Most games are at best mediocre and at worst shovelware crap. It doesn't hurt to wait a day or two after release and gather consensus whether a game is worth purchasing or not. I don't get the urgency that some people attach to getting a game the minute it is released. If the game is THAT GOOD, then the reviews and consensus will bear that out, and if it doesn't, well you've just saved yourself a chunk of money.
Be extra suspicious of games that embargo reviews, or allow just a handful of "exclusive" reviews to break the embargo. More often than not those reviews have been paid for in one way or another. Just like with other kinds of media there is usually a very good reason that publishers don't want you to know upfront what a game is like - because the product sucks.
UK is 230V, as is most of the rest of Europe. At one time it was 240V, but voltage rates have been harmonized. Hence the reason many devices have been required to support 220-240V to facilitate that harmonization.
Wifi is not as ubiquitous as it is in the US but its still available (if you're lucky the hotel will offer it for free), but why haul a massive laptop to do a bit of web surfing? A netbook is the perfect tool for the job. Standard 2 & 3 pin power cables should be easy to come by as are adapters. Bring an ethernet cable too. A trip to Poundland may also be in order if you forget a cable or something. You can also prepay (no contract) 3G modems from O2 but you'd have to be there a while to justify one of those.
As for geeky things to do, sit in your room and surf the web. Less geeky but still geeky might be to walk along Tottenham Court road (next to Oxford Street) and browse the computer shops. You can also bring your Anonymous mask and protest in front of the scientology center at the end of the road. The Trocadero next to Picadilly Circus houses Funland and various other attractions. Hamelys is also nearby. Further afield there might be a trade show on in Earl's Court worth visiting, then you have the Greenwich Martime museum, the HMS Belfast, the London Eye etc. Getting drunk is also a popular option.
MS could easily insert a tracking cookie by using a hidden iframe. It may even be that the iframe is original on the msdn host site but actually redirects you to the bing domain. Some browsers offer an option to disable 3rd party cookies if it worries you, or you can use an extension or proxy to explicitly block cookies you don't like. Banner ads are able to infest a machine with cookies through similar means.
In the case of bing, I really don't see a big deal about it at the moment. Bing cookies are benign compared to google or yahoo cookies which are used to access multiple services. That may change of course, for example Hotmail users must now accept 3rd party cookies, and it's Microsoft's attempt to do what the other sites do and create a strong association between a user, their searches and any other service MS thinks it can monetize.
If you were feeling paranoid about this, the solution would be to get your email through MS / Yahoo and your search through Google or vice versa so there is little chance of the two worlds being associated. Or use a lesser known service, especially a pay service. Or avoid webmail apps entirely. Since Yahoo is constantly discussed as a takeover target by MS, it may be best to avoid combining MS and Yahoo together.
I'd add that it's not just cookies people should be worried about. Flash shared objects are, IMO, a far more serious concern. They work on the same principle as cookies but they're browser independent and reside in a different place. Very few people are even aware they exist, or think to clear them out. Even if you deleted all your cookies, a 3rd party could (and many probably do) use shared objects in conjunction with cookies to keep that strong association. In the future you can throw Silverlight in there too as another way that sites can acquire limited local storage.
My wife was buying some bags the other day. If you visited the site cookie-less, it offered 20% off the list price and free shipping. But if you came in through an affiliate site, the offer disappeared in a puff of smoke, often replaced by a lesser offer. We discovered this when the price of the shopping cart suddenly leapt from $120 to $163 after she returned to the site from another link. In the end I had to zap all the cookies on the site and create a new cart to get back to the original price.
Point being that if you click an affiliate link, or enter through a partner site, there is no guarantee you'll be seeing the same prices. I expect lots of sites run various promotions in parallel, and if one of those offers a cut to an affiliate, it may work out worse for the buyer. If in doubt zap your cookies, or launch two browsers (one through tor if necessary), create baskets with the same items and compare the outcome.
Of course, modern LED TV's already meat the standard, but you go on a ignorantly pound your meat hooks against your keyboard in a futile attempt at making some sort of coherent point.
Virtually all of today's TVs meet the standard and a substantial number even meet the more stringent 2013 level. Even most plasmas would get through. The outcry is laughable to say the least. Power consumption isn't even an indication of screen performance so that isn't a valid reason either.
In the short term restrictions mean absolutely nothing and in the long term LED LCD and later OLED or similar tech are going to render plasma and CFL LCDs obsolete anyway.
These power restrictions aren't especially stringent and most TVs already pass so what is the problem? Many TVs even pass the tighter 2013 levels. The regulation is clearly there to weed out the most inefficient sets and push the industry in the direction of better consumption. There is no reason whatsoever in this day and age that TVs need to burn 400W+ to produce a picture and its good to see regulation to that effect.
Europe is going one better and requiring sets show an energy efficiency rating. There is an additional incentive on manufacturers to get their act together because a D rated set isn't going to look so attractive to consumers when its close to an A+ rated one.
The real smart crooks encrypt their stuff in a way that nothing short of banging them over the head with a $5 pipe wrench will ever reveal.
For every smart crook there are probably ten really stupid ones, and another ten who think they're smart but really aren't. Besides if someone really did use strong encryption, I am sure that law enforcement have more expensive means to obtain evidence, such as sending the hard disk off for analysis, or even renting computing time on faster hardware.
Traditionally part of KDE's problem has been that it overloads the UI with far too many settings, mixes the simple settings in with the advanced / esoteric settings and is generally an attractive desktop which just has far too much going on. Usability has always played second fiddle to kewl effects and eye candy for KDE.
I think if KDE put their usability folks front and centre and actually listened to them, they might make great strides in recapturing their popularity. GNOME might not have all the bells and whistles but its simple to use, has well organized simple configuration / preferences and does what a good desktop should which is get the hell out of the way and let you do stuff. Of course this may change in GNOME 3.0 which runs the risk of going full retard with GNOME Shell, but we'll have to wait and see.
From a what-do-you-have-to-lose perspective, sure, it's worth a shot. But this simply can't be a dependable part of estate planning.
Besides which, if you're dead and you left all your money to yourself, I doubt any of your relatives are going to be particularly interested in fighting the insurance company to get the money for yourself. More likely they would fight to have it for themselves and settle if they have to.
Anyway, if someone is rich, selfish and stupid enough to be cryogenically frozen they should just throw the remainder of their wealth into a trust which invests it in long term bonds. It wouldn't surprise me if there were investment schemes already like that. After all, it must be ridiculously easy money to manage and the trust administrators are basically laughing all the way to the bank.
In general it is a strawman. Waterfall doesn't work very and even companies that may have followed it at some point have softened up. I used to work for a financial firm which was originally waterfall but the reality meant that business requirements, ui design, technical requirements, and QA fed into each other so much that it required constant interaction between the groups. The best software shops cherry pick from different methodologies to suit their requirements. Slavishly following the methodology du jour might be great for consultants selling that crap but its not great for getting stuff done. Agile has good things about it such as test driven development, but it advocates some highly questionable practices of its own.
Don't they do code reviews at Microsoft? Loops 101: prove that the loop terminates under all conditions, even and especially when passed garbage.
Every OS in existence has received patches. OS X, Windows, Linux, Unix, BSD (even OpenBSD). Ubuntu Linux 9.10 has been out less than a month and I've already been received 90 odd patches and it still has a critical ext4 file corruption bug.
I expect that even if MS rigorously tested the code (and I expect they did), used code coverage tools to ensure good quality testing, that the bug could still have slipped past. That's the real world. It doesn't excuse MS from promptly making a patch to fix the issue though.
I completely disagree. IBM is switching to an OpenOffice derived solution. If IBM can do it then pretty much every other place could. Of course inertia, legacy reasons and fear mean many won't but the reality is many could. In this day and age every business from small to large should be questioning why they need to be running MS Office. That isn't to say OpenOffice is perfect since it isn't, but it is reliable, feature complete and most importantly uses an open document format.
As for GNOME, GNOME is an excellent desktop but it is plagued by the same issues that have plagued Linux from its inception. Linux has no shortage of programmers, but it sorely lacks in designers, usability testers, technical writers and QA testers. Fortunately GNOME has a human interface group and has wisely chosen to listen to them. Even so integration testing and overall experience are still a grade below OS X or Windows. Even the best distribution such as Ubuntu has quirks. My hope for any future GNOME development is they understand that if you reinvent something, you don't make it functionally worse than what goes before.
Double click is perfectly justifiable. Accidentally single clicking on an app is far more costly and annoying than clicking on a hyper link. Inadvertantly clicking on something like OpenOffice, Eclipse or whatever might waste a minute waiting for the bloody thing to start in order to shut down again.
Windows has had the ability to add bars for years, including a shortcut bar. I used to have icons for my most commonly used apps sitting next to the start menu. In W7, they've improved the task bar so you can pin shortcuts directly to it. You can still do it the old way but the new way is working out quite well for me so far. The behaviour is somewhat similar to the dock in OS X, but it's also an evolution of what came before.
Importantly, it doesn't break the old functionality. I can see what apps (at least those with frame windows) I have running at any one time by glancing at the task bar and I can even tweak the behaviour for a more classic feel . This GNOME shell looks like it is hiding this functionality which would be a horrible regression in usability. I feel it's very important that if you have to reinvent something that it doesn't regress the overall experience in the process.
It appears they are trying to unify everything into a more task centric "start menu" like experience. This in itself is not a bad thing as Windows and particularly Windows 7 have used a start menu for ages and it is a fairly well understood concept. It also works very well in W7 when combined with Aero preview panes and suchlike. GNOME has used two bars in the past (one at the top and one at the bottom) to accomplish the same and there really isn't any need to. The question is whether they are going to release some wannabe Windows 7 experience or actually produce something useful in its own right. Past GNOMEs have struck a happy balance producing a pleasing usable desktop without going full retard and cutting features that most advanced users need.
On the point of the tour, it seems to be demonstrating just the shell, not the file explorer or other apps. This may explain why it looks so spartan. I expect the real thing would have icons, spatial windows and all the other business you would expect from a modern desktop. My biggest concern with the shell is I like seeing all my running apps in a task bar or similar. The shell seems to be only showing one app at a time. I would consider it a major regression (almost as bad as multifinder) if I have to click on something, or even mouse into a corner to find out what I'm running.
Sadly I think some people really can't tell the difference, or rather can't conceptualize the difference unless you show them HD and SD running side by side. Once they see it they can tell instantly, but getting over that hurdle is an issue. I think this is why the industry is so keen to introduce 3D. It's a lot hard to claim you can't see the difference between a 2D and 3D image.
That "dead on arrival" format is experiencing growth comparable to DVD in its day. And even if it did die for whatever reason so what? Tools like AnyDVD make it fairly straightforward to rip the content to HDD at which point you have a high quality 1080p movie which will be good for years to come.
Instead of attacking his morals, let's attack the business plan and point out why upsetting your customers and breaking that important trust relationship is a bad long term strategy.
Scammers don't care about that. If their operation is shut down they'll just open up again with another name. They could even up several operations at once so that if one went down the others would continue.
OS X has been tardy in implementing things like ASLR and there have been plenty of security issues that Apple took too long to patch. It may be that OS X in general has a better track record than Windows, but Apple certainly aren't paying as close attention to security as they should.
Re:Philosophy versus reality
on
Lulu Introduces DRM
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Just because a book appears for sale on Amazon, doesn't mean a physical copy exists. For all anyone knows, someone automated system has scraped titles off Lulu and is selling them through Amazon for a markup. A person orders the book from Amazon, office_bookshelf trots on over to Lulu and orders a copy and has mailed it straight to the customer. At no time has an additional physical copy of the book even existed.
Slashdot Mirror
Be extra suspicious of games that embargo reviews, or allow just a handful of "exclusive" reviews to break the embargo. More often than not those reviews have been paid for in one way or another. Just like with other kinds of media there is usually a very good reason that publishers don't want you to know upfront what a game is like - because the product sucks.
UK is 230V, as is most of the rest of Europe. At one time it was 240V, but voltage rates have been harmonized. Hence the reason many devices have been required to support 220-240V to facilitate that harmonization.
As for geeky things to do, sit in your room and surf the web. Less geeky but still geeky might be to walk along Tottenham Court road (next to Oxford Street) and browse the computer shops. You can also bring your Anonymous mask and protest in front of the scientology center at the end of the road. The Trocadero next to Picadilly Circus houses Funland and various other attractions. Hamelys is also nearby. Further afield there might be a trade show on in Earl's Court worth visiting, then you have the Greenwich Martime museum, the HMS Belfast, the London Eye etc. Getting drunk is also a popular option.
In the case of bing, I really don't see a big deal about it at the moment. Bing cookies are benign compared to google or yahoo cookies which are used to access multiple services. That may change of course, for example Hotmail users must now accept 3rd party cookies, and it's Microsoft's attempt to do what the other sites do and create a strong association between a user, their searches and any other service MS thinks it can monetize.
If you were feeling paranoid about this, the solution would be to get your email through MS / Yahoo and your search through Google or vice versa so there is little chance of the two worlds being associated. Or use a lesser known service, especially a pay service. Or avoid webmail apps entirely. Since Yahoo is constantly discussed as a takeover target by MS, it may be best to avoid combining MS and Yahoo together.
I'd add that it's not just cookies people should be worried about. Flash shared objects are, IMO, a far more serious concern. They work on the same principle as cookies but they're browser independent and reside in a different place. Very few people are even aware they exist, or think to clear them out. Even if you deleted all your cookies, a 3rd party could (and many probably do) use shared objects in conjunction with cookies to keep that strong association. In the future you can throw Silverlight in there too as another way that sites can acquire limited local storage.
Point being that if you click an affiliate link, or enter through a partner site, there is no guarantee you'll be seeing the same prices. I expect lots of sites run various promotions in parallel, and if one of those offers a cut to an affiliate, it may work out worse for the buyer. If in doubt zap your cookies, or launch two browsers (one through tor if necessary), create baskets with the same items and compare the outcome.
Google web toolkit allows devs to write in Java which is translated into JS. I'm sure something similar is feasible for Ruby too.
Virtually all of today's TVs meet the standard and a substantial number even meet the more stringent 2013 level. Even most plasmas would get through. The outcry is laughable to say the least. Power consumption isn't even an indication of screen performance so that isn't a valid reason either.
In the short term restrictions mean absolutely nothing and in the long term LED LCD and later OLED or similar tech are going to render plasma and CFL LCDs obsolete anyway.
Europe is going one better and requiring sets show an energy efficiency rating. There is an additional incentive on manufacturers to get their act together because a D rated set isn't going to look so attractive to consumers when its close to an A+ rated one.
For every smart crook there are probably ten really stupid ones, and another ten who think they're smart but really aren't. Besides if someone really did use strong encryption, I am sure that law enforcement have more expensive means to obtain evidence, such as sending the hard disk off for analysis, or even renting computing time on faster hardware.
I think if KDE put their usability folks front and centre and actually listened to them, they might make great strides in recapturing their popularity. GNOME might not have all the bells and whistles but its simple to use, has well organized simple configuration / preferences and does what a good desktop should which is get the hell out of the way and let you do stuff. Of course this may change in GNOME 3.0 which runs the risk of going full retard with GNOME Shell, but we'll have to wait and see.
Besides which, if you're dead and you left all your money to yourself, I doubt any of your relatives are going to be particularly interested in fighting the insurance company to get the money for yourself. More likely they would fight to have it for themselves and settle if they have to.
Anyway, if someone is rich, selfish and stupid enough to be cryogenically frozen they should just throw the remainder of their wealth into a trust which invests it in long term bonds. It wouldn't surprise me if there were investment schemes already like that. After all, it must be ridiculously easy money to manage and the trust administrators are basically laughing all the way to the bank.
In general it is a strawman. Waterfall doesn't work very and even companies that may have followed it at some point have softened up. I used to work for a financial firm which was originally waterfall but the reality meant that business requirements, ui design, technical requirements, and QA fed into each other so much that it required constant interaction between the groups. The best software shops cherry pick from different methodologies to suit their requirements. Slavishly following the methodology du jour might be great for consultants selling that crap but its not great for getting stuff done. Agile has good things about it such as test driven development, but it advocates some highly questionable practices of its own.
Every OS in existence has received patches. OS X, Windows, Linux, Unix, BSD (even OpenBSD). Ubuntu Linux 9.10 has been out less than a month and I've already been received 90 odd patches and it still has a critical ext4 file corruption bug.
I expect that even if MS rigorously tested the code (and I expect they did), used code coverage tools to ensure good quality testing, that the bug could still have slipped past. That's the real world. It doesn't excuse MS from promptly making a patch to fix the issue though.
As for GNOME, GNOME is an excellent desktop but it is plagued by the same issues that have plagued Linux from its inception. Linux has no shortage of programmers, but it sorely lacks in designers, usability testers, technical writers and QA testers. Fortunately GNOME has a human interface group and has wisely chosen to listen to them. Even so integration testing and overall experience are still a grade below OS X or Windows. Even the best distribution such as Ubuntu has quirks. My hope for any future GNOME development is they understand that if you reinvent something, you don't make it functionally worse than what goes before.
Double click is perfectly justifiable. Accidentally single clicking on an app is far more costly and annoying than clicking on a hyper link. Inadvertantly clicking on something like OpenOffice, Eclipse or whatever might waste a minute waiting for the bloody thing to start in order to shut down again.
Importantly, it doesn't break the old functionality. I can see what apps (at least those with frame windows) I have running at any one time by glancing at the task bar and I can even tweak the behaviour for a more classic feel . This GNOME shell looks like it is hiding this functionality which would be a horrible regression in usability. I feel it's very important that if you have to reinvent something that it doesn't regress the overall experience in the process.
Except it's actually "scam the poor".
On the point of the tour, it seems to be demonstrating just the shell, not the file explorer or other apps. This may explain why it looks so spartan. I expect the real thing would have icons, spatial windows and all the other business you would expect from a modern desktop. My biggest concern with the shell is I like seeing all my running apps in a task bar or similar. The shell seems to be only showing one app at a time. I would consider it a major regression (almost as bad as multifinder) if I have to click on something, or even mouse into a corner to find out what I'm running.
Sadly I think some people really can't tell the difference, or rather can't conceptualize the difference unless you show them HD and SD running side by side. Once they see it they can tell instantly, but getting over that hurdle is an issue. I think this is why the industry is so keen to introduce 3D. It's a lot hard to claim you can't see the difference between a 2D and 3D image.
That "dead on arrival" format is experiencing growth comparable to DVD in its day. And even if it did die for whatever reason so what? Tools like AnyDVD make it fairly straightforward to rip the content to HDD at which point you have a high quality 1080p movie which will be good for years to come.
I agree the movie quality shouldn't suffer. However many disks do have some space left over so why not use it?
It isn't for distributors, it is for data centers and the like.
Scammers don't care about that. If their operation is shut down they'll just open up again with another name. They could even up several operations at once so that if one went down the others would continue.
OS X has been tardy in implementing things like ASLR and there have been plenty of security issues that Apple took too long to patch. It may be that OS X in general has a better track record than Windows, but Apple certainly aren't paying as close attention to security as they should.
Just because a book appears for sale on Amazon, doesn't mean a physical copy exists. For all anyone knows, someone automated system has scraped titles off Lulu and is selling them through Amazon for a markup. A person orders the book from Amazon, office_bookshelf trots on over to Lulu and orders a copy and has mailed it straight to the customer. At no time has an additional physical copy of the book even existed.