Heh, I wasn't referring to DRM, but rather to Blu-Ray itself. As I understand it, I recall that being a producer of Blu-Ray media requires hefty licensing requirements. Hence, a "copyright" on the "media."
The solution to that problem is adequately described by the sibling poster. Proper grammar and spelling can easily be used in all of the text-based forums you frequent, be they Slashdot, Twitter, text messages, or IM's.
Shortening "you" to "u," not capitalizing "i," leaving out periods, and so on are techniques I've frequently attributed to being a style that slow typists use to save time. However--unless, of course, you type with single-digit WPM--the amount of time saved by omitting what's usually no more than 5 keystrokes in a single sentence is so small that it doesn't even begin to eclipse the abnormally short attention spans of us internet generation folks.
That said, TL;DR: "Internet Slang" rarely saves time at the keyboard unless you're a really poor typist.
Also Flash and Silverlight are good attack vectors
FUD, sir. (whatever that means)
GP and GGP have it right. Apple's core business model and bottom line is in hardware and software/media sold exclusively through the routes that they (very tightly) control. Flash or Silverlight on these devices subverts that system, and as such, putting either on any is a very unwise business decision.
I'm going to go check their stock price now... and probably wish I owned some:-D
It is a fucking game, I am supposed to enjoy my time while playing it.
If only there were more people like you in game development and design.
I simply don't buy games anymore for several reasons, aside from the asinine price tags, but one sticks out most above all: I shouldn't be punished because I suck.
A very large number of games that I've tried lately have punished me for failure. I won't go deep into details about this one or that one, but the latest Wolfenstein title comes to mind as the last one I played for about an hour and then quit. My "allies" and I were sieging a train station, and, just as in the opening cut scene I had just watched, I tried to sprint around and go Rambo on all of the Nazis behind the door. I must've reloaded the game fifteen times and tried a different approach every time I got through this door, but alas, I kept dying. Hiding under cover to reload and recharge my "stamina" just aren't my kind of thing.
At the very least, in NSMB, when you fail too many times--and yes, even if it's because you're trying to play in a manner that's just too cavalier for your skill level for you to pull off correctly--you at least have the option to skip the level by watching Luigi one-up your ass and breeze through it. Ironically, even if you can't win it the way the developers intended you to, you can still play, have some fun, and at the very least, feel like the game was worth your money by beating the damned thing.
....I'm gonna go play some DotA and kindly get back off the hardcore gamers' lawns.
I like how they mapped it like the old style Nintendo controller as well.
Indeed! The Wiimote was laid out the way it is specifically to accommodate that kind of controller layout, which is quite handy. Honestly though, I think it was done so, though, to allow play of $5-a-pop virtual console (read: buy me again:-P) titles.
There's really no good way right now to force people to watch advertisements if the whole video is H.264
I'm wondering that myself. If you don't make the video player, or at the very least, know exactly how it's going to behave under all conditions, how do you force people to watch the ads?
One of my favorite parts about using Media Player Classic is jumping straight to "Title 1" on a DVD movie. The ads in them these days are extremely annoying.
A couple questions... h264 offers fantastic quality at 1080p in a size that fits on a DVD9, but it also offers quality superior to previous generation codecs for 480i/p video in a size that fits a 1 hour show onto a single CD. What is the current generation FOSS alternative that does the same?
Second, if h264 needs to be licensed at such exorbitant prices, how do x264, VLC, and MPC-HC do it?
I can think of a few people off the top of my head that I know who would take a Windows based solution from Microsoft for the cost of licenses + support, over a Linux based FOSS solution with a similar or lower cost of support, and I'm sure all of you all do as well. Microsoft would be downright foolish not to court that market segment.
My favorite part though, as per TFA:
"We have a system that is absolutely free that we can do anything with, so why are we so obsessed with picking on Microsoft?... Shouldn't we leave the elephant alone and stop poking it with sticks? Well, the problem is they aren't going to leave us alone."
Of course Microsoft is going to compete with your solutions. They're a god damned software company that makes every type of application they can produce without getting [successfully] sued by their competitors. I've never actually said this before, but...
....That's one of the problems with the mentality in the US.
For some reason, it's better to show up sick and underperform than it is to stay home without pay and recuperate.
There were maybe 4 or 5 days last year when I was genuinely too sick to come into work and actually have my work be worth my employer's money, including one where I was recovering from an outbreak of shingles (which was ironically induced by work related stress), and for some reason I felt like an asshole every time I called my boss on those mornings.
prevent you from automating things that shouldn't be (such as actual gameplay, combat in particular), those things are prevented by technical limitations.
Blizzard has made extensive changes to their LUA API over the years, sometimes to add functionality, and other times explicitly to break it.
Something that was recently added, for example, is a Quest Info API that makes it possible for addons to get information about quests you haven't completed and (I think) your eligibility to do so. There's a mod called Everyquest (I think) that makes use of this. Quite handy for those seeking the various "Loremaster" achievements.
Other times, however, when Blizzard doesn't like the functionality an addon provides, like that long ago offered by one called "Decursive," which was much more powerful several years ago, made it so that a player could basically bind, for example, their movement keys to trigger the addon's main function. This effectively created an "auto-dispel harmful debuffs" effect that was quite unfair in a PvP setting. The addon still exists today, only in a slightly less convenient form.
Many functions as well such as attacking units and casting spells and so on are also part of this LUA API, but can only be called from LUA code that's been signed by Blizzard. A little trivia: WoW bots remove this limitation and extensively utilize these protected API calls to perform their actions.
So how do I put \Users on a different volume during Windows7 installation?
Beats me. I remap users' profile folders using group policy. Of course, this only works for Domain users and not for local users, much to my own dismay.
You might be able to mount a separate NTFS volume under C:\Users prior to installation or just after a manual installation using ImageX, but that's something I've never tried nor looked into.
I can feel your point, but Windows feels like that on the surface because of a very well engendered Microsoft principle--backward compatibility.
The command interpreter that was command.com from the DOS era was integrated into NT5+ as cmd.exe, which many of us know, love, hate, and have thanked for allowing us to continue to run.bat files well into 2010 (even though we really, really should have taken the time to master VBScript). Meanwhile, the more powerful, flexible, and truly modern evolution of that archaic CLI comes in the form of PowerShell, which gives you that bash-like capability and power contained in a CLI that was designed specifically for the Windows platform.
The primary method to access a partition in windows is certainly via a drive letter, but if you do manage to go past 26 partitions, you'll get "A-A:," A-B:," and so on. Still, you can actually access these volumes in a more "modern" fashion by using their volume names directly (e.g. \\?\Volume{volume-guid-goes-here}) and not just the mount points they've been exposed on, or you could always expose the same volumes as a folder on an already mounted NTFS volume as well.
The thing is that many of the gripes more technical folks have had about Windows over the last decade have been solved in one way or another, but the problem is that since all of the old methods continue to work, there's little to no incentive for users (including systems admins, IT pros, programmers, and so on) to change our behavior, especially when we already know how to solve a given problem, irrespective of whether or not our chosen method is actually the most elegant solution.
I have to admit though, if I hadn't been forced to manipulate Linux based OS's in the ways that are required to get work done, particularly with respect to volume management, I probably wouldn't know about any of this stuff in Windows in the first place:P
Aye. I'm not a networking fellow myself, but when I went to the vSphere launch, my co-worker expressed serious interest in the 1000V portion of vSphere 4.
The hardest part about evaluating VMWare in our datacenter at the time was definitely teaching myself enough about networking to ensure that the ESX Servers' network configs were correct to implement the scenarios we wanted to test. Being able to basically follow a standard setup procedure for the server infrastructure and then pass off an IP or a management console to a Cisco guy and know that it's in good hands... that's a godsend.
Plenty of business users are on XP, where you could perhaps get your majority sampling, but 9 times out of 10 now, when I troubleshoot a home computer for anyone, it's a laptop or desktop running Vista or 7. The only machines you see with XP on them are enterprise machines, which won't be playing those files anyway, and ones that were manufactured before 2006, which probably wouldn't be able to reliably play h264 videos, or which the owners of long ago solved the issue of "this file doesn't work right."
If you have the skill, and are willing to troubleshoot the process, installing multiple applications on a Windows server is quite entirely doable.
The problem comes from the fact that it's so complicated to get it working correctly and even more difficult to troubleshoot it in the event of issues that you end up with a lower TCO in a virtualized "one VM per app" type of scenario.
I, not having a large amount of Windows licenses or servers to work with on certain occasions (and having worked for peanuts on occasions) have gotten pretty good at it.... But even I will never [again] install Exchange on a multipurpose Windows install.
Either you smoke or you don't, that's your choice.
Addiction isn't the problem with smoking. The side effects of being a smoker--smelling bad, getting sick more easily, and risking lung cancer et al.--are what's wrong with smoking.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh, I wasn't referring to DRM, but rather to Blu-Ray itself. As I understand it, I recall that being a producer of Blu-Ray media requires hefty licensing requirements. Hence, a "copyright" on the "media."
How can someone possibly "hold copyright on the media"?
Blu-Ray, anyone?
The solution to that problem is adequately described by the sibling poster. Proper grammar and spelling can easily be used in all of the text-based forums you frequent, be they Slashdot, Twitter, text messages, or IM's.
Shortening "you" to "u," not capitalizing "i," leaving out periods, and so on are techniques I've frequently attributed to being a style that slow typists use to save time. However--unless, of course, you type with single-digit WPM--the amount of time saved by omitting what's usually no more than 5 keystrokes in a single sentence is so small that it doesn't even begin to eclipse the abnormally short attention spans of us internet generation folks.
That said, TL;DR: "Internet Slang" rarely saves time at the keyboard unless you're a really poor typist.
That's why I prefer Android's approach
You know, it used to be the other way around, but...
Leave it to Apple to make Microsoft and Google look good.
Also Flash and Silverlight are good attack vectors
FUD, sir. (whatever that means)
:-D
;)
GP and GGP have it right. Apple's core business model and bottom line is in hardware and software/media sold exclusively through the routes that they (very tightly) control. Flash or Silverlight on these devices subverts that system, and as such, putting either on any is a very unwise business decision.
I'm going to go check their stock price now... and probably wish I owned some
Cheers though
It is a fucking game, I am supposed to enjoy my time while playing it.
If only there were more people like you in game development and design.
I simply don't buy games anymore for several reasons, aside from the asinine price tags, but one sticks out most above all: I shouldn't be punished because I suck.
A very large number of games that I've tried lately have punished me for failure. I won't go deep into details about this one or that one, but the latest Wolfenstein title comes to mind as the last one I played for about an hour and then quit. My "allies" and I were sieging a train station, and, just as in the opening cut scene I had just watched, I tried to sprint around and go Rambo on all of the Nazis behind the door. I must've reloaded the game fifteen times and tried a different approach every time I got through this door, but alas, I kept dying. Hiding under cover to reload and recharge my "stamina" just aren't my kind of thing.
At the very least, in NSMB, when you fail too many times--and yes, even if it's because you're trying to play in a manner that's just too cavalier for your skill level for you to pull off correctly--you at least have the option to skip the level by watching Luigi one-up your ass and breeze through it. Ironically, even if you can't win it the way the developers intended you to, you can still play, have some fun, and at the very least, feel like the game was worth your money by beating the damned thing.
....I'm gonna go play some DotA and kindly get back off the hardcore gamers' lawns.
I like how they mapped it like the old style Nintendo controller as well.
Indeed! The Wiimote was laid out the way it is specifically to accommodate that kind of controller layout, which is quite handy. Honestly though, I think it was done so, though, to allow play of $5-a-pop virtual console (read: buy me again :-P) titles.
Never underestimate the power of sales.
Essentially the licence is not for implementing the codec, but for using it.
So, technically speaking, VLC users that install/use the h264 decoder of libvacodec owe licensing fees?
That's... kinda funny.
There's really no good way right now to force people to watch advertisements if the whole video is H.264
I'm wondering that myself. If you don't make the video player, or at the very least, know exactly how it's going to behave under all conditions, how do you force people to watch the ads?
One of my favorite parts about using Media Player Classic is jumping straight to "Title 1" on a DVD movie. The ads in them these days are extremely annoying.
A couple questions... h264 offers fantastic quality at 1080p in a size that fits on a DVD9, but it also offers quality superior to previous generation codecs for 480i/p video in a size that fits a 1 hour show onto a single CD. What is the current generation FOSS alternative that does the same?
Second, if h264 needs to be licensed at such exorbitant prices, how do x264, VLC, and MPC-HC do it?
My favorite part though, as per TFA:
"We have a system that is absolutely free that we can do anything with, so why are we so obsessed with picking on Microsoft? ... Shouldn't we leave the elephant alone and stop poking it with sticks? Well, the problem is they aren't going to leave us alone."
Of course Microsoft is going to compete with your solutions. They're a god damned software company that makes every type of application they can produce without getting [successfully] sued by their competitors. I've never actually said this before, but...
Nothing to see here. Move along.
But then, I'm not on the MS 'turfing payroll
Do you happen to have any idea how I can get on the MS Apologists' payroll?
:(
I'm too broke to keep doing this for free
Yes there's a way to do it with net.exe, but I was referring to something more specific to Powershell. Just a lack of clarity on my part :P
I think I know which my manager'd prefer.
....That's one of the problems with the mentality in the US.
For some reason, it's better to show up sick and underperform than it is to stay home without pay and recuperate.
There were maybe 4 or 5 days last year when I was genuinely too sick to come into work and actually have my work be worth my employer's money, including one where I was recovering from an outbreak of shingles (which was ironically induced by work related stress), and for some reason I felt like an asshole every time I called my boss on those mornings.
Such is life, eh?
prevent you from automating things that shouldn't be (such as actual gameplay, combat in particular), those things are prevented by technical limitations.
Blizzard has made extensive changes to their LUA API over the years, sometimes to add functionality, and other times explicitly to break it.
Something that was recently added, for example, is a Quest Info API that makes it possible for addons to get information about quests you haven't completed and (I think) your eligibility to do so. There's a mod called Everyquest (I think) that makes use of this. Quite handy for those seeking the various "Loremaster" achievements.
Other times, however, when Blizzard doesn't like the functionality an addon provides, like that long ago offered by one called "Decursive," which was much more powerful several years ago, made it so that a player could basically bind, for example, their movement keys to trigger the addon's main function. This effectively created an "auto-dispel harmful debuffs" effect that was quite unfair in a PvP setting. The addon still exists today, only in a slightly less convenient form.
Many functions as well such as attacking units and casting spells and so on are also part of this LUA API, but can only be called from LUA code that's been signed by Blizzard. A little trivia: WoW bots remove this limitation and extensively utilize these protected API calls to perform their actions.
But there's no way to use a UNC as the current directory in DOS, is there? Would there be if I took some time to learn PowerShell?
I had to look it up, but apparently, yes.
As a note, I tried the double/triple backslash thing, and that didn't work. However, "cd \\server\share" did.
Not sure how to enumerate shares though.
I know, I tried :(
For some reason, that policy isn't available when you're configuring a local computer's policy settings.
So how do I put \Users on a different volume during Windows7 installation?
Beats me. I remap users' profile folders using group policy. Of course, this only works for Domain users and not for local users, much to my own dismay.
You might be able to mount a separate NTFS volume under C:\Users prior to installation or just after a manual installation using ImageX, but that's something I've never tried nor looked into.
I can feel your point, but Windows feels like that on the surface because of a very well engendered Microsoft principle--backward compatibility.
.bat files well into 2010 (even though we really, really should have taken the time to master VBScript). Meanwhile, the more powerful, flexible, and truly modern evolution of that archaic CLI comes in the form of PowerShell, which gives you that bash-like capability and power contained in a CLI that was designed specifically for the Windows platform.
:P
The command interpreter that was command.com from the DOS era was integrated into NT5+ as cmd.exe, which many of us know, love, hate, and have thanked for allowing us to continue to run
The primary method to access a partition in windows is certainly via a drive letter, but if you do manage to go past 26 partitions, you'll get "A-A:," A-B:," and so on. Still, you can actually access these volumes in a more "modern" fashion by using their volume names directly (e.g. \\?\Volume{volume-guid-goes-here}) and not just the mount points they've been exposed on, or you could always expose the same volumes as a folder on an already mounted NTFS volume as well.
The thing is that many of the gripes more technical folks have had about Windows over the last decade have been solved in one way or another, but the problem is that since all of the old methods continue to work, there's little to no incentive for users (including systems admins, IT pros, programmers, and so on) to change our behavior, especially when we already know how to solve a given problem, irrespective of whether or not our chosen method is actually the most elegant solution.
I have to admit though, if I hadn't been forced to manipulate Linux based OS's in the ways that are required to get work done, particularly with respect to volume management, I probably wouldn't know about any of this stuff in Windows in the first place
Aye. I'm not a networking fellow myself, but when I went to the vSphere launch, my co-worker expressed serious interest in the 1000V portion of vSphere 4.
The hardest part about evaluating VMWare in our datacenter at the time was definitely teaching myself enough about networking to ensure that the ESX Servers' network configs were correct to implement the scenarios we wanted to test. Being able to basically follow a standard setup procedure for the server infrastructure and then pass off an IP or a management console to a Cisco guy and know that it's in good hands... that's a godsend.
Plenty of business users are on XP, where you could perhaps get your majority sampling, but 9 times out of 10 now, when I troubleshoot a home computer for anyone, it's a laptop or desktop running Vista or 7. The only machines you see with XP on them are enterprise machines, which won't be playing those files anyway, and ones that were manufactured before 2006, which probably wouldn't be able to reliably play h264 videos, or which the owners of long ago solved the issue of "this file doesn't work right."
If you have the skill, and are willing to troubleshoot the process, installing multiple applications on a Windows server is quite entirely doable.
The problem comes from the fact that it's so complicated to get it working correctly and even more difficult to troubleshoot it in the event of issues that you end up with a lower TCO in a virtualized "one VM per app" type of scenario.
I, not having a large amount of Windows licenses or servers to work with on certain occasions (and having worked for peanuts on occasions) have gotten pretty good at it.... But even I will never [again] install Exchange on a multipurpose Windows install.
I pull down 1.1(ish) GB files in about 7 minutes on my G connection. I'd prefer N, but it's fast enough if you're only doing 1 of those files.
an unsecured telnet port and a pair of forgotten BSD machines doing DNS duty deep in the bowels of one organization...
Ahem. We read slashdot for the purposes of hearing the entirety of these types of stories. Please continue.
Either you smoke or you don't, that's your choice.
Addiction isn't the problem with smoking. The side effects of being a smoker--smelling bad, getting sick more easily, and risking lung cancer et al.--are what's wrong with smoking.
Personally, I love to smoke, but I hate being a smoker. Smoking a few cigarettes a week isn't a problem from my point of view, but it may not mean that you're not addicted to them.
Check out that link for some very interesting and, I think, necessary reading.
Cheers.