> That's so painfully true because Linux still has choppy playback of Flash/HTML5 video on low-performance hardware. It still is mostly a server OS (a very good one though).

It's bullshit because EVERY platform has choppy playback of Flash video on low-performance hardware. It's a feature of how lame Flash is. It has nothing to do with Linux.

Low performance hardware will happily decode much more interesting video so long as the coders in question have bothered to hook into relevant "shortcuts".

Adobe can't be trusted to do that (on any platform).

Adobe likes making excuses, instead just taking care of business like all the "hobbyists" have done.

In other words: "because Microsoft can't do then no one can".

The entire history of computing pretty much points out how wrong that proposition is. It's more like "If Micrososft can't do it then EVERYONE ELSE can, will, and have done it for 10 years prior".

Just use a little intelligence or barring that, allow the end user to decide which mode to operate. Also don't GUT one of the modes in question while you're at it.

The problem with this fixation on "performance" is that it was all effectively sabotaged by the bloat of operating systems at that time. The resources required weren't keeping pace with the cost of hardware. It became infeasible for most normal consumers to keep up with what things like OS/2 and Windows were demanding.

It doesn't matter how spiffy your 486 is if it is spending all of it's time swapping.

My own 486 had extremely dissappointing performance when compared to a even mere 68000 until RAM prices became low enough to adequately equip a PC.

Macs didn't "make USB", they forced it on their users while giving a big "fuck you" to all of their old customers running anything else. It's not like the old stuff was horrible either (ADB, SCSI).

In the meantime, USB was everywhere on PCs. It just wasn't forced down everyone's throats. Even recent systems with USB3 quietly included will still include interfaces from the :"dark ages".

It doesn't harm anything to have them there and is very handy should you actually want or need one of them.

The main problem with USB adoption was OS support from Microsoft. They dragged their feet as usual. Also, the market for USB peripherals really didn't get interesting until Microsoft's sandbagging stopped. The fact that Apple was abusing all of it's users didn't change the landscape all that much.

He dismissed the comment because that was very much justified. You are a misguided moron that thinks crying wolf will do anything but cause people to ignore your crusade. Characterizing trifling slights will impress no one except your own cabal and only marginalize the entire issue.

It will be seen as the domain of completely irrational KOOKS such as yourself.

It's not a troll. It's just a fact of life. Men are expected to be sexual predators and mating and courtship has to happen some time. If the girl doesn't like the guy, it will be characterized as "harassment" possibly as "assault".

Serious offenses and abuses of power should be focused on and eliminated. The "innapropriate comments" stuff needs to not contaminate the real issue.

Sexual harrassment started out as being defined as a genuine abuse of authority and has quickly mutated into "anything I don't personally like".

Not all "sexual harassment" is even sexual harassment. The original article referenced several "statistics" where several things were lumped together and they weren't really comparable at all. It was a clear attempt to create bogus inflated numbers.

The entire effort seemed like mindless yellow journalism intended to generate hysteria.

So I am inclined to think the article and the study is bullshit and weak ass science that should embarass any scientist.

Cable services re-compress signals in order to cram more channels into whatever transmission capacity they have. Sometimes they even monkey around with the size of the frame. This is all to save space/bandwidth.

What you get off of an antenna is the pristine version of whatever that broadcaster sent out.

They were full of shit and they knew it.

...too late. I already avoid Hulu because commercials are something that belong back in the 50s with embedded sponsor testimonials.

Tivo liberated me from commercials in the 90s.

Not going back.

> Even in the era of home theaters, how many of us really have such a setup at home where we'd be proud to show downloaded movies to our friends

I do.

It's part of the reason that I've pretty much given up on conventional movie theaters entirely. Beyond the new annoyances that have manifested in the last 20 years, the experience at a "real theater" just isn't sufficiently better to justify the bother.

Even if your local theater isn't crap, what your watching may not even be playing on any of their good screens.

It really doesn't take much. Pretty much anyone in suburbia has the resources to pull this off. Cinemas are doing remarkably well considering.

...except everyone understands that a "high fashion counterfeit" is usually of inferior quality to the original. This is one key area where "intellectual property" differs from manufacturing.

I wasn't aware that there were "special kinds" of cable companies. This seems like a crass attempt to move the goalposts. Someone is trying to change the rules in their favor and it's not the disruptive upstart.

"Rule of Law", perhaps you've heard of it.

Objection: relevance.

These other things are not the topic of discussion. They are just red herrings to distract from the fact that the US appears to have acted in a civilized manner this time.

Civilized behavior should not be swept under the rug because you have a hate-on for some particular country. Your nonsense undermines the positive reinforcement that encourages good behavior and discourages bad behavior.

Doesn't matter if it's the US or Hezbollah.

No. It was not a "sensible" comment for the time. Anyone with a lick of sense could see where the tech was going and could easily realize that you had to plan for the future.

PCs of the time were stuck in the kind of situation that Tannenbaum described not because of any inherent technical limitation but because Microsoft was a lame monopolistic sandbagger holding back the entire industry.

Even in 1992 there wasn't that much of a gap between the capabilities of proprietary Unix hardware and PCs. Some Unix machines even ran on microprocessors used by competing home computers.

That's why Linus created his own kernel to begin with.