No one has even come close to owning more than one SACD, so who would want to crack it? Theres so little source material that once you are done cracking the encryption, you end up with a next to useless exercise.
His first appearance after announcing his run for the presidency? The Alex Jones show. Good on him for military service and voting against the war or whatever, but see him for what he is: a crank.
Do you seriously think handing power to someone who holds insane views is a way to fix corruption? I know he comes across as a genial, harmless old duffer, but he displays all the usual crank libertarian beliefs in hokey alternative medicine and the evils of government (yet wants to run for it). He's overdue for a zimmer frame, an aspirin and a nice lie down.
Novell/Banyan/3Com - all had good, competing products and all of them disappeared or were made irrelevent in short order, except for Novell I suppose, which seems to have been dying for nearly 20 years.
The Soundblaster Live! (and LiveDrive!) I have never worked properly with XP after I upgraded from ME years ago (performance problems, features not working etc etc). Creative suck, no question, but the card is now pretty old so I am no longer worked up about it.
You can get good, working drivers from the http://kxproject.lugosoft.com/KX Project and they might do a Vista version if we all give them enough money. Either that or run Linux. The KX project at least makes the hardware usable, which it never really was under XP.
Any digital shop front they set up would have to be restricted to the UK (I don't see any issues with this though), as some of the content is already licensed to other third parties (Top Gear, for example, turns up in strange places on cable in the US).
You're going to say "they have nothing I want" - until you open your ears in the same way you did when you were a teenager. There's little that's truly mainstream you'll find on your local radio (maybe Creedance) but as a way of finding new music it's cheap enough to just give things a go. If you're in your mid-late thirties and need an excuse to go back through music you missed in the early eighties, or music from now that you've been having trouble justifying based on cost, the tracks end up being less than 30c each. It's fabulous.
I was stupid enough to buy music here and there from a couple of MS associated music sites in Australia. Files that would play on practically nothing other than the PC I downloaded them on, despite the assurances from WMA device vendors that this would not be problem. Three different WMA players and a Neuston MC-500 later and what do you know? DRM protected WMA files are the most useless format ever invented.
It turned out to be no problem at all once FairUse4WM turned up. I switched off automatic updates, converted everything over and won't be buying music online with DRM ever again. emusic gets my money now.
I think that's close to how it will play out, but last time there was also a bunch of proprietary technology in the form of competing GUI and API standards which made customers think twice. I worked for Bull at the time and we received an awful lot of marketing gumpf from our "partner" DEC who was pushing OSF rubbish. We were supposed to be "on the same side" but competition was pretty fierce in the also-ran Unix market (i.e. everybody who wasn't Sun). who was Microsoft rooting for? You guessed it, OSF (i.e. second place).
Watch what happens if Microsoft inject a bunch of.NET into SUSE..NET is useful and kinda cool, would make SUSE an alternative (but deliberately flawed) server for ASPX websites. Everybody else rallies around Mono and then watch the fur fly as the catchup games ensue. Mission accomplished as Linux servers for paying customers get relegated back to boutique duties.
While it's easy for us atheists to consider Santa Claus and religion to be about the same level of believability, it's wrong to characterise religous people as uncritical thinkers. Based on observation, a lot of them simply have no choice but to believe. They just as easily pity us poor atheists for being so far from $deity as we pity them for what we perceive as being uncritical acceptance (i.e. faith). The characterisation is unhelpful on both sides and needs to be reconciled (and quickly).
Flash (unfortunately), WMA, MP3, OGG, Theora, practically any avi file on the planet work fine in Fedora Core 5 (if you install the non-redhat packages) or in Mandriva or Ubuntu. Even silly places like the Disney website full of flash games work fine in Linux with very little extra downloading if you choose a non-fedora distribution.
Between Xine, Mplayer and the official flash plugin, you can be subjected to every stupid flashing advertisement on every web page on the net. Out of the box, Ubuntu and mandrive support more media formats than a default Windows XP installation.
I initially installed AnyDVD to get around a problem on an RPC drive that we'd fed one too many region 1 DVD's. We legitimately purchased all the DVD's that caused the problem, just forgot about the 5 change limit that locks the DVD drive to a particular region (silly, but easy to do).
I thought the price of AnyDVD was well worth it rather than buying a new DVD drive, the rest of the features (like FBI skipping) are just cake.
It starts that way - not worrying so much about what you listen to any more. Then you're not fixing your hair before you leave the house. Then you start leaving the house in track suit pants instead of jeans, and not bothering to find a clean shirt.
Typical situation: non-technical person who bought a PC umpteen years ago. Occasionally, bits of the PC fail and they get a local geek to install new hardware, but the HDD typically stays the same (this is the situation my own mother was in).
When the HDD started making funny noises, coinciding with a cheap ADSL deal, we upgraded the HDD and installed Windows XP on it. I did think about putting Fedora Core on there due to the upgrade cost to XP, but in the end decided that I couldn't handle the support calls from 300km away. XP was confusing enough for her. Gnome is nice and I run it myself at home, but I wouldn't wish it on a newbie.
I know it was slack, but it's reality. As a concession, I did ditch IE and Outlook and installed Firefox and Thunderbird on there which has been great in lowering the overall number of confused calls I get about viruses etc.
There are already solutions out there based on Sigma chipsets and Syabas software (the old Neuston mc-500, pinnacle showcenter type boxes). From what I can tell, these are 90% of what the iTV is supposed to be i.e. a box next to the TV with a remote control that will stream music and video off your PC.
I'm sure it'll be something similar to that (if not based on that). The Neuston/showcenter is actually a nifty little box that was priced way too high when first released. I bought one on sale ($100AUD) and it now gets used more than just about anything else attached to the home theatre i.e. all music, divx downloads, it can upscale DVD's to 1080i for the projector etc. Slap an apple badge and some DRM garbage for iTunes and you're already there.
If they were silly enough to do that, they'd hand over the entire PC industry to the $125 Chinese computer practically overnight. Who'd buy a PC that was restricted like that? The whole point of them is freedom to do what you like. You might as well just give up and buy an appliance instead.
The real issues are whether humans evolved from apes, whether life as a whole evolved from single-celled organisms, etc, etc.
Every time I read this it makes me angry. We and the chimps did not evolve from apes, we *share a common ancestor*. Subtle difference but all the "evolved from apes" thing does is make the Krazy Kristians froth at the mouth. so don't do it any more.
You've been sold a fallacy with voucher systems for schools. They are implicitly designed to entrench the privilege of the affluent (who will now have even more choice of education) at your expense. The voucher system sounds very fair and libertarian, but it turns out that it's just a ploy to fob off the aspirational classes of society.
I ought to know - we were stupid enough to pay for private schools for our eldest child for a number of years, based on the flawed assumption that the public schools available to us were somehow worse than the private ones.
All that ended up happening was that our child got no better an education and we were fleeced $5000 and more a year for nothing. Worse than that, the children that attended the schools in question were unremittingly nasty, a product of their greedy parents in more ways than one. Those small class sizes you're touting are great if your child fits in, but devastating if they don't. Bigger classes guarantee that your kids will find other kids they get along with which is very important to their enjoyment (and progression) at school.
The simple fact is that you should support your local public school, and if it has problems, get off your arse and get involved in it to fix it up. Schooling should be the ultimate level playing field in any society that calls itself a meritocracy. Vouchers are a sure fire way back to a class system that ultimately benefits only the few.
Anybody who had to deal with the woeful implementation of naming services in CORBA, who stupidly subjected themselves to cross-platform / cross language system implementations (try Visual C++ on NT talking to Smalltalk systems on SUN == headaches and midnight support calls every day) will tell you CORBA was a crock.
Anybody stupid enough to listen to Microsoft when they said they would fix the DCOM dropouts / timeout issues when the system would stop talking to other DCOM clients (requiring server reboots) will tell you DCOM was a crock.
The old RPC stuff was hard to use, but at least it worked. Give me a minimal raw socket solution any day of the week.
This has been implemented twice in Australia by social democratic governments and twice it has been dismantled by conservative governments. Each time it happens, the private health insurance companies *completely fail* to properly cover their members and we go through the cycle again. Universal health care is expensive, but dismantling it for no other reason than ideological arguments has proven to be a disaster here.
When "Medicare" and "Medibank" were operating, all we heard was bitching and moaning from Doctors and drug companies about how much money they weren't making. It works, it keeps costs down and the flow-on effects through the economy more than make up for the cost.
That's exactly the situation being replicated here. Standards compliance is nice but usually a distraction, especially where the incumbent "standard" is so common. It will take a lot of prying of Microsoft Word from cold, dead hands (whatever you think of the product) to make the average worker even *worry* about the file standard they're saving in. Mandated, "on high" pronouncements of products you have to use are destined for failure. In the places I worked, TCP/IP was preferred because it was the "protocol of last resort" - pretty much all the squabbling vendors at least had a marginal version of it available. OSI was just a PITA (and the PC version were especially woeful when you had to try to load the damn thing into upper memory blocks etc.) To me the whole "open document" thing is just a repeat of exactly the same scenario. Don't get me wrong, anything that starts to undermine the Microsoft Monopoly would be useful, but they're laughing with glee back at Redmond at the theatre they've created which is now hindering the development efforts of all their competitors while they try to implement this new, design by committee "standard". They win again.
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No one has even come close to owning more than one SACD, so who would want to crack it? Theres so little source material that once you are done cracking the encryption, you end up with a next to useless exercise.
When he ditches the FDA, consider yourself screwed (over).
His first appearance after announcing his run for the presidency? The Alex Jones show. Good on him for military service and voting against the war or whatever, but see him for what he is: a crank.
Do you seriously think handing power to someone who holds insane views is a way to fix corruption? I know he comes across as a genial, harmless old duffer, but he displays all the usual crank libertarian beliefs in hokey alternative medicine and the evils of government (yet wants to run for it). He's overdue for a zimmer frame, an aspirin and a nice lie down.
Ron Paul? And hand power to the conspiracy nuts? That sounds like a great idea.
Novell/Banyan/3Com - all had good, competing products and all of them disappeared or were made irrelevent in short order, except for Novell I suppose, which seems to have been dying for nearly 20 years.
The Soundblaster Live! (and LiveDrive!) I have never worked properly with XP after I upgraded from ME years ago (performance problems, features not working etc etc). Creative suck, no question, but the card is now pretty old so I am no longer worked up about it. You can get good, working drivers from the http://kxproject.lugosoft.com/KX Project and they might do a Vista version if we all give them enough money. Either that or run Linux. The KX project at least makes the hardware usable, which it never really was under XP.
Any digital shop front they set up would have to be restricted to the UK (I don't see any issues with this though), as some of the content is already licensed to other third parties (Top Gear, for example, turns up in strange places on cable in the US).
You're going to say "they have nothing I want" - until you open your ears in the same way you did when you were a teenager. There's little that's truly mainstream you'll find on your local radio (maybe Creedance) but as a way of finding new music it's cheap enough to just give things a go. If you're in your mid-late thirties and need an excuse to go back through music you missed in the early eighties, or music from now that you've been having trouble justifying based on cost, the tracks end up being less than 30c each. It's fabulous.
A bicycle helmet.
I was stupid enough to buy music here and there from a couple of MS associated music sites in Australia. Files that would play on practically nothing other than the PC I downloaded them on, despite the assurances from WMA device vendors that this would not be problem. Three different WMA players and a Neuston MC-500 later and what do you know? DRM protected WMA files are the most useless format ever invented.
It turned out to be no problem at all once FairUse4WM turned up. I switched off automatic updates, converted everything over and won't be buying music online with DRM ever again. emusic gets my money now.
I think that's close to how it will play out, but last time there was also a bunch of proprietary technology in the form of competing GUI and API standards which made customers think twice. I worked for Bull at the time and we received an awful lot of marketing gumpf from our "partner" DEC who was pushing OSF rubbish. We were supposed to be "on the same side" but competition was pretty fierce in the also-ran Unix market (i.e. everybody who wasn't Sun). who was Microsoft rooting for? You guessed it, OSF (i.e. second place).
.NET into SUSE. .NET is useful and kinda cool, would make SUSE an alternative (but deliberately flawed) server for ASPX websites. Everybody else rallies around Mono and then watch the fur fly as the catchup games ensue. Mission accomplished as Linux servers for paying customers get relegated back to boutique duties.
Watch what happens if Microsoft inject a bunch of
While it's easy for us atheists to consider Santa Claus and religion to be about the same level of believability, it's wrong to characterise religous people as uncritical thinkers. Based on observation, a lot of them simply have no choice but to believe. They just as easily pity us poor atheists for being so far from $deity as we pity them for what we perceive as being uncritical acceptance (i.e. faith). The characterisation is unhelpful on both sides and needs to be reconciled (and quickly).
Flash (unfortunately), WMA, MP3, OGG, Theora, practically any avi file on the planet work fine in Fedora Core 5 (if you install the non-redhat packages) or in Mandriva or Ubuntu. Even silly places like the Disney website full of flash games work fine in Linux with very little extra downloading if you choose a non-fedora distribution.
Between Xine, Mplayer and the official flash plugin, you can be subjected to every stupid flashing advertisement on every web page on the net. Out of the box, Ubuntu and mandrive support more media formats than a default Windows XP installation.
I initially installed AnyDVD to get around a problem on an RPC drive that we'd fed one too many region 1 DVD's. We legitimately purchased all the DVD's that caused the problem, just forgot about the 5 change limit that locks the DVD drive to a particular region (silly, but easy to do).
I thought the price of AnyDVD was well worth it rather than buying a new DVD drive, the rest of the features (like FBI skipping) are just cake.
This idea is stupid. What's wrong with using the pedals?
WTF is the point of attaching a motor when you've got perfectly good legs? The basket will still fit.
It starts that way - not worrying so much about what you listen to any more. Then you're not fixing your hair before you leave the house. Then you start leaving the house in track suit pants instead of jeans, and not bothering to find a clean shirt.
It's called growing up.
Typical situation: non-technical person who bought a PC umpteen years ago. Occasionally, bits of the PC fail and they get a local geek to install new hardware, but the HDD typically stays the same (this is the situation my own mother was in).
When the HDD started making funny noises, coinciding with a cheap ADSL deal, we upgraded the HDD and installed Windows XP on it. I did think about putting Fedora Core on there due to the upgrade cost to XP, but in the end decided that I couldn't handle the support calls from 300km away. XP was confusing enough for her. Gnome is nice and I run it myself at home, but I wouldn't wish it on a newbie.
I know it was slack, but it's reality. As a concession, I did ditch IE and Outlook and installed Firefox and Thunderbird on there which has been great in lowering the overall number of confused calls I get about viruses etc.
There are already solutions out there based on Sigma chipsets and Syabas software (the old Neuston mc-500, pinnacle showcenter type boxes). From what I can tell, these are 90% of what the iTV is supposed to be i.e. a box next to the TV with a remote control that will stream music and video off your PC.
I'm sure it'll be something similar to that (if not based on that). The Neuston/showcenter is actually a nifty little box that was priced way too high when first released. I bought one on sale ($100AUD) and it now gets used more than just about anything else attached to the home theatre i.e. all music, divx downloads, it can upscale DVD's to 1080i for the projector etc. Slap an apple badge and some DRM garbage for iTunes and you're already there.
If they were silly enough to do that, they'd hand over the entire PC industry to the $125 Chinese computer practically overnight. Who'd buy a PC that was restricted like that? The whole point of them is freedom to do what you like. You might as well just give up and buy an appliance instead.
The real issues are whether humans evolved from apes, whether life as a whole evolved from single-celled organisms, etc, etc.
Every time I read this it makes me angry. We and the chimps did not evolve from apes, we *share a common ancestor*. Subtle difference but all the "evolved from apes" thing does is make the Krazy Kristians froth at the mouth. so don't do it any more.
You've been sold a fallacy with voucher systems for schools. They are implicitly designed to entrench the privilege
of the affluent (who will now have even more choice of education) at your expense. The voucher system sounds very
fair and libertarian, but it turns out that it's just a ploy to fob off the aspirational classes of society.
I ought to know - we were stupid enough to pay for private schools for our eldest child for a number of years,
based on the flawed assumption that the public schools available to us were somehow worse than the private ones.
All that ended up happening was that our child got no better an education and we were fleeced $5000 and more a year
for nothing. Worse than that, the children that attended the schools in question were unremittingly nasty, a product
of their greedy parents in more ways than one. Those small class sizes you're touting are great if your child
fits in, but devastating if they don't. Bigger classes guarantee that your kids will find other kids they
get along with which is very important to their enjoyment (and progression) at school.
The simple fact is that you should support your local public school, and if it has problems, get off your arse and get involved in it to fix it up. Schooling should be the ultimate level playing field in any society that calls
itself a meritocracy. Vouchers are a sure fire way back to a class system that ultimately benefits only the
few.
dave.
Anybody who had to deal with the woeful implementation of naming services in CORBA, who stupidly subjected themselves to cross-platform / cross language system implementations (try Visual C++ on NT talking to Smalltalk systems on SUN == headaches and midnight support calls every day) will tell you CORBA was a crock. Anybody stupid enough to listen to Microsoft when they said they would fix the DCOM dropouts / timeout issues when the system would stop talking to other DCOM clients (requiring server reboots) will tell you DCOM was a crock. The old RPC stuff was hard to use, but at least it worked. Give me a minimal raw socket solution any day of the week.
This has been implemented twice in Australia by social democratic governments and twice it has been dismantled by conservative governments. Each time it happens, the private health insurance companies *completely fail* to properly cover their members and we go through the cycle again. Universal health care is expensive, but dismantling it for no other reason than ideological arguments has proven to be a disaster here. When "Medicare" and "Medibank" were operating, all we heard was bitching and moaning from Doctors and drug companies about how much money they weren't making. It works, it keeps costs down and the flow-on effects through the economy more than make up for the cost.
That's exactly the situation being replicated here. Standards compliance is nice but usually a distraction, especially where the incumbent "standard" is so common. It will take a lot of prying of Microsoft Word from cold, dead hands (whatever you think of the product) to make the average worker even *worry* about the file standard they're saving in. Mandated, "on high" pronouncements of products you have to use are destined for failure. In the places I worked, TCP/IP was preferred because it was the "protocol of last resort" - pretty much all the squabbling vendors at least had a marginal version of it available. OSI was just a PITA (and the PC version were especially woeful when you had to try to load the damn thing into upper memory blocks etc.) To me the whole "open document" thing is just a repeat of exactly the same scenario. Don't get me wrong, anything that starts to undermine the Microsoft Monopoly would be useful, but they're laughing with glee back at Redmond at the theatre they've created which is now hindering the development efforts of all their competitors while they try to implement this new, design by committee "standard". They win again.