many sports games as well.
Like it or not, ads are part of the pop culture now. If you take them away from places we expect them to be, it WILL feel wrong.
When I played Doom3 there were lots of "ads" inside the game but they were all manufactured from ID and advertised imaginary military agencies, corporations, and "punch the turkey" games (homage to Doom 1/2).
So, even when it's not about money, ads can enhance the experience in certain situations.
Don't be so stubborn. We have some guy up the thread wanting to astroturf buy and return the game multiple times. Then some guy worrying this means online multiplayer will suck.
Knee-jerk reactions happen, but usually a second later I realize I moved my knee despite no actual reason for it. Over here we see knee-jerk reactions raised to a culture on their own, and praised to heaven and back.
Second question: Anyone know how much this kind of live uploading of advertisements would affect online performance?
Online gaming: low traffic, low latency.
Advertisements: big latency, big traffic.
They don't step into each other's territory, and you could guess the ads will be cached, and can have lower priority than the multiplayer traffic.
As for the included adware/spyware/drm/rootkits, that has become customary for PC games. Never again would I let a game installer come near my production PC.
I guess that's one reason PC games sell in so low volumes compared to consoles.
Buy it, wait a week or so, and return it. Then buy it somewhere else, wait a week or so, and return it. If just 5000 people were to do this 5 times each, it could destroy the percieved marketability, and it would be attributed to targeting issue. Enough people wasting enough time of enough computer stores, and computer stores would be best off not carrying it.
Two things:
1. Astroturf does not feel like real grass. Hell, it doesn't look like real grass. Don't Astroturf.
2. You forgot something: denial. Hell, it can't be the ads, right? It must be the game is bad, despite all those gamers craving to see the targeted ads.
If he didn't have the annoying tendency to be right all the damn time, I think I might care about his footwear.
You may not, but you'll be surprised how odd certain other people (with power nonetheless) may see his behavior.
It's the world we live in. If you're sexy, you have a better chance at becoming the president of the USA.
I'm not saying Stallman should be sexy, but if he'll be pulling off such tricks, many people who could make a difference will just see him for the hippy he is and dismiss what he has to say and his entire movement.
I, at least, have to do presentations here and there to be moving my business, and realize that if you want people to figure out your message, you don't want to distract them with your odd persona, and follow basic etiquette, unless your odd persona is part of your product. And I'm not sure being barefooted is requirement for being against DRM.
Therein lies another insight into the self-effacing brilliance of RMS. He doesn't need a suit. He's proved his worth by making his vision work, not by using the usual tricks of the trade and flim-flamming with long words, suits and "presence".
Imagine I have a solution to global warming. So we meet to talk about this epic problem, but I have a little deformed third hand sticking out my neck.
You know I may have something important to say, and you know the number of my hands isn't related to it, but you keep staring uneasily at the third arm sticking out my neck, waving at your general direction.
You go home and need to start planning how to implement my solution to global warming, but all you can remember is "what the hack was that thing on his neck?!" and don't remember anything else.
Well, culture is like that, if Stallman wanted people to concentrate on his speech, he'd dress appropriately, even if cheap. I doubt pair of socks and trousers are something excessive to put on.
He's just plain weird, let's face it. Part trying to make us feel pitty about him and donate to his organisation, part "look me, I'm so unconventional, I'll shock you by coming bare footer, boooyaa!"
At least, that's all I'd remember.
In the last sentence, I'd change the word "statement" to "free ad" and then we might be closer to the truth.
You think? Hmm, what would be the point... "Come to our site. It's down". "Now you know about our site... which you can't visit".
Dunno.
I don't understand why the site is being taken down. The publisher's demands would be satisfied by removing the scores still under copyright in the EU. As I understand it, the copyright status of these scores is noted, so presumably it wouldn't be a difficult job to identify and remove those just those scores.
Reasons:
1. If they don't act immediately, it could be argued later in court they acted in bad faith delaying taking down the offending materials. The site will be off temporarily until all offending material is removed, and then put back up.
2. The site owner(s) is/are understandably pissed off, and taking the entire site off allows them for better publicity and press coverage. It's a statement of a sort.
I just changed the type of column "content" on my blog from "text" to "mediumtext". I'm ready to give a press conference as to the reason behind my decision to all interested.
should read the story of these two amazing machines. There's a lot that's wrong with NASA but there's so much that's right, too -- and this is proof positive.
:P ... Ok I'm sentimental like that about science and space exploration...
I agree wholeheartedly, but most of the "regular" people giving NASA bad rap do it since they are conspiracy freaks. One of my buddies here is such a freak and he constantly keeps bugging me with various suitable entangled plots about how NASA hid a UFO or lied about the rovers or whatever.
The latest thing is that some photo is floating around that apparently makes one of the panels appear is if it has no dust, while the others have. The conspiracy interpretation? Someone on the Mars "set" cleaned *one* of the panels, forgot to clean the other ones, shot it like that, didn't notice only one of the panels is clean, and released the photos like this.
I've not seen the photo but even like that I gave the dude about 10 more likely explanations (the panel was at a different angle, so not reflecting light, so the dust is less visible, or the panel was in a shadow, or behind a part, etc. etc.), but can someone point me to the said photo so I can shut this guy up once and for all.
BTW, for fans of NASA (and users of RSS videocast player like Miro), this is NASA's excellent high-def videocast: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/rss/podfeed-hd.xml
I like to watch what they're working on, and even shed the occasional tear in astonishment about what humanity has achieved as a whole thanks to them and people like them
Talk is abandoned? News to many people I am sure that use it constantly.
Right, many people. Approximately 44 thousand. That's less than 1% of the market compared to ICQ/MSN/Yahoo/AIM.
There are over 14 million people that use Windows 98 constantly as of yet too, do you take this as a sign MS is very enthusiastic about their Win98 support?
Google Talk still has audio issue on certain machines (confirmed on two of my machines, where Skype worked great), and a bunch of other bugs, like "100% CPU stalling" bug during long conversations. Guess if Google cared, they'd smooth those up by now.
Look at what Google Talk users do:
Google Talk also has several "hacks" or things you can use to enhance your communicational experience. They include making your words italic and bold. Also, many users have found out a way to log in with multiple logins by changing the target of the shortcut.
Huh? Why should people hack Talk to emulate text formatting and multiple profiles.
> We are trying a couple things differently with this application, and it is still in beta, but...
/except Orkut/ and sit on them, no development or updates.
What of Google's isn't in beta?
They lack direction. Their direction used to be better search, now it's just "more ad clicks in more places". The rest of their portfolio appears truly random to me, which it may very well be, as it consists mostly of "20% off time" projects left in the labs, or as early beta, or late beta.
Looks like the 20% time has side effects. Microsoft has been bashed here regularly for its strategy of entering in all markets it possibly can and observing "what sticks", but now Google is in the same situation, even more so.
Some random Google projects, which were abandoned while stuck in perpetual beta status:
Google Gears (the page say "early beta")
Google Video (looks like they recycled some of the tech in YouTube and left the rest stagnate)
Google Talk (what happened to this thing? They virtually abandoned it, and there are some known issues still not fixed in it)
Google Pack (they did an update some time ago, that rips off the look of Vista gadgets, and seems it staled)
Google Accelerator (the ill-received internet accelerator that will cache your password protected pages and share them out).
Google Product Search (former Froogle, now seems quite downplayed, and no development is happening in it. Of course, it's "beta")
Orkut, Picassa, Blogger, SketchUp: what's going on with those, they just bought them
Also I always wondered why they work on various improvements in the Labs, like Google Suggest, only to then never push them on the main site (oddly enough the Google search field in Firefox uses Google Suggest).
I checked few random articles in OS Weekly and they suffer from a similar problem:
Apple is entering a market (handhelds) that is likely to be a much larger market than laptops/desktops over the next few years. The iPhone stands a good chance of becoming the market leader in a particular segment. OS X will still be (mostly) a niche player. I hope to see adoption of mac's increase - after all, I own one.
I agree with your entire post, and just wanted to mention one of the more often forgot effects of devices like iPhone and iPod: they can complement your Windows PC (hence not as "scary" for PC users) and introduce those users to the idea behind the Apple experience.
I bet iPod has done far more to drive Mac adoption than we realize. This will be even more so with iPhone.
According to an article on OSWeekly.com, Apple missed a big opportunity by not releasing Leopard soon. They could've taken advantage of Vista's losing streak and one upped Microsoft, the author suggests.
OSWeekly sounds as if Leopard is the first OS Apple is about to release. Tiger is for most practical purposes just as good OS as Leopard. Leopard is a gradual improvement.
Plus it only is starting to become obvious in the recent 2-3 months how many problems Vista (still) has. The announcement of XP SP3, the oddly early Vista SP1 in Q1 2008, the extended OEM XP support period, the Vista-to-XP downgrade new policy.
And Leopard is here right for the holidays. I'd say, timing is as good as it could be. Perfect-storm-like good.
OSWeekly is just trolling for visits, and we're suckers for it.
I've no particular reason to reply here, but check the other replies.
They're actually insulting, ranting, cussing, since you mentioned Vista isn't vulnerable. Makes me sad of Slashdot, you know?
In 20 years, the RIAA will have been completely replaced by a set of publicists. These publicists won't own the copyright to anything--they'll be paid, on salary, to hook the musicians up with venues, hire web designers for band websites, and in some cases find places to record.
They'll have a professional organization, but no lobbyists and no power. They'll be more or less fungible--Home Managers, parallel to Road Managers. Some will even do both.
Unless time started spinning backwards that won't happen. There's always consolidation and incorporation of any business that lasts more than 5-10 years in the industry.
You're right: labels will lose a LOT of their power, similar to how movie studios lost their business with exclusive contracts with actors in the 70-80 period. Also some of the big labels will go away, and some will adapt to the new business model.
Where you're wrong is that those alternatives won't grow and become big companies and have their own lobbies.
The same will happen with the publishers that will replace TV channels like MTV. Look at one emerging publisher: YouTube. Is it some tiny player with no power? No. Even before Google bought them, they had influence since they had a big community going on. And with big community, comes Google, or Microsoft, or Yahoo, and buys them. Consolidation.
Clarification: consolidation is not necessarily bad.
http://www.free-codecs.com/download/Real_Alternative.htm [free-codecs.com]
Now I just have to worry about unpatched holes in Windows Media Player!
Actually "Real Alternative" and "QuickTime Alternative" uses ripped off binary libraries straight off the official apps. It's quite likely you're vulnerable as well.