AFAIK '$Company recommends Windows Vista $model', if printed everywhere, gets 'em many dollars from Microsoft. It's like with ads in magazines; the advertiser (in this case Microsoft) buys some space (and, in this case, a "recommendation") for lotsa money.
With all the OEM discounts and marketing aid going on, I imagine that little line may be worth half the ad, so the marketing department damn sure won't remove it.
Also, I don't think it's doing too much harm. Those interested in not getting Vista will usually be versed enough to find the XP/Ubuntu models and ignore the recommendation, those interested in large quantities get matching offers anyways and those not caring about what they're getting won't bother to look for alternatives (blindly accepting the "recommendation").
I can't speak for those millions of Americans, but if I knew my probability of catching lung cancer to be 70%, I'd make damn sure not to expose my lung to any tar/nicotine/smoke if possible. A statistic saying 27% of all Americans will be affected by disease X is, to me, way less personal than one saying my chance of having X, based on hard evidence, is 80%.
Ignorance is bliss. On the other hand, knowing that you are endangered of e.g. Parkinson's might be enough motivation to do something about it and maybe, just maybe, doing something about it might decrease the chances of actually suffering of the disease.
The NG version is all about Genealogy/Genography; 23andMe or deCODEme seem to provide similar detail in that area plus insights about your expected health problems and capabilities.
All three offers are updated with new discoveries and results.
This has already been mentioned, except last time the spotlight was on deCODEme by deCODE genetics which offers more details (1m vs. 600k "sites" of the genome) for less ($985 vs. $999).
Being a sequel to Warcraft III would imply WoW's game mechanics to be somewhat similar to WC III's which they aren't. What would you think about calling it a part of the Warcraft franchise?
There are tons of clients available for Linux, but to date I haven't found a decent one. I tried more or less everything I could find in gentoo's and Ubuntu's repositories, but may have missed lftp. If it's able to cover all points I mentioned in this other comment, nothing's holding me in the wine/FlashFXP world. If it, however, is worse than the mess I'm currently using, I'll just stick to that.
So, it doesn't decide it automatically (not sure how it could...)
That somewhat of a killer argument for me. I can tell FlashFXP to "intelligently" resume/skip (filesize on server equals size on client => skip, server > client => resume, server has, client doesn't => transfer) which seems to be kind of exclusive.
I need it to be able to decide automatically because I often have to transfer hundreds of gigabytes over a not-too reliable dsl connection (tens of hours, sometimes days spent on one transfer) and don't want to have to wait in front of the comp to catch any arrors.
I tend to avoid Firefox wherever possible, but if FireFTP can do the following I might have to think it over:
- Detect connection losses in a sensible timeframe (Konqueror likes to have a "Stalled" connection for several hours) and reconnect/resume accordingly
- Be able to decide if resuming or skipping (partially) downloaded files is appropriate and act accordingly
- Allow me to select a subset of all files in a directory (e.g. Ctrl + Click or checkboxes)
- Allow me to save the queue to a file (or be stable).
Because their primary source of income is not the software they sell. They sell iPods and iPhones and give away firmware upgrades for free - money made with hardware, not software. They sell Macs with OS X and iLife and iWhatever included and don't expect most users to upgrade. A certain subset of their users will keep their PCs updated with the latest Tiger, Housecat and Guinea Pig releases, but the crowd they're attracting with "Everything just works" kind of slogans won't.
Also, the software they sell runs exclusively on their hardware, ensured by their license agreement and software locks*. After BootCamp, their hardware, however, doesn't just run Apple software. Of course nobody would actually buy their hardware 'cause it's all about The Mac Experience and Being Pretentious, but essentially Apple wouldn't lose out if such behaviour was to occur.
* OSx86 is neither sanctioned nor supported by Apple. It's a project by hackers for hackers which, I imagine, doesn't really bother any high execs anywhere. If it were to somehow get some traction in the market this might change but I suspect it won't, at least not in the short term.
I agree on lots of stuff not working properly, but for many apps relatively simple workarounds exist.
For your mentioned IE problems, there's IEs4Linux. Versions 5-6 run more or less flawlessy, 7 mostly works and 1/2 sometimes do (for laughs). FlashFXP (which I frequently use because of the lack of any decently stable native FTP client(!)) runs almost perfectly after applying a small source patch and recompiling.
Steam with all it's HL2-based apps worked out-of-the-box, IIRC. (Bought HL2 back after buying and before trying to install Windows on my shiny new metal box. Unfortunately XP got a wee bit confused by too much storage and refused to install, so I switched to Gentoo and, more recently, Ubuntu).
Many other apps will work if you put a similar amount of work into them. For anything else, I've got a legacy XP ThinkPad with Office, Civ III and that kind of stuff installed. Ironically it's the only computer having trouble accessing some SMB shares on this network.
Ooookay. So basically you're saying it's a good idea for little johnny to spend 15% of his lunchmoney to have some knucks handy in case a horde of bullies isn't intimidated by his 50 professional, armed bodyguards and somehow manages to fight their way through to johnny (and in the process probably killing or immobilizing the bodyguards)? Sounds pretty pointless to me.
If you say a piece of software is Open Source or Free Software you are talking about one of many Open Source licenses. You could mean the very popular GPL, you could mean a BSD license, the Apache license, SUN's CDDL(?) or even Microsoft's PL, all of which are quite different and may require effort to find out what I can and can't do.
If you say a work is available under a Creative Commons license, you are talking about one of many possible combinations of all CC restrictions. If you, however, say a work is available under a cc-by-nc-sa license, you have told me I may use your work in mine as long as you are attributed, my works aren't comercially and my works are available under cc-by-nc-sa. The five other possibilites are similarly easy to understand.
Better start giving troops ammo again what for?
Please realize the idiocy for a nation of some 7 million people in having an army. Switzerland is neighbored by Germany (80m), France (65m people, nukes), Italy (60m) and Austria (some 8m). Except Austria, all of those nations are NATO members. Austria itself is surrounded by NATO members. Both Austria and Switzerland are politically stable, don't seem to have any conflicts whatsoever and are both considered neutral. Military aggression towards Switzerland by any non-NATO-nation except Austria would require to invade NATO territory upon which the NATO would very probably frown. If said aggressor was, however, able to fight his way through NATOland to the Swiss borders, do you seriously think less than a million mediocrely trained soldiers would be able to defeat what just pwnd the military pride of 26 medium-to-large nations of which several carry nukes?
I understand the need for nations in politically unstable regions to have a defensive force. I also realize that some dictatorships seem to require military force to randomly attack other nations instead of using diplomacy (e.g. North Korea or the U.S. of A. under religious fanatic George W. Bush).
* The FCC set a 4.6 Bln limit on the auction, if it did not reach the limit the restrictions would go away. Is this for each of the regional areas or is it 4.6 for all of them.
From what I've heard, the FCC would not have auctioned the spectrum off if the $4.6bn minimum wouldn't have been reached. Google's two rules seem to have been established as an exchange for bidding $4.6bn.
* Google is exptected to bid 4.6 B on the auction, Did they indicate if they would lean on certain areas more than the others?
* This has been referred to as "beachfront property" in terms of spectrum, why is that?
Because it seems to be the best compromise of high bandwidth (GHz bands excel here, see W-LAN) and pervasiveness (The low to medium MHz bands' speciality, see FM radio). Ideally, it'd "go through concrete like a hot knife through butter" yet provide nice bandwidths).
* I've sporadically heard talk about emergency services (police etc) making use of this spectrum, is it bundled in this auction or is it outside?
Internationally, some emergency services seem to be shifting away from the 700 MHz bands, I don't have any insight here though. My best guess would be them using some other block in the 700 MHz range.
Again, most of this is from dubiously trustworthy news outlets, [citation needed] so to speak.
Yep, cause it's utterly stupid to even imagine (or plan for) the development of HTML forking at some point (and different dtds existing peacefully amongst each other).
Going semantic with custom tags sans some doctype kind of explanation about what they mean sounds like utter bullshit to me. Slimming the standard down to fewer tags (e.g. "html", "head", "body", "script", "block", "inline", "form", "input", "table", "row", "cell" and a generic "object" for images and flash and whatnot), aided by a descriptive "name" attribute for anything would, in my opinion, be a probably better approach.
Luckily, though, I'm not in charge of either gundam or HTML and find (especially the XML version of) the latter to be going in a generally good direction. Cheers:)
If this applies to law amendments, which sometimes try to correct existing bad laws, then that wouldn't be a good thing.
It applies to all law changes. Don't forget the law should be made for the people it affects, not against them. If a majority of them don't like it, the law is bad. Simple, really.
I totally disagree with more or less everything you said:
1: "Suisse". If you're talking English, you meant "Swiss".
2: CHF Gold backing: It's true the Swiss franc lost some of it's gold backing in 2000, but (other than, for example, the US Dollar) it's value seems solid as a rock in a moving sea of global currencies. An inflation of some 1% (according to your(?) governmental factbook) supports this as well as Yahoo! data on exchange rates.
About that bank panics idea of yours: Remember the all-american Subprime Mortgage Crisis? Some swiss banks lost a few billion on it, some lower management positions will need to be restaffed, high management seems largely unchanged, the general public wasn't concerned at all. How well did british and americanbanks cope with it?
3: Disarmament: As opposed to some nation in the far west, a majority of Swiss people seems to be slowly realizing the idiocy of maintaining an overproportional army while surrounded by allied and politically stable countries. With a very recent incident of an army recruit shooting some girl he didn't even know out of the blue, abolishing the forced armament seems nearer than ever. There's no debate about prohibiting guns completely, merely talks about safely storing army equipment outside of individuals' homes. By the way: just a few months ago, in what probably is a first step in the disarmament, soldiers are no longer equipped with any ammo to take home with 'em.
I realize that such events need to be put into perspective (during the writing of this post more people died of hunger than were killed by Swiss army weapons in the last decades), but if an action (forced armament) does not cause any good and very few deaths, it's still a stupid thing to do.
The teenager is said to have infiltrated top secret government networks throughout the universe. "He created both Linux and Windows in the lunch breaks of his freshman year in college and plans to take over control of the world after finishing his PhD next year", Kleintjes said.
I, for one, ph34r our new NZ script kiddie overlords.
Apparently, RapidShare.de is based in Germany, RapidShare.com in Switzerland. The servers of both domains seem to be located in Germany (which is, coincidentally, widely known for cheap bandwidth and server hosting/housing). The current legal situation after some battles with the GEMA (The german equivalent to the RIAA) seem to be DMCAy to me RapidShare is obliged to take down any infringing files upon individual request by the respective copyright holder.
What is illegal is for me to bypass the region coding that I have on half my DVD's so that I can watch them on my computer.
Negative. Bypassing protection seems to be unchangedly legal as long as it's done to consume the work in a legal manner. Clearly speaking: Using DeCSS to watch or back up DVDs is perfectly legal; commercially copying copyrighted DVDs isn't.
Unfortunately, creation and advertising of products to circumvent protections appear to be outlawed. Effectively private copies are thus limited to people knowing how and where to obtain tools to create them. This may be a slippery slope towards trying to forbid usage of the tools as soon as the general public forgets about them being available in the first place.
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AFAIK '$Company recommends Windows Vista $model', if printed everywhere, gets 'em many dollars from Microsoft. It's like with ads in magazines; the advertiser (in this case Microsoft) buys some space (and, in this case, a "recommendation") for lotsa money.
With all the OEM discounts and marketing aid going on, I imagine that little line may be worth half the ad, so the marketing department damn sure won't remove it.
Also, I don't think it's doing too much harm. Those interested in not getting Vista will usually be versed enough to find the XP/Ubuntu models and ignore the recommendation, those interested in large quantities get matching offers anyways and those not caring about what they're getting won't bother to look for alternatives (blindly accepting the "recommendation").
I can't speak for those millions of Americans, but if I knew my probability of catching lung cancer to be 70%, I'd make damn sure not to expose my lung to any tar/nicotine/smoke if possible. A statistic saying 27% of all Americans will be affected by disease X is, to me, way less personal than one saying my chance of having X, based on hard evidence, is 80%.
Midichlorians live, as far as I know, in your cells and blood. 23andMe analyzes a cheek swab. Unless your spit is blood, no, it won't tell you.
Ignorance is bliss. On the other hand, knowing that you are endangered of e.g. Parkinson's might be enough motivation to do something about it and maybe, just maybe, doing something about it might decrease the chances of actually suffering of the disease.
The NG version is all about Genealogy/Genography; 23andMe or deCODEme seem to provide similar detail in that area plus insights about your expected health problems and capabilities.
All three offers are updated with new discoveries and results.
[...] if they aren't really enforcing it, you might have wanted to use at least a fake name, even better a disposable P.O. box address.
This has already been mentioned, except last time the spotlight was on deCODEme by deCODE genetics which offers more details (1m vs. 600k "sites" of the genome) for less ($985 vs. $999).
I'd love to hear about the results, though.
Heh. After a few minutes of looking at heavily zoomed in pic 4 (they don't seem bolted on), I got the ballmer/chair joke. Well done, sir, well done.
Being a sequel to Warcraft III would imply WoW's game mechanics to be somewhat similar to WC III's which they aren't. What would you think about calling it a part of the Warcraft franchise?
There are tons of clients available for Linux, but to date I haven't found a decent one. I tried more or less everything I could find in gentoo's and Ubuntu's repositories, but may have missed lftp. If it's able to cover all points I mentioned in this other comment, nothing's holding me in the wine/FlashFXP world. If it, however, is worse than the mess I'm currently using, I'll just stick to that.
I need it to be able to decide automatically because I often have to transfer hundreds of gigabytes over a not-too reliable dsl connection (tens of hours, sometimes days spent on one transfer) and don't want to have to wait in front of the comp to catch any arrors.
I tend to avoid Firefox wherever possible, but if FireFTP can do the following I might have to think it over:
- Detect connection losses in a sensible timeframe (Konqueror likes to have a "Stalled" connection for several hours) and reconnect/resume accordingly
- Be able to decide if resuming or skipping (partially) downloaded files is appropriate and act accordingly
- Allow me to select a subset of all files in a directory (e.g. Ctrl + Click or checkboxes)
- Allow me to save the queue to a file (or be stable).
Any insights if FireFTP's worth being tried?
Because their primary source of income is not the software they sell. They sell iPods and iPhones and give away firmware upgrades for free - money made with hardware, not software. They sell Macs with OS X and iLife and iWhatever included and don't expect most users to upgrade. A certain subset of their users will keep their PCs updated with the latest Tiger, Housecat and Guinea Pig releases, but the crowd they're attracting with "Everything just works" kind of slogans won't.
Also, the software they sell runs exclusively on their hardware, ensured by their license agreement and software locks*. After BootCamp, their hardware, however, doesn't just run Apple software. Of course nobody would actually buy their hardware 'cause it's all about The Mac Experience and Being Pretentious, but essentially Apple wouldn't lose out if such behaviour was to occur.
* OSx86 is neither sanctioned nor supported by Apple. It's a project by hackers for hackers which, I imagine, doesn't really bother any high execs anywhere. If it were to somehow get some traction in the market this might change but I suspect it won't, at least not in the short term.
I agree on lots of stuff not working properly, but for many apps relatively simple workarounds exist.
For your mentioned IE problems, there's IEs4Linux. Versions 5-6 run more or less flawlessy, 7 mostly works and 1/2 sometimes do (for laughs).
FlashFXP (which I frequently use because of the lack of any decently stable native FTP client(!)) runs almost perfectly after applying a small source patch and recompiling.
Steam with all it's HL2-based apps worked out-of-the-box, IIRC. (Bought HL2 back after buying and before trying to install Windows on my shiny new metal box. Unfortunately XP got a wee bit confused by too much storage and refused to install, so I switched to Gentoo and, more recently, Ubuntu).
Many other apps will work if you put a similar amount of work into them. For anything else, I've got a legacy XP ThinkPad with Office, Civ III and that kind of stuff installed. Ironically it's the only computer having trouble accessing some SMB shares on this network.
Ooookay. So basically you're saying it's a good idea for little johnny to spend 15% of his lunchmoney to have some knucks handy in case a horde of bullies isn't intimidated by his 50 professional, armed bodyguards and somehow manages to fight their way through to johnny (and in the process probably killing or immobilizing the bodyguards)? Sounds pretty pointless to me.
If you say a piece of software is Open Source or Free Software you are talking about one of many Open Source licenses. You could mean the very popular GPL, you could mean a BSD license, the Apache license, SUN's CDDL(?) or even Microsoft's PL, all of which are quite different and may require effort to find out what I can and can't do.
If you say a work is available under a Creative Commons license, you are talking about one of many possible combinations of all CC restrictions. If you, however, say a work is available under a cc-by-nc-sa license, you have told me I may use your work in mine as long as you are attributed, my works aren't comercially and my works are available under cc-by-nc-sa. The five other possibilites are similarly easy to understand.
Better start giving troops ammo again what for?
Please realize the idiocy for a nation of some 7 million people in having an army. Switzerland is neighbored by Germany (80m), France (65m people, nukes), Italy (60m) and Austria (some 8m). Except Austria, all of those nations are NATO members. Austria itself is surrounded by NATO members. Both Austria and Switzerland are politically stable, don't seem to have any conflicts whatsoever and are both considered neutral. Military aggression towards Switzerland by any non-NATO-nation except Austria would require to invade NATO territory upon which the NATO would very probably frown. If said aggressor was, however, able to fight his way through NATOland to the Swiss borders, do you seriously think less than a million mediocrely trained soldiers would be able to defeat what just pwnd the military pride of 26 medium-to-large nations of which several carry nukes?
I understand the need for nations in politically unstable regions to have a defensive force. I also realize that some dictatorships seem to require military force to randomly attack other nations instead of using diplomacy (e.g. North Korea or the U.S. of A. under religious fanatic George W. Bush).
Again, most of this is from dubiously trustworthy news outlets, [citation needed] so to speak.
Yep, cause it's utterly stupid to even imagine (or plan for) the development of HTML forking at some point (and different dtds existing peacefully amongst each other).
Going semantic with custom tags sans some doctype kind of explanation about what they mean sounds like utter bullshit to me. Slimming the standard down to fewer tags (e.g. "html", "head", "body", "script", "block", "inline", "form", "input", "table", "row", "cell" and a generic "object" for images and flash and whatnot), aided by a descriptive "name" attribute for anything would, in my opinion, be a probably better approach. :)
Luckily, though, I'm not in charge of either gundam or HTML and find (especially the XML version of) the latter to be going in a generally good direction. Cheers
I totally disagree with more or less everything you said:
1: "Suisse". If you're talking English, you meant "Swiss".
2: CHF Gold backing: It's true the Swiss franc lost some of it's gold backing in 2000, but (other than, for example, the US Dollar) it's value seems solid as a rock in a moving sea of global currencies. An inflation of some 1% (according to your(?) governmental factbook) supports this as well as Yahoo! data on exchange rates.
About that bank panics idea of yours: Remember the all-american Subprime Mortgage Crisis? Some swiss banks lost a few billion on it, some lower management positions will need to be restaffed, high management seems largely unchanged, the general public wasn't concerned at all. How well did british and american banks cope with it?
3: Disarmament: As opposed to some nation in the far west, a majority of Swiss people seems to be slowly realizing the idiocy of maintaining an overproportional army while surrounded by allied and politically stable countries. With a very recent incident of an army recruit shooting some girl he didn't even know out of the blue, abolishing the forced armament seems nearer than ever. There's no debate about prohibiting guns completely, merely talks about safely storing army equipment outside of individuals' homes. By the way: just a few months ago, in what probably is a first step in the disarmament, soldiers are no longer equipped with any ammo to take home with 'em.
I realize that such events need to be put into perspective (during the writing of this post more people died of hunger than were killed by Swiss army weapons in the last decades), but if an action (forced armament) does not cause any good and very few deaths, it's still a stupid thing to do.
Apparently, RapidShare.de is based in Germany, RapidShare.com in Switzerland. The servers of both domains seem to be located in Germany (which is, coincidentally, widely known for cheap bandwidth and server hosting/housing). The current legal situation after some battles with the GEMA (The german equivalent to the RIAA) seem to be DMCAy to me RapidShare is obliged to take down any infringing files upon individual request by the respective copyright holder.
Unfortunately, creation and advertising of products to circumvent protections appear to be outlawed. Effectively private copies are thus limited to people knowing how and where to obtain tools to create them. This may be a slippery slope towards trying to forbid usage of the tools as soon as the general public forgets about them being available in the first place.