Presumably at some point its BD+ program is cracked and sales will fall as high quality rips show up on the internet
Or, ya'know, the opposite. True, there are those who want the copy protection lessened so they can pirate - but there are also those (including myself) who want to be able to do things like play the disk on Linux, make legitimate backups (fscking kids keep scratching my disks), and ripping the movies to play them on portable devices (at lower resolutions, anyway).
Yes, yes, I know I'm part of a sufficiently small minority to be largely ignored by people who impliment things like BD+, but there has got to be plenty enough people out there like me to make your simple equation far less feasible. No sharp drop if the crack leads to a somewhat counterbalancing increase in sales.
Not true. Ubuntu doesn't take quite as long as Debian does to make sure each release is flawless, but Canonical has been willing to extend deadlines when it found it necessary (eg Dapper Drake).
I figure that can be tried easily enough right now for anyone who has their own domain name. Sadly I don't, but I'd be interested to hear the results from someone who does.
No, Ubuntu. Just because Microsoft's parents let them do something naughty it doesn't mean you can get away with it yourself, young man. We expect better of you.
Neither Vista nor Ubuntu have improved sufficiently over their previous versions to justify the decreased performance. Ubuntu's focus is on user-friendliness, and it so it isn't exactly counting calories. Vista doesn't really have any excuses.
Ubuntu was the distro that completely replaced Windows for me a bit over two years ago. Since then my desktop has just gotten faster and faster and left more and more RAM and disk space for the applications as I've found more bloated things I can take out of Ubuntu. It seems pretty evident to me that Ubuntu could keep its weight down if the developers put some focus there. Ubuntu's target audience is largely Windows users who are used to the bloat so Ubuntu can get away with it, but that doesn't make it right.
While it's influence has certainly been fading, the US still has quite a pull both economically and politically around the world. It's not exactly unheard of for the US to put pressure on other countries for things like this, and it's not unheard of for other countries to cave.
The more the US leans along these lines, the more other countries will. Sadly.
When Joe Sixpack closes a program, he expects it to close, not run in the background and consume resources
. No, that's you and me and/.'ers. Plenty of simply do not understand the idea of apps running in the background and plenty who do don't really care to manage it. Just let the OS and your local techie care about it.
If he gets off lightly, it sets a dangerous president.
Same can be said of pretty much any crime. That doesn't mean we should give someone five years and a quarter mil fine for getting a five-finger-discount on a candy bar for fear of setting a precedent which would encourage candy bar theft.
I was considering adding a "[sic]" after the last quoted word, but after re-reading it I decided to congratulate you on a brilliant pun. Yeah, I don't think Palin would make a good president either.
That is a horrible way to look at it. If the government illegally killed an innocent man, it's no big F'ing deal for the citizens in the country to go kill anyone at will? Just because someone (in this case members of a government) does something wrong, it doesn't somehow justify others to commit the same crime.
Just because the target was an incredibly stupid individual does not justify the crime. That kind of logic easily leads to some very scary things.
This act did nothing to change the minds of those who've seen Sara Palin's interviews and her debate and still thought she was capable.
If there was anything respectable about this whole ordeal, you have failed to pointed it out.
Hacking is modifying packets, cracking passwords, and looking for security vulnerabilities. This is none of those
Sure it is.
This is similar to the concept behind "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." To Joe Sixpack, if it's some computer wizardry that is beyond him, it's hacking, especially if it's security related.
It doesn't matter if I found out that $LUSER went to a porn site because s/he didn't clear the history (something utterly trivial), to $LUSER who wasn't even aware of concepts such as history what I have done is hacking. Also blackmail. >.>
While I personally don't like the dock, it's not that hard to understand why others would appreciate it. Joe Sixpack doesn't care if a program is running or not... he wants access to it, he clicks on the icon. If it's running it pops up, if it's not running it pops up after a few seconds more. It's simple and it gets the job done. Having separate areas that could have been cleanly combined is a largely unnecessary complication for many people.
P.S. You arrogant fans of Go can frak yourselves. Where do you think the scientists will go once they're done with chess. Enjoy it while it lasts.
This is obviously trolling, but what the heck. Chess has been dominated by computers for quite some time now - many have moved on to Go, and they still fail to beat amateur-level Go players. There are practical reasons why a Go AI is more difficult to program than a Chess one, which I'm sure by the time this has been posted will be explained in great detail by other replies.
What I want to explain is why Go is better than Chess. It is not because it is more difficult for computers. While Chess doesn't really scale well, Go can be scaled down quite nicely to where the number of moves that have to be read out is equivalent to that of a Chess game. On 9x9 boards, Go AIs are rapidly catching up to humans. MoGo, for instance, consistently beats many amateur-level go players on 9x9's. There is more lost in the transition to a smaller board than simply brute-force reading, but the example still stands.
The reason Go is better than Chess is that unlike Chess much of it's depth is a natural, mathematical result of the very simple rule set. Essentially the entire game:
Players take turns placing pieces on the board. When a piece or group of pieces by one team is surrounded (ie, no empty spaces touching any of them in the group), the pieces are removed from the board. Whoever controls the majority of the board at the end wins.
There are details missing there about things such as defining who controls the majority of the board, but with one exception (ko) that's really all the game is. Everything, all of it's depth, is a mathematical result. Interesting patterns emerge, comparable to things like prime numbers or pi. For example: From the rules I put above it should quickly become apparent that I could just surround the opponents pieces that surrounded mine, and my opponent could do the same. No piece would ever really be safe, or ever really be captured that could not be replaced. No rules had to be made to remedy this: go naturally has a system in place where pieces cannot be captured. It's just plain cool. (See: "eyes").
For the most part, Go is not about brute-force reading so much as recognizing and understanding the patterns. I don't have to mathematically derive the formula for the area of a circle each time I need to calculate it - once I understand the concept I can retain it. Go is very similar. That's not to say there is no brute-force reading. For example: one of the interesting phenomenon in Go is the "ladder," which results in one player chasing the other across the board diagonally. The winner will be determined based on whose pieces (if any) are met along the way. As a result, people just read out the very simple pattern across the board rather than playing the whole thing out.
Go isn't flawless. There is a situation (ko) which essentially breaks the game. It's comparable to where in Chess if both players repeatedly make the same moves the game becomes a draw. There had to be rules added to deal with this situation, and while they do add even more depth and change the way the game is played, it is an area where Go's awesome depth-through-simplicity is marred.
I recognize that Chess does have some depth to it other than just brute-force reading. There are concepts like pinning which result from the rules, but they're far fewer and generally not as interesting. There's also many concepts which carry between the two, such as Go's sente/gote vs Chess's tempo.
Go is less about reading than it is about understanding. This, combine with the cool patters and concepts which emerge, is why Go is better than Chess. This is largely opinion; someone who plays Go is not necessarily a better, smarter person than someone who plays Chess. It is possible for an intelligent, healthy, mentally-stable human to prefer Chess's convoluted rules, simpler concepts and overwhelming amounts of brute-force reading. They'd just be silly for it.
I'm waiting for Slashdot to update its category image for Apple with the "Bill of Borg" image reserved for Micro$oft stories.
The Borg image wasn't just applied to MS because they're evil, but how they went about it. Like the Borg, either you join them or they destroy you, and like the Borg their technological advancement is largely just a rip off of other people's ideas.
Gotta come up with something different for Apple.
Hmm... Apple reminds me of of the Vulcans. They do a lot of good stuff (contributions to F/OSS with things like Webkit and Darwin) and do help give tech/humanity a push in the right direction every now and then but they still hold back real progress at times with things like this. Give Jobs pointy ears and throw 'em up there.
To be fair, the cell phones actually make really good use of the data plan for the GPS software, by downloading the maps et al live rather than storing it offline. There are offline options, but they really don't hold up against those which require an internet connection. The maps are going to be far more limited. And they're a pain to set up and use. And they use a sizable chunk of your microSD space even if you limit it to just, say, your state. And if you're going to limit to just locally, you probably shouldn't need fancy tech to tell you where you are.
Yes, the data plans can be expensive, but if you want a good experience with your GPS on your phone you'd need it. Telecoms can't compete with main-stream GPS navigation thingies head-to-head, but with the 'net access they've actually managed to - in many ways - get you a better product. If it's too expensive, then just get an main-stream GPS navigation thingie.
It may be possible to argue that whoever you got your cell from should have mentioned that you do have crappy offline options from third parties. Although I really don't think it's fair to expect such things. If you want to make a smart choice, do your research.
I don't think IBM feels like much of a 'Big Player', considering how much the ISO listened to them in regards to the OOXML stuff. If the ISO is going to act so stupid here, ignoring IBM, why should IBM expect their remarks to be considered by the ISO in the future? While it's true that MS isn't going to... influence the ISO's decisions quite so strongly on every tech-related issue as it did here (and so IBM will still have some voice) it is still a better idea to act now. If this happens again (and again and again), IBM won't have as much ground for fighting it. They'd have to justify why they didn't fight quite so hard before, and even if they make a perfectly reasonable argument (ie, your argument) the very fact they're put in that position weakens them.
IBM - and anyone else who cares to (and is in the position to) make a stance against the ISO's actions - must do it immediately and make it clear.
when the asus ee came out it heralded a revolution in computing - a genuine low cost device that would perform all the simple tasks asked off it with a long battery life and portable.
The original eeepc (pre-atom) does not have a long battery life. To get through a school day I spend all my time in a tty with vim with nearly everything else disabled. No X, no sound, no wifi, et al. (To preview LaTeX stuff I use imagemagick to convert it to a jpg than use ZGV to see it without X.) This is fine for me, but for Joe Sixpack the real-world hour-and-a-half battery life is pretty bad. Don't get me wrong, I love my eeepc - it's just that it's battery life is not one of it's strong points.
in the same way I like linux as it removes the vast majority of the worthless eye candy from a modern operating system.
Not really. Maybe most Linux distros don't actually focus on that, or require the disk space be wasted (is it possible to not just disable but remove Aero completely?), but Linux definitely has the worthless eye candy. When I don't care about the battery life, I can get my eeepc to show off bunches of worthless eye candy. I can get it to mimic Vista's Aero quite smoothly, for instance.
vista (for me) is the sum of everything I hate about modern operating systems - far too much eye candy and not enough substance.
Vista's marketing focus(ed) on Aero largely because that's what Joe Sixpack can understand. There was a lot of under-the-hood work with Vista. Many new security improvements, for instance. You can certainly make an argument about whether or not the under-the-hood improvements justify the high system requirements (even with Aero disabled), but don't act as though they are not there.
the newer aus ees and sub-notebooks are once again in a performance and features war. now 10" screens, now HDD not flash, battery life is shortening. and the price is rising.
The newer Asus eeepcs and other sub-notebooks are filling in other niches. The dirty-cheap original eeepc is still available for sale. Give the tech improvements some time - it's inevitable that the 9" screen eeepcs will have the same price as the original 7" with better performance across the board. And no, the battery life is not shortening significantly - the move to Atom improved the battery life. If you don't want the HDD Asus has higher-end eeepc's available with flash. The HDD is not required.
also the new distros have the same issue - I'm sure that KDE4 is the mutts nuts, but to me it is more eye candy that will slow my PC down and get in the way of what I want to do.
KDE4 actually lowers system requirements, even with the eye candy. There was an article on/. a ways back claiming 40% less RAM required, if I remember correctly.
if you do not like the WM then simply install another. with MS you get windows shoveled down your throat if you want it or not.
Okay, here I agree with you. Unix(-like) OS's have a lot more options for things like WM's.
for all the new technology and better software I would much rather see the focus on delivering more stable, faster, leaner systems that run on cheaper hardware more reliably on longer. I am totally disinterested in eye candy, effects, and features that add nothing in the way of functionality yet remove a lot in the way of performance. I just think their focus is seriously wrong.
The focus isn't on the eyecandy, just the marketing. As much as I dislike MS, I'll give them this: they're at least trying to improve things other than the eyecandy.
I agree with what you're trying to say - eyecandy should take a backseat to functionality and system requirements. It's just that nearly all of your individual points are quite a bit off the mark.
Yummie coincidence: I've got a box in arms reach right now make installworld'ing.
While there are numerous benefits to using the source code directly rather pre-compiled packages, there is good reason to standardize pre-compiled package systems. Most prominently, there are cases where compile time / cpu cycles really shouldn't be wasted unnecessarily.
Not only does this sound hilarious ("essential to the economic structure...") but not once in the history of software piracy, as far as I know, has DRM -ever- stopped piracy.
(1) The goal isn't to completely stop all piracy of the product, just curb it. Some people would prefer to just buy the game rather than waiting for a crack or having to hassle with it. While it varries, this is the case sufficiently for companies to consider it worth the downsides. Of course this isn't the case when the DRM more trouble than just waiting a bit more for a clean crack, or if the crack is out before the game actually launches (as happened with Spore).
(2) BD+ is still pretty locked down.
The surface of your brain is pretty thin to, ya'know. At least I know my brain doesn't 'lose capacity' when I go over a speed bump. Like the brainm the single-atom-thick part of the proposed ultracapacitor won't be out to the open air.
Look into how capacitors work. It's capacity is largely based on the surface area of internal parts. You get that by making things thin. Thin is huge for capacitors, even the normal kind you have in the computer you used to type that post. Capacitors are all wound up inside and packed nicely. They *do* break on occasion and get icky gooey stuff everywhere, but it's not exactly so fragile as to be caused by a speed bump. Otherwise we'd have a lot of dead cars on the road.
2D area vs mass. What that statement was trying to get across was that graphene is so thin that you could almost cover a football field with only a gram of it. Think of spreading cream cheese on a bagel. You only have a gram of cream cheese, though, so you have to spread very, very thin. Except the bagel is the size of a football field, so you have to spread it even more ridiculously thin: only an atom thick. Now instead of cream cheese it's carbon atoms.
The problem with that is I can keep checking my neighbor's doors or trying to crack my school's computers until I find something worth the risk of failing to report it. Maybe the guy deserves a relatively minor punishment, but what he did is not ignorable.
Piracy does not *hurt* the developers, it's the lack of sales. You really, really don't want your software pirated? Don't release it. Want to maximize your profit? Release the best product you can for the price [as compared to the customer's alternatives]. If the market cannot be profitable, move to a different market.
Solution #2 Users can buy the game with no DRM, but at a much larger fee like $100+ to cover the costs of people pirating the game from their copy.
Scream into a pillow or something, just stop taking frustration at pirates out on the legitimate customers, please.
I don't think they're trying to sell at the highest price they can, just the one that leads to the most profit, including those who pirated it because they could not afford it. Which is pretty much what they should do. The issue is they may disagree with you as to what the optimum price would be. There's also the issue of people expecting the software to be crappy at a low price.
It's not as though people who had zero interest in a game at USD$50 are going to have anymore interest in it at $10. They're not interested. A lowered price does not guarantee sufficient sales to counterbalance the price drop.
As much as the 1.0 release was exciting, that doesn't mean it's anywhere near 100% yet. Updates - both to WINE or the win32 programs - break things regularly. Many legitimately purchased programs need cracks. Some things just don't work yet. As much as I love WINE, the support calls for it would be outrageous.
Just a simple Gnome or KDE desktop with Open office and Firefox is all HP really needs to push. Anything much beyond that targeted at Joe Sixpack will not be worth the effort.
Irrelevant, they've got an unnecessary dependency on someone else. If MS does screw up (or just acts nasty) sufficiently to hurt HP's bottom line, it'd be quite helpful to have something else to fall back on. If HP has they're own distro they're set until they screw themselves over.
It'd be silly for companies like Dell and HP not to regularly consider non-MS options. Plan B.
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Presumably at some point its BD+ program is cracked and sales will fall as high quality rips show up on the internet
Or, ya'know, the opposite. True, there are those who want the copy protection lessened so they can pirate - but there are also those (including myself) who want to be able to do things like play the disk on Linux, make legitimate backups (fscking kids keep scratching my disks), and ripping the movies to play them on portable devices (at lower resolutions, anyway).
Yes, yes, I know I'm part of a sufficiently small minority to be largely ignored by people who impliment things like BD+, but there has got to be plenty enough people out there like me to make your simple equation far less feasible. No sharp drop if the crack leads to a somewhat counterbalancing increase in sales.
Not true. Ubuntu doesn't take quite as long as Debian does to make sure each release is flawless, but Canonical has been willing to extend deadlines when it found it necessary (eg Dapper Drake).
Presumably the same thing that happens when you host a file with a TLD as an extension. ie: http://www.example.com/path/to/file/foo.com
I figure that can be tried easily enough right now for anyone who has their own domain name. Sadly I don't, but I'd be interested to hear the results from someone who does.
No, Ubuntu. Just because Microsoft's parents let them do something naughty it doesn't mean you can get away with it yourself, young man. We expect better of you.
Neither Vista nor Ubuntu have improved sufficiently over their previous versions to justify the decreased performance. Ubuntu's focus is on user-friendliness, and it so it isn't exactly counting calories. Vista doesn't really have any excuses.
Ubuntu was the distro that completely replaced Windows for me a bit over two years ago. Since then my desktop has just gotten faster and faster and left more and more RAM and disk space for the applications as I've found more bloated things I can take out of Ubuntu. It seems pretty evident to me that Ubuntu could keep its weight down if the developers put some focus there. Ubuntu's target audience is largely Windows users who are used to the bloat so Ubuntu can get away with it, but that doesn't make it right.
While it's influence has certainly been fading, the US still has quite a pull both economically and politically around the world. It's not exactly unheard of for the US to put pressure on other countries for things like this, and it's not unheard of for other countries to cave.
The more the US leans along these lines, the more other countries will. Sadly.
When Joe Sixpack closes a program, he expects it to close, not run in the background and consume resources
. No, that's you and me and /.'ers. Plenty of simply do not understand the idea of apps running in the background and plenty who do don't really care to manage it. Just let the OS and your local techie care about it.
If he gets off lightly, it sets a dangerous president.
Same can be said of pretty much any crime. That doesn't mean we should give someone five years and a quarter mil fine for getting a five-finger-discount on a candy bar for fear of setting a precedent which would encourage candy bar theft.
I was considering adding a "[sic]" after the last quoted word, but after re-reading it I decided to congratulate you on a brilliant pun. Yeah, I don't think Palin would make a good president either.
That is a horrible way to look at it. If the government illegally killed an innocent man, it's no big F'ing deal for the citizens in the country to go kill anyone at will? Just because someone (in this case members of a government) does something wrong, it doesn't somehow justify others to commit the same crime.
Just because the target was an incredibly stupid individual does not justify the crime. That kind of logic easily leads to some very scary things.
This act did nothing to change the minds of those who've seen Sara Palin's interviews and her debate and still thought she was capable.
If there was anything respectable about this whole ordeal, you have failed to pointed it out.
Hacking is modifying packets, cracking passwords, and looking for security vulnerabilities. This is none of those
Sure it is.
This is similar to the concept behind "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." To Joe Sixpack, if it's some computer wizardry that is beyond him, it's hacking, especially if it's security related.
It doesn't matter if I found out that $LUSER went to a porn site because s/he didn't clear the history (something utterly trivial), to $LUSER who wasn't even aware of concepts such as history what I have done is hacking. Also blackmail. >.>
While I personally don't like the dock, it's not that hard to understand why others would appreciate it. Joe Sixpack doesn't care if a program is running or not... he wants access to it, he clicks on the icon. If it's running it pops up, if it's not running it pops up after a few seconds more. It's simple and it gets the job done. Having separate areas that could have been cleanly combined is a largely unnecessary complication for many people.
P.S. You arrogant fans of Go can frak yourselves. Where do you think the scientists will go once they're done with chess. Enjoy it while it lasts.
This is obviously trolling, but what the heck. Chess has been dominated by computers for quite some time now - many have moved on to Go, and they still fail to beat amateur-level Go players. There are practical reasons why a Go AI is more difficult to program than a Chess one, which I'm sure by the time this has been posted will be explained in great detail by other replies.
What I want to explain is why Go is better than Chess. It is not because it is more difficult for computers. While Chess doesn't really scale well, Go can be scaled down quite nicely to where the number of moves that have to be read out is equivalent to that of a Chess game. On 9x9 boards, Go AIs are rapidly catching up to humans. MoGo, for instance, consistently beats many amateur-level go players on 9x9's. There is more lost in the transition to a smaller board than simply brute-force reading, but the example still stands.
The reason Go is better than Chess is that unlike Chess much of it's depth is a natural, mathematical result of the very simple rule set. Essentially the entire game:
Players take turns placing pieces on the board. When a piece or group of pieces by one team is surrounded (ie, no empty spaces touching any of them in the group), the pieces are removed from the board. Whoever controls the majority of the board at the end wins.
There are details missing there about things such as defining who controls the majority of the board, but with one exception (ko) that's really all the game is. Everything, all of it's depth, is a mathematical result. Interesting patterns emerge, comparable to things like prime numbers or pi. For example: From the rules I put above it should quickly become apparent that I could just surround the opponents pieces that surrounded mine, and my opponent could do the same. No piece would ever really be safe, or ever really be captured that could not be replaced. No rules had to be made to remedy this: go naturally has a system in place where pieces cannot be captured. It's just plain cool. (See: "eyes").
For the most part, Go is not about brute-force reading so much as recognizing and understanding the patterns. I don't have to mathematically derive the formula for the area of a circle each time I need to calculate it - once I understand the concept I can retain it. Go is very similar. That's not to say there is no brute-force reading. For example: one of the interesting phenomenon in Go is the "ladder," which results in one player chasing the other across the board diagonally. The winner will be determined based on whose pieces (if any) are met along the way. As a result, people just read out the very simple pattern across the board rather than playing the whole thing out.
Go isn't flawless. There is a situation (ko) which essentially breaks the game. It's comparable to where in Chess if both players repeatedly make the same moves the game becomes a draw. There had to be rules added to deal with this situation, and while they do add even more depth and change the way the game is played, it is an area where Go's awesome depth-through-simplicity is marred.
I recognize that Chess does have some depth to it other than just brute-force reading. There are concepts like pinning which result from the rules, but they're far fewer and generally not as interesting. There's also many concepts which carry between the two, such as Go's sente/gote vs Chess's tempo.
Go is less about reading than it is about understanding. This, combine with the cool patters and concepts which emerge, is why Go is better than Chess. This is largely opinion; someone who plays Go is not necessarily a better, smarter person than someone who plays Chess. It is possible for an intelligent, healthy, mentally-stable human to prefer Chess's convoluted rules, simpler concepts and overwhelming amounts of brute-force reading. They'd just be silly for it.
I'm waiting for Slashdot to update its category image for Apple with the "Bill of Borg" image reserved for Micro$oft stories.
The Borg image wasn't just applied to MS because they're evil, but how they went about it. Like the Borg, either you join them or they destroy you, and like the Borg their technological advancement is largely just a rip off of other people's ideas.
Gotta come up with something different for Apple.
Hmm... Apple reminds me of of the Vulcans. They do a lot of good stuff (contributions to F/OSS with things like Webkit and Darwin) and do help give tech/humanity a push in the right direction every now and then but they still hold back real progress at times with things like this. Give Jobs pointy ears and throw 'em up there.
To be fair, the cell phones actually make really good use of the data plan for the GPS software, by downloading the maps et al live rather than storing it offline. There are offline options, but they really don't hold up against those which require an internet connection. The maps are going to be far more limited. And they're a pain to set up and use. And they use a sizable chunk of your microSD space even if you limit it to just, say, your state. And if you're going to limit to just locally, you probably shouldn't need fancy tech to tell you where you are.
Yes, the data plans can be expensive, but if you want a good experience with your GPS on your phone you'd need it. Telecoms can't compete with main-stream GPS navigation thingies head-to-head, but with the 'net access they've actually managed to - in many ways - get you a better product. If it's too expensive, then just get an main-stream GPS navigation thingie.
It may be possible to argue that whoever you got your cell from should have mentioned that you do have crappy offline options from third parties. Although I really don't think it's fair to expect such things. If you want to make a smart choice, do your research.
I don't think IBM feels like much of a 'Big Player', considering how much the ISO listened to them in regards to the OOXML stuff. If the ISO is going to act so stupid here, ignoring IBM, why should IBM expect their remarks to be considered by the ISO in the future? While it's true that MS isn't going to... influence the ISO's decisions quite so strongly on every tech-related issue as it did here (and so IBM will still have some voice) it is still a better idea to act now. If this happens again (and again and again), IBM won't have as much ground for fighting it. They'd have to justify why they didn't fight quite so hard before, and even if they make a perfectly reasonable argument (ie, your argument) the very fact they're put in that position weakens them.
IBM - and anyone else who cares to (and is in the position to) make a stance against the ISO's actions - must do it immediately and make it clear.
when the asus ee came out it heralded a revolution in computing - a genuine low cost device that would perform all the simple tasks asked off it with a long battery life and portable.
The original eeepc (pre-atom) does not have a long battery life. To get through a school day I spend all my time in a tty with vim with nearly everything else disabled. No X, no sound, no wifi, et al. (To preview LaTeX stuff I use imagemagick to convert it to a jpg than use ZGV to see it without X.) This is fine for me, but for Joe Sixpack the real-world hour-and-a-half battery life is pretty bad. Don't get me wrong, I love my eeepc - it's just that it's battery life is not one of it's strong points.
in the same way I like linux as it removes the vast majority of the worthless eye candy from a modern operating system.
Not really. Maybe most Linux distros don't actually focus on that, or require the disk space be wasted (is it possible to not just disable but remove Aero completely?), but Linux definitely has the worthless eye candy. When I don't care about the battery life, I can get my eeepc to show off bunches of worthless eye candy. I can get it to mimic Vista's Aero quite smoothly, for instance.
vista (for me) is the sum of everything I hate about modern operating systems - far too much eye candy and not enough substance.
Vista's marketing focus(ed) on Aero largely because that's what Joe Sixpack can understand. There was a lot of under-the-hood work with Vista. Many new security improvements, for instance. You can certainly make an argument about whether or not the under-the-hood improvements justify the high system requirements (even with Aero disabled), but don't act as though they are not there.
the newer aus ees and sub-notebooks are once again in a performance and features war. now 10" screens, now HDD not flash, battery life is shortening. and the price is rising.
The newer Asus eeepcs and other sub-notebooks are filling in other niches. The dirty-cheap original eeepc is still available for sale. Give the tech improvements some time - it's inevitable that the 9" screen eeepcs will have the same price as the original 7" with better performance across the board. And no, the battery life is not shortening significantly - the move to Atom improved the battery life. If you don't want the HDD Asus has higher-end eeepc's available with flash. The HDD is not required.
also the new distros have the same issue - I'm sure that KDE4 is the mutts nuts, but to me it is more eye candy that will slow my PC down and get in the way of what I want to do.
KDE4 actually lowers system requirements, even with the eye candy. There was an article on /. a ways back claiming 40% less RAM required, if I remember correctly.
if you do not like the WM then simply install another. with MS you get windows shoveled down your throat if you want it or not.
Okay, here I agree with you. Unix(-like) OS's have a lot more options for things like WM's.
for all the new technology and better software I would much rather see the focus on delivering more stable, faster, leaner systems that run on cheaper hardware more reliably on longer. I am totally disinterested in eye candy, effects, and features that add nothing in the way of functionality yet remove a lot in the way of performance. I just think their focus is seriously wrong.
The focus isn't on the eyecandy, just the marketing. As much as I dislike MS, I'll give them this: they're at least trying to improve things other than the eyecandy.
I agree with what you're trying to say - eyecandy should take a backseat to functionality and system requirements. It's just that nearly all of your individual points are quite a bit off the mark.
Yummie coincidence: I've got a box in arms reach right now make installworld'ing.
While there are numerous benefits to using the source code directly rather pre-compiled packages, there is good reason to standardize pre-compiled package systems. Most prominently, there are cases where compile time / cpu cycles really shouldn't be wasted unnecessarily.
Not only does this sound hilarious ("essential to the economic structure...") but not once in the history of software piracy, as far as I know, has DRM -ever- stopped piracy.
(1) The goal isn't to completely stop all piracy of the product, just curb it. Some people would prefer to just buy the game rather than waiting for a crack or having to hassle with it. While it varries, this is the case sufficiently for companies to consider it worth the downsides. Of course this isn't the case when the DRM more trouble than just waiting a bit more for a clean crack, or if the crack is out before the game actually launches (as happened with Spore).
(2) BD+ is still pretty locked down.
The surface of your brain is pretty thin to, ya'know. At least I know my brain doesn't 'lose capacity' when I go over a speed bump. Like the brainm the single-atom-thick part of the proposed ultracapacitor won't be out to the open air.
Look into how capacitors work. It's capacity is largely based on the surface area of internal parts. You get that by making things thin. Thin is huge for capacitors, even the normal kind you have in the computer you used to type that post. Capacitors are all wound up inside and packed nicely. They *do* break on occasion and get icky gooey stuff everywhere, but it's not exactly so fragile as to be caused by a speed bump. Otherwise we'd have a lot of dead cars on the road.
2D area vs mass. What that statement was trying to get across was that graphene is so thin that you could almost cover a football field with only a gram of it. Think of spreading cream cheese on a bagel. You only have a gram of cream cheese, though, so you have to spread very, very thin. Except the bagel is the size of a football field, so you have to spread it even more ridiculously thin: only an atom thick. Now instead of cream cheese it's carbon atoms.
The problem with that is I can keep checking my neighbor's doors or trying to crack my school's computers until I find something worth the risk of failing to report it. Maybe the guy deserves a relatively minor punishment, but what he did is not ignorable.
Piracy does not *hurt* the developers, it's the lack of sales. You really, really don't want your software pirated? Don't release it. Want to maximize your profit? Release the best product you can for the price [as compared to the customer's alternatives]. If the market cannot be profitable, move to a different market.
Solution #2 Users can buy the game with no DRM, but at a much larger fee like $100+ to cover the costs of people pirating the game from their copy.
Scream into a pillow or something, just stop taking frustration at pirates out on the legitimate customers, please.
I don't think they're trying to sell at the highest price they can, just the one that leads to the most profit, including those who pirated it because they could not afford it. Which is pretty much what they should do. The issue is they may disagree with you as to what the optimum price would be. There's also the issue of people expecting the software to be crappy at a low price.
It's not as though people who had zero interest in a game at USD$50 are going to have anymore interest in it at $10. They're not interested. A lowered price does not guarantee sufficient sales to counterbalance the price drop.
It'd be nice for consumers, though.
My question is how many of those people will continue to purchase DRM'd software after these experiences.
As much as the 1.0 release was exciting, that doesn't mean it's anywhere near 100% yet. Updates - both to WINE or the win32 programs - break things regularly. Many legitimately purchased programs need cracks. Some things just don't work yet. As much as I love WINE, the support calls for it would be outrageous.
Just a simple Gnome or KDE desktop with Open office and Firefox is all HP really needs to push. Anything much beyond that targeted at Joe Sixpack will not be worth the effort.
Irrelevant, they've got an unnecessary dependency on someone else. If MS does screw up (or just acts nasty) sufficiently to hurt HP's bottom line, it'd be quite helpful to have something else to fall back on. If HP has they're own distro they're set until they screw themselves over.
It'd be silly for companies like Dell and HP not to regularly consider non-MS options. Plan B.