The worst thing that could've happened, even when providing a serious account, are temporary liquidity problems. Direct debits can be disputed and will be refunded without any trouble. Same goes for fraudulous withdrawals. As long as you keep the secrets to yourself (PINs and the like), account numbers can be as public as you like 'em to be.
In a properly configured environment, the delta from "now" and "the next day" should be smaller than the amount of time taken to PXE-install RHEL, Suse or Ubuntu (not Gentoo as compiling KDE or Gnome would take too long;)) on each of your workstations. With the proper backup strategy, "them leaving" and "morning of the day after tomorrow" ought to give you enough time to restore everything back to "now" (or just keep running OSS).
Microsoft office is NOT free. Everyone on Earth knows that.
Sorry to be so pedantic but you're very very wrong here. Many of the non-techies (even heavy Office users) I know consider Office to be a standard part of Windows. Consumer PCs coming with a 90-day trial preinstalled doesn't help fix that -- after it not launching with a weird "Expired" message, the neighborhood comp kid will, for a few bucks, make it work again.
Finding an alternative is a no-brainer to anyone with some technical background, but many Office users simply don't care about PC internals, including, to many, licensing.
If you got Microsoft Windows XP included on a computer from Dell, have the COA for the installed copy of XP, have an invoice for the computer but don't have a line item on the invoice for Windows XP, you're a pirate and may get included on this list.
That won't uphold in court. If you only lack licenses for preinstalled stuff you didn't "enhance" by entering serials you found somewhere on the web (or apply cracks), take it to court and you'll be okay. In the very unlikely case of judge or jury deciding in the BSA's favor, take the suit to the next higher court and sue whomever supplied the hardware for misinformation based on your lost trial's outcome. At the very least they misinformed you and broke contracts.
What sucks, though, is the combination of having a few copies of "free" Photoshop installed on some of your (in the BSA's eyes unlicensed) XP boxen. Settling out of court will cost you for each copy of XP, again; going to court might turn out expensive because of the actually unlicensed software.
Notice how the same software companies show up on the list of "pirated" software, and the majority of them are companies whose software is included bundled with computers from major makers.
Microsoft Win XP is likely to be bundled with more or less every system you buy. Windows Server 03, Office Professional and Exchange aren't. Adobe Photoshop Elements might be bundled, too. The Creative Suite 3 that "somehow found it's way on lotsa company X's PCs" isn't.
And, there's an even simpler reason for the prominence of Microsoft, Adobe, Autodesk, McAffee and Symantec on the list: They're frickin' huge, are frickin' everywhere and sell the standard implementation of some extremely common formats (think doc, xls, ppt, psd, pdf, cad,...). The BSA doesn't care about those cool tools from Joe's Software Shack; they look for widely used software from big vendors with a high chance of being found in any given audit.
Caps Lock can be quite useful with exotic keyboard layouts. The best example of which I could think is the standard Swiss layout. It accomodates all the accents and umlauts for Switzerland's four official languages and an awesome shitload of special chars most people wouldn't even dream of having on a single keyboard (ranging from $, £ and to , and ).
To accomodate all those functions, several keys have three, some up to five(!) functions (example: Normal: ü, Shift: é, CL: Ü, CL+Shift: É, Ctrl+Alt: [). There's also discrete umlaut and accent keys (e.g. Ctrl + Alt + , then Shift + E for É).
Long story short: Some languages require more characters than US-ASCII and some layouts have been built to provide those with CapsLock as a modifier.
1. They "taste" the domain for five days, for free
2. Their "tasted" domains feature a nice "parking" placeholder containing ads
3. People click links to parked domains.
4. ???
5. Profit!
Whoa. I knew europe had a nice public transport system, but I had no idea the U.S. one is so seriously fucked up. In the western parts of europe you tend to have bus (or equiv) stops some five minutes from any somewhat urban point with busses travelling as frequently as on a 5-minute schedule. Smaller towns are often connected by both bus (15, 30 min schedules) and train (30, few only 60 min schedule).
The concept of public transport's just fine, your american implementation just seems to be really bad.
Oh and about the shopping trips: If you're going to transport back more than, say, 40 pounds worth of stuff, using a car seems like a good idea to me.
> Ultimately, with a perfect system, it would: > * Make truckers obsolete Thanks for eliminating yet another not-so-technical job. > * Allow dropoff/pickup of children without you being present Ever heard of a "School Bus"? Or car pooling? > * Allow pickup of groceries or other goods without you being present Yeah, can't order your stuff online and get it delivered home... five years ago. > * Make it so you don't need parking near your destination (vehicle can leave, park elsewhere, and return later) Yay for no more vatlet parking. By the way: walking those three mins from parking space to destination is the last bit of workout some americans seem to get. > * Greatly increase speeds (same) Because we aren't just using enough gas yet. Wind resistance makes up a large part of the used up energy and increases exponentially with higher speeds. > * Greatly decrease fuel or energy consumed at a given speed (same), helping the environment How exactly would that work? Cars with an automatic transmission tend to use at least as much if not more fuel as a decently driven stick. If they can't get something as simple as that right, I wouldn't bet on a way more complex system. > * Decrease costs to consumers (as above) and thus opens up wider travel opportunities/deurbanization Decrease costs of what? Cars? You have to be kidding me. > * Facilitate better integration of the vehicle and the road (example: bridges that know how much capacity they can support and vehicles that know how much they weigh so that they can be built lighter (and thus cheaper) while still being safe by never routing too much weight to be crossing a given bridge at once) That's a seriously stupid idea. Parts of the U.S. infrastructure are falling apart because they were built quickly and cheaply. (And not supported enough, afterwards.) > * No speeding tickets Most cars are able to somehow indicate their current speed to their driver. If the driver's too (stupid|lazy|distracted) to notice this indicated speed being greater than the allowed speed, he's a bad driver. Maybe, just maybe it's a bad idea to hand out licenses to every other 16 year old teen (c'mon, handing them a deadly weapon five years before they're considered mature enough to handle something as dangerous as alcohol?) and try doing it like the rest of the (OECD-) world. No driving under 18 and before taking lessons and completing an exam. > * No drunk drivers Call it "attempted manslaughter" instead of "DUI" and many will consider dnd twice. > * No need to pay attention to the road -- but those who like to drive could still offroad, go to tracks, etc. I agree in your POV of cars being a means of transportation and not much more, but to some it's obviously quite different. What would you say about government-mandated, forced trusted computing with only a few bigwigs receiving the licenses to publish software? "No need for security concerns -- but those who like to play around could still offline, on their old, pre-DMCA-era devices. > * Greater response time of vehicle and built-in system-aware hardware eases transition to new technologies, such as inductrac maglev roads, powered roads to recharge electric vehicles, or whatnot. If you're going to build a new maglev infrastructure anyways, build it as an addition to roads. That's the only way to enforce a smooth transition for something as publicly important as transport. Then put that maglev rail into a vacuum tube and thanks to nearly unlimited speeds you won't need second lanes anymore. What's even better: Thanks to using a new, standardized, railway-like system, only cars who follow the standard will use it, making automated driving actually feasible.
My dual 1600x1200 setup is working better than I'd imagine a huge-ass back projection setup with a lower resolution would. In the case of needing more space, I'll happily add a 2560x1600 center screen and pivot the 20" ones on it's sides, netting me some three times the screen real estate.
Also IT will always be around, 90% of end users don't want to fix anything they just want to call someone and have them do it for them.
No need for an IT department to do that. I used to work for a government organization providing IT services to other GOs who outsourced their office IT. We'd take care of our and our customers servers while IBM GS took care of our workstations, printers and so on. The fact that this is happening in a GO (who'd usually be late-adopters of novel business tactics and most anything) demonstrates that this part of IT doesn't need an own IT dept anymore.
May I ask what makes you think whomever is able to coordinate ten simultaneous attacks would be unable to coordinate ten simultaneous attacks with two missiles each?
Seriously, a single laser is not going to help against somebody determined to take down one or multiple aircraft. It might help against that single uncoordinated fanatic who happened to get his hands onto an heat seeking missile, but that's about it.
Also, whenever this measure actually gets implemented, classic IR missiles could just become a thing of the past. There alredy are alternative approaches like radar-guided systems, scaling those down to a portable size and inventing new ways to target aircraft will happen.
"Cheap cables" as in low-quality, badly insulated, perhaps overly long cables. This may not necessarily make their retail price lower than reasonably priced quality cables, but it ought to reduce analog signal quality (due to external influences, insufficient conductivity, crosstalk between the different cores and so on).
I'm not saying "go buy monster/pear/whatever cable", but the not-even-packaged 5 meter cable from the $1 bargain bin mightn't provide optimal signal quality either.
As far as I know, LCDs are inherently digital in terms of "which pixel" is being targetted. The subpixel brightness values will have to be analogized somewhere in the process, but using DVI/HDMI that'd mean "Digital signal from video card is losslessy transmitted to LCD circuitry, then converted to analog where necessary". For analog (VGA) transmission to an LCD it's more along the lines of "Digital signal from video card is analogized, sent thru a potentially lossy connection, digitalized (so the LCD is able to process it) and analogized again. Especially with higher resolutions and cheap cabling this will cause images to become less sharp.
HDMI may not be better than DVI, but both are way better than VGA.
HDMI is basically HDCP-enabled DVI with sound. If you don't mind the extra cable, DVI will produce the same optical result and by usually not supporting HDCP is a better choice. Both are way better than analog VGA in terms of picture quality and sharpness. Digital converted to analog, sent thru a cable at maximum capacity, converted back to digital will, by definition, look worse than a fully digital signal converted perfectly for each single pixel.
There are many of us on/. who simply don't use windows, and don't want to. But since we're tens of thousands and Microsoft's customer base is in the hundreds of millions, they simply don't care.
The Wii's a casual gaming console. It did actually outsell the 360 already (some 12.7M vs 13.1M units to date) and seems to be going stronger than the X-Box, but afaik the number of games sold somewhat change the financial picture. The (still very gamer-targeted) 360 probably doesn't make MS any money per console sold, I'd guess it's a few bucks either lost or won. Lots of high-profile games, however, do. Each Wii sold, otoh, is an instant win for Nintendo. A great part of those buyers are happy with Wii Sports and one or two additional titles, Nintendo's income for sold games is accordingly lower than MSFT's.
Also, the Wii introduced a whole new gaming style. Unlike Microsoft and Sony, Nintendo now is under quite a bit of innovation pressure. The first generation does have lots of novelty value, but I doubt a Wii2 with merely increased performance would sell anywhere near as fast.
I'd wager it's going to be more of a marketing than a legal or technological war. If decisions were made about technological capabilities, we'd all be running Linux, listen to Archos or Creative Jukeboxes instead of iPods and TV would've been cancelled a long time ago. With many people equating Adobe to "Acrobat", Microsoft clearly has an unfair marketing advantage here. They can, probably unpunished, push out Silverlight to the hundreds of millions of Windows users silently and almost unavoidably. Even though it's not innovative, pushing it isn't that hard if one's in their position.
If the Mozilla stuff feels pretty fast to you, you really ought to try one of the "native" alternatives (e.g. MSIE on Windows, Safari on OS X, Konq on KDE, Opera on all of those, ELinks/Lynx/... on a console). After that, "XUL fast" will feel like "Daewoo fast" as opposed to "Ferrari fast".
Old records don't sell too well, so reduced to the copyright sector their funds would be quite a bit smaller as compared to now. Without their current kind of liquidity their political weight would end after the terms of already bought politicians, lobby work couldn't be done as effectively as it is now. Consumer rights groups (supported by just about any somewhat intelligent lifeform) would have better chances to reform copyright to more sensible terms, killing off the big four's last income stream.
Availability of massive financial resources is all that's keeping the RIAA alive now, without all the bribery they'll die quicker than you're able to take your next breath.
Oh, if you should be right about never being able to convince the "douchebags in Washington to fix the mess they were paid to create": Step down from your soap box, skip ballot and jury and help yourself to some ammo already. The American system could really use a makeover, be it thru the 2008 elections or... a bit more direct.:)
Which is also, in part, what I am saying to Zed. He says, stupidly, that the "best part" about ripping on people is that he is legally allowed to do so, and their only recourse is to write about it. And then he says he would fight them if they wanted to, which shows there are, in fact, other recourses available.
Without wanting to support either side of this battling, I have to somewhat disagree with you here. If I didn't happen to totally misunderstand what he wrote, the fighting possibility seemed more like a possible recourse with his agreement of such. "Writ[ing] their pathetic little rebuttals in their stupid little blogs" remains the only possible recourse (apart from, of course, questionably meritful legal action) available to them without an arrangement between them and him.
If you read the full piece, you'll notice the clarification about the alleged 4 minute uptime (400 restarts over 60 parallel instances because of hitting the memory limit, not ruby/rails instabilities; seemingly fixed now(?)). It's in the "DHH Still Rocks More Than You" section about halfway down the page.
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The worst thing that could've happened, even when providing a serious account, are temporary liquidity problems. Direct debits can be disputed and will be refunded without any trouble. Same goes for fraudulous withdrawals. As long as you keep the secrets to yourself (PINs and the like), account numbers can be as public as you like 'em to be.
You wouldn't steal a baby.
...
You wouldn't shoot a policeman and then steal his helmet.
You wouldn't go to the toilet in his helmet
And then send it to the policeman's grieving widow
And then steal it again!
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAr7zKxjCDY from The IT Crowd.]
In a properly configured environment, the delta from "now" and "the next day" should be smaller than the amount of time taken to PXE-install RHEL, Suse or Ubuntu (not Gentoo as compiling KDE or Gnome would take too long ;)) on each of your workstations. With the proper backup strategy, "them leaving" and "morning of the day after tomorrow" ought to give you enough time to restore everything back to "now" (or just keep running OSS).
Finding an alternative is a no-brainer to anyone with some technical background, but many Office users simply don't care about PC internals, including, to many, licensing.
What sucks, though, is the combination of having a few copies of "free" Photoshop installed on some of your (in the BSA's eyes unlicensed) XP boxen. Settling out of court will cost you for each copy of XP, again; going to court might turn out expensive because of the actually unlicensed software.
Microsoft Win XP is likely to be bundled with more or less every system you buy. Windows Server 03, Office Professional and Exchange aren't. Adobe Photoshop Elements might be bundled, too. The Creative Suite 3 that "somehow found it's way on lotsa company X's PCs" isn't.
And, there's an even simpler reason for the prominence of Microsoft, Adobe, Autodesk, McAffee and Symantec on the list: They're frickin' huge, are frickin' everywhere and sell the standard implementation of some extremely common formats (think doc, xls, ppt, psd, pdf, cad,
Caps Lock can be quite useful with exotic keyboard layouts. The best example of which I could think is the standard Swiss layout. It accomodates all the accents and umlauts for Switzerland's four official languages and an awesome shitload of special chars most people wouldn't even dream of having on a single keyboard (ranging from $, £ and to , and ).
To accomodate all those functions, several keys have three, some up to five(!) functions (example: Normal: ü, Shift: é, CL: Ü, CL+Shift: É, Ctrl+Alt: [). There's also discrete umlaut and accent keys (e.g. Ctrl + Alt + , then Shift + E for É).
Long story short: Some languages require more characters than US-ASCII and some layouts have been built to provide those with CapsLock as a modifier.
1. They "taste" the domain for five days, for free
2. Their "tasted" domains feature a nice "parking" placeholder containing ads
3. People click links to parked domains.
4. ???
5. Profit!
Whoa. I knew europe had a nice public transport system, but I had no idea the U.S. one is so seriously fucked up. In the western parts of europe you tend to have bus (or equiv) stops some five minutes from any somewhat urban point with busses travelling as frequently as on a 5-minute schedule. Smaller towns are often connected by both bus (15, 30 min schedules) and train (30, few only 60 min schedule).
The concept of public transport's just fine, your american implementation just seems to be really bad.
Oh and about the shopping trips: If you're going to transport back more than, say, 40 pounds worth of stuff, using a car seems like a good idea to me.
> Ultimately, with a perfect system, it would:
> * Make truckers obsolete
Thanks for eliminating yet another not-so-technical job.
> * Allow dropoff/pickup of children without you being present
Ever heard of a "School Bus"? Or car pooling?
> * Allow pickup of groceries or other goods without you being present
Yeah, can't order your stuff online and get it delivered home... five years ago.
> * Make it so you don't need parking near your destination (vehicle can leave, park elsewhere, and return later)
Yay for no more vatlet parking. By the way: walking those three mins from parking space to destination is the last bit of workout some americans seem to get.
> * Greatly increase speeds (same)
Because we aren't just using enough gas yet. Wind resistance makes up a large part of the used up energy and increases exponentially with higher speeds.
> * Greatly decrease fuel or energy consumed at a given speed (same), helping the environment
How exactly would that work? Cars with an automatic transmission tend to use at least as much if not more fuel as a decently driven stick. If they can't get something as simple as that right, I wouldn't bet on a way more complex system.
> * Decrease costs to consumers (as above) and thus opens up wider travel opportunities/deurbanization
Decrease costs of what? Cars? You have to be kidding me.
> * Facilitate better integration of the vehicle and the road (example: bridges that know how much capacity they can support and vehicles that know how much they weigh so that they can be built lighter (and thus cheaper) while still being safe by never routing too much weight to be crossing a given bridge at once)
That's a seriously stupid idea. Parts of the U.S. infrastructure are falling apart because they were built quickly and cheaply. (And not supported enough, afterwards.)
> * No speeding tickets
Most cars are able to somehow indicate their current speed to their driver. If the driver's too (stupid|lazy|distracted) to notice this indicated speed being greater than the allowed speed, he's a bad driver. Maybe, just maybe it's a bad idea to hand out licenses to every other 16 year old teen (c'mon, handing them a deadly weapon five years before they're considered mature enough to handle something as dangerous as alcohol?) and try doing it like the rest of the (OECD-) world. No driving under 18 and before taking lessons and completing an exam.
> * No drunk drivers
Call it "attempted manslaughter" instead of "DUI" and many will consider dnd twice.
> * No need to pay attention to the road -- but those who like to drive could still offroad, go to tracks, etc.
I agree in your POV of cars being a means of transportation and not much more, but to some it's obviously quite different. What would you say about government-mandated, forced trusted computing with only a few bigwigs receiving the licenses to publish software? "No need for security concerns -- but those who like to play around could still offline, on their old, pre-DMCA-era devices.
> * Greater response time of vehicle and built-in system-aware hardware eases transition to new technologies, such as inductrac maglev roads, powered roads to recharge electric vehicles, or whatnot.
If you're going to build a new maglev infrastructure anyways, build it as an addition to roads. That's the only way to enforce a smooth transition for something as publicly important as transport. Then put that maglev rail into a vacuum tube and thanks to nearly unlimited speeds you won't need second lanes anymore. What's even better: Thanks to using a new, standardized, railway-like system, only cars who follow the standard will use it, making automated driving actually feasible.
My dual 1600x1200 setup is working better than I'd imagine a huge-ass back projection setup with a lower resolution would. In the case of needing more space, I'll happily add a 2560x1600 center screen and pivot the 20" ones on it's sides, netting me some three times the screen real estate.
Looking at the form factor of the display wouldn't that be more of a wide shot?
You worried about your fingers? :)
Don't be, the shark to whose head your laser keyboard's attached will already have bitten them off.
May I ask what makes you think whomever is able to coordinate ten simultaneous attacks would be unable to coordinate ten simultaneous attacks with two missiles each?
Seriously, a single laser is not going to help against somebody determined to take down one or multiple aircraft. It might help against that single uncoordinated fanatic who happened to get his hands onto an heat seeking missile, but that's about it.
Also, whenever this measure actually gets implemented, classic IR missiles could just become a thing of the past. There alredy are alternative approaches like radar-guided systems, scaling those down to a portable size and inventing new ways to target aircraft will happen.
"Cheap cables" as in low-quality, badly insulated, perhaps overly long cables. This may not necessarily make their retail price lower than reasonably priced quality cables, but it ought to reduce analog signal quality (due to external influences, insufficient conductivity, crosstalk between the different cores and so on).
I'm not saying "go buy monster/pear/whatever cable", but the not-even-packaged 5 meter cable from the $1 bargain bin mightn't provide optimal signal quality either.
As far as I know, LCDs are inherently digital in terms of "which pixel" is being targetted. The subpixel brightness values will have to be analogized somewhere in the process, but using DVI/HDMI that'd mean "Digital signal from video card is losslessy transmitted to LCD circuitry, then converted to analog where necessary". For analog (VGA) transmission to an LCD it's more along the lines of "Digital signal from video card is analogized, sent thru a potentially lossy connection, digitalized (so the LCD is able to process it) and analogized again. Especially with higher resolutions and cheap cabling this will cause images to become less sharp.
HDMI may not be better than DVI, but both are way better than VGA.
HDMI is basically HDCP-enabled DVI with sound. If you don't mind the extra cable, DVI will produce the same optical result and by usually not supporting HDCP is a better choice. Both are way better than analog VGA in terms of picture quality and sharpness. Digital converted to analog, sent thru a cable at maximum capacity, converted back to digital will, by definition, look worse than a fully digital signal converted perfectly for each single pixel.
The Wii's a casual gaming console. It did actually outsell the 360 already (some 12.7M vs 13.1M units to date) and seems to be going stronger than the X-Box, but afaik the number of games sold somewhat change the financial picture. The (still very gamer-targeted) 360 probably doesn't make MS any money per console sold, I'd guess it's a few bucks either lost or won. Lots of high-profile games, however, do. Each Wii sold, otoh, is an instant win for Nintendo. A great part of those buyers are happy with Wii Sports and one or two additional titles, Nintendo's income for sold games is accordingly lower than MSFT's.
Also, the Wii introduced a whole new gaming style. Unlike Microsoft and Sony, Nintendo now is under quite a bit of innovation pressure. The first generation does have lots of novelty value, but I doubt a Wii2 with merely increased performance would sell anywhere near as fast.
I'd wager it's going to be more of a marketing than a legal or technological war. If decisions were made about technological capabilities, we'd all be running Linux, listen to Archos or Creative Jukeboxes instead of iPods and TV would've been cancelled a long time ago. With many people equating Adobe to "Acrobat", Microsoft clearly has an unfair marketing advantage here. They can, probably unpunished, push out Silverlight to the hundreds of millions of Windows users silently and almost unavoidably. Even though it's not innovative, pushing it isn't that hard if one's in their position.
If the Mozilla stuff feels pretty fast to you, you really ought to try one of the "native" alternatives (e.g. MSIE on Windows, Safari on OS X, Konq on KDE, Opera on all of those, ELinks/Lynx/... on a console). After that, "XUL fast" will feel like "Daewoo fast" as opposed to "Ferrari fast".
Old records don't sell too well, so reduced to the copyright sector their funds would be quite a bit smaller as compared to now. Without their current kind of liquidity their political weight would end after the terms of already bought politicians, lobby work couldn't be done as effectively as it is now. Consumer rights groups (supported by just about any somewhat intelligent lifeform) would have better chances to reform copyright to more sensible terms, killing off the big four's last income stream.
... a bit more direct. :)
Availability of massive financial resources is all that's keeping the RIAA alive now, without all the bribery they'll die quicker than you're able to take your next breath.
Oh, if you should be right about never being able to convince the "douchebags in Washington to fix the mess they were paid to create": Step down from your soap box, skip ballot and jury and help yourself to some ammo already. The American system could really use a makeover, be it thru the 2008 elections or
If you read the full piece, you'll notice the clarification about the alleged 4 minute uptime (400 restarts over 60 parallel instances because of hitting the memory limit, not ruby/rails instabilities; seemingly fixed now(?)). It's in the "DHH Still Rocks More Than You" section about halfway down the page.
What about ten of those, united in a Top Ten 'Top Ten 'Top Ten 'Top Ten lists''' list with laser beams attached to it's head?