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Or just maybe "power users" bitch about every tiny change. That's why Slashdot still looks just like it did 10 years ago.

Slashdot had a major overhaul in '06.

You mean this one

"Yes - charging shipping to pass along a variable, customer dependent charge is outrageous!

Get back under your bridge."

R U SURE? Many infomercials sell stuff for only shipping and handling but do not advertise what that cost is. Years ago, I think it was $6.95. A google search references a price of $18.81 for a 16 oz product. Seriously, if the cost of the product is in S&H, then that is deceptive advertising at best. Maybe not outrageous in your book. My advise is not to buy from infomercials or Microsoft, but if you are stuck because you need that upgrade and don't want to get ripped off, call customer service repeatedly and escalate every call. Let them know they will spend hundreds in support before you drop a dime on shipping.

As a science major, I felt a great disturbance in the force when Reaganomics shifted universities from learning and R&D institutions into glorified trade schools. The engineering and computer science programs were particularly overwhelmed by students whose talents and interests were elsewhere but whose counselors and student debt demanded that they get a degree in what's hot at the moment. A few years later it was MBA and we got a glut of substandard MBAs, then it was Law and I don't know what's next, but I don't think it serves any of us for students to ignore their talent and to have their focus driven, not by their personal aspirations or talent, but by the whims of the stock market their freshman year.

The same goes for basic scientific research. For the most part, in the U.S. funds for basic research is dried up. R&D instead is funded by those with a vested interest in getting the answer they want. "X- drug is safe and effective", "Tobacco is harmless", "Toxic waste is good for you."

IMHO U.S. university focus on the bottom line has turned them into trade-schools, ponzi schemes and country clubs. The fact that the price of university education has risen FAR faster than inflation convinced me that this is yet another bubble. Kudos to openuniversity and straighter to deflate this bubble before it blows up as spectacularly as dotcom and housing have.

Life critical monitoring equipment is never plugged into the Internet.

"Should never be" and "never is" are two different things.

And what constitutes "life critical" is fuzzy. Is Google Maps "life critical"? Do you remember the family that got lost and the father froze to death? (It's not clear that the map in this case came from Google Maps, but it show the possibility.)

Is your word processor "life criticial"? Michael Richard was executed after his lawyers were unable to file paperwork by a deadline due to computer problems, under circumstances that would likely have at least postponed his murder by the state.

Is your local park service's database "life critical"? It becomes so when a dead tree that was supposed to be removed falls and kills somebody.

(By the way, if you're a computer professional and you're not reading the RISKS digest, you oughta be.)

well paint the key 0x09 F9 ... C0 Then they will have to blur out your house, or be in violation of the DMCA. (or arrest you, and paint your house; charging you government contractor rates to do so)

Dreamhost, for their 5 Terabyte bandwidth limit, where if you approach even 1/5 of the limit they cancel your account for "putting too much strain on the servers."

Story here

If it's a Dell, sure. http://elliottback.com/wp/archives/2006/08/20/exploding-dell-laptop-battery-bonanza/

The point isn't that iPods and other players don't have the power to decode Oggs (hell, they all do video, which is in a whole 'nother league), but more processing power sucks up more juice, and that's pretty crucial for portable devices. And we're talking about QUITE A BIT more battery power... like a 25% loss in consumption.

Well no, that is exactly what the tubesteak said and what Rockbox disproves.

As far as power consumption goes, I think you are getting confused with another format (WMA 12%) (WMA with DRM 25%). My nano sized Trekstore easily gets more than 8 hours of play off it's tiny lithium battery.

I know a lot of people that use their webmail accounts in this manner (yahoo, hotmail, etc) where if they think they need to be access a file somewhere else, they'll just e-mail it to themselves in an attachment. In all honesty though, the adoption rate for something like this for home personal users isn't going to ramp up until the average upload speeds of a home connection increases. Especially for large files, too many Joe Computer users are going to think their computer froze just because it's taking so long to upload their files.

For the umpteenth time, it's NOT a male texture.

http://elliottback.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2006/ 05/oblivion-nude-texture.jpg

See for yourself.

NOT a male texture...

http://elliottback.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2006/ 05/oblivion-nude-texture.jpg

"Nobody included bare female chest textures in this game."

Yes they did. Tell me that this is a male texture. I dare you.

http://elliottback.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2006/ 05/oblivion-nude-texture.jpg

Does this really appear to be a male texture to you?

http://elliottback.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2006/ 05/oblivion-nude-texture.jpg

Nope, not a male texture, topless *female* textures are *also* included in the game...

See for yourself.

http://elliottback.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2006/ 05/oblivion-nude-texture.jpg

Wrong, and once again.. does this look male to you?

http://elliottback.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2006/ 05/oblivion-nude-texture.jpg

No it's not the male texture.

Does this look even remotely male?

http://elliottback.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2006/ 05/oblivion-nude-texture.jpg

This is not the case, and just in case I'm terribly confused, being a blonde woman and all, but it sure looks like it has nipples to me.

http://elliottback.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2006/ 05/oblivion-nude-texture.jpg

No, they're not male. I'm not sure where this rumor started, but I think it was on some forum where I read a message that was saying Bethesda should lie and say it was actually the male texture used on the female mesh.

http://elliottback.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2006/ 05/oblivion-nude-texture.jpg

Sure doesn't look male to me.

Sorry no, you are wrong. It's NOT a male texture.. well, unless you can call this...

http://elliottback.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2006/ 05/oblivion-nude-texture.jpg

anything like male.

At least, if what I found is really what it appears to be...

http://elliottback.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2006/ 05/oblivion-nude-texture.jpg

Looks pretty female to me. I was getting tired of all the "it's a male upper body texture mapped to the female mesh" talk and decided to dig a little bit.. not that it took that much digging, but anyways, there it is, supposedly the base texture in question.

I agree with you, but for the initial run of units, many (most?) DID sell far above the MSRP. JC Penny, for example, sold their stock at $799 a unit. Not to mention the eBay retailers who managed to sell units for upwards of $1000.

so in reality, a large number of units went for far more than the $400 price. i.e. The market self-adjusted the price. Microsoft may not have seen the profits, but that wasn't the point. Microsoft is selling the console as a loss-leader using the "razor blade" model. Advertising the system to be more costly would reduce demand, and thereby cut profits for Microsoft as fewer games got sold. With the lower MSRP, Microsoft was able to generate not only demand for games, but also buzz about the system. Buzz leads to more system sales (in the future), and more system sales can lead to more game sales. More game sales == more profit.

And that's without assuming that Microsoft isn't using its resources to undercut the competition in an attempt to monopolize the market.

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Like your statement that you need to abuse your monopoly to be a monopolist. So what does that make all those companies that have a monopoly and don't abuse it?

They are monopolies, but not abusive. They should be watched closely by regulators, but it doesn't do anyone any good to say "omg bad!"

And then there's the software they release, which indeed is not open source and only runs on Windows.

So? They respond to market forces. Should Ford be forced to continue making parts for Model-T cars because there are few out there? No.

This is coming from a Mac user, too. I may love my Mac, but I'm not going to force businesses to make dumb business decisions.

This is significant enough that there was (is?) serious consideration of adapting the GPL to prevent it in the future.

If you release stuff under the GPL, companies use it entirely legally, and then you complain that the license is too free... who the hell is at fault? YOU.

If you don't like that aspect of the GPL, again, USE ANOTHER LICENSE. Take the GPL and add in a clause saying "Big companies I criticize on Slashdot (but say 'not to say that there's anything wrong with that' while I do) may not use this software because it makes me sad." License it under the ShieldW0lf's Paranoia License. Whatever.

Just don't bitch about people using GPL'ed software entirely within the constraints of the GPL.

What exactly is the difference between releasing software-as-a-service with well documented APIs and releasing compiled code with well documented APIs?

If you release a service, the code is still entirely under your control. Your millions of dollars of research and development are not rendered instantly worthless by 200 identical copies of your system being available. People still get the benefit, but you get to feed your kids.

Do your hero a favour.

My hero? Hardly, and if they make stuff like this widespread I'll stop using Google's search and not look back. I'm just not going to go criticizing them for doing things that aren't at all wrong.

how many people in the open source community / Slashdot actually paid for their version of Windows? Probably less than 4%.

Doesn't Windows come with the computer?

Someone should start http://www.spreadopera.com/

Or even sicker: Spread IE

http://elliottback.com/wp/wp-content/thumb-steph-b sod95.jpg

By the description (I haven't seen it myself) it would probably be classified as pornography, making it illegal to sell to minors (it would no longer be up to a permissive guardian).

Perhaps you should actually see it before you pass judgement...

I think you'll agree that calling this bit-mapped mess 'pornography' is a serious stretch of the term.

Google and 10 seconds can solve that problem for you.

http://elliottback.com/wp/?p=908

A long standing bug can be seen in the Longhorn screenshots. Personally, I'd be more interested in a solid bit of engineering than yet another heap of rubbish with another irritatingly over-keen GUI.

here you can see that just executing a dos program (which cuold have been made aware of long filenames by now, but hasn't) will confuse the heck out of the poor (and I mean porr) CLI so it loses track of the "long filename" version of the working directory. I mean, how difficult can it be? On any OS I've ever used (and I've used more than a couple) the environment is inherited by child processes but *not* un-inherited at the end, so I'm frankly at a loss to know how this bug appeared in the first place. Then there's the fact that the horrendous hacky short/long filename situation was a bad idea in the first place, poorly dealt with (I can quite happily use any number of filesystems with differing ideas of valid filenames simultaneously on my linux machines, how does microsoft not get this right? Then there's the fact that, although edit has been a part of windows for around a decade of long filenames and *still* can't understand it.

I'll say it again, Microsoft, you really need to start producing some good software, rather than just polishing pap.,

Cheers & God bless
Sam "SammyTheSnake" Penny

PS

Not just that but notice the firefox ad in the screenshot of IE7: "The browser you can trust" :-)

Nice that they still have those longdirectorynames as longdi~1 in the prompt if you happened to use 16-bit programs. Oh, and winver really does seem to work. Nice work, MS!

The desktop seems to have the two most used icons shown as default... and these are:
Recycle Bin
(and, you guessed it) How to Report a Bug!
At least they have their priorities right. ;)
screenshot here

http://elliottback.com/wp/wp-content/lh2r8ad.png

Good to see Internet Explorer still not working.

Wow, I actually expected more, considering how much MS has been hyping the "new UI" of Longhorn.

In no particular order:

(1) Explorer seems to have taken a cue from PathFinder's directory browsing, a concept which has also been integrated into the GTK File Open Chooser Widget in the Linux world. Definitely a step in the right direction, but perhaps bundled up with a couple steps backward. Notice the new "My Computer", which sports all sorts of useless widgets everywhere, a mixture of task- and object-oriented interfaces, and more panes than one can possibly be expected to comprehend quickly. Typical Microsoft "toolbaritis," now applied to the file manager.

(2) Media Player continues to amaze in how far it distances itself from any UI sanity. Yet another argument for why toolkit consistency does not matter to normal users. File menu: gone, or just "annoyingly mouseover hidden"? I can only imagine what that menacing "Online Stores" button is for (can anyone say software-as-advertisement money?)

(3) Transparency: ooh, eye-candy. But wait, why does my desktop look like so many stained glass windows, who are, at the same time, light sources? Yet another Microsoft imitation gone bad. Notice how the borders of applications turn into transparent "stained glass" areas, serving to do nothing but make it more difficult to see, grab, and interact with the border of an application. For some reason, toolbar areas are also "semi-transparent," I guess just so you can make sure your graphics driver is working. Notice also how even when the eye candy features are enabled (transparent borders, shadows), Media Player refuses to comply! Stubborn lil' guy, aren't ya? heh heh.

(4) I'm utterly not surprised to see that Windows still makes use of dialogs whom cannot be resized, as in the displayed (and New) Copy Dialog. Yet another great "feature," as my 1920x1280 screen real estate can't even be utilized to show me the full directory name of a the path I'm copying from. Instead, I must make due with two halves of a path concatenated by three dots '...'

(5) Internet Explorer 7. Does this even need comment? What a UI disaster. First, the "toolbar" area is a different color than the rest of the application, which gives us some sort of Carbon/Cocoa hybrid in a single application. Then, the menubar exists below the tabs, implying that these options are on a per-tab basis, when this is clearly not the case (It's true sometimes, like in View Source or Save As, but not true others, like Work Offline or New Tab, which alter the whole application and not just a single tab).

In conclusion, Longhorn, at least from a UI innovation standpoint (but probably from others, too), looks to be the vaporware we were all expecting. Let's keep our eyes and minds pointed at where the real innovation is happening: in ANY of the alternative OSes, proprietary or Free. Maybe by the time Longhorn is released, we won't even need it anymore. We'll just send Microsoft a memo: "Dear Sirs, you can have it back."

On a more serious note, one of the screenshots (found here) says "you are here>>/home/". Is it just me, or does that look like Linux to you?

The screenshots are als on http://elliottback.com/wp/archives/2005/07/09/long horn-5203-screenshots/

I have a zip archive of the original page here: http://elliottback.com/wp/?p=533

I took a look at the Giant Antispyware Product after it had been rebranded by Microsoft the other week. I used a clean VMware installation of a completely unpatched windows XP pro, and set about to find as much spyware as I could.

After installing several dozen spyware products, I tested Microsoft Antispyware Beta 1 against Adaware and Spybot. It came in first, removing nearly twice as much crud as its nearest competitor, Adaware.

I have to say, if Microsoft Antispyware can find and remove the 53 different spyware products that I installed, it's pretty good. I no longer use Spybot or Adaware, because this upstart (rebranded?!) beta has bested both of them. (more on the blog...)

That's what the WordPress plugin Spam Stopgap Extreme does.

I was under the impression that exit polling methodology had been subjected to extensive review by statisticians since 2000 due to some of the previous problems with it. This was what the news networks were claiming anyway.

Anyway, it seems pretty trivial to construct a better methodology not subject to these weaknesses (take this proposal for instance). Not hard at all now, is it?

Firefox crashed for me. See this image of the firefox crash.