The difference is that Vista's way of prompting for more privileges is more annoying than, say, getting software updates on Ubuntu. Sure, the Vista way of escalating privileges doesn't require a password, but the first time Vista brought up the UAC prompt, for that split-second that the screen flickered, I thought I had some kind of major hardware problem. The fact that the rest of the screen dimmed and UAC hijacked everything I was doing is one of the reasons I now refuse to use anything made by Microsoft on my personal computers (Work computers are another story, even though there's no windows-only app that requires it).
Around here, you can actually be arrested for not carrying some form of ID. I found this out a few years ago, when the police decided that they had sufficiently cleaned up the drugs and prostitution in a really bad part of town, and decided to arrest 400+ people on one street in one day for failing to carry an ID. It was some kind of misdemeanor charge, but the sad part is one day, what you've guessed will probably come to pass.
Before I learned to cheat in the XP version of Solitaire, my best time was 46 seconds. After I learned to cheat, my times actually got worse until I picked up a Logitech G-5. With it, I got a time of 34 seconds when I was testing out the mouse the day I got it, and I got a 33 second time the next day. It was somewhere after that point that I realized that when you can play a single game of Solitaire and beat it in under 60 seconds without having to worry back, it's time to find a new game. With that, Solitaire lost its magic.
At work (Where I have to use Vista when I'm in the office), I switched to Chess for a while, before moving on to reading Slashdot. So basically, I've traded one time-wasted activity for another. Does anybody have any ideas on what's next?
They dont need actually viruses and malware, they just need people (and businesses) to be afraid of them enough to consider them treat. Yeah, because the average user considers screen savers, animated cursors, and nude pictures of Britney Spears to be treats.
Live Shit: Binge and Purge was probably their last decent album (1993), and that's only because it contained live stuff of the first four albums. Other than that one exception, I'm going to agree with you.
I collect vinyl (Especially picture discs), but everything I actually listen to has been downloaded from whatever P2P app was popular at the time, from Napster to BitTorrent, and then either burned on CDs or transferred to my iPod. If an artist doesn't have a vinyl version of their work, there's exactly a 0% chance of them making any money off of me.
For a Pinball Survivor, the Game Isn't Over
By MONICA DAVEY
MELROSE PARK, Ill. -- Being inside a pinball machine factory sounds exactly as you think it would. Across a 40,000-square-foot warehouse here, a cheery cacophony of flippers flip, bells ding, bumpers bump and balls click in an endless, echoing loop. The quarter never runs out.
But this place, Stern Pinball Inc., is the last of its kind in the world. A range of companies once mass produced pinball machines, especially in the Chicago area, the one-time capital of the business. Now there is only Stern. And even the dinging and flipping here has slowed: Stern, which used to crank out 27,000 pinball machines each year, is down to around 10,000.
To most, the story seems familiar -- of a craze that had its moment, of computers that grew sophisticated, of a culture that started staying home for fun, of being replaced by video games. But to pinball people, this is a painful fading, and one that, some insist, might yet be turned around.
"There are a lot of things I look at and scratch my head," said Tim Arnold, who ran an arcade during a heyday of pinball in the 1970s and recently opened The Pinball Hall of Fame, a nonprofit museum in a Las Vegas strip mall. "Why are people playing games on their cellphones while they write e-mail? I don't get it."
"The thing that's killing pinball," Mr. Arnold added, "is not that people don't like it. It's that there's nowhere to play it."
Along the factory line in this suburb west of Chicago, scores of workers pull and twist at colored wires, drill holes in wooden frames, screw in flippers and tiny light bulbs and assorted game characters who will eventually move and spin and taunt you.
Though pinball has roots in the 1800s game of bagatelle, these are by no means simple machines. Each one contains a half-mile of wire and 3,500 tiny components, and takes 32 hours to build -- as the company's president, Gary Stern, likes to say, longer than a Ford Taurus.
Mr. Stern, the last pinball machine magnate, is a wise-cracking, fast-talking 62-year-old with a shock of white hair, matching white frame glasses and a deep tan who eats jelly beans at his desk and recently hurt a rib snowboarding in Colorado.
The manufacturing plant is a game geek's fantasy job, a Willy Wonka factory of pinball.
Some designers sit in private glass offices seated across from their pinball machines.
Some workers are required to spend 15 minutes a day in the "game room" playing the latest models or risk the wrath of Mr. Stern. "You work at a pinball company," he explained, grumpily, "you're going to play a lot of pinball." (On a clipboard here, the professionals must jot their critiques, which, on a recent day, included "flipper feels soft" and "stupid display.")
And in a testing laboratory devoted to the physics of all of this, silver balls bounce around alone in cases for hours to record how well certain kickers and flippers and bumpers hold up.
Mr. Stern's father, Samuel Stern, spent his life in the pinball business, starting out as a game operator in the 1930s -- when a simple version of the modern mass-produced pinball machine first appeared. Dozens of companies were soon producing the machines, said Roger Sharpe, widely considered a foremost historian of the sport after the 1977 publication of his book, "Pinball!"
The creation of the flipper -- popularized by the Humpty Dumpty game in 1947 -- transformed the activity, which went on to surges in the 1950s, '70s and early '90s.
"Everybody thinks of it as retro, as nostalgia," Mr. Sharpe said. "But it's not. These are sophisticated games. Pinball is timeless."
Perhaps, but even Mr. Stern acknowledges that demand is down. The hard-core players are faithful; the International Flipper Pinball Association keeps careful watch of the top-ranked players in the world. But the casual player has drifted.
"The whole coin-op industry is not what it once was," Mr.
The bad thing with that is that BitTorrent traffic isn't encrypted or anonymized, so governments could then theoretically crack down on the people sharing the whistle-blowing material.
I can see libraries sort of turning their reference sections into small data centers, with a treasure trove of free reference material backed up on a central server that's made accessible through the computers on-site. You can't take reference books out of the library now, so I don't see that as being a big deal. Just shove a bunch of hard drives in a file server, and load it down with ebooks that have been properly sorted and organized. They could even keep the Dewey Decimal System.
I don't, however, see how checking out books would work in that situation. Not without some sort of DRM, or disabling/ripping out/pouring epoxy in all the USB ports, just to keep the publishers from crying that they're legalizing the pirating of ebooks.
No matter what, libraries are going to evolve. I personally welcomed the demise of the card catalog, but I don't think that libraries themselves will die out. That could just be wishful thinking on my part, though.
I wonder how long it will take Comcast to figure out a way to thwart this new method. The blocking and obfuscation methods are only going to get more and more complicated from here.
But if the automakers standardized on USB (Or anything else, for that matter), they couldn't smack you with a "computer diagnostic" fee to hook up a small computer to your car at the dealership, just to tell you what's wrong (And of course, using the computer still isn't nearly as good as having a good mechanic look at it). While it's a great idea, the automakers are going to make money every way they possibly can, and charging a fee for running a computer diagnostic is just one of many to help supplement their bottom line.
What you have to realize is that the Russian mob pretty much IS the government of Russia, in a lot of ways. The Russian gangsters in general are a whole different breed, too, because while your stereotypical mob guy dropped out in grade school, the typical Russian gangster has at least one college degree. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the mob was responsible for Storm, the RBN, and basically every other cybercrime-related thing that's come out of Russia in recent history. They also happen to be pretty violent, even as far as organized crime groups go.
This is sort of the same principle as hacking carrying the death penalty in China, and yet we've had stuff like Titan Rain happen. The only big difference is the country of origin.
This isn't really surprising, given that most people treat computers like just another appliance. Then again, not every piece of software alerts you when a new version comes out, so actually keeping 100% of all software on the box current is harder for Windows than say, Ubuntu.
Slashdot Mirror
Who thought of this movie upon reading the headline?
The difference is that Vista's way of prompting for more privileges is more annoying than, say, getting software updates on Ubuntu. Sure, the Vista way of escalating privileges doesn't require a password, but the first time Vista brought up the UAC prompt, for that split-second that the screen flickered, I thought I had some kind of major hardware problem. The fact that the rest of the screen dimmed and UAC hijacked everything I was doing is one of the reasons I now refuse to use anything made by Microsoft on my personal computers (Work computers are another story, even though there's no windows-only app that requires it).
Around here, you can actually be arrested for not carrying some form of ID. I found this out a few years ago, when the police decided that they had sufficiently cleaned up the drugs and prostitution in a really bad part of town, and decided to arrest 400+ people on one street in one day for failing to carry an ID. It was some kind of misdemeanor charge, but the sad part is one day, what you've guessed will probably come to pass.
That's an interesting idea, but no. To keep this short, it's a reference to the *chan boards, and /b/ in particular.
Before I learned to cheat in the XP version of Solitaire, my best time was 46 seconds. After I learned to cheat, my times actually got worse until I picked up a Logitech G-5. With it, I got a time of 34 seconds when I was testing out the mouse the day I got it, and I got a 33 second time the next day. It was somewhere after that point that I realized that when you can play a single game of Solitaire and beat it in under 60 seconds without having to worry back, it's time to find a new game. With that, Solitaire lost its magic.
At work (Where I have to use Vista when I'm in the office), I switched to Chess for a while, before moving on to reading Slashdot. So basically, I've traded one time-wasted activity for another. Does anybody have any ideas on what's next?
They should change the name of this place to //./
Live Shit: Binge and Purge was probably their last decent album (1993), and that's only because it contained live stuff of the first four albums. Other than that one exception, I'm going to agree with you.
I collect vinyl (Especially picture discs), but everything I actually listen to has been downloaded from whatever P2P app was popular at the time, from Napster to BitTorrent, and then either burned on CDs or transferred to my iPod. If an artist doesn't have a vinyl version of their work, there's exactly a 0% chance of them making any money off of me.
For a Pinball Survivor, the Game Isn't Over By MONICA DAVEY
MELROSE PARK, Ill. -- Being inside a pinball machine factory sounds exactly as you think it would. Across a 40,000-square-foot warehouse here, a cheery cacophony of flippers flip, bells ding, bumpers bump and balls click in an endless, echoing loop. The quarter never runs out.
But this place, Stern Pinball Inc., is the last of its kind in the world. A range of companies once mass produced pinball machines, especially in the Chicago area, the one-time capital of the business. Now there is only Stern. And even the dinging and flipping here has slowed: Stern, which used to crank out 27,000 pinball machines each year, is down to around 10,000.
To most, the story seems familiar -- of a craze that had its moment, of computers that grew sophisticated, of a culture that started staying home for fun, of being replaced by video games. But to pinball people, this is a painful fading, and one that, some insist, might yet be turned around.
"There are a lot of things I look at and scratch my head," said Tim Arnold, who ran an arcade during a heyday of pinball in the 1970s and recently opened The Pinball Hall of Fame, a nonprofit museum in a Las Vegas strip mall. "Why are people playing games on their cellphones while they write e-mail? I don't get it."
"The thing that's killing pinball," Mr. Arnold added, "is not that people don't like it. It's that there's nowhere to play it."
Along the factory line in this suburb west of Chicago, scores of workers pull and twist at colored wires, drill holes in wooden frames, screw in flippers and tiny light bulbs and assorted game characters who will eventually move and spin and taunt you.
Though pinball has roots in the 1800s game of bagatelle, these are by no means simple machines. Each one contains a half-mile of wire and 3,500 tiny components, and takes 32 hours to build -- as the company's president, Gary Stern, likes to say, longer than a Ford Taurus.
Mr. Stern, the last pinball machine magnate, is a wise-cracking, fast-talking 62-year-old with a shock of white hair, matching white frame glasses and a deep tan who eats jelly beans at his desk and recently hurt a rib snowboarding in Colorado.
The manufacturing plant is a game geek's fantasy job, a Willy Wonka factory of pinball.
Some designers sit in private glass offices seated across from their pinball machines.
Some workers are required to spend 15 minutes a day in the "game room" playing the latest models or risk the wrath of Mr. Stern. "You work at a pinball company," he explained, grumpily, "you're going to play a lot of pinball." (On a clipboard here, the professionals must jot their critiques, which, on a recent day, included "flipper feels soft" and "stupid display.")
And in a testing laboratory devoted to the physics of all of this, silver balls bounce around alone in cases for hours to record how well certain kickers and flippers and bumpers hold up.
Mr. Stern's father, Samuel Stern, spent his life in the pinball business, starting out as a game operator in the 1930s -- when a simple version of the modern mass-produced pinball machine first appeared. Dozens of companies were soon producing the machines, said Roger Sharpe, widely considered a foremost historian of the sport after the 1977 publication of his book, "Pinball!"
The creation of the flipper -- popularized by the Humpty Dumpty game in 1947 -- transformed the activity, which went on to surges in the 1950s, '70s and early '90s.
"Everybody thinks of it as retro, as nostalgia," Mr. Sharpe said. "But it's not. These are sophisticated games. Pinball is timeless."
Perhaps, but even Mr. Stern acknowledges that demand is down. The hard-core players are faithful; the International Flipper Pinball Association keeps careful watch of the top-ranked players in the world. But the casual player has drifted.
"The whole coin-op industry is not what it once was," Mr.
The bad thing with that is that BitTorrent traffic isn't encrypted or anonymized, so governments could then theoretically crack down on the people sharing the whistle-blowing material.
There's also that Registry key editing trick that made its way around the Internet a while back....
I can see libraries sort of turning their reference sections into small data centers, with a treasure trove of free reference material backed up on a central server that's made accessible through the computers on-site. You can't take reference books out of the library now, so I don't see that as being a big deal. Just shove a bunch of hard drives in a file server, and load it down with ebooks that have been properly sorted and organized. They could even keep the Dewey Decimal System.
I don't, however, see how checking out books would work in that situation. Not without some sort of DRM, or disabling/ripping out/pouring epoxy in all the USB ports, just to keep the publishers from crying that they're legalizing the pirating of ebooks.
No matter what, libraries are going to evolve. I personally welcomed the demise of the card catalog, but I don't think that libraries themselves will die out. That could just be wishful thinking on my part, though.
It's actually closer to 5:16, but that still doesn't make it any less ridiculous.
I was thinking more or less the same thing.
It must be a slow night.
Maybe it's time for a Jack Thompson Facts page.
Where is the itsabouttime tag?
Hey, that's better than ROT26.
I wonder how long it will take Comcast to figure out a way to thwart this new method. The blocking and obfuscation methods are only going to get more and more complicated from here.
For a minute there, I thought we were going to get yet another car analogy.
Undersea fiber optic cables cut you.
But if the automakers standardized on USB (Or anything else, for that matter), they couldn't smack you with a "computer diagnostic" fee to hook up a small computer to your car at the dealership, just to tell you what's wrong (And of course, using the computer still isn't nearly as good as having a good mechanic look at it). While it's a great idea, the automakers are going to make money every way they possibly can, and charging a fee for running a computer diagnostic is just one of many to help supplement their bottom line.
What you have to realize is that the Russian mob pretty much IS the government of Russia, in a lot of ways. The Russian gangsters in general are a whole different breed, too, because while your stereotypical mob guy dropped out in grade school, the typical Russian gangster has at least one college degree. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the mob was responsible for Storm, the RBN, and basically every other cybercrime-related thing that's come out of Russia in recent history. They also happen to be pretty violent, even as far as organized crime groups go.
This is sort of the same principle as hacking carrying the death penalty in China, and yet we've had stuff like Titan Rain happen. The only big difference is the country of origin.
You can't do something like that! It makes too much sense.
This isn't really surprising, given that most people treat computers like just another appliance. Then again, not every piece of software alerts you when a new version comes out, so actually keeping 100% of all software on the box current is harder for Windows than say, Ubuntu.
... If this system will lead to the use of BSODs tailored to the current mood of the user.