I ran the beta 2 and RC1 and RC2, I enjoyed using vista it was fun to use and while my creative driver sucked but the creative promised a complete driver for jan 30th. Since Everything else installed from the box without me doing anything there really wern't any compatibility issues from my point of view. I tried going back to XP. Somehow it wasnt the easy pleasing expearence it had been. I tried switching to Ubunutu but after a few days I had a strange need to hit the next linux enthusaist I met which lead me to putting in my preorder for Vista.
Since getting it on the 23rd of Jan (thank you Overclockers.co.uk) I've gone back to enjoying my PC interface again. February 16th saw the (re)release of drivers for my Creative Audigy and so far my compatibility issues are:
Visual Studio 2003.net's smartphone assembler won't work (2005 is fine even without the service pack)
Sony Erricsons starter code/program for the rok101008 (Bluetooth chip)refuses to install, to be fair the code/program was designed for win98/2000 and crashes in 98, while the driver dies in 2000, in Xp it will lock up the comm/usb port in question. I wasn't really expecting it to work, but its still a pain.
Creative, their driver means WMP won't play DVD audio I have to load PowerDVD XP in XP compatibility mode (set up automatically now) to be able to listen to my DVD's in 5.1
Every game wants to install itself in program files, this is a no no, so you have to delete the "Program Files\" out of all those install wizards.
A 4fps drop in my non frame limited games, In Myst Online: Uru Live I have an identical expearence however there seems to be a loss of 4fps in HL2 and HL2:Episode 1 (according to fraps) Since my frame rate was above 70 already, is still about 70 and my LCD refreshes at 70hz I'm not really fussed.
Vista's seems to be similar to Office 2007, Xp and 2003 both got everything you needed and yet Vista/2007 order them in a way that makes you feel more powerful, seems slightly mre logical and just feels like a good evolution of XP. I'll admit I'm a bit of a "OMG new and shiney PS3/PSP/Vista" person the beta/RC's had given me a few features which I began to use quite heavily which don't exist in XP.
Oh I'm a 4.3 on the Windows Expearence index what are you? (Only microsoft could simply things so non techies could brag as well!)
BTW the rally was actually ran by Gates telling us of the dangerous that Linus *cough* Lucifer had brought to the world and how we needed to support God umm I mean Microsoft to keep his evil threat at bay.
I live in te UK and consider myself an early adopter, when the PSP was announced in the uk I was first in line and still consider it a bargin (even if the whole UMD film side is a joke) but I have seen the Wii's sales, as well as played a Xbox360 while paitently waiting for a PS3.
Why is the PS3 worth twice the price of a Wii?
With many of the PS exclusive games going to Xbox what are Sony doing, atm three of my five favorite series will be available on Xbox and PS3 so what is my incentive to spend almost twice the price on a PS3?
Has Sony learned something from the Wii console?
Why is the PS3 so much more expensive in europe than in the USA and Japan?
Do you think this is turning away prospective buyers like myself? (hint it is why do I have to pay twice the price?)
Are sony aware of the price people are willing to pay for a games console? (from my limited research about £325 seems to be what my mates and I are waiting for)
Is all I have got, if you could make sure that he gets the idea that people in Europe are very annoyed at the pricing difference then I don't really care whats asked, cause at the moment i want a PS3 but am going to simply wait until the price drops to the £200/£300 mark, I think most people think that as well. I really don't care about the 'media centre' aspect of it, if it wants to do that give me a tv card and maybe I'll factor it in.
I asked here because this is a place filled with people who use C#, I was hoping one or two authors/books would be repeated and they have in this thread. There are tonnes of books out there rated excellent so it becomes hard to tell which ones are really good. When I'm a poor student buying a £60 book blindly (my local waterstones doesn't have any C# books) is a bad idea
Why do I ask for a book? I've found having a book as a reference is a great way to learn, when I was first messing around with Visual C++ looking though a book helps me understand everything I am doing. I learnt C just by screwing around with some code and learning how to control a robot arm. I didn't understand C until I attempted a pure C++ project and began learning which commands were C++, which were C and what the difference between them actually was.
As for the MSDN well I have a copy of VS 6/2003.net/2005 using the MSDN help file in any of those usually means I want to punch my PC. I don't get on at all with it, I'm sure its a valuable resource and great for 99% of people out there but not for me.
The UK Government has not been shy about tackling the food industry. Jamie Oliver (a top UK chef) did a TV series were he went to several schools and basically created healthy menus which the dinnerladies had to make on the same budget as the preprocessed rubbish. Basically he showed the UK the crap their kids were eating and the governments had a huge drive to change school dinners. This has had a backlash
I'll use my old school as an example, when I grew up in secondary school there was a coke and chocolate vending machine in the cafeteria as well as the awfull school menu. Because the hamburgers were 2p happy shopper style hamburgers I brought in packed lunch (which was healthy) and would occasionally buy a chocolate bar or drink. Now the governments gone on its food drive the school has been ordered to get rid of both vending machines which have been replaced with a fruit machine, the entire school menu has changed to pasta and other 'healthy' things and packed lunches are basically banned. Kids have lost all choice, now I'm told in that school the sixth formers are making money by running to the local bakery for little kids.
The government should force a choice menu which has healthy food in it but still give people a choice else you will get scenes like we did a while back when mums were buying fish and chips and passing it to their kids because the kids refused to eat broccoli and horse raddish suprise or whatever.
I think that list is a little unfair, Symbian series 60 version 1 software works fine on Symbian Series 60 version 3 it doesn't take much to convert this over to UIQ (admitting i've only run this in simulation) MS Mobile 2002-2003ppc all will run each others software and most 2002 software i have will run happily on 2005. The only time thats going ot be different is when your locking specific features down from the OS's, in the UK no phone carrier I've been with (Tmobile, Orange, O2) locks down any phone feature. The companies do like to modify and stick in their own awfull awfull applications. Orange have taken this so far I don't want their future phones (They build in this really stupid sidebar) most of the O2 and originally Orange applications aren't complicated and could work on multiple versions of CE.
I've always thought a oligopoly were often far worse than monopolies, I remember studying washing powder companies and being amazed that the thirty plus brands I was looking at were owned by three or four companies. At least when theres a monopoly company like Microsoft, British Telecom and the BPI/RIAA you can see them for what they are and the consumer can be informed and petition the government for regulation if its needed
Regulation does work well on oligopolys, look at the UK's Supermarket market, no company is allowed more than a 35% (I think)share of the market, since the market became saturated and none of the big companies can merge or really advance without coming into trouble with the regulatory body, we are seeing those companies diversify and offer other products their size means they don't have to make much in those markets and so its causing a shake up in those markets. Take Tesco's broadband/mobile packages they beat any other ISP for package (None of this Fair Usuage Policy nonsense, good customer service and actually reliable.) Asda have spent millions marketing their 'George' line of clothing, a proper regulated oligopoly market can be quite good for your consumer.
From everything posted on slashdot and what I've read on CNN american telcos are definitly not regulated very well, perhaps you should be taking notes from OfCom and other telephone regulators?
Didn't try Fedora, I'm a linux newbie everyone tells me that Ubuntu was the Human version of Linux so I tried that last. I had to reinstall five times before I got it working properly (on a brand new high spec machine) things like the fdisk application in the setup don't explain the options. Sure Linux people often like options but there is something to the Windows setup with its two options delete partition and create partition.
Linux does boot up and go but most users will be looking to play games and use things like beryll, getting beryll on, installing graphics drivers, trying like hell to get WINE running, hearing about mounting drives to view NTFS partitions, having no WMP replacement without finding one, the lack of clarity in the control panel.
Sure in some ways setting up Linux can be the easiest thing going but setting up linux with the aim of getting the same functionality that you do from your windows machine prooved impossible for me let alone having a true windows replacement.
Linux in my expearence is harder to install and get running, its one of the areas that really needs working on (when I have free time I might compile a list from a newbie perspective to the mainatiners and even try to improve it myself) While you can produce similar quality documents in writer compared to word I still think the GUI looks like word 6. Pretty is important and money should be spent on making it less ugly (Mac OSX and Vista sell largely to consumers because their pretty (there are other reasons as well.))
Final Fantasy takes years to produce, to lessen the chance that the games outdated when it comes out they spend 70% on art, 20% on game design and 10% on engineering. There was mention that they built tools to output their 'art' through a PS2 onto a TV to get a true representation of how it will look. Lots of comments about how much FFXII sucked, suggesting this business plan is a bad idea.
There i saved you the hassle of reading the article
Your views a bit warped I think, teaching english is important, just as making sure they have a knowledge of basic geography and IT. But the problem here is simple the best teachers are ones with a passion for a subject, the ones who really love a subject usually take advanced degrees in it. That doesn't mean all of those people will be excellent teachers but it does mean that when a student asks "why" the teacher can answer. I've always hated maths in my first year of University I came accross a properly qualified lecturer with a passion for the subject I now actually enjoy maths. I fell in love with electrical engineering because my teacher for GCSE was a MEng Electrical Engineer who knew a hell of a lot. I'm not saying a degree makes you qualifed but I've found that lecturers and teachers with them do tend to be better.
Now I have no idea what job a socialogy degree nets you (niether do many of my lady friends doing such a degree) the only people I know doing english degree either do them because they have nothing better to do or because they want to move into teaching. People doing an engineering degree, a science degree and maths degrees do them mostly because they love the subject and secondly because the jobs out there offer really good pay, most engineering starting jobs I've seen start at £20k and go upto £27k, within ten years its not uncommon for that pay to increase to £40k. I do have several friends and it seems that the best wage you will get out of teaching primary and secondary schools is about £25k, most start at £17k and can be quite often lower. So I have to do an extra year at univeristy to get the teaching qualifcation which is so placement heavy I won't be able to hold down a earning job during it, I get to deal often with a bunch of horrible kids all for far less money? Sure there is going to be pay envy but when an english degree means a relativily good job which pays well I'd expect that departments pay to go up. If no one wants the job then you must provide incentive for them, pay increases and other benifits would do that.
In short when you have a chronic shortage of qualified people in a market and you want to attract them you won't achieve this by offering them far less pay, for increased responsibility and more hassle. Oh I'm not insulting socialogy,english,pyschology and the other 'humanties' disciplines, its just from a university student perspective alot of people are doing those degrees and when your beating candidates off with a stick you should be naming the price. having a standardised wage doesn't make sense its only going to cause shortages to get worse, when there are more maths/science teachers around the real wage could probably be reduced.
To be honest I think the sheer number of adds has made me atleast immune to adverts but you notice when they aren't there. In a stargate sg1 they once wore northern rock (i forget the proper name) jackets as it was cold. But because the company hadn't paid for advertising the logo was covered over. that entire episode was ruined for me as I spent most of it staring at the missing logo. The idea of walking into KFC instead of clucking bell is interesting to me, those type of adverts are applicable to every game but they do add to the immersiveness.
I'll cite an example in Myst Online: Uru live beta alot of people mentioned the idea of adverts in game, many many people spoke out against it, however Cyan did make several 'advert' tshirts (to do with turner/gametap) in the beta the most sucessfull T Shirt (the t shirt everyone was wearing in game) was a T Shirt which advertised 'Space Ghost'. There were twenty t shirt designs we could choose from and most of us wanted space ghost (I didn't know what space ghost was until someone in game explained it to me) I think the advert T Shirts have been removed from the final game to make room for other in game designs but i would still happily wear that space ghost one.
I think the point here is correct advertising and proper product placement do help add to realisim if your going for that kinda thing. I've seen american TV and that is niether personnally I dont see how americans put up with it, to see what I mean I'd recommed trying to watch a channel 4, ITV program (UK).
My dismissal is simple, The Wii is a slightly upgraded Gamecube from what I have read you can use the gamecube development packs to make games for it. The one real difference I see is the 'Wiimote' it wasn't realised for the gamecube but for the Wii. A new controller for gamecube would not have grabbed headlines. The device itself is much like the buzz,singstar,eyetoy,guitar hereo controllers in that it grabs peoples attention and they want to pick it up. They enjoy using the controller the game itself is secondary this applies to all the previous controllers as well. I've used the Wiimote and I don't see it as a 'revolutionary new way to play'I see it as nice controller that kinda works with Wii Sports and Zelda but does make them much much easier to play. Within Minutes I was getting strikes with theh controller. When a game really requires a new controller they are starting to be made If I had a choice between a Wiimote and a standard gun accessory I'll go for the gun accessory it does the job better and most of the time these controllers come included in the price of the game (Buzz off with controller is £30 cheaper than a normal ps2 game) To win on a console your games should do the talking, PS2 currently has the monopoly for me and the third generation looks to be spreading this to anouther console. The Wii so far has sold itself pretty much soley on its controller Wii sports isn't on the adverts I see in town the Wiimote is.
The parent sounds alot like a shill (lots marketing speak) but for the most part I do agree with the parent my PC has not been 'shut down' for two weeks it just goes in and out of hibernation mode quite happily. Xp wouldn't let it hibernate, so this 'new' function is great for me. The desktop backgrounds cause eyestrain? Are you just grasping at straws? Apart from getting the light Auras and the black and white photos with vista most of the wallpapers are pretty similar to the older XP ones, perhaps you want a plain green background like 95?
Yes Ribbons are different, as are the placing of some files but if you ignore what XP has taught you and try to look objectivily at some of the changes, then you'll see they make sense. I haven't seen the menu issue your talking about or the explorer window name bug you discuss so I can't comment there. Things like the Start Bar, Ribbons and IE7 do take a little getting used to but, I've found after a week something clicked and I've found myself really liking all of those things and being quicker at what I'm doing and Ribbons have made me a more 'powerfull'* user.
I really am getting tired of poor M$ FUD, there are problems in vista like the network setup is more complicated, the UAC isn't inteligent enough and the fact that video/audio drivers have to support a DRM layer, oh and the MS Word 2007 Equation editor is a pain in the butt to use when compared to Word 2003's. Its like people aren't even trying anymore and just attacking MS for the first thing they see thats different "OMG theres this folder on the start menu with the word games on it! They stole that from [insert obscure OS of choice]"
*I loathe terms like 'power user' normally but ribbons have lead to me finding features in MS Office that have been there for years and actually improved the look of my university work differentiated it from the masses and taken less time to do!
If your looking for my two cents (admittedly as a Sony Fan boy) reading everything I've come to the following conclusions.
Nintendo Wii is a gimmick, its really well put together but has no staying power, games like Buzz and Singstar are great games on the PS2 but you don't play them often, the entire Wii game list so far seems to be games like that. It is massivily underpowered but sells itself on the idea of the Wiimote, which everyone thinks is brilliant. I think the console can be best summed up this way: My dad and my little sister have both seen the Wii in action and want one, we have a PS2 hooked up to the tv downstairs and they both play Colin Mcrae rally, GTA SA, Tekken, regulary. When I asked them if they would play Wii Sports/Zelda regulary and get rid of the PS2 they both admitted no. This is an example of a more serious game dev getting fed up that Nintendo don't seem to have done much other than marketing for the Wii
The Xbox360 is a nice idea but personnally after looking at the games library and then looking at my PC library there is nothing it can offer me that my PC can't already provide. I'm currently building a XP MCE machine capable of running all the XBox360/PC games that I like and all I'm missing is the cool white box of the 360. Then again I do know people who love the exclusive library so its a question of your gaming tastes. I'm actually quite impressed with the 360 as a unit, just lacks any games for me to get one.
Personnally I'm looking at the PS3 european realise and I can see four games I quite want, its the most powerfull of the three but, that doesn't mean much, it has blue ray (but then I only have a standard TV) and sony look like they've understood what people are after and that singstar, guitar hero and Buzz are their way into the market that Nintendo is after. The singstar online thing does show they've thought about it as well(its actually something I can see my mum and little sisters using.) The Playstation home thing is an interesting idea but not something that would sell the console to me. But is costs £425!
I'll use my O2 XDA Mini S as an example here its a small phone as you can see it doesn't rival this machine in specs, far from it but it like many others do a good job of working on the go. Most of the current brand of PPC's all use Word Mobile, support pop3,imap,hotmail and pocket explorer. It helps me write reports, make spreadsheets on the fly when I need to but the keyboard (very similar to the one in TFA) isn't good for long term work, I don't mind taking the occasional notes in class on it but if I had a choice between my laptop and it, I'd want my laptop. These range of PPC's (all networks do their own versions) already allow a person to do much of what this device wants, I even think that WM5 does it really really well. There also free on the £30 tariffs, and usually less than £100 on lower tariffs, this is £1000 and doesn't get you all those free minutes or texts.
When I want to do real work I want a mouse, a keypad that lets me use all my fingers and a 12"+ screen that why I don't think PPC's will be moving on much further, screen size has become a growing limitation with them. Tablet Pc's fill the void between PPC's and Laptops and we see these arent particulary popular
This is just an apple/nintendo fan boy, asking someone about apple/nintendo products, "what do you think of the Itunes music interface and why aren't games like that?"
As far as I can tell the article had little to do with the/. summary. We got to hear about the 'amazing iPhone' and its hype, something called Mii and how great that was. The only interesting piece of information was a mention of a keynote by Phill Harrison which fills the person with 'tremendous confidence in the platform' aparently because of that keynotes content. Oh and the nintendo guy will also be speaking for the first time in eight years.
Re:if wasn't this format, it would have been anoth
on
How MP3 Was Born
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This is the second time I've heard of FLAC and I still don't know what it is and how it differ's from MP3. MP3 did well because it was small and one of the first on the seen that almost everything seemed to support. Its the interoperability, size and quality that are important. I can't hear the difference between a 192kbs MP3 and a audio CD most people can't, using earphones I can't hear a difference between 128kbs and a audio CD (I've found this to be fifty/fifty) and there is your problem. Early on you could get a lot of tracks on an MP3 player with 'good enough' quality and with 2gb,20gb MP3 players being around most people are tempted to encode them to 192kbs and they still got hundreds of songs on their device. FLAC, Ogg and WMA may offer substantial benifits (I know WMA offers a higher rate of compression for the same quality) but many MP3 players don't support those formats, so why bother storing your music in them?
Umm I'm confused once the mac version of office starts slipping in compatibility with the windows version people would choose Mac's over windows. Isn't that illogical? If companies are using office with normal PC's (a mac is a pc dammit!) alongside mac's with office and find that to be a very important application for them as soon as the mac version of office loses compatibility as long as there isn't a substantial reason for needing those Mac's (some other application) the companies going to switch back to windows. Be logical for a moment
Company A has a art department who prefer Mac's and do lotsa photoshop work but use Office to talk with rest of the company enviroment. Mac's cost a lot of money but its made back in the improved morale of your workers. Their version of office isn't functioning in line with the rest of the company's pc. Dell is selling you PC's at £300 a go which do exactly what you need with minor alterations, Mac requires £500 a computer (assuming a mini) plus the retraining cost for all the staff. If you have those problems I can see IT departments installing boot camp and purchasing windows photoshop licensing, not the other way around.
After reading that all I can see if the guy evading the question, flat out denying truths, agreeing with them in limited fashions, constantly playing dumb. His investigation methods are borderline incompetent, after reading that huge PDF I could only say he should not be allowed to be a whitness in any case I mean I'm a third year computer engineering student most of my course emphasis has been on networking and hardware rather than this sort of thing but I can see huge holes in his logic.
1.Doesn't verify his sources Beckermans point about "are mediasomethigns and verizons clock synchronised" is a good one espeacially when you consider his point about the nature of IP address's, at the very least he should have requested the lease time of that IP (so when did the subscriber start using the IP and for how long) to verify that the information had a chance of being correct.
2.No set method, the lack of reports and the fact he never made print outs suggests he doesn't have a set method of investigating, which personnally would make me question his investigation techniques this results in a whole list of problems:
2a.means no evidence supporting the defendent was kept, in effect his not impartial and also hurts the defense
2b.suggests he makes it up as he goes along, a "what seems a good idea at the time", as you can clearly see he's missed out on some issues which are important, like confirming the MAC address of the machine and its method of connecting to the internet.
3.Deliberate attempts to twist what hes saying or not sticking to the question an example would be towards the end where he starts talking about IPV4 and finishs with IPV6. I don't know how either works exactly but he should have talked about both seperatly, the use of both at once means he could be dilibertly hiding stuff, when was IPV6 rolled out anyways? Anouther example would be his linking IP address's directly to a PC, no matter how many times Beckerman tried to get him to admit that when accessed through a router the IP address given to the outside world is the routers not the individual PC's.
4.Lack of actual investigation, now I'm not sure what he was exactly hired to do but by the looks of it RIAA hired him to prove and be a whitness to say that a person used Kaza to download and share music. Hes not done that, hes investigated the drive he was sent found no traces of Kaza on it, or any MP3's (I think he indirectly said this) rather than investigate possible explanations for this, for example did the person own two pc's, did they connect to the internet through a router, could this router have been compromised (perhaps unsecured), perhaps then look for security vulnerabilities to see if it was a zombie machine, or for other security problems. Then if he couldn't prove any of that attempt to verify that mediashares information was correct, check it and check verizons and then attempt to co-oberate that information somehow, for example attempt to obtain the MAC address from the hard drive and from mediashares packet information in otherwords to link them up. Otherwise all he can actually claim is that "The pc in question when inspected did not have the Kazaa program on it at any time, nor does it appeared to have or have had the media files that mediasomething accuse the computer of having" His conclusions from his investigation lack any form of imparitality and it appears that he was unwilling to give any real unbiased opinion.
personnaly after reading that disposition I would seriously call into credibility as a expert or even as a whitness.
I'm sure better people than I could take apart his disposition its 3am here I'm tired but those are the things that come to my mind at least
Actually its one of those weirds things I can identify with, my University (university of Plymouth in the UK) runs a modified version of exchange and every single student gets a email account, all the lecture stuffs put on there as well. Its a great system, but it does take less time to turn on outlook 2003 and download a message than it does to open ie goto the site and then read your message, the other upside is you can set small devices like your WM5 phone/PDA for the IMAP server and get emails that way (much faster than stupid pocket explorer.)
Mostly its because while our exchange email interface is very close to outlook 2003 in appearence its far more clunky and has a ton of features you can't turn off which annoy me. Having seen Windows Live Mail beta (I really really don't want my hotmail account turning into something like this.) Lastly most students have multiple email accounts accessing them all from one client be it thunderbird to outlook is a lot easier than visiting 10 different web based emails.
These products are no longer supported by microsoft, I believe Microsoft will support Windows 2000 for a price. You can't think that microsoft will support a product forever for free, I mean could you name me one company that does. This isn't much of a story and only a rather bad attempt at spreading FUD. Microsoft stops free support for seven year old product, new american law requires change to get the correct time to display. Microsoft sees a chance for money, makes a patch then sells patch for a profit.
I also think the price might be a little higher than necessary to try and move people onto XP or Vista, think about it for $4000 you can get a patch for all your systems. If you only have one or two Windows 2000 or Outlook 2000 systems then you could probably upgrade them for less than the cost of the patch (microsoft gets additional revenue) if you have a large number of machines using outlook 2000 or windows 2000 then the cost per machine for the patch is probably a few dollars and so worth it as it maintains your legacy systems despite unexpected changes (in this case the alteration of DST.) In that case you win as you don't have to either spend ages getting the network sorted out for DST change, pay to upgrade your infrastructure and microsoft gets some extra revenue for providing a service.
Really I've found the media centre to be identical to the one in Windows XP Media Centre 2005 but with a slightly different skin and a few extra menus which make sense (even they they are only in the TV menu.)
try playing a game, or doing something else, I have a system with 2gb of ram, running nothing but Windows Messenger I use 1.02GB of ram at idle. The weird thing is if I open HL2 I'm only using 1.14gb of ram, right now I have a ton of applications open and am only using 1.09gb. Vista's memory allocation is quite a bit superior to XP's I think in part its because so much is loaded into memory that most applications don't need to load much and so load much faster. Oh and some other ancedotal evidence
Until Uru (predessor to Myst Online: Uru Live) could use upto 1.5gb of memory before refusing to load anything else. On this system with XP That meant I was using 1.83gb of Ram, running it on Vista first I was only using 1.89gb of ram. Its something that has been annoying me for sometime just how does an OS with a much larger memory requirement not use that much more memory for gaming than Xp?
Its not very hard, the EU is the European Union, basically it is a framework in which member countries can co-operate. You have the European parliment, this is pretty much what it says on the tin. I vote in a MP he/she goes and tries to propose laws and they debate/watchover about European Union institutions. You have the European Commission, this is basically a watchdog. If the European Parliment makes a law for example all crash helmet safety standards must conform to the EU safety standard then if a country doesn't do this then they are the people who take said country to task. Sometimes this is a good thing. In the above example I believe the crash helmet standard rose to meet the EU standard, in others bad as the UK was forced to lower its safety standard. If you don't follow the law the EU commision will refer you to the Court of Justice where you country (or company) can be fined and forced to do certain things. There are other branches like the European Ombudsman and the council of ministers but we will forget these for now.
In many ways some of the moves made by the EU are for turning it into a federation of countries, mostly I don't object to the EU (excusing the CAP France give me my money back!) I wouldn't be surprised if we bagan to see more and more challenges against Germany and France who were the strongest politcal forces in it. Since the expansion of the EU and all those lovely countries the UK got buddy buddy with things have started to swing from 'old europe' to 'new europe'. The EU does a lot of the member countries alot of good (except the stupid CAP) This is nothing new, and nothing to get alarmed over, the Euro was something to worry about, not this.
Your working on the assumption that everyone is a theif. Your not actually thinking about how people think.I don't pirate music, I even used the Itune Music store when it came out, but after a week I realised that none of the song I had purchased were playable on anything but my PC. I switched to the great WMP's MSN store and playsforsure and started getting flaky playing (believe it or not it would only play sometimes on WMP9 but everytime on my sync'd device.) After two bad expearences I gave up on online music, it wasn't cheaper (we're talking £7.99 an album when I could buy it for £9.97) it gave me less choice and generally put me off. So I went back to my old habits of simply waiting until a album fell from popular interest or looking out for lesser known artists before they were big and getting the albums on the cheap.
The first music store which can offer me music without DRM and actually be cheaper than retail stores (ITMS has been more expensive in some cases) will have my business I like owning legitmate copies of disks most people do, but most people don't like to feel like their being ripped off. When a DVD first comes out it can be as much as £17.99 5 months later that samew dvd is £4.99. Music is much the same, so people pirate.
If filesharering and piracy is so prolific perhaps this suggests that the price of music/films doesn't match the price the demand (consumer) expects to pay. The fact that no music/film company adjusts their pricing to take advantage of this simply screams of price fixing. There will always be some priacy as there is always a blackmarket for any good for any other service, but give consumers the product/service they want at a price they are happy paying (competitiveness always helps here) you'll never stop all piracy its an impossible goal. My idea is based on the principle of "This is how the world works" the nice music companies seem to be working on the principle of "this is how the world should be"
Slashdot Mirror
My motivations?
I ran the beta 2 and RC1 and RC2, I enjoyed using vista it was fun to use and while my creative driver sucked but the creative promised a complete driver for jan 30th. Since Everything else installed from the box without me doing anything there really wern't any compatibility issues from my point of view. I tried going back to XP. Somehow it wasnt the easy pleasing expearence it had been. I tried switching to Ubunutu but after a few days I had a strange need to hit the next linux enthusaist I met which lead me to putting in my preorder for Vista.
Since getting it on the 23rd of Jan (thank you Overclockers.co.uk) I've gone back to enjoying my PC interface again. February 16th saw the (re)release of drivers for my Creative Audigy and so far my compatibility issues are:
Visual Studio 2003.net's smartphone assembler won't work (2005 is fine even without the service pack)
Sony Erricsons starter code/program for the rok101008 (Bluetooth chip)refuses to install, to be fair the code/program was designed for win98/2000 and crashes in 98, while the driver dies in 2000, in Xp it will lock up the comm/usb port in question. I wasn't really expecting it to work, but its still a pain.
Creative, their driver means WMP won't play DVD audio I have to load PowerDVD XP in XP compatibility mode (set up automatically now) to be able to listen to my DVD's in 5.1
Every game wants to install itself in program files, this is a no no, so you have to delete the "Program Files\" out of all those install wizards.
A 4fps drop in my non frame limited games, In Myst Online: Uru Live I have an identical expearence however there seems to be a loss of 4fps in HL2 and HL2:Episode 1 (according to fraps) Since my frame rate was above 70 already, is still about 70 and my LCD refreshes at 70hz I'm not really fussed.
Vista's seems to be similar to Office 2007, Xp and 2003 both got everything you needed and yet Vista/2007 order them in a way that makes you feel more powerful, seems slightly mre logical and just feels like a good evolution of XP. I'll admit I'm a bit of a "OMG new and shiney PS3/PSP/Vista" person the beta/RC's had given me a few features which I began to use quite heavily which don't exist in XP.
Oh I'm a 4.3 on the Windows Expearence index what are you? (Only microsoft could simply things so non techies could brag as well!)
BTW the rally was actually ran by Gates telling us of the dangerous that Linus *cough* Lucifer had brought to the world and how we needed to support God umm I mean Microsoft to keep his evil threat at bay.
I live in te UK and consider myself an early adopter, when the PSP was announced in the uk I was first in line and still consider it a bargin (even if the whole UMD film side is a joke) but I have seen the Wii's sales, as well as played a Xbox360 while paitently waiting for a PS3.
Why is the PS3 worth twice the price of a Wii?
With many of the PS exclusive games going to Xbox what are Sony doing, atm three of my five favorite series will be available on Xbox and PS3 so what is my incentive to spend almost twice the price on a PS3?
Has Sony learned something from the Wii console?
Why is the PS3 so much more expensive in europe than in the USA and Japan?
Do you think this is turning away prospective buyers like myself? (hint it is why do I have to pay twice the price?)
Are sony aware of the price people are willing to pay for a games console? (from my limited research about £325 seems to be what my mates and I are waiting for)
Is all I have got, if you could make sure that he gets the idea that people in Europe are very annoyed at the pricing difference then I don't really care whats asked, cause at the moment i want a PS3 but am going to simply wait until the price drops to the £200/£300 mark, I think most people think that as well. I really don't care about the 'media centre' aspect of it, if it wants to do that give me a tv card and maybe I'll factor it in.
I asked here because this is a place filled with people who use C#, I was hoping one or two authors/books would be repeated and they have in this thread. There are tonnes of books out there rated excellent so it becomes hard to tell which ones are really good. When I'm a poor student buying a £60 book blindly (my local waterstones doesn't have any C# books) is a bad idea
Why do I ask for a book? I've found having a book as a reference is a great way to learn, when I was first messing around with Visual C++ looking though a book helps me understand everything I am doing. I learnt C just by screwing around with some code and learning how to control a robot arm. I didn't understand C until I attempted a pure C++ project and began learning which commands were C++, which were C and what the difference between them actually was.
As for the MSDN well I have a copy of VS 6/2003.net/2005 using the MSDN help file in any of those usually means I want to punch my PC. I don't get on at all with it, I'm sure its a valuable resource and great for 99% of people out there but not for me.
The UK Government has not been shy about tackling the food industry. Jamie Oliver (a top UK chef) did a TV series were he went to several schools and basically created healthy menus which the dinnerladies had to make on the same budget as the preprocessed rubbish. Basically he showed the UK the crap their kids were eating and the governments had a huge drive to change school dinners. This has had a backlash
I'll use my old school as an example, when I grew up in secondary school there was a coke and chocolate vending machine in the cafeteria as well as the awfull school menu. Because the hamburgers were 2p happy shopper style hamburgers I brought in packed lunch (which was healthy) and would occasionally buy a chocolate bar or drink. Now the governments gone on its food drive the school has been ordered to get rid of both vending machines which have been replaced with a fruit machine, the entire school menu has changed to pasta and other 'healthy' things and packed lunches are basically banned. Kids have lost all choice, now I'm told in that school the sixth formers are making money by running to the local bakery for little kids.
The government should force a choice menu which has healthy food in it but still give people a choice else you will get scenes like we did a while back when mums were buying fish and chips and passing it to their kids because the kids refused to eat broccoli and horse raddish suprise or whatever.
I think that list is a little unfair, Symbian series 60 version 1 software works fine on Symbian Series 60 version 3 it doesn't take much to convert this over to UIQ (admitting i've only run this in simulation) MS Mobile 2002-2003ppc all will run each others software and most 2002 software i have will run happily on 2005. The only time thats going ot be different is when your locking specific features down from the OS's, in the UK no phone carrier I've been with (Tmobile, Orange, O2) locks down any phone feature. The companies do like to modify and stick in their own awfull awfull applications. Orange have taken this so far I don't want their future phones (They build in this really stupid sidebar) most of the O2 and originally Orange applications aren't complicated and could work on multiple versions of CE.
I've always thought a oligopoly were often far worse than monopolies, I remember studying washing powder companies and being amazed that the thirty plus brands I was looking at were owned by three or four companies. At least when theres a monopoly company like Microsoft, British Telecom and the BPI/RIAA you can see them for what they are and the consumer can be informed and petition the government for regulation if its needed
Regulation does work well on oligopolys, look at the UK's Supermarket market, no company is allowed more than a 35% (I think)share of the market, since the market became saturated and none of the big companies can merge or really advance without coming into trouble with the regulatory body, we are seeing those companies diversify and offer other products their size means they don't have to make much in those markets and so its causing a shake up in those markets. Take Tesco's broadband/mobile packages they beat any other ISP for package (None of this Fair Usuage Policy nonsense, good customer service and actually reliable.) Asda have spent millions marketing their 'George' line of clothing, a proper regulated oligopoly market can be quite good for your consumer.
From everything posted on slashdot and what I've read on CNN american telcos are definitly not regulated very well, perhaps you should be taking notes from OfCom and other telephone regulators?
Didn't try Fedora, I'm a linux newbie everyone tells me that Ubuntu was the Human version of Linux so I tried that last. I had to reinstall five times before I got it working properly (on a brand new high spec machine) things like the fdisk application in the setup don't explain the options. Sure Linux people often like options but there is something to the Windows setup with its two options delete partition and create partition.
Linux does boot up and go but most users will be looking to play games and use things like beryll, getting beryll on, installing graphics drivers, trying like hell to get WINE running, hearing about mounting drives to view NTFS partitions, having no WMP replacement without finding one, the lack of clarity in the control panel.
Sure in some ways setting up Linux can be the easiest thing going but setting up linux with the aim of getting the same functionality that you do from your windows machine prooved impossible for me let alone having a true windows replacement.
Linux in my expearence is harder to install and get running, its one of the areas that really needs working on (when I have free time I might compile a list from a newbie perspective to the mainatiners and even try to improve it myself) While you can produce similar quality documents in writer compared to word I still think the GUI looks like word 6. Pretty is important and money should be spent on making it less ugly (Mac OSX and Vista sell largely to consumers because their pretty (there are other reasons as well.))
Final Fantasy takes years to produce, to lessen the chance that the games outdated when it comes out they spend 70% on art, 20% on game design and 10% on engineering. There was mention that they built tools to output their 'art' through a PS2 onto a TV to get a true representation of how it will look. Lots of comments about how much FFXII sucked, suggesting this business plan is a bad idea.
There i saved you the hassle of reading the article
Your views a bit warped I think, teaching english is important, just as making sure they have a knowledge of basic geography and IT. But the problem here is simple the best teachers are ones with a passion for a subject, the ones who really love a subject usually take advanced degrees in it. That doesn't mean all of those people will be excellent teachers but it does mean that when a student asks "why" the teacher can answer. I've always hated maths in my first year of University I came accross a properly qualified lecturer with a passion for the subject I now actually enjoy maths. I fell in love with electrical engineering because my teacher for GCSE was a MEng Electrical Engineer who knew a hell of a lot. I'm not saying a degree makes you qualifed but I've found that lecturers and teachers with them do tend to be better.
Now I have no idea what job a socialogy degree nets you (niether do many of my lady friends doing such a degree) the only people I know doing english degree either do them because they have nothing better to do or because they want to move into teaching. People doing an engineering degree, a science degree and maths degrees do them mostly because they love the subject and secondly because the jobs out there offer really good pay, most engineering starting jobs I've seen start at £20k and go upto £27k, within ten years its not uncommon for that pay to increase to £40k. I do have several friends and it seems that the best wage you will get out of teaching primary and secondary schools is about £25k, most start at £17k and can be quite often lower. So I have to do an extra year at univeristy to get the teaching qualifcation which is so placement heavy I won't be able to hold down a earning job during it, I get to deal often with a bunch of horrible kids all for far less money? Sure there is going to be pay envy but when an english degree means a relativily good job which pays well I'd expect that departments pay to go up. If no one wants the job then you must provide incentive for them, pay increases and other benifits would do that.
In short when you have a chronic shortage of qualified people in a market and you want to attract them you won't achieve this by offering them far less pay, for increased responsibility and more hassle. Oh I'm not insulting socialogy,english,pyschology and the other 'humanties' disciplines, its just from a university student perspective alot of people are doing those degrees and when your beating candidates off with a stick you should be naming the price. having a standardised wage doesn't make sense its only going to cause shortages to get worse, when there are more maths/science teachers around the real wage could probably be reduced.
To be honest I think the sheer number of adds has made me atleast immune to adverts but you notice when they aren't there. In a stargate sg1 they once wore northern rock (i forget the proper name) jackets as it was cold. But because the company hadn't paid for advertising the logo was covered over. that entire episode was ruined for me as I spent most of it staring at the missing logo. The idea of walking into KFC instead of clucking bell is interesting to me, those type of adverts are applicable to every game but they do add to the immersiveness.
I'll cite an example in Myst Online: Uru live beta alot of people mentioned the idea of adverts in game, many many people spoke out against it, however Cyan did make several 'advert' tshirts (to do with turner/gametap) in the beta the most sucessfull T Shirt (the t shirt everyone was wearing in game) was a T Shirt which advertised 'Space Ghost'. There were twenty t shirt designs we could choose from and most of us wanted space ghost (I didn't know what space ghost was until someone in game explained it to me) I think the advert T Shirts have been removed from the final game to make room for other in game designs but i would still happily wear that space ghost one.
I think the point here is correct advertising and proper product placement do help add to realisim if your going for that kinda thing. I've seen american TV and that is niether personnally I dont see how americans put up with it, to see what I mean I'd recommed trying to watch a channel 4, ITV program (UK).
My dismissal is simple, The Wii is a slightly upgraded Gamecube from what I have read you can use the gamecube development packs to make games for it. The one real difference I see is the 'Wiimote' it wasn't realised for the gamecube but for the Wii. A new controller for gamecube would not have grabbed headlines. The device itself is much like the buzz,singstar,eyetoy,guitar hereo controllers in that it grabs peoples attention and they want to pick it up. They enjoy using the controller the game itself is secondary this applies to all the previous controllers as well. I've used the Wiimote and I don't see it as a 'revolutionary new way to play'I see it as nice controller that kinda works with Wii Sports and Zelda but does make them much much easier to play. Within Minutes I was getting strikes with theh controller. When a game really requires a new controller they are starting to be made If I had a choice between a Wiimote and a standard gun accessory I'll go for the gun accessory it does the job better and most of the time these controllers come included in the price of the game (Buzz off with controller is £30 cheaper than a normal ps2 game) To win on a console your games should do the talking, PS2 currently has the monopoly for me and the third generation looks to be spreading this to anouther console. The Wii so far has sold itself pretty much soley on its controller Wii sports isn't on the adverts I see in town the Wiimote is.
The parent sounds alot like a shill (lots marketing speak) but for the most part I do agree with the parent my PC has not been 'shut down' for two weeks it just goes in and out of hibernation mode quite happily. Xp wouldn't let it hibernate, so this 'new' function is great for me. The desktop backgrounds cause eyestrain? Are you just grasping at straws? Apart from getting the light Auras and the black and white photos with vista most of the wallpapers are pretty similar to the older XP ones, perhaps you want a plain green background like 95?
Yes Ribbons are different, as are the placing of some files but if you ignore what XP has taught you and try to look objectivily at some of the changes, then you'll see they make sense. I haven't seen the menu issue your talking about or the explorer window name bug you discuss so I can't comment there. Things like the Start Bar, Ribbons and IE7 do take a little getting used to but, I've found after a week something clicked and I've found myself really liking all of those things and being quicker at what I'm doing and Ribbons have made me a more 'powerfull'* user.
I really am getting tired of poor M$ FUD, there are problems in vista like the network setup is more complicated, the UAC isn't inteligent enough and the fact that video/audio drivers have to support a DRM layer, oh and the MS Word 2007 Equation editor is a pain in the butt to use when compared to Word 2003's. Its like people aren't even trying anymore and just attacking MS for the first thing they see thats different "OMG theres this folder on the start menu with the word games on it! They stole that from [insert obscure OS of choice]"
*I loathe terms like 'power user' normally but ribbons have lead to me finding features in MS Office that have been there for years and actually improved the look of my university work differentiated it from the masses and taken less time to do!
If your looking for my two cents (admittedly as a Sony Fan boy) reading everything I've come to the following conclusions.
Nintendo Wii is a gimmick, its really well put together but has no staying power, games like Buzz and Singstar are great games on the PS2 but you don't play them often, the entire Wii game list so far seems to be games like that. It is massivily underpowered but sells itself on the idea of the Wiimote, which everyone thinks is brilliant. I think the console can be best summed up this way: My dad and my little sister have both seen the Wii in action and want one, we have a PS2 hooked up to the tv downstairs and they both play Colin Mcrae rally, GTA SA, Tekken, regulary. When I asked them if they would play Wii Sports/Zelda regulary and get rid of the PS2 they both admitted no. This is an example of a more serious game dev getting fed up that Nintendo don't seem to have done much other than marketing for the Wii
The Xbox360 is a nice idea but personnally after looking at the games library and then looking at my PC library there is nothing it can offer me that my PC can't already provide. I'm currently building a XP MCE machine capable of running all the XBox360/PC games that I like and all I'm missing is the cool white box of the 360. Then again I do know people who love the exclusive library so its a question of your gaming tastes. I'm actually quite impressed with the 360 as a unit, just lacks any games for me to get one.
Personnally I'm looking at the PS3 european realise and I can see four games I quite want, its the most powerfull of the three but, that doesn't mean much, it has blue ray (but then I only have a standard TV) and sony look like they've understood what people are after and that singstar, guitar hero and Buzz are their way into the market that Nintendo is after. The singstar online thing does show they've thought about it as well(its actually something I can see my mum and little sisters using.) The Playstation home thing is an interesting idea but not something that would sell the console to me. But is costs £425!
I'll use my O2 XDA Mini S as an example here its a small phone as you can see it doesn't rival this machine in specs, far from it but it like many others do a good job of working on the go. Most of the current brand of PPC's all use Word Mobile, support pop3,imap,hotmail and pocket explorer. It helps me write reports, make spreadsheets on the fly when I need to but the keyboard (very similar to the one in TFA) isn't good for long term work, I don't mind taking the occasional notes in class on it but if I had a choice between my laptop and it, I'd want my laptop. These range of PPC's (all networks do their own versions) already allow a person to do much of what this device wants, I even think that WM5 does it really really well. There also free on the £30 tariffs, and usually less than £100 on lower tariffs, this is £1000 and doesn't get you all those free minutes or texts.
When I want to do real work I want a mouse, a keypad that lets me use all my fingers and a 12"+ screen that why I don't think PPC's will be moving on much further, screen size has become a growing limitation with them. Tablet Pc's fill the void between PPC's and Laptops and we see these arent particulary popular
This is just an apple/nintendo fan boy, asking someone about apple/nintendo products, "what do you think of the Itunes music interface and why aren't games like that?"
/. summary. We got to hear about the 'amazing iPhone' and its hype, something called Mii and how great that was. The only interesting piece of information was a mention of a keynote by Phill Harrison which fills the person with 'tremendous confidence in the platform' aparently because of that keynotes content. Oh and the nintendo guy will also be speaking for the first time in eight years.
As far as I can tell the article had little to do with the
This is the second time I've heard of FLAC and I still don't know what it is and how it differ's from MP3. MP3 did well because it was small and one of the first on the seen that almost everything seemed to support. Its the interoperability, size and quality that are important. I can't hear the difference between a 192kbs MP3 and a audio CD most people can't, using earphones I can't hear a difference between 128kbs and a audio CD (I've found this to be fifty/fifty) and there is your problem. Early on you could get a lot of tracks on an MP3 player with 'good enough' quality and with 2gb,20gb MP3 players being around most people are tempted to encode them to 192kbs and they still got hundreds of songs on their device. FLAC, Ogg and WMA may offer substantial benifits (I know WMA offers a higher rate of compression for the same quality) but many MP3 players don't support those formats, so why bother storing your music in them?
Umm I'm confused once the mac version of office starts slipping in compatibility with the windows version people would choose Mac's over windows. Isn't that illogical? If companies are using office with normal PC's (a mac is a pc dammit!) alongside mac's with office and find that to be a very important application for them as soon as the mac version of office loses compatibility as long as there isn't a substantial reason for needing those Mac's (some other application) the companies going to switch back to windows. Be logical for a moment
Company A has a art department who prefer Mac's and do lotsa photoshop work but use Office to talk with rest of the company enviroment. Mac's cost a lot of money but its made back in the improved morale of your workers. Their version of office isn't functioning in line with the rest of the company's pc. Dell is selling you PC's at £300 a go which do exactly what you need with minor alterations, Mac requires £500 a computer (assuming a mini) plus the retraining cost for all the staff. If you have those problems I can see IT departments installing boot camp and purchasing windows photoshop licensing, not the other way around.
After reading that all I can see if the guy evading the question, flat out denying truths, agreeing with them in limited fashions, constantly playing dumb. His investigation methods are borderline incompetent, after reading that huge PDF I could only say he should not be allowed to be a whitness in any case I mean I'm a third year computer engineering student most of my course emphasis has been on networking and hardware rather than this sort of thing but I can see huge holes in his logic.
1.Doesn't verify his sources Beckermans point about "are mediasomethigns and verizons clock synchronised" is a good one espeacially when you consider his point about the nature of IP address's, at the very least he should have requested the lease time of that IP (so when did the subscriber start using the IP and for how long) to verify that the information had a chance of being correct.
2.No set method, the lack of reports and the fact he never made print outs suggests he doesn't have a set method of investigating, which personnally would make me question his investigation techniques this results in a whole list of problems:
2a.means no evidence supporting the defendent was kept, in effect his not impartial and also hurts the defense 2b.suggests he makes it up as he goes along, a "what seems a good idea at the time", as you can clearly see he's missed out on some issues which are important, like confirming the MAC address of the machine and its method of connecting to the internet.
3.Deliberate attempts to twist what hes saying or not sticking to the question an example would be towards the end where he starts talking about IPV4 and finishs with IPV6. I don't know how either works exactly but he should have talked about both seperatly, the use of both at once means he could be dilibertly hiding stuff, when was IPV6 rolled out anyways? Anouther example would be his linking IP address's directly to a PC, no matter how many times Beckerman tried to get him to admit that when accessed through a router the IP address given to the outside world is the routers not the individual PC's. 4.Lack of actual investigation, now I'm not sure what he was exactly hired to do but by the looks of it RIAA hired him to prove and be a whitness to say that a person used Kaza to download and share music. Hes not done that, hes investigated the drive he was sent found no traces of Kaza on it, or any MP3's (I think he indirectly said this) rather than investigate possible explanations for this, for example did the person own two pc's, did they connect to the internet through a router, could this router have been compromised (perhaps unsecured), perhaps then look for security vulnerabilities to see if it was a zombie machine, or for other security problems. Then if he couldn't prove any of that attempt to verify that mediashares information was correct, check it and check verizons and then attempt to co-oberate that information somehow, for example attempt to obtain the MAC address from the hard drive and from mediashares packet information in otherwords to link them up. Otherwise all he can actually claim is that "The pc in question when inspected did not have the Kazaa program on it at any time, nor does it appeared to have or have had the media files that mediasomething accuse the computer of having" His conclusions from his investigation lack any form of imparitality and it appears that he was unwilling to give any real unbiased opinion.
personnaly after reading that disposition I would seriously call into credibility as a expert or even as a whitness. I'm sure better people than I could take apart his disposition its 3am here I'm tired but those are the things that come to my mind at least
Actually its one of those weirds things I can identify with, my University (university of Plymouth in the UK) runs a modified version of exchange and every single student gets a email account, all the lecture stuffs put on there as well. Its a great system, but it does take less time to turn on outlook 2003 and download a message than it does to open ie goto the site and then read your message, the other upside is you can set small devices like your WM5 phone/PDA for the IMAP server and get emails that way (much faster than stupid pocket explorer.)
Mostly its because while our exchange email interface is very close to outlook 2003 in appearence its far more clunky and has a ton of features you can't turn off which annoy me. Having seen Windows Live Mail beta (I really really don't want my hotmail account turning into something like this.) Lastly most students have multiple email accounts accessing them all from one client be it thunderbird to outlook is a lot easier than visiting 10 different web based emails.
These products are no longer supported by microsoft, I believe Microsoft will support Windows 2000 for a price. You can't think that microsoft will support a product forever for free, I mean could you name me one company that does. This isn't much of a story and only a rather bad attempt at spreading FUD. Microsoft stops free support for seven year old product, new american law requires change to get the correct time to display. Microsoft sees a chance for money, makes a patch then sells patch for a profit.
I also think the price might be a little higher than necessary to try and move people onto XP or Vista, think about it for $4000 you can get a patch for all your systems. If you only have one or two Windows 2000 or Outlook 2000 systems then you could probably upgrade them for less than the cost of the patch (microsoft gets additional revenue) if you have a large number of machines using outlook 2000 or windows 2000 then the cost per machine for the patch is probably a few dollars and so worth it as it maintains your legacy systems despite unexpected changes (in this case the alteration of DST.) In that case you win as you don't have to either spend ages getting the network sorted out for DST change, pay to upgrade your infrastructure and microsoft gets some extra revenue for providing a service.
Really I've found the media centre to be identical to the one in Windows XP Media Centre 2005 but with a slightly different skin and a few extra menus which make sense (even they they are only in the TV menu.)
try playing a game, or doing something else, I have a system with 2gb of ram, running nothing but Windows Messenger I use 1.02GB of ram at idle. The weird thing is if I open HL2 I'm only using 1.14gb of ram, right now I have a ton of applications open and am only using 1.09gb. Vista's memory allocation is quite a bit superior to XP's I think in part its because so much is loaded into memory that most applications don't need to load much and so load much faster. Oh and some other ancedotal evidence
Until Uru (predessor to Myst Online: Uru Live) could use upto 1.5gb of memory before refusing to load anything else. On this system with XP That meant I was using 1.83gb of Ram, running it on Vista first I was only using 1.89gb of ram. Its something that has been annoying me for sometime just how does an OS with a much larger memory requirement not use that much more memory for gaming than Xp?
Its not very hard, the EU is the European Union, basically it is a framework in which member countries can co-operate. You have the European parliment, this is pretty much what it says on the tin. I vote in a MP he/she goes and tries to propose laws and they debate/watchover about European Union institutions. You have the European Commission, this is basically a watchdog. If the European Parliment makes a law for example all crash helmet safety standards must conform to the EU safety standard then if a country doesn't do this then they are the people who take said country to task. Sometimes this is a good thing. In the above example I believe the crash helmet standard rose to meet the EU standard, in others bad as the UK was forced to lower its safety standard. If you don't follow the law the EU commision will refer you to the Court of Justice where you country (or company) can be fined and forced to do certain things. There are other branches like the European Ombudsman and the council of ministers but we will forget these for now.
In many ways some of the moves made by the EU are for turning it into a federation of countries, mostly I don't object to the EU (excusing the CAP France give me my money back!) I wouldn't be surprised if we bagan to see more and more challenges against Germany and France who were the strongest politcal forces in it. Since the expansion of the EU and all those lovely countries the UK got buddy buddy with things have started to swing from 'old europe' to 'new europe'. The EU does a lot of the member countries alot of good (except the stupid CAP) This is nothing new, and nothing to get alarmed over, the Euro was something to worry about, not this.
Your working on the assumption that everyone is a theif. Your not actually thinking about how people think.I don't pirate music, I even used the Itune Music store when it came out, but after a week I realised that none of the song I had purchased were playable on anything but my PC. I switched to the great WMP's MSN store and playsforsure and started getting flaky playing (believe it or not it would only play sometimes on WMP9 but everytime on my sync'd device.) After two bad expearences I gave up on online music, it wasn't cheaper (we're talking £7.99 an album when I could buy it for £9.97) it gave me less choice and generally put me off. So I went back to my old habits of simply waiting until a album fell from popular interest or looking out for lesser known artists before they were big and getting the albums on the cheap.
The first music store which can offer me music without DRM and actually be cheaper than retail stores (ITMS has been more expensive in some cases) will have my business I like owning legitmate copies of disks most people do, but most people don't like to feel like their being ripped off. When a DVD first comes out it can be as much as £17.99 5 months later that samew dvd is £4.99. Music is much the same, so people pirate.
If filesharering and piracy is so prolific perhaps this suggests that the price of music/films doesn't match the price the demand (consumer) expects to pay. The fact that no music/film company adjusts their pricing to take advantage of this simply screams of price fixing. There will always be some priacy as there is always a blackmarket for any good for any other service, but give consumers the product/service they want at a price they are happy paying (competitiveness always helps here) you'll never stop all piracy its an impossible goal. My idea is based on the principle of "This is how the world works" the nice music companies seem to be working on the principle of "this is how the world should be"