Having done Windows upgrades, I have to say in many respects, Ubuntu (and many other Linux distros) are ahead of Windows.
And I think KDE and Gnome are better in the UI department, too.
And I think Ubuntu (and others) are clearly ahead in the approach to security, with Vista following along with a sudo-style approach to administrative functions.
Its all a matter of what is important to you.
OTOH, it doesn't have to be a war, except to the people who have a financial stake in the dominance of one system or the other; XP and Kubuntu are perfectly happy alongside eachother on my system.
Then you're talking about it in the wrong venue. This is a discussion about federal legislation, and that has nothing to do with you local zoning rules.
Really, I don't think federal legislation should require multiple overlapping fibre networks to acheive freedom and competition here. Indeed, the whole point of common carrier regulation in the telephone industry is to avoid requiring that while still stopping control of the wires from being leveraged into control of what was done over the wires.
The logic with internet service is the same. It is socially undesirable to have dozens of different cable providers trying to run fiber on polls or underground through the same neighborhoods, much as it would be (though not nearly as dramatically) to have competing road networks.
There is no reason for federal policy to present locals with two bad options.
I have four ISPs with fiber, coax, and other forms of copper to pick from (more, if you count wireless providers) - already run right to the curb in my neighborhood.
I have many broadband ISPs to choose from, though most of them use the cable that belongs to the telco. Well, all of them, as far as I know, except the wireless and the local cable monopoly.
Don't muddy up a conversation about the merits of a silly, prospective federal act when your real frustration is about your inability to get your local zoning and utility commission people to wake up and allow businesses to compete for your network dollars.
People are competing for my network dollars now, even though they aren't, for the most part, competing for the right to physically run cable to my house.
Players can create things? Well how about trying to modding tools that come with almost every game that isn't an MMORPG these days, creat all you want.
Yeah, well, see the unique thing about SL is that it is a massively multiplayer online environment and it focusses on participant creation. Saying, well, yeah, there are plenty of non-MMO facilities that you can create custom content for misses the point.
While I'm ranting, why do people think that 1080i is better than 720p?
Because for some things, it is.
1080i is really only 540p, where every other frame are the interlaced lines, it's 30 full 1080 line frames being shown as pairs of 540 line frames.
No, 1080i != 540p. For one thing, there is no "540p" HDTV mode. 1080i has greater horizontal resolution than 720p, though fewer vertical lines are updated per update. 720p updates slightly more pixels per unit time than 1080i.
1080i is better for largely static content, 720p for highly dynamic content. Most games probably look better in 720p, though there are some kinds of games that might look better in 1080i.
Uh, Laserdisc doesn't even have digital video, just digital audio, which comes in PCM or AC3 forms. And you're forgetting some other important formats.
Doh! Forgot that about LD. (Though I think, from the user perspective, "digital", per se, wasn't the key issue.)
And I'm not sure I'd characterize VCD and S-VCD as important formats, though they certainly existed and were relevant at the time. At any rate, the key point the upthread poster seems to have meant, that DVD was well-established as the new format-of-choice at the time of the PS2's release is well-made, even if there is some quibbling to be done over the details of the way it was made.
That's exactly what it is -- extortion to protect the infrastructure providers efforts to branch out into (and dominate) various content businesses (VoIP, Video-on-Demand, etc.)
It seems to me quite likely that, in SL (and certainly it seems to have been the case with MUSH's as well), there are quite a few people for whom the main focus is playing games (or experiencing other pre-created content).
The difference between SL and a game is that the focus of SL isn't on providing the content, but providing the framework, tools, and access for both the creators of the content, and the people that are interested in simply enjoying created content (game or otherwise).
Now, generally, that means that you won't have as elaborate content in any environment in SL that you would in a major commercial game, but on the other hand, it means that you'll have a considerable variety of content from creators with different visions. Even without being a creator yourself, that's going to appeal to some people.
And, of course, a basic SL account is free (you have to get a paid account to get virtual real estate), as is the client, which gives it a price advantage over many games, too.
Second Life isn't really a game in itself, even if it is superficially like a MMORPG. (I'd call it a Massively Multiparticipant Online Roleplaying Environment more than a "game"). But there are plenty of games -- and other diversions -- created by people within Second Life.
Again, I think this generation of consoles has been rushed. In 2-4 years, BluRay and HD-DVD will be cheaper and more desirable to home consumers. By then, we will start seeing games bigger than 1 DVD in size, and new block-buster movies will be released in HD for the home. But, in 2006, BluRay is not worth the cost.
Its probably not worth the additional cost to the average consumer in the marketplace. OTOH, given the persistent launch shortages with almost every recent console, its pretty clear that almost every recent console has been priced too low at launch for initial manufacturing capacity.
Certainly, a strategy of aiming slightly higher end, targetting initially a narrower market, isn't completely insane. The question is: will Sony be able to drop the price later, or generate the kind of momentum with Blu-Ray necessary to make it more valuable to purchasers other than the early adopters?
Why is it assumed that the internet is the common property of all mankind?
"The internet" isn't a unit.
The wires over which access to the internet is delivered by cable and telephone companies, however, are supported by a government-granted (i.e., public) franchise agreements with cable companies, public policies to promote telephone access, including subsidies paid by taxpayers, and numerous other public benefits provided by through government action to those companies.
If they didn't want to serve the public interest, they shouldn't feed at the public trough.
What would happen if Congress tried to pass some Net Neutrality Law?
ISPs would be common carriers just as telcos are in their role as telephone companies. Which is largely what the telcos are trying to escape.
This isn't really a new scenario. Narrow control of infrastructure and its leverage to anti-competitive advantage in other fields is a well-known problem. We don't have to pretend we don't know the difficulties in each new kind of infrastructure until the abuses are realized.
From a "free speech" point of view, how is this any different than than your local newspaper's editorial policy?
My local newspaper doesn't deliver its papers to my neighbors by running them over my property on a free easement granted specially to them through law on the premise that they are providing infrastructure that serves the public interest as well as their own private interest as a business.
Broadband internet infrastructure providers in my area do.
If they want to control content by making charges for tiered access to content providers, I want the freedom to charge them for every bit that they ship across through my property.
OTOH, I'll accept not having that freedom so long as they are actually providing a content-neutral network, charging as they have been for access and bandwidth.
As long as they work with only phone numbers, and names don't get involved they are in the clear. Law enforcement can get phone records of calls to and from a specific number by simply asking, without any court order.
Actually, it was illegal under existing statute at the time this operation began for the phone companies to provide that information without a court order or a reasonable belief in a specific emergency to which the particular information being handed over is necessary.
During the existence of this program, those provisions were broadened somewhat (from "reasonable" to "good faith", which allows a subjective belief without any substantive basis, and expanded the kind of "emergency" required), but even so the program remains dubious.
As to constitutionality, I'm well aware of the pen register-related cases, OTOH, those involved factually more narrow inquiries that, while not supported by court orders, were based on specific suspicion, and the key cases predate the statutory prohibitions, which could be read as influencing what is Constitutionally reasonable (as they specifically refer to whether there is an expectation of privacy recognized by society).
What I mean is that the wholesale conversion from VHS to DVD that occurred over the past 5 years or so is pretty much guaranteed not to happen again.
I'm not sure that's true. I'd say its almost guaranteed to happen again, but probably not until a new storage medium is developed that is fundamentally radically different from DVD (or for audio, CD) such that a player for both the old and the new media costs nearly as much as a new player plus an old player, rather than being easy to add and adding little cost to the new player.
As long as the new formats are basically compatible, you'll get audio- and videophiles upgrading, new purchasers buying the new format, and lots of people with existing media keeping using their old media, and buying players for the new format as a low priority luxury purchase, and probably mostly only buying new titles in the new format, while still using their old media as well.
Because consoles -- and I suspect this will continue to be the case with the new models, even with harddrives standard, unlike PCs, don't rely on "installing" anything to the computer, but tend to play directly off the distribution media. Further, PCs are less standardized than consoles, so games sell better if designed for the least-common-denominator media. Plus, CDs are cheap.
All those together give plenty of reason for companies distributing PC games to use CDs -- though the least-common-denominator one has faded -- long after DVD was available. A PC game can use compression that would add too much to load time on the disk to use in play, because it can count on the software being installed (and the files expanded) to a hard disk before the game is played. Similarly, they can distribute on multiple CDs if the content exceeds one CD, so there is little incentive to make the quantum leap up to a higher-capacity medium.
OTOH, in the console environment, you usually want a single-disk distribution that is playable from the disk, and you can count on anyone using the platform you are targetting having the same media options. So there is a lot more incentive to use the most capable medium available.
People WILL have a limit on how many times they will buy the exact same damned thing on a slightly different media.
OTOH, media degrades, is damaged, is lost, etc. and there are a steady stream of new people entering the market each year that haven't bought anything on older media.
Yeah, but DVD was the sole digital video disc platform of the era,
This isn't quite true. LD was still limping on its last legs (I think the last major-maker player was released in 2000 and disks were still being pressed in Japan until 2001). But, yeah, DVD was clearly the format of the immediate future, an advantage Blu-Ray doesn't have now.
Obviously, everyone wants the government to stay out of the public's provate life, but there is a big difference between listening to peoples phone calls and looking for calling patterns.
There is a difference in that one is expressly and well-established to be unconstitutional, and the other is merely of dubious constitutionality and prohibited by statute (or, at least, the telcos turning over the information si generally prohibited by statute.)
OTOH, they are both the same in that they involve the gathering of information in which individuals have a legitimate, and recognized-in-law expectation of privacy, and therefore should not be done by the government in a free country except with a showing that there is some credible reason to expect evidence to be uncovered by the examination of the information associated with a particular target.
The government is in a tough situation where people demand protection, but want to maintain their civil rights rightfully so. It's a tough task in which there is no easy solution.
There is an easy solution which was known by our founders -- to intrude into the private information of a citizen, the executive takes specific information justifying the particular inquiry to a court, and gets a warrant if indeed that information shows probable cause.
There is in reality nothing called "Intellectual Property".
There is, in reality, something called "Intellectual Property".
Its a subset of "Intangible Personal Property", itself a subset of "Property".
Similarly, there is a thing called "Property", even though actual property interests are governed by distinct (but sometimes overlapping) sets of case and statute law depending on whether the "property" involved is "real property", "tangible personal property", "intangible personal property", and even more specifically by which particular subcategory of some of those categories it falls into.
The existence of important subcategories of a broader category does not mean the broader category doesn't exist.
I see. And so, in your opinion, not-poor reporting would presumably involve the reporter spending the next six years getting an advanced degree in psychiatry and then stating his own opinion?
Well, no, not-poor reporting would start with media outlets recruiting and assigning people to beats in which they have some understanding, and then would involve at least a brief survey and attempt to inform rather than presenting he-said/she-said all the time.
Or are you just one of those people who gets such a kick out of looking cool and cynical that you must instantly put down anyone who is cited as an expert at anything?
Nah, I think its just that you are one of those people that gets such a kick out of looking cool and post-cynical that you have to reflexively put down anyone who challenges the status quo without thinking.
Hitting someone with a frying pan? What fool would take that?
The same fool, I suppose, that would say "I'm bored, let's find some other techies and start beating the crap out of each other."
Or, I suppose, that would watch the fictional account of a character that went completely and destructively insane (but who may have, at the end of the story, "saved" himself by shooting himself in the head) and say "hey, let's imitate that."
Fight Club is a good movie. Imitating because your life is boring is, well, a sign that you need serious help.
It is probably a fact that "Michael Messner, a University of Southern California sociology and gender studies professor".
It is poor (though typical) reporting that these types of claims are reported simply as "so-and-so says", but it saves journalist from having to have any knowledge of or do any research in the field they are covering, they can simply find the nearest person with a degree or job in a superficially relevant field, and get a quote, and go home for the day. If they are particularly ambitious, they'll get two conflicting quotes from different experts, to show "balance".
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Having done Windows upgrades, I have to say in many respects, Ubuntu (and many other Linux distros) are ahead of Windows.
And I think KDE and Gnome are better in the UI department, too.
And I think Ubuntu (and others) are clearly ahead in the approach to security, with Vista following along with a sudo-style approach to administrative functions.
Its all a matter of what is important to you.
OTOH, it doesn't have to be a war, except to the people who have a financial stake in the dominance of one system or the other; XP and Kubuntu are perfectly happy alongside eachother on my system.
...only outlaws will do chemistry at home.
Really, I don't think federal legislation should require multiple overlapping fibre networks to acheive freedom and competition here. Indeed, the whole point of common carrier regulation in the telephone industry is to avoid requiring that while still stopping control of the wires from being leveraged into control of what was done over the wires.
The logic with internet service is the same. It is socially undesirable to have dozens of different cable providers trying to run fiber on polls or underground through the same neighborhoods, much as it would be (though not nearly as dramatically) to have competing road networks.
There is no reason for federal policy to present locals with two bad options.
I have many broadband ISPs to choose from, though most of them use the cable that belongs to the telco. Well, all of them, as far as I know, except the wireless and the local cable monopoly.
People are competing for my network dollars now, even though they aren't, for the most part, competing for the right to physically run cable to my house.
Yeah, well, see the unique thing about SL is that it is a massively multiplayer online environment and it focusses on participant creation. Saying, well, yeah, there are plenty of non-MMO facilities that you can create custom content for misses the point.
Because for some things, it is.
No, 1080i != 540p. For one thing, there is no "540p" HDTV mode. 1080i has greater horizontal resolution than 720p, though fewer vertical lines are updated per update. 720p updates slightly more pixels per unit time than 1080i.
1080i is better for largely static content, 720p for highly dynamic content. Most games probably look better in 720p, though there are some kinds of games that might look better in 1080i.
It probably will -- for PCs. Consoles aren't PCs.
Doh! Forgot that about LD. (Though I think, from the user perspective, "digital", per se, wasn't the key issue.)
And I'm not sure I'd characterize VCD and S-VCD as important formats, though they certainly existed and were relevant at the time. At any rate, the key point the upthread poster seems to have meant, that DVD was well-established as the new format-of-choice at the time of the PS2's release is well-made, even if there is some quibbling to be done over the details of the way it was made.
That's exactly what it is -- extortion to protect the infrastructure providers efforts to branch out into (and dominate) various content businesses (VoIP, Video-on-Demand, etc.)
It seems to me quite likely that, in SL (and certainly it seems to have been the case with MUSH's as well), there are quite a few people for whom the main focus is playing games (or experiencing other pre-created content).
The difference between SL and a game is that the focus of SL isn't on providing the content, but providing the framework, tools, and access for both the creators of the content, and the people that are interested in simply enjoying created content (game or otherwise).
Now, generally, that means that you won't have as elaborate content in any environment in SL that you would in a major commercial game, but on the other hand, it means that you'll have a considerable variety of content from creators with different visions. Even without being a creator yourself, that's going to appeal to some people.
And, of course, a basic SL account is free (you have to get a paid account to get virtual real estate), as is the client, which gives it a price advantage over many games, too.
Second Life isn't really a game in itself, even if it is superficially like a MMORPG. (I'd call it a Massively Multiparticipant Online Roleplaying Environment more than a "game"). But there are plenty of games -- and other diversions -- created by people within Second Life.
Its probably not worth the additional cost to the average consumer in the marketplace. OTOH, given the persistent launch shortages with almost every recent console, its pretty clear that almost every recent console has been priced too low at launch for initial manufacturing capacity.
Certainly, a strategy of aiming slightly higher end, targetting initially a narrower market, isn't completely insane. The question is: will Sony be able to drop the price later, or generate the kind of momentum with Blu-Ray necessary to make it more valuable to purchasers other than the early adopters?
"The internet" isn't a unit.
The wires over which access to the internet is delivered by cable and telephone companies, however, are supported by a government-granted (i.e., public) franchise agreements with cable companies, public policies to promote telephone access, including subsidies paid by taxpayers, and numerous other public benefits provided by through government action to those companies.
If they didn't want to serve the public interest, they shouldn't feed at the public trough.
ISPs would be common carriers just as telcos are in their role as telephone companies. Which is largely what the telcos are trying to escape.
This isn't really a new scenario. Narrow control of infrastructure and its leverage to anti-competitive advantage in other fields is a well-known problem. We don't have to pretend we don't know the difficulties in each new kind of infrastructure until the abuses are realized.
My local newspaper doesn't deliver its papers to my neighbors by running them over my property on a free easement granted specially to them through law on the premise that they are providing infrastructure that serves the public interest as well as their own private interest as a business.
Broadband internet infrastructure providers in my area do.
If they want to control content by making charges for tiered access to content providers, I want the freedom to charge them for every bit that they ship across through my property.
OTOH, I'll accept not having that freedom so long as they are actually providing a content-neutral network, charging as they have been for access and bandwidth.
Actually, it was illegal under existing statute at the time this operation began for the phone companies to provide that information without a court order or a reasonable belief in a specific emergency to which the particular information being handed over is necessary.
During the existence of this program, those provisions were broadened somewhat (from "reasonable" to "good faith", which allows a subjective belief without any substantive basis, and expanded the kind of "emergency" required), but even so the program remains dubious.
As to constitutionality, I'm well aware of the pen register-related cases, OTOH, those involved factually more narrow inquiries that, while not supported by court orders, were based on specific suspicion, and the key cases predate the statutory prohibitions, which could be read as influencing what is Constitutionally reasonable (as they specifically refer to whether there is an expectation of privacy recognized by society).
I'm not sure that's true. I'd say its almost guaranteed to happen again, but probably not until a new storage medium is developed that is fundamentally radically different from DVD (or for audio, CD) such that a player for both the old and the new media costs nearly as much as a new player plus an old player, rather than being easy to add and adding little cost to the new player.
As long as the new formats are basically compatible, you'll get audio- and videophiles upgrading, new purchasers buying the new format, and lots of people with existing media keeping using their old media, and buying players for the new format as a low priority luxury purchase, and probably mostly only buying new titles in the new format, while still using their old media as well.
Because consoles -- and I suspect this will continue to be the case with the new models, even with harddrives standard, unlike PCs, don't rely on "installing" anything to the computer, but tend to play directly off the distribution media. Further, PCs are less standardized than consoles, so games sell better if designed for the least-common-denominator media. Plus, CDs are cheap.
All those together give plenty of reason for companies distributing PC games to use CDs -- though the least-common-denominator one has faded -- long after DVD was available. A PC game can use compression that would add too much to load time on the disk to use in play, because it can count on the software being installed (and the files expanded) to a hard disk before the game is played. Similarly, they can distribute on multiple CDs if the content exceeds one CD, so there is little incentive to make the quantum leap up to a higher-capacity medium.
OTOH, in the console environment, you usually want a single-disk distribution that is playable from the disk, and you can count on anyone using the platform you are targetting having the same media options. So there is a lot more incentive to use the most capable medium available.
Consoles aren't PCs.
This isn't quite true. LD was still limping on its last legs (I think the last major-maker player was released in 2000 and disks were still being pressed in Japan until 2001). But, yeah, DVD was clearly the format of the immediate future, an advantage Blu-Ray doesn't have now.
There is a difference in that one is expressly and well-established to be unconstitutional, and the other is merely of dubious constitutionality and prohibited by statute (or, at least, the telcos turning over the information si generally prohibited by statute.)
OTOH, they are both the same in that they involve the gathering of information in which individuals have a legitimate, and recognized-in-law expectation of privacy, and therefore should not be done by the government in a free country except with a showing that there is some credible reason to expect evidence to be uncovered by the examination of the information associated with a particular target.
There is an easy solution which was known by our founders -- to intrude into the private information of a citizen, the executive takes specific information justifying the particular inquiry to a court, and gets a warrant if indeed that information shows probable cause.
There is, in reality, something called "Intellectual Property".
Its a subset of "Intangible Personal Property", itself a subset of "Property".
Similarly, there is a thing called "Property", even though actual property interests are governed by distinct (but sometimes overlapping) sets of case and statute law depending on whether the "property" involved is "real property", "tangible personal property", "intangible personal property", and even more specifically by which particular subcategory of some of those categories it falls into.
The existence of important subcategories of a broader category does not mean the broader category doesn't exist.
Well, no, not-poor reporting would start with media outlets recruiting and assigning people to beats in which they have some understanding, and then would involve at least a brief survey and attempt to inform rather than presenting he-said/she-said all the time.
Nah, I think its just that you are one of those people that gets such a kick out of looking cool and post-cynical that you have to reflexively put down anyone who challenges the status quo without thinking.
The same fool, I suppose, that would say "I'm bored, let's find some other techies and start beating the crap out of each other."
Or, I suppose, that would watch the fictional account of a character that went completely and destructively insane (but who may have, at the end of the story, "saved" himself by shooting himself in the head) and say "hey, let's imitate that."
Fight Club is a good movie. Imitating because your life is boring is, well, a sign that you need serious help.
It is probably a fact that "Michael Messner, a University of Southern California sociology and gender studies professor".
It is poor (though typical) reporting that these types of claims are reported simply as "so-and-so says", but it saves journalist from having to have any knowledge of or do any research in the field they are covering, they can simply find the nearest person with a degree or job in a superficially relevant field, and get a quote, and go home for the day. If they are particularly ambitious, they'll get two conflicting quotes from different experts, to show "balance".