You're obviously reaching for extremes here. "seems false" != "is false". Yes, people said to eat chicken soup when you are sick, and no, there was no scientific basis for it. There was no scientific basis for it because no one looked. Period. Not because science can't explain everything. Because no one bothered to check. Do you think that makes science somehow fallable, that there aren't enough scientists around to look into every 'ancient' wisdom and every natural (or not so natural) phenomenon?
I've noticed my memory sucking recently as well. However, I blame it on getting older.
I also have had lots of trouble falling asleep, but not any more. Instead of blaming computers and cell phones, I decided to start doing some physical activities on a daily basis, and usually (99% of the time) it takes me somewhere between 30 seconds and 3 minutes to fall asleep, as opposed to 3-4 hours a year or 2 ago.
The cause to problems is not always obvious or expected. In this case, a lifestyle change is most likely at fault.
OK, Thomson is being reasonable here. The conspiracy theorists will no doubt make a big deal out of this by saying that this is a selective enforcement license; should someone become a thorn in Thomson's side they will get sued off the face of the planet. I believe it is in Thomson's best interest to have free decoders widely available, and I think even their lawyers know that.
The real reason they removed that exemption is so that players such as Winamp, which are commercial but distributed free of charge, have to pay a license fee. If you formally list an exception for free decoders, they wouldn't have to do that, because they technically are free (even though they are made by a large corporation and are supposed to make money). Also, pretty much anyone would be able to have an MP3 decoder in their application (even if it costs money) by shipping it separately free of charge. It's a gaping loophole. So, Thomson now is saying that the fees still apply to everyone, although Thomson is not enforcing them for what they consider free decoders.
But now we come to the $64k question. Suppose a company A makes a commercial for profit product including a plug-in architecture such that some freely available and popular decoder (made by an OS group B, not by company A) can be downloaded and just plugs in. Clearly, company A is going for the loophole, but they can't be sued, they just provide generic plug-in interface that can be used for any legitimate purpose, and they don't make the mp3 decoder, or make it available for download. Suppose this becomes a popular product, and this method starts getting copied by other for profit software makers. Who gets sued? Company A? OS group B?
As I read it, that's exactly what this new drive will be good for
Well, yes, but it doesn't solve the problem: multiple competing non-compatible formats. And it still leaves the issue of having to read the damn things. Well, history of the CDR/RW will just be repeated. Wait a year or two and pick up a Plextor DVD burner for $200.
I don't get what this mislabeled song phenomenon is all about. I've been downloading mp3s since before Fanning got his first computer, and can safely say I've downloaded thousands of mp3s, 10s (or even 100s?) of gigabytes of music of various types. I have yet to download a mislabeled or corrupt song. So far I've noticed 3 types of mislabeled songs out there: a. obvious, b. obvious and c. obvious. I guess if you see a match for Britney's latest @ 23856 bytes and think it's your lucky day, yeah, there are tons of mislabeled songs out there.
And for the other issue, I don't think you understand the business model here; I highly doubt HMV will be selling you mislabeled songs encoded by 12 year olds in their parents' basement.
The registry. It's loaded at boot-up. If you change it, you have to reboot.
WHAT?!?!? You must be smoking some good crack man. You do NOT have to reboot to update registry changes. It depends on the application. Just like in the config file world, some apps need to be restarted after a change, some don't. Same deal with the registry.
The only time you need to reboot Windows for changes to take effect is when files that are in use and cannot be released are updated.
to mollify countries like China who would like to
prevent people from seeing a lot of films
No it wasn't. That doesn't make any sense. Virtually every DVD player out there (except for Sony it would seem) can be modified to play other regions. Region coding doesn't physically prevent Chinese from watching non-approved western movies; if a DVD finds its way into their hands, it WILL be played, region coding or not.
Well, not that I approve of the extreme measures to keep government workers off your land. However, you say they haven't gone through more peaceful methods, but I bet that's not the first time some surveyor tried to get in with their equipment. The farmers can argue and wave their arms all day long, or settle the whole thing in less than a minute and get on with their day.
The described situation is called trespass. If someone can't be on your land without your permission, or can be removed by you if you so wish, you can use necessary force to remove them. Out in the middle of nowhere this usually means waving around a rifle or a shutgun.
I dislike agreeing to something before I even get a chance to use it.
You got it backwards maybe, Cliff? So you have a problem with agreeing to a license before using software, but agreeing to a license just by USING software is ok with you? Yeah, click-throughs suck, but lets be logical about its faults.
USPS is non-profit. Less *motivation* to sell your email address. We wouldn't get more spam... instead, we'd be reasonably sure that if we never gave out our email addresses, we'd never get *any* spam. Not so with many (most?) of today's ISPs.
[snort] yeah, so all the SPAM in my Real Life mailbox must be teleported in by evil aliens?
There's nothing wrong with the ICQ UI. It's just like all the other IM UIs, except the window can actually be shrunk down to a size you can keep on top on an average desktop. Turn off all the crap, switch to advanced mode, and edit the defaults to be more reasonable. It's not rocket science. As any other free service, it is to ICQ's advantage to by default turn everything on. It only takes a couple of clicks to turn off everything except strict IM. In the new ICQ, the only things I'd remove would be the stupid bar just below the title bar, and the system notice bar. Other than that I can't possibly agree with you, especially since you do not point out even ONE fault in the UI while saying how absolutely terrible it it.
I don't see any pointless buttons, there being a grand total of 2 (two) in the main window (an app menu, and an online status selector menu). I have yet to see ANY popup windows in the over 6 years I've been using ICQ.
Indeed, 3mbits is nothing to crow about, since virtually all cable providers cap their download speeds at around 300kb/s anyways. After overhead, etc, that's roughly 3mbits. So it's PR, nothing else.
GameSpy used to actually useful (and usable) way back in the QuakeWorld days. It stopped being relevant to me sometime before it got renamed to GameSpy Arcade (or whatever it's called now), and it came with a bunch of useless crap. I never understood the 'scanning the hd' bit... I mean, it knows what games it supports, it knows their registry keys, the whole process should take less than a second, not several minutes. I just added games manually anyways.
In any case, most games come with their own server browsers; launching a huge ad-riddled app just to connect to a server a pointless excercise.
So what do people who used GS back in the 'good old days' and still use it have to say about it? Good? Bad?
Ironically though, since SSH and Apache are both off in the default install, does that mean that OS X takes over the title of "Never had an exploit in the default install"?
Not to burst your bubble or anything, but it's not very difficult to find an OS with no running services that has not had a (you mean remote perhaps?) exploit in over a year.
This is a newswire story, why would you link to Salon, as opposed to a dozen of more obvious places? Like, say, Yahoo? I understand Salon is going under, but really, come on...
Went hiking today in the area where the G8 will be held. The area is already closed off. The particluar mountain we went to was (just) outside the get-your-ass-arrested zone, but nevertheless we had to sign in and show id, and were cautioned not to get too close to the zone. There are black helicopters flying around (even over the city), often in groups of 3 in close formation. I don't even want to know what will happen during the actual summit. I'll also probably call in sick Thurs/Friday so I don't have to dodge protesters and pepper spray on my way to/from work.
I doubt the Pope's visit will get as much security, after all having 8 heads of the most powerful states in one convinient location must make for an awfully tempting target for anyone with an axe to grind.
Counterfitting is not the problem per se, rather, not too many people get to handle $50 bills. Most purchases of that size are made with debit or credit cards. Most people have seen 5s and 10s lots of times, and at the very least can compare a suspect bill to something they probably have in their wallet (unlike, say a $50 or $100). Hence, to avoid loss to counterfits, cashiers are instructed not to take high value bills.
OMG! I'm having the same issue on my new dual machine/win2000! I never did figure out what the problem is (skips sound on mp3 playback like all heck) because I've made many other changes at the same time (new drivers, all new hardware actually, mp3s on a network drive). And the card is in the very bottom slot, to minimize interferance (a futile attempt no doubt, but what the heck), so it's not like it's next door to anything big. Hmm...
The Internet Media Streaming Alliance, which is apparently located in Tuvalu
If you took a 10 second look at the site you'd know that they are 'apparently not' in Tuvalu. Their contact page says Mountain View, CA: http://ism-alliance.tv/html/about/contactus.shtml
Slashdot Mirror
You're obviously reaching for extremes here. "seems false" != "is false". Yes, people said to eat chicken soup when you are sick, and no, there was no scientific basis for it. There was no scientific basis for it because no one looked. Period. Not because science can't explain everything. Because no one bothered to check. Do you think that makes science somehow fallable, that there aren't enough scientists around to look into every 'ancient' wisdom and every natural (or not so natural) phenomenon?
I've noticed my memory sucking recently as well. However, I blame it on getting older.
I also have had lots of trouble falling asleep, but not any more. Instead of blaming computers and cell phones, I decided to start doing some physical activities on a daily basis, and usually (99% of the time) it takes me somewhere between 30 seconds and 3 minutes to fall asleep, as opposed to 3-4 hours a year or 2 ago.
The cause to problems is not always obvious or expected. In this case, a lifestyle change is most likely at fault.
The real reason they removed that exemption is so that players such as Winamp, which are commercial but distributed free of charge, have to pay a license fee. If you formally list an exception for free decoders, they wouldn't have to do that, because they technically are free (even though they are made by a large corporation and are supposed to make money). Also, pretty much anyone would be able to have an MP3 decoder in their application (even if it costs money) by shipping it separately free of charge. It's a gaping loophole. So, Thomson now is saying that the fees still apply to everyone, although Thomson is not enforcing them for what they consider free decoders.
But now we come to the $64k question. Suppose a company A makes a commercial for profit product including a plug-in architecture such that some freely available and popular decoder (made by an OS group B, not by company A) can be downloaded and just plugs in. Clearly, company A is going for the loophole, but they can't be sued, they just provide generic plug-in interface that can be used for any legitimate purpose, and they don't make the mp3 decoder, or make it available for download. Suppose this becomes a popular product, and this method starts getting copied by other for profit software makers. Who gets sued? Company A? OS group B?
Well, yes, but it doesn't solve the problem: multiple competing non-compatible formats. And it still leaves the issue of having to read the damn things. Well, history of the CDR/RW will just be repeated. Wait a year or two and pick up a Plextor DVD burner for $200.
I don't get what this mislabeled song phenomenon is all about. I've been downloading mp3s since before Fanning got his first computer, and can safely say I've downloaded thousands of mp3s, 10s (or even 100s?) of gigabytes of music of various types. I have yet to download a mislabeled or corrupt song. So far I've noticed 3 types of mislabeled songs out there: a. obvious, b. obvious and c. obvious. I guess if you see a match for Britney's latest @ 23856 bytes and think it's your lucky day, yeah, there are tons of mislabeled songs out there.
And for the other issue, I don't think you understand the business model here; I highly doubt HMV will be selling you mislabeled songs encoded by 12 year olds in their parents' basement.
WHAT?!?!? You must be smoking some good crack man. You do NOT have to reboot to update registry changes. It depends on the application. Just like in the config file world, some apps need to be restarted after a change, some don't. Same deal with the registry.
The only time you need to reboot Windows for changes to take effect is when files that are in use and cannot be released are updated.
My god, talk about FUD.
No it wasn't. That doesn't make any sense. Virtually every DVD player out there (except for Sony it would seem) can be modified to play other regions. Region coding doesn't physically prevent Chinese from watching non-approved western movies; if a DVD finds its way into their hands, it WILL be played, region coding or not.
Well, not that I approve of the extreme measures to keep government workers off your land. However, you say they haven't gone through more peaceful methods, but I bet that's not the first time some surveyor tried to get in with their equipment. The farmers can argue and wave their arms all day long, or settle the whole thing in less than a minute and get on with their day.
I don't want to know what state YOU live in.
The described situation is called trespass. If someone can't be on your land without your permission, or can be removed by you if you so wish, you can use necessary force to remove them. Out in the middle of nowhere this usually means waving around a rifle or a shutgun.
But they can't spell as well...
<duck>
You got it backwards maybe, Cliff? So you have a problem with agreeing to a license before using software, but agreeing to a license just by USING software is ok with you? Yeah, click-throughs suck, but lets be logical about its faults.
[snort] yeah, so all the SPAM in my Real Life mailbox must be teleported in by evil aliens?
No, the 10 day notice is for publicly releasing any info in 'confidential' docs. Any bets on how many ICANN docs will suddenly become 'confidential'?
I would be embarassed to give (or receive) a CD or DVD that wasn't still shrinkwrapped. That's just rude.
The best currency converter, and easier to remember than slashdot.org: http://www.xe.com/.
Someone look at this and tell me how you can tell it's not a picture...
There's nothing wrong with the ICQ UI. It's just like all the other IM UIs, except the window can actually be shrunk down to a size you can keep on top on an average desktop. Turn off all the crap, switch to advanced mode, and edit the defaults to be more reasonable. It's not rocket science. As any other free service, it is to ICQ's advantage to by default turn everything on. It only takes a couple of clicks to turn off everything except strict IM. In the new ICQ, the only things I'd remove would be the stupid bar just below the title bar, and the system notice bar. Other than that I can't possibly agree with you, especially since you do not point out even ONE fault in the UI while saying how absolutely terrible it it.
I don't see any pointless buttons, there being a grand total of 2 (two) in the main window (an app menu, and an online status selector menu). I have yet to see ANY popup windows in the over 6 years I've been using ICQ.
Indeed, 3mbits is nothing to crow about, since virtually all cable providers cap their download speeds at around 300kb/s anyways. After overhead, etc, that's roughly 3mbits. So it's PR, nothing else.
GameSpy used to actually useful (and usable) way back in the QuakeWorld days. It stopped being relevant to me sometime before it got renamed to GameSpy Arcade (or whatever it's called now), and it came with a bunch of useless crap. I never understood the 'scanning the hd' bit... I mean, it knows what games it supports, it knows their registry keys, the whole process should take less than a second, not several minutes. I just added games manually anyways.
In any case, most games come with their own server browsers; launching a huge ad-riddled app just to connect to a server a pointless excercise.
So what do people who used GS back in the 'good old days' and still use it have to say about it? Good? Bad?
Not to burst your bubble or anything, but it's not very difficult to find an OS with no running services that has not had a (you mean remote perhaps?) exploit in over a year.
This is a newswire story, why would you link to Salon, as opposed to a dozen of more obvious places? Like, say, Yahoo? I understand Salon is going under, but really, come on...
Went hiking today in the area where the G8 will be held. The area is already closed off. The particluar mountain we went to was (just) outside the get-your-ass-arrested zone, but nevertheless we had to sign in and show id, and were cautioned not to get too close to the zone. There are black helicopters flying around (even over the city), often in groups of 3 in close formation. I don't even want to know what will happen during the actual summit. I'll also probably call in sick Thurs/Friday so I don't have to dodge protesters and pepper spray on my way to/from work.
I doubt the Pope's visit will get as much security, after all having 8 heads of the most powerful states in one convinient location must make for an awfully tempting target for anyone with an axe to grind.
Counterfitting is not the problem per se, rather, not too many people get to handle $50 bills. Most purchases of that size are made with debit or credit cards. Most people have seen 5s and 10s lots of times, and at the very least can compare a suspect bill to something they probably have in their wallet (unlike, say a $50 or $100). Hence, to avoid loss to counterfits, cashiers are instructed not to take high value bills.
OMG! I'm having the same issue on my new dual machine/win2000! I never did figure out what the problem is (skips sound on mp3 playback like all heck) because I've made many other changes at the same time (new drivers, all new hardware actually, mp3s on a network drive). And the card is in the very bottom slot, to minimize interferance (a futile attempt no doubt, but what the heck), so it's not like it's next door to anything big. Hmm...
If you took a 10 second look at the site you'd know that they are 'apparently not' in Tuvalu. Their contact page says Mountain View, CA: http://ism-alliance.tv/html/about/contactus.shtml