Actually, our organisation has a roaming cyber cafe which we use for promotion. The server is Linux based and I boot it up and shut it down very often in order to move it!
Man! How did I miss that - did/. report the open-sourcing of Star Office. Surely that is very significant - I was very impressed by the applications when I first saw them but could not stand the stupid "desktop" that ate up the screen. Any piece of software that doesn't allow its windows to be neatly arranged next to other apps is next to useless as far as I'm concerned. If some sensible development work is being done on this suite then it should blow everything else out of the water.
I work for a charitable organisation that is 'locked in' to MS Office 2000 but we're really running out of cash to support it. If I could move to something like Star Office, and look at jettisoning Win98 clients entirely I would be a very happy man indeed.
Litigation is not the answer though: there are smart ways of stopping direct linking to pages in your site without these kinds of problems.
At the end of a day, a link is a redirection and creates traffic to a site. Almost all the web sites I regularly enjoy (including slashdot) were introduced to me because I followed a link from somewhere. These sites that want to charge for a link would see a drop in the amount of new traffic coming to their site.
If you're publishing material you need to follow the rules of the media you're publishing in. Publishers of television programmes can't air their show and then tell the public that they must pay in order to watch it (and then sue people who go ahead and watch it anyway). If you want your TV show to be pay-to-view, then you need to only show it on networks who encrypt their channel and have some kind of charging structure in place. In the same way, everything on the web is free-to-air, unless you put password controls or some kind of database engine that makes linking impossible. Then you can complain if someone links.
It's not like they're pulling these judgements out of their collective ass or doing something secretive. They have a clear policy on what gets you in. According to a recent press release this ISP got listed for hosting spam-advertised sites. They are also clearly continuing to host sites that sell bulk-mail software and addresses. According to spamhaus.org, Media3 is the largest spam site hoster currently active.
But if you read the article, MAPS suggested that ISPs have different IP addresses for the customers' domains, to avoid exactly this situation.
The blocking of sites that sell spamming software is (IMHO) dubious but understandable; blocking 1500 addresses is appaling, and contrary to the cooperative spitit that makes the Net work. Also, RBL is used in a backbone and those using it have no choice in the matter.
I had one of those too - for the ZX Spectrum 48k (Sinclair Timex in the US IIRC). I got it to work by recording it on a _really good_ hi-fi and playing with the tone controls loads. With a good tape deck the speccy worked really well (compared to other micros) even to the point of having really big games that needed tape loads between levels!
Re:EULAs and the UK Sale of Goods Act
on
EULA In Games
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· Score: 1
Interesting!
But I suspect (don't really know!) that the legal position would be that a game purchase is implicitly that of a license. The reason being that there are several "products" that you could be buying:
The physical media in the box
The game license
The full rights to the game
And purchasing the "game" gives you the first two but not the third. The same is true of buying a book, whereby you are not allowed to make copies of the book or plagurise (sp.) it - you own the physical media and a license to view it.
It's about the content being categorised not the system breaking:-)
Re:EULAs and the UK Sale of Goods Act
on
EULA In Games
·
· Score: 2
But.... I wonder whether the Sale of Goods Act would apply to the license or the software. If indeed a license only is being sold, then the Sale of Goods Act would be fulfilled as follows:-
Is it of satisfactory quality? The license allows you to access the software without any obvious faults
Is it fit for the purpose sold? It always makes the software run (The only exception I can see is if the vendor said "Microsoft Word allows you to create databases" in which case the license could be considered at fault because the vendor should have sold you a license for Access instead of Word.)
Is it "as described"? Again, it makes the software work, unless the box contains the wrong CD or the license key is incorrect or damaged.
Anyway, I think you can see what I'm getting at. Of course IANAL either, but I guess there needs to be a test case to see how the sale of licenses applies to the Sale of Goods act.
no, it said "the London Times" implying that "London Times" is the title of the paper. In fact, the paper is called "The Times" (both capitalized). Nobody in the UK calls the paper "London Times".
Anal and OT.... sorry
No, what you are referring to is meant to speed up access to frequently used programs.
Yes, I understand what it's meant to do (I was speaking in the context of Word 2000, you are thinking of the Start Menu 'hiding' feature.
It is my considered opinion after six months of supporting inexperienced users at my organisation that this 'feature' is confusing at best. Why should less-frequently used application disappear! If I put a 'change my password' shortcut on the menu and insist that network users change it every 4-6 weeks, by the time they come to do it it may well have disappeared. The 'recognition' element of a good GUI is destroyed because the menu items move about. (Don't even get me started about being able to drag the menu bar out of Office apps and IE..)
Have you used whistler? Did you know that is configurable to work the way you do?
No, but I've used every current MS OS from Win3.1 to 2000 (not ME yet) and I'm sure that their current paradigm is not about to change. It may be configurable but I want a default configuration that isn't braindead!
As for your gripe about where applications put their icons in the menu, at least applications put icons in the damn menu. You at least have the luxury of editing those menus after.
YES! And I spend half my time doing that for confused users who don't understand why a paint package is in a folder called 'Adobe' and not called 'Graphics' or 'Drawing'.
In conclusion, Whistler mops the floor with KDE and GNOME combined. It's also themeable so you can expect a migration of people whose only use for X was installing themes.
I don't think anyone uses an OS/WM because they want to install themes. Are you sure you're not a troll?
It seems to me that MS is moving in all sorts of different directions at once with their UI and aren't really sure where they want to go.
This article notes many features present in Windows Whistler (such as an advanced taskbar, start menu, and file-manager integration) that both Linux GUIs lack.
What strikes me most about all of this is the apparent lack of insight that Microsoft have into what is really required of a user interface. From what I've learnt in a single module on GUIs in my degree course and during six months as sysadmin for a medium-sized organisation running 98 clients, they don't have a clue!
A good UI should:
Allow novice users to get to grips with the system easily without excess information and confusion
Allow intermediate users to acquire greater skill with the system and begin to understand the internals and allow users of similar systems to understand the differences quickly (e.g. mac->windows windows->linux etc)
Allow expert users to do thier quickly and cleanly, the way they want to do it, without being hampered by braindead features designed for newbies
One of the "features" in Office 2000 and Win2K meant to address the first point is the 'menus show recently used commands first'; it's meant to hide advanced features from novice users. The stupid thing is it hides any features that they don't use regularly and is totally frustrating for users because they can't find what they're looking for. It entirely negates the 'discovery' principle of good GUIs and brings us back to the DOS days of packages having many features users don't know about because they don't know the shortcut key. All three levels of users are affected detrimentally by this feature.
The 'friendly' start button I see on the Whistler design concerns me because - who decides what goes where? At the moment any software I install makes icons all over the place and I have to tidy them up. As a computer consultant to small businesses, half the work I do is rationalising Start menus so that there's less junk and more logical arrangement. Microsoft should take the approach that the Debian Windowmaker menus use (or used to; I haven't used Debian for a year) where there are subheadings such as 'Productivity', 'Games', 'System Tools', 'Internet tools', 'Text tools' etc. and distributers decide where there app belongs. The Windows approach, where most software houses make a new folder with their trade name is crazy, and not helpful to users at all.
Microsoft should also decide once and for all how multiple files in the same app should work. As a user I don't care whether a file is in Word, Excel or anything else as long as the package has the functionality I need. The '9x MDI approach where each application has a window with little windows in it is terrible, because it means that cross-referncing files in different applications requires lots of window jiggling. The proposed Whistler approach also forces users to associate files with applications; in a GUI world it really doesn't matter, and we should be able to mix and match. The best approach is that of Word 2000, which has a separate task bar entry for each document and allows their windows to be arranged separately.
In the Museum of Film and Photography in Bradford, UK, there's a videoconferencing system set up either end of a room. There's a bed in each cubicle, with a video projector above it. You lie down on the bed, and the other person is projected next to you. A random background picture is keyed underneath - grass, water etc. - and the bedsheet is white so it shows up nicely.
The whole effect is surprisingly realistic, partailly I think because we're so used to seeing 3-D images projected 2-D in any case, and also because of the subdued lighting.
I really do think that bands could make a living by giving their music away. There's a parallel with OSS:
Redhat create a distro and give it away for free by various means over the 'net.
A band records an album and gives it away for free by various means over the 'net and radio.
Redhat create a package whereby you get a copy of the free distro on the media of your choice, a nice book and a glossy box - at a cost.
The band create a package whereby you get a copy of the free album on the media of your choice, a nice book and a glossy box, PLUS you get the tracks in the order they were meant to be in, with the track gaps as they were meant to be - at a cost.
Redhat sell you support, whereby they basically say this is our operating system, and this is how we do it - for which you pay a premium.
The band sell you a gig - whereby they say these are our songs, and this is how we do them - for which you pay a premium.
Of course, you could get someone else to support your Redhat Linux, but it wouldn't be Redhat and you could get a cover band to play the songs (no copyright issues), but it wouldn't be the band. By attending more gigs, cover bands would get better at playing the songs, and would therefore be able to charge more when performing.
Can you imagine bands "open-sourcing" their pieces? Not only would we have access to every music sheet they write on, but they would be giving their "software" out for free. How would they make a living?
Gigs, baby, gigs!
I would happily pay GBP 50 to go see a band I really liked, and happily pay it again six months later if they wrote some more songs:-) I pay GBP10 for a CD and don't buy anymore until they record a new album...
This Beatles reissue just happens to do a very nice job of illustrating _how_ the vinyl was sounding better all these years, and gets the 'feel' of the music much better than previous CDs in general.
That hits it - it's hard to tell how good a format can be until a very, very good example of what can be done is demonstrated. A few weeks ago I happened to be in a PC shop with a friend of mine who's a hi-fi newbie; I'd been trying to convince her, for ages, that different components really sounded different (or better/worse) and that most "real" hi-fi would sound better than a midi system. There happened to be a load of PC sound systems linked to the same system with a selector switch - she was amazed that the same piece of music sounded completely different as I changed the switch! Slightly OT, but I think it demonstrates the point...
Not at all, I've got a large number of albums on vinyl and CD, and I have no problem comparing and contrasting their relative quality. As an example, most of the newly released vinyl I have purchased since about aound 1996 or 1997 has been poor, being physically flimsy and sounding compressed and screechy. Conversely, the majority of CDs which were remastered in the late 80s/early 90s don't sound nearly as good as their vinyl counterparts.
Whilst I agree that there is a subjective element (that's the whole point of music!!) it's not a case of me being 'used to' a particular sound; there is a common thread due to the poor remastering mentioned in the other reply to my original post. The only quality I dislike about older vinyl is the tendancy for high pitched sounds to be distorted, although I believe this is probably due to my deck and stylus.
As a rule, I now tend to buy vinyl for pre-90s recordings which were likely to have been remastered in the 80s or 90s, and buy CD for later recordings.
In the specific case of Vinyl->CD (or VHS->DVD), there is a valid argument that you're buying something new; that the digital copy is significantly better than the analog. It is perfectly legal for you to make a CD from your Vinyl; you just don't want to because the quality would suck.
I would disagree. I wanted a copy of a Carly Simon album which brings back fond childhood memories:-) and I borrowed my parents copy and made a CD using a good record deck, soundcard and CD burner. A month ago I bought the album on CD because I happened to see it discounted. Guess what?...the CD I made sounds better - richer sound, deeper bass. My advice would be, if you own the vinyl and it's in good condition then get a friend with good equipment to make a CD for you.
Just to brag, last week someone gave me a boxed set of all the Beatles' albums on vinyl and I'm a very happy man...
I'm and Englishman posting from Sheffield, England, and I have never heard the expression "another think coming" in my life. I've heard and said another thing coming lots of times...
Neither make sense ('think' is a verb, not a noun) but they're idioms so they don't have to.
Once I was staying in France and did a lot of troubleshooting on a friends windoze computer. It was back in the days of DOS and I ended up remapping the keyboard to QWERTY and typing blind. Thats what I think of AZERTY!
Slashdot Mirror
It's like Pulp Fiction in its blackness and weirdness, and in fact this movie isn't non-linear (at least not to PF's degree).
It's like Trainspotting in it's unglamourous presentation (grunginess is probably the right word) and attention to detail in accents, dialects etc.
I've got my "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Island Passport" in front of me. Under the heading "Nationality" is says "British Citizen".
Awful photo though...
Actually, our organisation has a roaming cyber cafe which we use for promotion. The server is Linux based and I boot it up and shut it down very often in order to move it!
Man! How did I miss that - did /. report the open-sourcing of Star Office. Surely that is very significant - I was very impressed by the applications when I first saw them but could not stand the stupid "desktop" that ate up the screen. Any piece of software that doesn't allow its windows to be neatly arranged next to other apps is next to useless as far as I'm concerned. If some sensible development work is being done on this suite then it should blow everything else out of the water.
I work for a charitable organisation that is 'locked in' to MS Office 2000 but we're really running out of cash to support it. If I could move to something like Star Office, and look at jettisoning Win98 clients entirely I would be a very happy man indeed.
When my Linux server is booting, I know when something's wrong by how long the [OK] takes to appear, so even the [OK] is useful.
At the end of a day, a link is a redirection and creates traffic to a site. Almost all the web sites I regularly enjoy (including slashdot) were introduced to me because I followed a link from somewhere. These sites that want to charge for a link would see a drop in the amount of new traffic coming to their site.
If you're publishing material you need to follow the rules of the media you're publishing in. Publishers of television programmes can't air their show and then tell the public that they must pay in order to watch it (and then sue people who go ahead and watch it anyway). If you want your TV show to be pay-to-view, then you need to only show it on networks who encrypt their channel and have some kind of charging structure in place. In the same way, everything on the web is free-to-air, unless you put password controls or some kind of database engine that makes linking impossible. Then you can complain if someone links.
But if you read the article, MAPS suggested that ISPs have different IP addresses for the customers' domains, to avoid exactly this situation.
The blocking of sites that sell spamming software is (IMHO) dubious but understandable; blocking 1500 addresses is appaling, and contrary to the cooperative spitit that makes the Net work. Also, RBL is used in a backbone and those using it have no choice in the matter.
I had one of those too - for the ZX Spectrum 48k (Sinclair Timex in the US IIRC). I got it to work by recording it on a _really good_ hi-fi and playing with the tone controls loads. With a good tape deck the speccy worked really well (compared to other micros) even to the point of having really big games that needed tape loads between levels!
But I suspect (don't really know!) that the legal position would be that a game purchase is implicitly that of a license. The reason being that there are several "products" that you could be buying:
- The physical media in the box
- The game license
- The full rights to the game
And purchasing the "game" gives you the first two but not the third. The same is true of buying a book, whereby you are not allowed to make copies of the book or plagurise (sp.) it - you own the physical media and a license to view it.It's about the content being categorised not the system breaking :-)
The license allows you to access the software without any obvious faults
It always makes the software run (The only exception I can see is if the vendor said "Microsoft Word allows you to create databases" in which case the license could be considered at fault because the vendor should have sold you a license for Access instead of Word.)
Again, it makes the software work, unless the box contains the wrong CD or the license key is incorrect or damaged.
Anyway, I think you can see what I'm getting at. Of course IANAL either, but I guess there needs to be a test case to see how the sale of licenses applies to the Sale of Goods act.
All generalizations are false. KABOOOOM!!
no, it said "the London Times" implying that "London Times" is the title of the paper. In fact, the paper is called "The Times" (both capitalized). Nobody in the UK calls the paper "London Times". Anal and OT.... sorry
But it's title is "The Times" and should therefore be refered to as '"The Times", London' to avoid confusion, or perhaps "The [London] Times".
It is my considered opinion after six months of supporting inexperienced users at my organisation that this 'feature' is confusing at best. Why should less-frequently used application disappear! If I put a 'change my password' shortcut on the menu and insist that network users change it every 4-6 weeks, by the time they come to do it it may well have disappeared. The 'recognition' element of a good GUI is destroyed because the menu items move about. (Don't even get me started about being able to drag the menu bar out of Office apps and IE..)
No, but I've used every current MS OS from Win3.1 to 2000 (not ME yet) and I'm sure that their current paradigm is not about to change. It may be configurable but I want a default configuration that isn't braindead!
YES! And I spend half my time doing that for confused users who don't understand why a paint package is in a folder called 'Adobe' and not called 'Graphics' or 'Drawing'.
I don't think anyone uses an OS/WM because they want to install themes. Are you sure you're not a troll?
It seems to me that MS is moving in all sorts of different directions at once with their UI and aren't really sure where they want to go.
What strikes me most about all of this is the apparent lack of insight that Microsoft have into what is really required of a user interface. From what I've learnt in a single module on GUIs in my degree course and during six months as sysadmin for a medium-sized organisation running 98 clients, they don't have a clue!
A good UI should:
- Allow novice users to get to grips with the system easily without excess information and confusion
- Allow intermediate users to acquire greater skill with the system and begin to understand the internals and allow users of similar systems to understand the differences quickly (e.g. mac->windows windows->linux etc)
- Allow expert users to do thier quickly and cleanly, the way they want to do it, without being hampered by braindead features designed for newbies
One of the "features" in Office 2000 and Win2K meant to address the first point is the 'menus show recently used commands first'; it's meant to hide advanced features from novice users. The stupid thing is it hides any features that they don't use regularly and is totally frustrating for users because they can't find what they're looking for. It entirely negates the 'discovery' principle of good GUIs and brings us back to the DOS days of packages having many features users don't know about because they don't know the shortcut key. All three levels of users are affected detrimentally by this feature.The 'friendly' start button I see on the Whistler design concerns me because - who decides what goes where? At the moment any software I install makes icons all over the place and I have to tidy them up. As a computer consultant to small businesses, half the work I do is rationalising Start menus so that there's less junk and more logical arrangement. Microsoft should take the approach that the Debian Windowmaker menus use (or used to; I haven't used Debian for a year) where there are subheadings such as 'Productivity', 'Games', 'System Tools', 'Internet tools', 'Text tools' etc. and distributers decide where there app belongs. The Windows approach, where most software houses make a new folder with their trade name is crazy, and not helpful to users at all.
Microsoft should also decide once and for all how multiple files in the same app should work. As a user I don't care whether a file is in Word, Excel or anything else as long as the package has the functionality I need. The '9x MDI approach where each application has a window with little windows in it is terrible, because it means that cross-referncing files in different applications requires lots of window jiggling. The proposed Whistler approach also forces users to associate files with applications; in a GUI world it really doesn't matter, and we should be able to mix and match. The best approach is that of Word 2000, which has a separate task bar entry for each document and allows their windows to be arranged separately.
The whole effect is surprisingly realistic, partailly I think because we're so used to seeing 3-D images projected 2-D in any case, and also because of the subdued lighting.
Much better than "face-to-face" conferencing.
I really do think that bands could make a living by giving their music away. There's a parallel with OSS:
Of course, you could get someone else to support your Redhat Linux, but it wouldn't be Redhat and you could get a cover band to play the songs (no copyright issues), but it wouldn't be the band. By attending more gigs, cover bands would get better at playing the songs, and would therefore be able to charge more when performing.
Gigs, baby, gigs!
I would happily pay GBP 50 to go see a band I really liked, and happily pay it again six months later if they wrote some more songs :-) I pay GBP10 for a CD and don't buy anymore until they record a new album...
That hits it - it's hard to tell how good a format can be until a very, very good example of what can be done is demonstrated. A few weeks ago I happened to be in a PC shop with a friend of mine who's a hi-fi newbie; I'd been trying to convince her, for ages, that different components really sounded different (or better/worse) and that most "real" hi-fi would sound better than a midi system. There happened to be a load of PC sound systems linked to the same system with a selector switch - she was amazed that the same piece of music sounded completely different as I changed the switch! Slightly OT, but I think it demonstrates the point...
plus the covers are bigger and nicer
Definitely. :-)
Whilst I agree that there is a subjective element (that's the whole point of music!!) it's not a case of me being 'used to' a particular sound; there is a common thread due to the poor remastering mentioned in the other reply to my original post. The only quality I dislike about older vinyl is the tendancy for high pitched sounds to be distorted, although I believe this is probably due to my deck and stylus.
As a rule, I now tend to buy vinyl for pre-90s recordings which were likely to have been remastered in the 80s or 90s, and buy CD for later recordings.
I would disagree. I wanted a copy of a Carly Simon album which brings back fond childhood memories :-) and I borrowed my parents copy and made a CD using a good record deck, soundcard and CD burner. A month ago I bought the album on CD because I happened to see it discounted. Guess what? ...the CD I made sounds better - richer sound, deeper bass. My advice would be, if you own the vinyl and it's in good condition then get a friend with good equipment to make a CD for you.
Just to brag, last week someone gave me a boxed set of all the Beatles' albums on vinyl and I'm a very happy man...
Neither make sense ('think' is a verb, not a noun) but they're idioms so they don't have to.
Once I was staying in France and did a lot of troubleshooting on a friends windoze computer. It was back in the days of DOS and I ended up remapping the keyboard to QWERTY and typing blind. Thats what I think of AZERTY!
Order them over the web! http://rswww.com http://www.maplin.co.uk Cheaper and better quality than Tandy (generally)