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if you want to write your own mobile code you should check out www.savaje.com then?
If you aren't familiar with them you can check out a post in my blog I made about them a month ago.
http://deancollinsblog.blogspot.com/2006/05/javaon e.html

cheers,
Dean

All in a days work for [GM]Dave.

Either that or the percentage of "cheaters" in WoW is greater than in FFXI. I put "cheaters" in quotes because, at least in the case of WoW, the "cheaters" often aren't using any illegal hacks or third party programs -- they are either buying or selling gold, items, or accounts. That doesn't mean that some (or perhaps most) of the farmers in WoW aren't using illegal macros or other 3rd party programs, but my guess is that the majority of people banned didn't use any illegal programs -- they just violated the terms of use in some way.

Also, from the article it looks like Square-Enix focused on the suppliers (these so-called "RMT" groups), while Blizzard went after both the buyers and the sellers.

If you have any question on how aggressive the staff at Square-Enix is, take a look at this blog by a GM for the game.

That reminds me of the recent case where a guy was caught trying to pass a counterfeit billion dollar bill. Most criminals avoid detection by trying to fly under the radar with a scam so low level it is undetected. This guy was caught because the attack was so ridiculously visible - which reminds me I blogged on this and forgot to actually publish the post, must do that.

These frauds are all pretty standard ones that any good auditor should be able to spot. Placing orders with a cutout company is an old ruse. What is suprising is the way that an exec of a public company would put it all on the line for what was actually chickenfeed compared to his salary and $900K stock options. I did that rant on my blog already though

The only part of this that is Internet specific is the attempt to shut down the whistle blowers with court orders in the fourth case. Again it happend in Enrons home base of Texas.

The blogosphere recently uncovered a series of frauds committed by Duke Cunningham and a number of other congressmen. The mainstream media has yet to tell the public anything close to the whole tale which is still being investigated but has already cased the dismissal of Porter-Goss as head of the CIA, the uncovering of a prostitutes and poker game held by lobbyists at the Watergate hotel and a peculiar series of limosine contracts. The bloggers are also currently getting their teeth into what appears to be a bipartisan scam where a legislator buys land up cheap, gets an earmark appropriation passed to build on or close to it that massively increases the value of the land and then sells dear.

In the UK the magazine Private Eye has traditionally been the whistle blower. The US has never had a true equivalent. Private Eye has dramatically reduced the amount of graft in UK public life by bringing to light many schemes that would otherwise have continued for decades.

Perhaps the Internet can be the Private Eye for the US.

This once again shows the stifling effect that religion can have on science.

I kept reading through the posts until I found it, and I knew I would -- the god-hater's words on the matter.

Religion isn't perfect and neither is science. If, indeed, a religious figure told a great scientist to not study something then that's unfortunate. It doesn't make religion useless, no more than detonating an scientifically discovered atom bomb over a city makes science useless, but pound-for-pound, one could argue that science has been far more effective in providing the means by which humanity can annihilate itself than religion ever has.

Here's one for ya: science & religion are both imperfect. Indeed, science is no slouch itself when it comes to being misused by humanity. Religion can stifle science? True. I concur, and scientifically-based governments have stifled religion. The soviets and Nazi governments both were quite efficient at imprisoning, killing priests & destroying churches. It was unfortunate that governments came to be that both laid foundational claims to science and then also persecuted the religious.

We cannot get rid of either really, nor should we. Science we need and it has vastly benefited the human race, but religion will not go away nor should it. It really cannot you see.

I'll digress here and point to my blog post on the subject: http://fatkiddown.blogspot.com/2005/08/death-of-ta o.html

http://www.quickbase.com/ ... web-based, hosted by intuit, multi-user, permissions, file attachments, easy gui tools for editing the db, customizable interface, http, java, perl, vb, ruby apis, xml in/out.

there are also a few others: http://www.dabbledb.com/ http://www.eunifydb.net/

http://oakleafblog.blogspot.com/2006/03/dabble-db- new-look-in-web-databases.html

http://toorg.blogspot.com/

1133 21st St NW Suite M100 c/o Ralph R Brown Washington, DC 20036 Phone: 202-546-4242 Tech Central Science Foundation was formed in late November 2002 (Form 990). The Foundation appears to be a funding arm of the free-market news site, TechCentralStation.com.

ExxonMobil gave the Foundation $95,000 in 2003 for "Climate Change Support." According to Guidestar.org, a nonprofit research tool, the Foundation had 2003 income of $150,000 and $110,903 in assets. The Foundation commissioned a study by Charles River Associates alleging that the costs of the McCain-Lieberman bill of 2003 would be a minimum of $350 annually per household through 2010, rising to $530 per household by 2020, and could rise to as high as $1,300 per year per household. Related information: Tech Central Station was launched in 1999 as "a cross between a journal of Internet opinion and a cyber think tank open to the public" (TCS news release). According to Washington Monthly, TCS is published by the DCI Group, 'a prominent Washington public affairs firm specializing in P.R., lobbying, and so-called 'Astroturf' organizing, generally on behalf of corporations, GOP politicians, and the occasional Third-World despot." TCS shares office space, staff and ownership with DCI Group. ('Meet the Press' Washington Monthly, December 2003. http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/031 2.confessore.html) Corporate funders of Tech Central Station include AT&T, Avue Technologies, The Coca-Cola Company, General Motors Corporation, Intel, McDonalds, Merck, Microsoft, Nasdaq, PhRMA, and Qualcomm (Tech Central Station website).

No; Carter is one of hundreds of highly qualified non-governmental, non-industry, non-lobby group climate experts who contest the hypothesis that human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) are causing significant global climate change.

FYI, Konqueror is part of kdebase, but it'd probably be easier to just install all of kde, if you have the space. That also means you get to install and play with amarok (media player), digikam (photo manager) and k3b (cd/dvd burner) that I consider to be best of breed apps on any platform. It's worth pointing out that both fedora and ubuntu are mainly Gnome platforms, though they do support vanilla kde installs.

If you do end up liking KDE more than gnome - which happened to me - your two main choices of other distros are SUSE and mandriva for slightly better KDE integration. I'm a firm believer in sticking to the distro you know and making it work though, rather than jump around too much. If you like fedora - and yum is very nice - stick with it, you won't be missing out as such.

As far as speed goes, if your box is a little light on horsepower, you might have the most joy with xfce or the rox desktop, both sort of 'gnome-lite'. You'll still be able to use all the kde and gnome apps you've got installed, so you can pick the desktop that suits you best.

Also, if you can confirm opengl is working ok, you can give Xgl a go. It's very new and pretty buggy yet, but it's part of the future of 3D accelerated desktops on linux, and very swish. You'll need a fairly beefy nvidia card though.

Ignore those flagging your original post as a troll; linux has zealots who can't stand criticism or basic questions, just like any platform. There's plenty of sane and helpful people who are happy to see people finding the fun that linux can be.

that mocks on users with funny anecdotes and stuff like that? A GUIDE?!
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Donde Ser Geek No Duele

That's why you are not a real geek, you just look geek. Be a man and recompile the kernel ;-) Anyway, the real thing here is to keep Darwin a part of the community. Thank God there are out there geeks who wants to recompile the kernel, and see what's in it, and point out bugs and throw ideas about it.

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Donde Ser Geek No Duele

Apple will release the kernel code when Vista comes around. They are just so sick of Microsoft copying them they'll wait till vista is out and done...

I know, it may take some time...
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Donde Ser Geek No Duele

You're right. The muslims don't want to turn us into Muslims.

They want to rape our women in Sweden. http://fjordman.blogspot.com/2005/12/immigrant-rap e-wave-in-sweden.html
They want to burn our cars in France. They don't like trains either. http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/story.cfm?c_id=2 &objectid=10362567
They don't like tall buildings. http://www.terrorism-victims.org/terrorists/wtc-pe ntagon/3trade-towers-collapse.jpg
They want Sharia law in Indonesia. http://washingtontimes.com/upi-breaking/20041022-1 01916-3985r.htm
Forget discos. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Bali_terrorist_b ombing
They want Sharia in the UK. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/ne ws/2006/02/19/nsharia19.xml&sSheet=/portal/2006/02 /19/ixportaltop.html
Oh crap, no more political cartoons. (I think you know of this one)
No, they don't want a Caliphate. Oh no. http://www.khilafah.com/home/index.php (wish I still had the pic of the guy protesting in canada w/ sign asking for Caliphate)
What does that sign say? Oh, it only says to massacre those who INSULY Islam. Nothing in it about conversion. http://www.sky.com/skynews/article/0,,30100-135019 17,00.html

You're right. 100% spot on. We need to fear the Christians.

Agreed, but every industry should always at least try to push the limits, try new things, even try new twists on old ideas...if they make an old idea better, then I don't really care...

there may not be anything new in the world, but there are always new ways to tell the same story.

So can't wait for Halo 3, 4...even Halo 26 with the complete VR setup.
And would definitely like a new version, lots of new stuff, better graphics of my old favorite, Iron Helix.

Not an anonymous coward, just a lazy lurker.
CG
cganders@myuw.net
**Goals are just DREAMS with DEADLINES!
**Live your life with passion and risk!
kinetically active website: http://home.myuw.net/cganders
irreverent blog: Musings and Meanings on NonSensical Events and Canada
http://ahablogolicious.blogspot.com/ (mainly spoof news, light satire and humor)

Someone in here posted a suggestion of destructable ads. That is phenomenal! It would take an advertiser with BIG balls to do it, but it would be a guaranteed hit.

I wrote an article on my site a while ago that I will not shamelessly plug that discusses this exact topic and how companies can make their ads fit into the gameworlds rather than just be intrusive and disruptive to the gaming experience. You can read the article here. Would love any feedback people have.

Wouldn't surprise me at all if there was an NDA. Not that long ago I heard about some people that did a high-res scan of Michaelangelo's David and were only allowed to release the 3-D model with DRM applied. Here's an article, although I don't think it was the original one I read. Apparently the Italians are afraid that the market for Davids is going to be flooded with thousands of "simulated marble replicas" based on the "pirated" scans.

Right. Or more likely, they're afraid that it might somehow cause people to not want and fly to Italy to see the original.

Whatever: be careful not to allow anyone to take or distribute photos, either; you never know when they might stop caring about the original once they get their grubby little paws on a postcard. Hell, what value will the original be once everybody can get one?

They aren't responsible enough to list all of their memebers clearly on their website. This blog has a list of the major players though http://childrensgroup.blogspot.com/2006/04/childre ns-group-resigns-cria.html/

The beta 2 Vista release is actually getting pretty good reviews so far. Check out this guy http://vistabetablogger.blogspot.com/ he seems to like it so far, albeit it looks like he hasn't seen very much.

SG

For all those that think that the microsoft blogs are noticably pro-microsoft, there are a lot of "normal" people that are blogging on Vista as well now that the beta 2 has been released... Like this guy, http://vistabetablogger.blogspot.com/

Some people seem are having good reactions to the intial beta 2 release.

SG

We got so excited around here about the first anniversary of Google Earth that we decided to celebrate a bit early. Beginning today, you can download a brand new version, Google Earth 4. Running on OS X? Feel the love. Prefer Linux? Ditto. Yes, we're releasing simultaneously for PC, Mac (universal binary for full performance on both Intel and PowerPC based Macs) and for the first time ever, native support for popular Linux distributions.

By 2015, it will be XBOX 720, with a glitchy VR immersion filter, optional upgrades to neurally linked handset controls, and directions written in New Japanese--and still unreadable.

Then again, the competitors may have something better, like the GoogleMania LiveVR Console--New Search And Destroy Feature: search the web, and then destroy it!

Waiting for Halo 26...or at least a redo of Iron Helix.

Not an Anonymous Coward! Just a Lazy Lurker!

CG
cganders1@yahoo.com
**Goals are just DREAMS with DEADLINES!
**Live your life with passion and risk!
kinetically active website: http://home.myuw.net/cganders
irreverent blog: Musings and Meanings on NonSensical Events and Canada
http://ahablogolicious.blogspot.com/ latest blog posts include Gordon
Michael Woolvett winning award and the prerelease announcement of HALO 26 (first 500 orders get free cloning)

http://reverendomeh.blogspot.com/

When I read the post, the first thing that occured to me was Mark Lucovsky Post, about Shipping Software. It was one of the reasons why he quit Microsoft.

Shipping Software. That's what its about now. Anyway, it does not mean Microsoft is standing still though. It is just that they have chosen to do it another way. Google looks at AJAX powered, HTML based applications. Firefox downloads help too, it isnt surprising they are offering $1 for every Firefox referral. Microsoft will depend on .Net, XAML and IE for application delivery. No doubt they will be more capable, compared to HTML. But only if you overlook the lockin. Ahh.. i dont know. But yes, online Word will not be far off.

Who's closer to a police state?

http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2006/06/why-eu-n eeds-to-be-destroyed-and-soon.html

Where can I be fined for blasphemy?

Where can I be sent to jail for writing a book or violating some hate speech law?

How about having a swastika? What will that buy me in France?

[...] while pirates will still be laughing at M$'s latest attempt at stamping them out!

The real issue is that this is not an attempt to stop piracy, but something else: if they wanted to stop piracy, they would lock down computers, not show popups. I recently blogged about this.

Mind Streams of Information Security Knowledge will fill you in on the clear and present danger lurking not in robots but in human beings.

A recent breakthrough in Artificial Intelligence means that robots will soon surpass homo sapiens in brain-power, reliability and security.

An AI Security Module is built into intelligent robots, not as an afterthought but as a preconditiion for their emergence as legally recognized persons having full civil rights on a par with humans.

The most advanced artificial intelligence on the Open-Source AI market has always had a Security Module to protect humans from robots and robots from humans.

The Joint Stewardship of Earth under human and robot control will usher in either a time of peace and security, or a hellish nighmare of the final destruction of Earth by the evil homo sapiens.

The Singularity Timetable predicts robot superintelligence and a Technological Singularity within six years -- by 2012.

Currently ISP'S are Common Carriers.

Telephone companies are "common carriers". ISPs are not.

This "genuine advantage" notifier is remarkably easy to disable. Here's a link that documents numerous ways to defeat it. http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/04/workarounds-to- disable-non-genuine.html

A friend wrote this on the same topic. I call this limit the "Burton Radius", after my pal, Burton.

30 seconds spent thInking of a good definition for the lower limit of whAt can define a planet leads Me to tHink "planet" should be defIned as "any celestial body that orbits a star, off of which a typical human could not jump themselves into orbit". if you can Go jump into orbit, it's not a planet. if you can't, it is. i define an orbit as moving 2*pi or greater rotations (in radians) around another mass to which you are gravitationally bound without touching the ground.

Just so.

taken from:
http://burtonmackenzie.blogspot.com/2006/06/lower- size-limit-of-planet-my-two.html

Two words for Ann Coulter: "Itsa Dude"

You can read my article here. While it will inevitably be intrusive in some shape or form, at least they can make it entertaining.

DK: It is ridiculous to believe that you can give product away for free and be more successful. I mean it defies the laws of nature.

I think, to grossly generalize, linear games will be looked upon more favourably in the future than open-ended games. Linear games have a narrow, well defined goal. Open-ended games strive to do things a little better than the last open-ended game. For instance, I can't even play Vice City anymore now that I've played San Andreas.

Oblivion is definitely an evolution in some aspects over Morrowind in some aspects, but some features are a step down (the made-for-TV interface is worthless on a PC monitor and mouse) and the fundamentals haven't changed one iota since Dragon Warrior for the NES (and are a huge step down compated to some of the Ultimas).

That being said, for some reason I'll always look back fondly at the Ultima Underworld series. However, the crazy mouse-only control scheme is really obnoxious in the WASD generation.

So I vote for FFVII in terms of longevity. Then again, Oblivion bored me to tears before long (granted, pretty long - 50 hours).

http://demodulated.blogspot.com/2006/04/elder-scro lls-oblivious.html - my various bitches about why Oblivion felt dated the day it was launched

PLEASE!!! GO VOMIT ON THEIR DOOR!!! That's where a vomit worths it!
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Donde Ser Geek No Duele

as Windows Vista is postponed again!

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Donde Ser Geek No Duele

I'm not sure about the journalism in general... and I don't know how much are they paid for this kind of crap. The main thing is to entertain. As long as you keep reading!

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Donde Ser Geek No Duele

And Microsoft is so NOT cool everybody wants Apple to kick MS in the head. And this kind of rumours spreads only because someone thinks this will hurt Redmond guys.

-Hey! that Nintento DOES look like an Apple product!
-So the smart boys at Apple are planning to buy them to shake MS!
-But they don't have the money!
-They have a lot of partners... someone is going to lend them the rest, no big deal.
-COOL!
-Hey!!! Look, that Lamborghini DOES looks like an Apple product!


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Donde Ser Geek No Duele

Dad, What Was Internet?

Why not? I hadn't heard of Parallels and just took a look at the website. From what I can see it's signficantly cheaper than VMware stuff, and from a Linux perspective they seem to use Qt, they provide a .deb, and they mention Kubuntu in the setup instructions, all of which are good to see. On the downside there's no 64-bit support. Oh and they do Mac support, which is nice I suppose. The blog is informative. It all looks much the same as VMware from a regular user's perspective, but cheaper. Why wouldn't you be worried about them?

Your post reminded me of http://lyle151.blogspot.com/2006/05/fn-caved-in.ht ml. Not a real blog, is a blog "written by" a character from Achewood.com

The better analogy would be if a private company wanted to put up toll booths on public roads and start charging tolls.

Sadly, our government is working on that too.

And naturally our reps here in Texas take the wrong stand on Net Neutrality also. Argh, why can't we get people with a clue elected to this state...

I had told you so in this post: Dad, What Was Internet?

My SO had her laptop stolen last year, while on a trip home (to a country far from the US, where we currently live).

Several months later, we hear from the police to say a) that the burglar is in prison awaiting trial and b) they have her laptop. Her sister picked it up, and discovered that it was full of home made pr0n, and we briefly thought of posting some of the highlights on the web. However, the burglar was sitting in prison (and remains there to this day), and we couldn't be bothered humiliating him further, and we had replaced the laptop and restored almost everything on it from the back-up. So I sent the system disks home, her sister did an erase/install, and then sold it on our behalf.

However, this morning I came across this -- not exactly our story, since in this case the perp. has avoided legal trouble (thus far) and the ripoff was via an internet auction, rather than "breaking and entering", but it makes me wonder whether our burglar shouldn't also be the star of his own internet site. Too late now, though....

      http://www.amirtofangsazan.blogspot.com/ [not completely work safe]

Not being alive is no excuse.

Pick yourself up an emulator and get to work. You've got some catching up to do. Only my list of "required playing":
* Super Mario 1 and 3 (ignore 2, it was teh suck)
* Final Fantasy 1 and 2
* Contra (up-up-down-down-left-right-left-right-b-a-select- start)
* Life Force (see Contra)
* Metroid (i don't think the game has an ending or even a point, but it's fun)
* Sonic the Hedgehog (if you can figure out how to get the system into "debug" mode, you're cool)
* Megamania (atari 2600)
* Mike Tyson's Punch Out (007-373-5963)
* Advanced Dungeons & Dragons - Treasures of Tarmin (Aquarius) -- hard to find, but awesome
* Phantasy Star II
* Kings Quest (Space Quest, Police Quest) -- entire series up until they got "good" graphics-- don't play the remakes

After that, come back and there'll be a test.

http://sunbeltblog.blogspot.com/2006/03/yankee-gro upsunbelt-2006-server.html
if you read that article:
Windows Server 2003 and Red Hat Linux with customizations and Novell SuSE Linux all reported roughly equivalent per server, per year outage times of just under 800 minutes. Surprisingly, Red Hat Enterprise Linux standard distribution users reported said they experienced 900 minutes of per server, per year.
I guess that is wherer the 20% more uptime thing is comming from.

and here is another factiod:
Windows 2000 Server and Windows Server 2003 recorded the greatest number of Tier 1 Reliability related incidents -- nearly 3 incidents per server, per year for Windows 2000 Server and 2.5 Tier 1 reliability incidents for each Windows Server 2003 system annually. Still, the actual number does not vary substantially from rival platforms.

"Notify me but don't automatically download or install them". (In Control Panel -> System -> Automatic Updates.)

Then you can pick and choose which updates you want, and when you decline one, it pops up a message in which you can check "Never ask me again".

Too late for those who trusted Microsoft, though...now you have to do a lot of registry tweaks and stuff.

WGA, or were blindsided by automatic update, here are a couple of suggested workarounds: Disable Non Genuine Windows Warning Messages.

I agree. I have pretty much stopped playing games
anymore. I get bored so quickly with the first person
kill everything in sight games and I get tired of trying
to solve every little frigging puzzle in order to move
forward two steps.

I miss the days of Myst and Iron Helix, anybody remember
Iron Helix? That game was the only one to every scare
the daylights out of me. I was so into it that it really
felt real to me, so much so that the little beeping of the
coming death droid had me sweating and panicking.

As with the gorgeously designed VR like games, such as Halo,
I often just find myself wanting to stroll around the grounds,
not the shootem up scenario stuff going on. (I get killed a lot!)

Why can't I have my Myst combo Iron Helix back with VR-Halo
level graphics and movement?

Has gaming forgotten about the VR tourists like me and only want the
10-35 year old hardcore shootem up D&D game playing male? Sigh.

(not an anonymous coward, just a lazy lurker)
CG Anderson
Blog sites: http://ahablogolicious.blogspot.com/
URL: http://home.myuw.net/cganders/

Google must stay in China continue to curtail civil rights and help track down unbelievers. The Death Ray must not be allowed to become rusty with disuse.

If they do pull out, that will seriously damage their claim to being
the New Evil Empire...and might give Microsoft another chance at the
title. Government collusion and bullying others are required
attributes for any good, sorry EVIL, Evil Empire.

Cheers,
(not an anonymous coward, just a lazy lurker...)
CG Anderson
BLOG: Musings and Meanings on NonSensical Events and Canada
http://ahablogolicious.blogspot.com/

There are much larger threats to democracy than media companies locking down music files. Just don't buy their shit.

This is a much larger threat to democracy: http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2006/06/why-eu-n eeds-to-be-destroyed-and-soon.html