I for one will gladly pay twice as much for DVD content as I would for equivalent VHS content; the extensive capabilities of the DVD format make the medium that much more valuable.
I've yet to see a DVD that added anything more than a regular old VHS tape. Sure, there's the occassional trailer (whoopie, I have the movie, why do I need a trailer for it on the same disc?), a music video, some cast of character biography info (sometimes), outtakes (sometimes), deleted scenes (again, sometimes), and other languages and director's commentary (useless to me since I don't care what the director is thinking while watching the movie and I only speak English). The only thing I like about them is they're more compact, more durable and I don't have to rewind them. Also, buying previewed DVDs from a video rental store is nice since DVDs obviously don't wear out like their VHS tapes do so you get a bargain. Anyway, all in all I wouldn't even think of paying twice the cost of the movie for these frivilous extras. Of course, the downside of DVDs is you can't make a backup copy of it very easily. Sure, there is illegal software to rip them onto your hard drive if you have tons of disk space free, but I'd like a nice consumer device where you put the original DVD in one tray and a recordable DVD in the other, hit the dub button and after a period of time out pops your copied DVD for backup. I can do that with my "software" CDs so why shouldn't I do it with my "software" DVDs?
NAT and IP Masquerading are the same thing. One is the Linux specific name for it and the other is what the rest of the world uses (and what is listed in the RFC). Many addresses "masquerading" behind one is called overloading in Cisco parlance. I don't know what anyone else calls it but it's probably similar. It's all essentially the same thing. Use state tracking the remember connections and map them to high source ports accordingly. When replies come back in to those high source ports on the NAT device, translate it to the correct source port and send it to the correct destination listed in the table.
That's a good point. What if you have multiple X-Terms around the house and you run all your applications from your machine attached to your cable modem. You can even shut off IP forwarding and NAT completely if you did that. Or for that matter, use serial terminals and text consoles hanging off the one box. Does that still count as multiple machines? This all just sounds like out and out greed to me. What's next, only one person is allowed to be staring at the screen at once. "Honey, come over and take a look at this... hold on let me close my eyes so you can look without violating our AUP."
We can only hope Harrison Ford comes back to play Indiana Jones. During the Golden Globes Ben Affleck mentioned he was going to be taking on the role of Jack Ryan in the next Tom Clancy movie. *sigh*. I'd rather see a 70 year old Harrison Ford bumbling around in a walker fighting international terrorists than that arrogant tosser. Oh well.:-)
Quake 3 for Linux has been out for a long time. Maybe the lackluster sales is the reason it's not on the shelves not the other way around? 95% of gamers are going to have Windows on their machine to play games. Another 4% will use Macs and less than 1% will use open source operating systems for gaming. 76% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
So I guess I have 4 more years before I have to throw away my 2" pocket television huh? I guess I can always rip it apart and use it to make a portable PS2.
Agreed. Let them go to cable or DirecTV and leave that nice chunk of the spectrum to amateurs. The entire broadcast TV spectrum should be allocated to Ham radio operators that want to do video.:-)
Everything is internal so there's no clutter. Your desk can look nice and clean and still have a lot of devices connected to it. On the other hand, to expand an iMac you need to have everything external hanging off USB or Firewire so you go back to having cables all over the place. Want another hard drive? Attach it via firewire. Want a cdwriter? Attach it via firewire. Want to upgrade your video card? Why would you want to do that? Want a bigger monitor? Buy a Powermac G4 at twice the price of the iMac. Basically we're taking the guts of our computers and throwing them up all over the desktop rather than keeping them nice and tidy and crammed into that 3 foot tower case.
"You gotta admit it's getting better...It's getting better all the time!"
...Can't get no worse.
Well, it COULD be worse. The government could tax us for every TV we own whether you use it or not and use it to prop up a bloated public television company that nobody watches.:-)
Ministers make baby Jesus cry when they violate intellectual property laws. Did he have permission from the book publisher to read the book before an audience?
Of course they are. They've always been out to make money ever since they started charging for domain names. Yet every time their contract comes up for renewal someone keeps them on. They must have some pretty dirty laundry on whoever is granting this monopoly to them because if I was ICANN I'd have given them the boot already. Publicly traded companies should NOT control a vital part of the Internet infrastructure as a monopoly. Period.
You don't need to replace the DNS system. The DNS system works fine the way it is. The problem is the administration that controls the DNS database that gets pushed out to the root servers is corrupt. The answer is an international non-profit group that has no shareholders to please and isn't worried about making money to inflate their stock prices based on their monopoly. It's easy to do guys. You just need to convince the majority of DNS servers in the world that your root servers are the blessed ones and have them use your root.cache file instead of NSI's. Suddenly, overnight NSI and ICANN becomes completely irrelevent to the world. It's something that'll never happen of course because people are too reluctant (or lazy?) to change these days. We've become sloppy and let the corporate monopolies take over the one world that we still had a chance to mold to our liking. I guess in the end, Americans (and the majority of Internet users) are just a bunch of capitalist lap-dogs at heart. That really saddens me. We need to stir up enough grass-roots support to get people to at least use another common root system that doesn't overlap with NSI's in parallel and eventually just cut over to it completely.
The difference being, unlike the ordinary average netizen and small company operating on the web, any of those people could easily sick their lawyers on Verisign and their domain name would be renewed in less than an hour even though someone else bought it. It's really funny (in a sad sort of way) how the Internet has been changed and shaped to reflect the real life world. 7 or 8 years ago you could escape the "real" world into cyberspace where everyone was equal and everyone had an equal chance of putting up a killer site that would attract interested users. These days the only sites that seem to get many hits are the mega-conglomerates and the multi-billion dollar corporations that already have brick and mortar existences. These days we have bouncing flash ads that take up the entire screen in order to turn the Net into a god damned TV replacement complete with advertising and commercial breaks. Bah humbug.
NSI has NEVER played fair and they've always had the most horrible service of *any* company I've ever dealt with. If this company had to rely on staying in business by marketing a product that wasn't a granted monopoly they would have been out of business 10 years ago! Even now with an "open" registrar system NSI still controls the database! ICANN was smoking crack when they renewed NSI's contract yet again. Why not give it to another company or (better yet) an independent non-profit group to maintain?
I think you'll find a lot of people aren't going to be willing to pay that much. I know if it came to it and my cable/satellite bill was raised much more for the very basic channels I get I'd consider dropping it altogether and doing without the television. I can get all the news and financial info I want from the Internet. I'm sure not going to miss the commercials on cable TV which I already pay for. I always found that particularly ironic. We're paying for television and then they have the nerve to put on advertisements anyway. That's the point? I might as well watch broadcast network TV. I'd rather just pay the 4 or 5 cable channels I watch directly and get them streaming over the net than pay a cable monopoly to provide them to me along with 95 other channels I'll never watch.
Well, for what it's worth, I think it'd be smart of Sun to drop the x86 Cobalt line and replace it with a line based on their Netra T1 AC200 and/or Netra X1 boxes and Solaris. The *only* thing the Cobalts have going for them is the easy web interface and fairly standard interface to everything. They're not particularly cheap compared to building your own. Even so, the web interface isn't that impressive anymore either and I'm sure someone could write a better replacement. Another thing they don't have going for them is they lack Sun's lights-out management support. Considering they're supposed to be "appliances" and have only a serial console they really would benefit from LOM support in the areas they're marketed to. A box marketed for colocation should never need to be visited for anything but a hardware failure.
Anyone that pays $300 for anything less than 2 gigs of ram needs to have their head examined. NEVER buy ram from the vendor. Purchase the machine with the least amount possible and go to Crucial.com and buy the dimms.
Last week? These programs have had spyware installed along with them for months (or longer). It's certainly nothing new or exciting. Get a copy of Ad-aware if you're paranoid. It seems to be pretty good at cleaning that stuff up.
That's interesting. Why should I pay for two CDs for the convenience of not having to transport the physical media between my car and house? That's ridiculous. I can only listen to it one place or the other so why should I have to buy it twice?
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I for one will gladly pay twice as much for DVD content as I would for equivalent VHS content; the extensive capabilities of the DVD format make the medium that much more valuable.
I've yet to see a DVD that added anything more than a regular old VHS tape. Sure, there's the occassional trailer (whoopie, I have the movie, why do I need a trailer for it on the same disc?), a music video, some cast of character biography info (sometimes), outtakes (sometimes), deleted scenes (again, sometimes), and other languages and director's commentary (useless to me since I don't care what the director is thinking while watching the movie and I only speak English). The only thing I like about them is they're more compact, more durable and I don't have to rewind them. Also, buying previewed DVDs from a video rental store is nice since DVDs obviously don't wear out like their VHS tapes do so you get a bargain. Anyway, all in all I wouldn't even think of paying twice the cost of the movie for these frivilous extras. Of course, the downside of DVDs is you can't make a backup copy of it very easily. Sure, there is illegal software to rip them onto your hard drive if you have tons of disk space free, but I'd like a nice consumer device where you put the original DVD in one tray and a recordable DVD in the other, hit the dub button and after a period of time out pops your copied DVD for backup. I can do that with my "software" CDs so why shouldn't I do it with my "software" DVDs?
NAT and IP Masquerading are the same thing. One is the Linux specific name for it and the other is what the rest of the world uses (and what is listed in the RFC). Many addresses "masquerading" behind one is called overloading in Cisco parlance. I don't know what anyone else calls it but it's probably similar. It's all essentially the same thing. Use state tracking the remember connections and map them to high source ports accordingly. When replies come back in to those high source ports on the NAT device, translate it to the correct source port and send it to the correct destination listed in the table.
That's a good point. What if you have multiple X-Terms around the house and you run all your applications from your machine attached to your cable modem. You can even shut off IP forwarding and NAT completely if you did that. Or for that matter, use serial terminals and text consoles hanging off the one box. Does that still count as multiple machines? This all just sounds like out and out greed to me. What's next, only one person is allowed to be staring at the screen at once. "Honey, come over and take a look at this... hold on let me close my eyes so you can look without violating our AUP."
We can only hope Harrison Ford comes back to play Indiana Jones. During the Golden Globes Ben Affleck mentioned he was going to be taking on the role of Jack Ryan in the next Tom Clancy movie. *sigh*. I'd rather see a 70 year old Harrison Ford bumbling around in a walker fighting international terrorists than that arrogant tosser. Oh well. :-)
Step Two: Manufacture and market amazing new router.
That wasn't that hard now was it?
Quake 3 for Linux has been out for a long time. Maybe the lackluster sales is the reason it's not on the shelves not the other way around? 95% of gamers are going to have Windows on their machine to play games. Another 4% will use Macs and less than 1% will use open source operating systems for gaming. 76% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
So I guess I have 4 more years before I have to throw away my 2" pocket television huh? I guess I can always rip it apart and use it to make a portable PS2.
Agreed. Let them go to cable or DirecTV and leave that nice chunk of the spectrum to amateurs. The entire broadcast TV spectrum should be allocated to Ham radio operators that want to do video. :-)
Everything is internal so there's no clutter. Your desk can look nice and clean and still have a lot of devices connected to it. On the other hand, to expand an iMac you need to have everything external hanging off USB or Firewire so you go back to having cables all over the place. Want another hard drive? Attach it via firewire. Want a cdwriter? Attach it via firewire. Want to upgrade your video card? Why would you want to do that? Want a bigger monitor? Buy a Powermac G4 at twice the price of the iMac. Basically we're taking the guts of our computers and throwing them up all over the desktop rather than keeping them nice and tidy and crammed into that 3 foot tower case.
"You gotta admit it's getting better...It's getting better all the time!"
:-)
...Can't get no worse.
Well, it COULD be worse. The government could tax us for every TV we own whether you use it or not and use it to prop up a bloated public television company that nobody watches.
Ministers make baby Jesus cry when they violate intellectual property laws. Did he have permission from the book publisher to read the book before an audience?
NSI are just out to fleece their users.
Of course they are. They've always been out to make money ever since they started charging for domain names. Yet every time their contract comes up for renewal someone keeps them on. They must have some pretty dirty laundry on whoever is granting this monopoly to them because if I was ICANN I'd have given them the boot already. Publicly traded companies should NOT control a vital part of the Internet infrastructure as a monopoly. Period.
You don't need to replace the DNS system. The DNS system works fine the way it is. The problem is the administration that controls the DNS database that gets pushed out to the root servers is corrupt. The answer is an international non-profit group that has no shareholders to please and isn't worried about making money to inflate their stock prices based on their monopoly. It's easy to do guys. You just need to convince the majority of DNS servers in the world that your root servers are the blessed ones and have them use your root.cache file instead of NSI's. Suddenly, overnight NSI and ICANN becomes completely irrelevent to the world. It's something that'll never happen of course because people are too reluctant (or lazy?) to change these days. We've become sloppy and let the corporate monopolies take over the one world that we still had a chance to mold to our liking. I guess in the end, Americans (and the majority of Internet users) are just a bunch of capitalist lap-dogs at heart. That really saddens me. We need to stir up enough grass-roots support to get people to at least use another common root system that doesn't overlap with NSI's in parallel and eventually just cut over to it completely.
The difference being, unlike the ordinary average netizen and small company operating on the web, any of those people could easily sick their lawyers on Verisign and their domain name would be renewed in less than an hour even though someone else bought it. It's really funny (in a sad sort of way) how the Internet has been changed and shaped to reflect the real life world. 7 or 8 years ago you could escape the "real" world into cyberspace where everyone was equal and everyone had an equal chance of putting up a killer site that would attract interested users. These days the only sites that seem to get many hits are the mega-conglomerates and the multi-billion dollar corporations that already have brick and mortar existences. These days we have bouncing flash ads that take up the entire screen in order to turn the Net into a god damned TV replacement complete with advertising and commercial breaks. Bah humbug.
NSI has NEVER played fair and they've always had the most horrible service of *any* company I've ever dealt with. If this company had to rely on staying in business by marketing a product that wasn't a granted monopoly they would have been out of business 10 years ago! Even now with an "open" registrar system NSI still controls the database! ICANN was smoking crack when they renewed NSI's contract yet again. Why not give it to another company or (better yet) an independent non-profit group to maintain?
I think you'll find a lot of people aren't going to be willing to pay that much. I know if it came to it and my cable/satellite bill was raised much more for the very basic channels I get I'd consider dropping it altogether and doing without the television. I can get all the news and financial info I want from the Internet. I'm sure not going to miss the commercials on cable TV which I already pay for. I always found that particularly ironic. We're paying for television and then they have the nerve to put on advertisements anyway. That's the point? I might as well watch broadcast network TV. I'd rather just pay the 4 or 5 cable channels I watch directly and get them streaming over the net than pay a cable monopoly to provide them to me along with 95 other channels I'll never watch.
Heh, that's basically how it works. Time to buy a big screen TV for the basement. :-)
We've got West Wing, Will and Grace, Friends, Third Watch and ER. What more could you want in Prime Time?
Why would you want to drive a car older than a year or two? Help the economy and buy a new car. We can't let Osama bin Laden win!
For learning *nix, why spend $99 on a solaris media kit when you can copy/download your choice of Linux distro or BSD flavour for next to nothing?
Well, you can download the Solaris 8 iso images and burn your own CDs of it as well though.
Well, for what it's worth, I think it'd be smart of Sun to drop the x86 Cobalt line and replace it with a line based on their Netra T1 AC200 and/or Netra X1 boxes and Solaris. The *only* thing the Cobalts have going for them is the easy web interface and fairly standard interface to everything. They're not particularly cheap compared to building your own. Even so, the web interface isn't that impressive anymore either and I'm sure someone could write a better replacement. Another thing they don't have going for them is they lack Sun's lights-out management support. Considering they're supposed to be "appliances" and have only a serial console they really would benefit from LOM support in the areas they're marketed to. A box marketed for colocation should never need to be visited for anything but a hardware failure.
You can get a pretty nice Dell Inspiron 8100 laptop with all the trimmings for that price. I think someone is on crack. :-) Call me when it's $500.
Anyone that pays $300 for anything less than 2 gigs of ram needs to have their head examined. NEVER buy ram from the vendor. Purchase the machine with the least amount possible and go to Crucial.com and buy the dimms.
Last week? These programs have had spyware installed along with them for months (or longer). It's certainly nothing new or exciting. Get a copy of Ad-aware if you're paranoid. It seems to be pretty good at cleaning that stuff up.
That's interesting. Why should I pay for two CDs for the convenience of not having to transport the physical media between my car and house? That's ridiculous. I can only listen to it one place or the other so why should I have to buy it twice?