..... if left to the devices of Microsoft and companies who focus on the bottom line, instead of secure, stable, atomic software. They would absolutely LOVE to have Windows embedded in some form in our public works infrastructure -- not only would it a recurring source of revenue (thanks to their new licensing model), but it's a massive new (and, as of right now, thankfully unexploited) market, as well.
Before software is deemed safe to run the more "modern" aspects of our lives, I think we need to hold people / companies accountable for the work that they do (or don't do). Somehow I think that MS would be less enthusiastic about peddling its wares if they were held criminally and financially liable for the consequences associated with any of the bugs in their various OS'es.
When signing up for spam-friendly service (Hotmail is the only one that comes to mind right away), submit your real name -- but enter the rest of the information (address, phone #, etc) of your local congressman. Let them pay for the crimes you'd otherwise be suffering -- no, it won't stop you from receiving e-spam, but it will send all snail mail spam and now phone spam to those guys instead. They're in the position to change things, so let them see the folly of their ways!
I'm not sure whether to feel juiced about the fact that the nForce has USB 2.0, Ethernet, Firewire, TV Tuner (!!) and a bunch of PCI slots built in automatically, or unhappy that they've paired all of these great features with what amounts to a budget on-chip video card.
Is there any surreptitious DRM crap in QT6?
on
QuickTime 6 Is Out
·
· Score: 2
I'm looking to dump Windows Media Player once and for all -- I'll accept whatever version ships with Windows 2000, but I've grown wear of having to worry about EULA updates and security holes in my friggin' video player, of all things. That being said, are there any known evil features in Quicktime 6? Things that Apple has built into it that will affect the way I work, without exception? DRM is the obvious example of this, but any addition info would be welcome...........
I was kicking myself when I was posting those links, since I had once upon a time had the Chaos URL, but forgot both the name and address of it. Thank you _so_ for posting it again...........:)
I guess I'm obviously not a Mac user -- I screwed up a bunch of the figures. 90% of 200 million is 180m, not 160m. And the 8% figure is wrong anyway.......... the revised figure is ~3%. So if slightly less than 3% of the 180m PC owners out there are affluent and well-educated, they'd outnumber the # of comparably situated Mac users.
Can you tell I haven't had to do much more than basic algebra since I started programming?:) You'd think of that Calc-III triple integration crap would still have done something for my math skills........
the greater affluence and education level of those who surf using a Mac is attributable in part to the company's comparatively pricier machines
The average Mac user appears to be better educated and wealthier than their PC counterparts, judging by this survey. However, by the report's own figures, Mac users constitute less than 5 percent of the overall market. That means the total number of well-educated and well-to-do Mac users, when compared with the size of the US market, is extremely small.
Stated another way -- there are many more wealthy and well-educated users currently using PCs than there are Mac users. Let's assume the US has 200 million people who use computers. 5% of 200 million people is 10m, which means there's a maximum of 10m Mac users in the US. Even if 50% of them are well-educated and affluent, that's a max of 5m people. 90% of 200 million is 160m, which means that if only 8% of PC users fit the same criteria for education / $$, you'll have the same number of smart, rich peeps using each type of computer. And if that number's higher, it means that more intelligent, affluent people use PCs than Macs.
If the study really wanted to back up the conclusions they stated in the article, they'd survey users whose educational background and yearly earnings were comparable. Given a large enough survey sampling group, I'm sure they would reach the same conclusion.
Psytrance is essentially trance on acid -- it ranges from ambient to trance with totally wacked-out effects in it. What's more, psytrance "DJs" don't usually spin records -- it's all digital mixing. I prefer psytrance (also called goa) over trance, because it's usually faster and eschews a lot of the house-y aspects of trance -- there aren't really many "anthems" to speak of, it's a bit faster and it can get downright goofy sometimes.
We wanted to focus on interaction. And what is more interactive than games? We made this market. We made new sectors. American media companies were just using online capacity to distribute offline media.
I don't think I've heard anything as progressive and rational as this statement from any company in the US for a long, long time. Good stuff........
And let's not forget X-Wing, either. While I agree that Tie Fighter broke more ground, because it was more original in terms of the direction it took (I mean, how much time in all of the movies combined do you get to see the Empire's slant on things?), I nearly burst with joy when I found out I would be running an assault on the Death Star during the final level. And that made it seem as hard as it looked in the movie -- laser tower firing on approach, trench cannons busting a cap in you and your crew as you flew down the claustrophobic corridor, and then getting to dump oodles of plasma-laden lovin' straight down the throat of the planet-sized weapon.
Too bad they haven't been able to crank out anything nearly as cool since. Dark Forces was fun, but I didn't have much desire to play the single player version again once I beat it.
Why in God's name would I trust a company that changed its privacy policy overnight, much to the chagrin of millions of people worldwide (Hotmail.com)? Why would I trust a company that surreptitiously modified the EULA of their _media player_ to include consent to modify the DRM / OS it runs on?
I trust my VISA (and credit card companies in general), because they tend to work in my interest and take care of me when I have bonafide problems with unauthorized usage and such. I have zero trust in Microsoft, a company that has systematically undermined my digital rights on a regular basis without apparent consideration of what I want. It may be "good for business", but it's not good for me.
That being said, I plan on reformatting my Win2k boxes at home this weekend and uninstalling the Media Player. I'll also be removing the "Automatic Updates" feature they added to their "Windows Update" site recently -- I don't trust them not to modify my preferences there, either.
There's been a lot of chatting about ATi vs NVidia over on Shacknews.com recently about this kinda stuff. Especially since the Carmack came out and said that he thought the R300 was gonna be more capable, from a hardware standpoint, even if ATi's drivers didn't do it justice. If ATi decides to hunker down and make their drivers as good as their hardware, I think they'll do just fine. But if not, then Nvidia will retain its crown, since their drivers seem to work better for the masses than ATi's do.
As far as all this power going unused -- I doubt it. I think at some point game companies _will_ have to focus on better gameplay, instead of simply rehashing the same game concepts and upgrading the graphics engines. But I think that graphics will play a large part in that, too.
We have a pretty small MIS department within my company (I'm the newest addition, which brings our headcount up to 5), and we've just finished migrating all of our servers to Windows 2000. Next year, after we've budgeted the funds for it, we'll probably go ahead and upgrade all of our client computers to Office 2000 and a newer OS. Personally, I'm pushing for Windows 2000 -- I think it's a terrific blend of NT and 9x, and it's stable enough that we don't have to worry about it crashing all the time.
Beyond that, however, I really can't say I'm interested in upgrading to the latest and greatest, Office or Windows. MS seems to be pushing these OS's out the door faster than I can learn them, and I'm not convinced that the new ones are either more robust or stable than the last.
What I'm concerned about is the 200% Microsoft tax that lies ahead for those who don't want whatever OS Microsoft is pushing during that month. For instance, most non-white-box computers ship with an OEM OS, period -- you can't ask for no OS to be installed and save on the cost of the box. So what happens if you decide you want to install a different OS after-the-fact? You have to pay for a license for that OS, on top of the OEM-packaged OS you already paid for! Pretty absurd............
I agree with your two points -- it's "the question" that you pose that I strongly disagree with. This assuming that you're alluding to the condition of the American Taliban, John Walker Lindh. As has been stated a bunch of times, he is NOT considered an American citizen -- he voluntarily left this country to join a group of fighters hostile to the US, with the active intent of causing damage to this country. Add to the mix the fact that the Taliban have no country to call their own, and clearly do not adhere to rules dictated by the Geneva Peace Accord, and you have a perfectly rational explanation for denying this individual his rights under US law.
Don't try to confuse the issues of commercial surveillance with that of American liberties and law at large. They're two mutually exclusive issues.
Same here. I went over to DSLReport.com to check out what kind of speed I was getting up / down -- 1.2Mb down, 0.98Mb up. Good for just about everything I'd use it for -- Halo Online, KaZaA Lite, Neverwinter Nights and surfing.:)
When you buy a DVD, you usually get higher quality output, less volatile / damage-prone media, and the quality won't crap out with extended use. In addition, you usually get a bunch of extras / goodies tossed in, such as interviews, Easter eggs and deleted scenes. Plus, you're able to rent a DVD first if you don't wanna buy it outright, sample the goods, and then decide if it's worth it to buy it.
With music CDs, you can't conveniently sample the music before you buy it. Or maybe you can, if you go to a Virgin MegaStore and stand at one of those kiosks for 90mins, but that's not for me. Music CDs don't have any *bonus* features beyond what you hear on the radio, and it's rare when you ever hear more than a single song or two on the radio, to give you an idea of whether the price of the CD is worth the quality of the entire album.
So am I surprised that the music industry is faltering at a time when video is booming? No. Piracy does and will continue to happen -- you can bitch about it, or you can improve your legit product and/or change your business model to make it more attractive.
Do I have a good solution for how the music industry can solve its woes? Nope. But I don't feel sorry for them -- they've been dragging their feet for decades, exploiting the lack of choice of musical options by jacking prices way up for shoddy, over-produced sound. And they continue to do it......... and so, I continue to pirate most of my music and only buy those items I deem worthy of my hard-earned greenery.
I think this is rather amusing.........
on
Is Linux Dead?
·
· Score: 1
.... because this means that Microsoft is losing market share (or losing out on _potential_ markets) to a dead operating system. But then again, I'd like to see MSNBC explain away Linux's inroads in Taiwan, Peru, Disney's server farms, the US education market...... blah blah blah.
Move digital broadcasts outside of the US to nations that aren't beholden to the RIAA / privatized interests. Granted, those may be far and few in between, but it's clear that innovation and choice no longer have a home here in the US. Between the assault on user privacy (i.e. lack of European-style safeguards against spam) and digital rights (attempts by RIAA member companies to sabotage CDs in the interests of preserving their strangehold on the market), the consumer can't get a break here anymore.
Oh, and I forgot the broadband market -- true, we have choice, but it's nowhere near as progressive as it needs to be. Tons of unlit fiber lies buried beneath the ground, yet the companies can't seem to find a way to take advantage of it. And if anything's gonna drive the next big wave in our economy, it's information -- the value of which should be made quite apparent by the myriad shortcomings of various elements of the US Government on 9/11.
But that's just my opinion..... kick me in the jimmy, if it suits you.
A voice of reasons speaks! I wholly agree..... by zBoD's argument, there shouldn't have been any awards given out to any items shown at E3, because there _technically_ weren't any (finished) games there, only demos. But people are missing the point -- the awards are purely subjective assessments of how various games looked. And Doom III looked to be the best-of-show........... thank you, drive through.
Can somebody please loan Michael a clue.......
on
Doom III Takes E3 Awards
·
· Score: 5, Informative
..... as to what E3 is? It is NOT a software store, where titles that have already been released are shown. It _IS_ an expo where new, bleeding-edge games that people will see IN THE FUTURE are shown (to varying degrees).
Here's a hint -- you WON'T see Neverwinter Nights again as a candidate for "Best of Show" next year. Next time, be sure to think before you post..........
Slashdot Mirror
(Steve, the Dell guy) "Duuuude, you're getting a Dell! But you're _not_ getting an HP printer........"
(Nelson steps in for a cameo) "Ha ha!"
..... if left to the devices of Microsoft and companies who focus on the bottom line, instead of secure, stable, atomic software. They would absolutely LOVE to have Windows embedded in some form in our public works infrastructure -- not only would it a recurring source of revenue (thanks to their new licensing model), but it's a massive new (and, as of right now, thankfully unexploited) market, as well.
Before software is deemed safe to run the more "modern" aspects of our lives, I think we need to hold people / companies accountable for the work that they do (or don't do). Somehow I think that MS would be less enthusiastic about peddling its wares if they were held criminally and financially liable for the consequences associated with any of the bugs in their various OS'es.
For the right of users to install patches without having to accept EULAs that don't apply to the OS whatsoever.
When signing up for spam-friendly service (Hotmail is the only one that comes to mind right away), submit your real name -- but enter the rest of the information (address, phone #, etc) of your local congressman. Let them pay for the crimes you'd otherwise be suffering -- no, it won't stop you from receiving e-spam, but it will send all snail mail spam and now phone spam to those guys instead. They're in the position to change things, so let them see the folly of their ways!
I'm not sure whether to feel juiced about the fact that the nForce has USB 2.0, Ethernet, Firewire, TV Tuner (!!) and a bunch of PCI slots built in automatically, or unhappy that they've paired all of these great features with what amounts to a budget on-chip video card.
I'm looking to dump Windows Media Player once and for all -- I'll accept whatever version ships with Windows 2000, but I've grown wear of having to worry about EULA updates and security holes in my friggin' video player, of all things. That being said, are there any known evil features in Quicktime 6? Things that Apple has built into it that will affect the way I work, without exception? DRM is the obvious example of this, but any addition info would be welcome...........
I was kicking myself when I was posting those links, since I had once upon a time had the Chaos URL, but forgot both the name and address of it. Thank you _so_ for posting it again........... :)
I guess I'm obviously not a Mac user -- I screwed up a bunch of the figures. 90% of 200 million is 180m, not 160m. And the 8% figure is wrong anyway.......... the revised figure is ~3%. So if slightly less than 3% of the 180m PC owners out there are affluent and well-educated, they'd outnumber the # of comparably situated Mac users.
:) You'd think of that Calc-III triple integration crap would still have done something for my math skills........
Can you tell I haven't had to do much more than basic algebra since I started programming?
the greater affluence and education level of those who surf using a Mac is attributable in part to the company's comparatively pricier machines
The average Mac user appears to be better educated and wealthier than their PC counterparts, judging by this survey. However, by the report's own figures, Mac users constitute less than 5 percent of the overall market. That means the total number of well-educated and well-to-do Mac users, when compared with the size of the US market, is extremely small.
Stated another way -- there are many more wealthy and well-educated users currently using PCs than there are Mac users. Let's assume the US has 200 million people who use computers. 5% of 200 million people is 10m, which means there's a maximum of 10m Mac users in the US. Even if 50% of them are well-educated and affluent, that's a max of 5m people. 90% of 200 million is 160m, which means that if only 8% of PC users fit the same criteria for education / $$, you'll have the same number of smart, rich peeps using each type of computer. And if that number's higher, it means that more intelligent, affluent people use PCs than Macs.
If the study really wanted to back up the conclusions they stated in the article, they'd survey users whose educational background and yearly earnings were comparable. Given a large enough survey sampling group, I'm sure they would reach the same conclusion.
Psytrance is essentially trance on acid -- it ranges from ambient to trance with totally wacked-out effects in it. What's more, psytrance "DJs" don't usually spin records -- it's all digital mixing. I prefer psytrance (also called goa) over trance, because it's usually faster and eschews a lot of the house-y aspects of trance -- there aren't really many "anthems" to speak of, it's a bit faster and it can get downright goofy sometimes.
p l.shtmlw .microdots.org/
http://www.isratrance.com
http://goablaze.org/
http://www.hallucinogenic.de/
http://ww
http://www.psynews.org/
We wanted to focus on interaction. And what is more interactive than games? We made this market. We made new sectors. American media companies were just using online capacity to distribute offline media.
I don't think I've heard anything as progressive and rational as this statement from any company in the US for a long, long time. Good stuff........
And let's not forget X-Wing, either. While I agree that Tie Fighter broke more ground, because it was more original in terms of the direction it took (I mean, how much time in all of the movies combined do you get to see the Empire's slant on things?), I nearly burst with joy when I found out I would be running an assault on the Death Star during the final level. And that made it seem as hard as it looked in the movie -- laser tower firing on approach, trench cannons busting a cap in you and your crew as you flew down the claustrophobic corridor, and then getting to dump oodles of plasma-laden lovin' straight down the throat of the planet-sized weapon.
Too bad they haven't been able to crank out anything nearly as cool since. Dark Forces was fun, but I didn't have much desire to play the single player version again once I beat it.
Why in God's name would I trust a company that changed its privacy policy overnight, much to the chagrin of millions of people worldwide (Hotmail.com)? Why would I trust a company that surreptitiously modified the EULA of their _media player_ to include consent to modify the DRM / OS it runs on?
I trust my VISA (and credit card companies in general), because they tend to work in my interest and take care of me when I have bonafide problems with unauthorized usage and such. I have zero trust in Microsoft, a company that has systematically undermined my digital rights on a regular basis without apparent consideration of what I want. It may be "good for business", but it's not good for me.
That being said, I plan on reformatting my Win2k boxes at home this weekend and uninstalling the Media Player. I'll also be removing the "Automatic Updates" feature they added to their "Windows Update" site recently -- I don't trust them not to modify my preferences there, either.
There's been a lot of chatting about ATi vs NVidia over on Shacknews.com recently about this kinda stuff. Especially since the Carmack came out and said that he thought the R300 was gonna be more capable, from a hardware standpoint, even if ATi's drivers didn't do it justice. If ATi decides to hunker down and make their drivers as good as their hardware, I think they'll do just fine. But if not, then Nvidia will retain its crown, since their drivers seem to work better for the masses than ATi's do.
As far as all this power going unused -- I doubt it. I think at some point game companies _will_ have to focus on better gameplay, instead of simply rehashing the same game concepts and upgrading the graphics engines. But I think that graphics will play a large part in that, too.
We have a pretty small MIS department within my company (I'm the newest addition, which brings our headcount up to 5), and we've just finished migrating all of our servers to Windows 2000. Next year, after we've budgeted the funds for it, we'll probably go ahead and upgrade all of our client computers to Office 2000 and a newer OS. Personally, I'm pushing for Windows 2000 -- I think it's a terrific blend of NT and 9x, and it's stable enough that we don't have to worry about it crashing all the time.
Beyond that, however, I really can't say I'm interested in upgrading to the latest and greatest, Office or Windows. MS seems to be pushing these OS's out the door faster than I can learn them, and I'm not convinced that the new ones are either more robust or stable than the last.
What I'm concerned about is the 200% Microsoft tax that lies ahead for those who don't want whatever OS Microsoft is pushing during that month. For instance, most non-white-box computers ship with an OEM OS, period -- you can't ask for no OS to be installed and save on the cost of the box. So what happens if you decide you want to install a different OS after-the-fact? You have to pay for a license for that OS, on top of the OEM-packaged OS you already paid for! Pretty absurd............
Is "MacWEKK" a 133+ h4x0r Macintosh publication or something? :)
I agree with your two points -- it's "the question" that you pose that I strongly disagree with. This assuming that you're alluding to the condition of the American Taliban, John Walker Lindh. As has been stated a bunch of times, he is NOT considered an American citizen -- he voluntarily left this country to join a group of fighters hostile to the US, with the active intent of causing damage to this country. Add to the mix the fact that the Taliban have no country to call their own, and clearly do not adhere to rules dictated by the Geneva Peace Accord, and you have a perfectly rational explanation for denying this individual his rights under US law.
Don't try to confuse the issues of commercial surveillance with that of American liberties and law at large. They're two mutually exclusive issues.
Couldn't you just say you'll turn it in "when it's done"?
Same here. I went over to DSLReport.com to check out what kind of speed I was getting up / down -- 1.2Mb down, 0.98Mb up. Good for just about everything I'd use it for -- Halo Online, KaZaA Lite, Neverwinter Nights and surfing. :)
When you buy a DVD, you usually get higher quality output, less volatile / damage-prone media, and the quality won't crap out with extended use. In addition, you usually get a bunch of extras / goodies tossed in, such as interviews, Easter eggs and deleted scenes. Plus, you're able to rent a DVD first if you don't wanna buy it outright, sample the goods, and then decide if it's worth it to buy it.
With music CDs, you can't conveniently sample the music before you buy it. Or maybe you can, if you go to a Virgin MegaStore and stand at one of those kiosks for 90mins, but that's not for me. Music CDs don't have any *bonus* features beyond what you hear on the radio, and it's rare when you ever hear more than a single song or two on the radio, to give you an idea of whether the price of the CD is worth the quality of the entire album.
So am I surprised that the music industry is faltering at a time when video is booming? No. Piracy does and will continue to happen -- you can bitch about it, or you can improve your legit product and/or change your business model to make it more attractive.
Do I have a good solution for how the music industry can solve its woes? Nope. But I don't feel sorry for them -- they've been dragging their feet for decades, exploiting the lack of choice of musical options by jacking prices way up for shoddy, over-produced sound. And they continue to do it......... and so, I continue to pirate most of my music and only buy those items I deem worthy of my hard-earned greenery.
That's DISGUSTING!!
.... because this means that Microsoft is losing market share (or losing out on _potential_ markets) to a dead operating system. But then again, I'd like to see MSNBC explain away Linux's inroads in Taiwan, Peru, Disney's server farms, the US education market...... blah blah blah.
(--- is a MS programmer)
Move digital broadcasts outside of the US to nations that aren't beholden to the RIAA / privatized interests. Granted, those may be far and few in between, but it's clear that innovation and choice no longer have a home here in the US. Between the assault on user privacy (i.e. lack of European-style safeguards against spam) and digital rights (attempts by RIAA member companies to sabotage CDs in the interests of preserving their strangehold on the market), the consumer can't get a break here anymore.
Oh, and I forgot the broadband market -- true, we have choice, but it's nowhere near as progressive as it needs to be. Tons of unlit fiber lies buried beneath the ground, yet the companies can't seem to find a way to take advantage of it. And if anything's gonna drive the next big wave in our economy, it's information -- the value of which should be made quite apparent by the myriad shortcomings of various elements of the US Government on 9/11.
But that's just my opinion..... kick me in the jimmy, if it suits you.
A voice of reasons speaks! I wholly agree..... by zBoD's argument, there shouldn't have been any awards given out to any items shown at E3, because there _technically_ weren't any (finished) games there, only demos. But people are missing the point -- the awards are purely subjective assessments of how various games looked. And Doom III looked to be the best-of-show........... thank you, drive through.
..... as to what E3 is? It is NOT a software store, where titles that have already been released are shown. It _IS_ an expo where new, bleeding-edge games that people will see IN THE FUTURE are shown (to varying degrees).
Here's a hint -- you WON'T see Neverwinter Nights again as a candidate for "Best of Show" next year. Next time, be sure to think before you post..........