The thing is, that councils in Britain put in speed bumps / ramps all over urban areas to slow (calm) traffic and to stop joyriders. If they're putting in the ramps anyway, why not make a bit of power from it at the same time?
And if you're not that much of a power user? If there's something users are going to want to change, it should be changeable from within the GUI.
And therein lies the exciting field of usability - figure out what fields most people are likely to want to change and those fields that very few people want to change. Then proceed to design a user interface which pushes the commonly used settings forward in a task-oriented, logically presented fashion and holds back the advanced settings either in advanced dialogs, or even hides them from the UI altogether.
It is quite conceivable that you might have a normal user who wants to touch some advanced setting. But I would argue that it is better that they visit a secondary dialog or read a HOWTO to change it rather than confuse the hell out of everyone else who doesn't by lumping it in with other actions.
A clean and simple desktop isn't just for "idiots". Personally I like a desktop which puts 95% of the functionality that most users are ever likely to need in front of them and hides the rest. If I as a power user (which I am) absolutely positively need to do something not in the UI I can simply drop to the command line or even write my own power tools for the job.
KDE is too keen to put every single bloody option whether advanced or not straight in your face, rendering it a pain to find the simple settings. Not only that but the defaults are horrible including the single-click-to-launch paradigm. I spent a good while looking to change that behaviour, foolishly thinking it might set be somewhere desktop prefs which it isn't - it's in the mouse settings. On top of that, you only have to look at Konq or KMail and you'll see six or seven menu items in a row starting with Configure.
The one thing you can hand to KDE is that it is consistent, but it sorely needs to be streamlined. It's not hard to see why enterprise versions of Linux use GNOME - it's so much simpler and cleaner. I truly expect that supporting 100 KDE users would be significantly more work work than 100 GNOME users.
The hard part is how to get unauthorized code to run. This part involves bypassing systems bios and installing a compatible version over the top that the system cannot detect. This could take a few years.
And if MS have learnt anything from the likes of the PSP (as they undoubtedly have). Any exploit will be quickly patched, either when you install a new game or next go online.
You need to get permission every time you play a disc, and your discs are permanently mated to your player. You can't play your disc at a friends house or in another room in your house, and if your player breaks, you lose your whole DVD collection.
This is absurd. Discs can't be mated to a player unless they are rewritable. The fact is that a Blu-Ray disc will play on any player.
Anyway, any regional / disc encryption they may employ is a waste of time. The image quality from these discs will be so good that you could rip and reencode from the video out and it would be virtually indistinguishable from the original.
Sony used to be a brand you could trust. Now thanks to shitty proprietary formats and DRM, I don't trust Sony at all.
I might buy a PSP or PS3 since those are unique devices with unique selling points but I see little reason at all to risk buying Sony branded television, DVD player, audio system, MP3 player etc. These are not unique devices and there are literally hundreds of models and brands to choose from. In virtually every case Sony kit costs more than that from competing brands and is not significantly better. In some ways it is actively worse. Why buy a Sony DVD player if I can't region unlock it? Why buy their MP3 player if I must run some shitty DRM'd software to download tracks to it? Why buy any of the products when they use a memory card that no other manufacturer uses? Why buy Sony music if it's going to royally fuck up my PC?
The net result of such shennanigans is that techo savvy people don't trust Sony. I'm sure it hasn't dented them at the box shifting bottom end of their market, but it sure as hell has at the other end. People who read reviews, compare features and so forth know that Sony has lost it's golden boy image. Once upon a time Sony could do no wrong and commanded a premium price on its products. These days all that remains is the premium price.
GET A CLUE SONY! YOUR MUSIC / FILM INTERESTS ARE SCREWING YOUR PRODUCT COMPANY INTO THE GROUND.
Such a model is doomed to failure and no provider would allow it. Imagine a site that sets the "pay per processed order" criteria so high that no one ever qualifies. e.g. an order being someone who pays $10,000 to buy a baked bean from a page I don't even link to. So no one orders but Google sends tens of thousands of people to the site for nothing. It would never happen. Besides how do you quantify "pay per processed order" on a religious site as with ID / creationist adverts.
To go back to my point about "click fraud", I would say that it is possible to detect blatant fraud, but so long as someone is operating within the background noise, they are entirely safe from discovery.
Re:/. Owes me at least $500,000
on
Webhost Sues Google
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I've been clicking the refresh button @/. since the late 90s.
With google, you pay when someone clicks on your link rather than how often the ad appears. You name your price for how much you'll pay for each click and that governs where and how often your ad appears. Obviously the more you'll pay for your keywords, the more Google will show it and the more impressions it will make. A part of that price you pay goes to the site that hosts it. Therefore I can reward a host site simply by clicking on their ads. I suppose in a way this classifies as "click fraud" since I rarely have the intention of buying whatever is being sold.
Another bonus (or detriment depending on your POV) of pay-per-click is that you can "punish" advertisers that you don't like. A real-life example is the word "evolution". Fundamentalist religious outfits have paid for that word and consequently you see their ads all over biology and scientific sites that mention it. I click on the links since the concept of religious crazies paying scientists is deliciously ironic. This too could classify as "click fraud".
Until the day that Google installs mind probes in every human being, it seems unlikely that they can do anything about either of these common situations. As long as such "click fraud" is essentially random and indistinguishable from background noise there is nothing they could do to stop it. Nothing at all.
A single IP address doesn't mean one person
on
Webhost Sues Google
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
If someone were malicious enough they could nibble away at a site by using a large proxy, clear their cookies each time, use different useragents, and do just enough clicks that it wouldn't necessarily stand out against the background noise. Google couldn't do a thing to stop them and it would be stupid to expect them to. Perhaps Google could implement some kind of time sensitive automated IP blacklist based on certain thresholds but it's hard to see what else they could do.
If these guys have the single IP in their logs, perhaps they be looking to see who it is and sue them instead of google.
It may have 625 lines but only 576 are visible and the picture is interlaced on top of that. Despite that, I think the picture quality is okay and certainly much better than NTSC. Of course it depends on what channel you're watching as well and what content. If you end up watching some crap US imported comedy on a crap highly compressed channel, the picture quality will be horrible. If you watch one of the main channels such as BBC, picture quality is just fine and widescreen already.
Still, HDTV is coming to the UK. Lots of TVs are tagging themselves as "HDTV Ready" though what that means is highly questionable. There are a lot of different HDTV resolutions and progressive & interlaced modes to choose from. The labelling is confusing as hell and I would be extremely wary of buying a TV now when there is nothing to test it against. I truly expect some chumps will buy their HDTV now and the warranty will have expired before they discover what the quality is truly like. On top of that Sky are touting some HDTV channels but where is the pricing for them? When is the service and the HDTV rolling out? How many channels are there? When will Sky+ go HDTV? I wouldn't put it past Sky to bend the early adopters over and rape them for every penny they have. The only other use for HDTV at present is the XBox 360 and next year the PS3. That hardly seems worth it either.
Better to wait a few years until there is a market and channels that actually justify the price of these things.
Phishers on the whole work off scripts. Trawl the WHOIS database and you now have a bunch of people who are website owners, their country of origin, their telephone, their real and email addresses and other information. It would be very straightforward to use that information to run targetted phishing campaigns against them. e.g. send Bogus notices for a Boston bank to people who live in Boston and so on. It would even be possible for the phisher to spoof alerts from the hosting provider host (Verisign, GoDaddy etc.) and use that info to steal credit card info from the sites owners.
While I'm sure a manual phisher could go after a (high net worth) individual based on their blog, I suspect the effort and perceived risk would be far greater than an automated and anonymous trawling operation.
The findings could mean that many websites are fronts for spammers, phishing gangs and other net criminals.
Or that a great many domain owners see no reason to post their personal data up on the web where it is available to spammers, phishers or other net criminals. Not to mention random psychos who have some beef with the site's contents.
In the end, you create a lot of ill-will within the professions that staff your company.
I disagree. I don't know about anyone else but if I resigned with notice and was immediately paid that notice on the spot, I would be delighted. Absolutely, positively thrilled. It means a free paid holiday, or being able to start in a new position much earlier and being paid by old company for doing so.
I might feel bad that my old employees were left holding the bag, but it's company policy and not my fault that things are the way they are.
It's just too bad that my company doesn't do that. If I resigned I would be required to work every damned day until it was time to leave. Bah.
Or just as easily sell a "deluxe" (costing perhaps $20 extra to make) version and sell it to the slavering geeks and probably mainstream consumer who would snap it up even it were $250.
After all, Bayliss did something similar with their clockwork radios. The original idea was to sell something that worked in Africa, yet they found a market for them in developed countries too.
The point is that Microsoft rolls out the next big version of Windows every 4 or 5 years meaning there are always hundreds if not millions of NT / W2K / XP servers sitting out there. The owners of such systems are faced with either keeping what they got or attempting an upgrade of some kind.
Since Microsoft offers such an upgrade and Linux doesn't, you can bet which one they will choose each time. Microsoft even produce Small Business Server version of Windows which even touts its ability to install over NT 4.0 and W2K.
Porting to Linux is not going to be easy but I truly believe that the big dists could produce a tool which generates a manifest from an existing NT / W2K deployment - the user names, shares, printers, drivers, network cards, IP addresses, DHCP settings, web content etc. and then replicates that when Linux is installed. I even believe it would be possible to convert the filesystem, or even run natively over NTFS.
As I said before, it wouldn't be a magic bullet, but if it could automate even half of the tasks it would be a good thing.
Not the same thing at all, though it doesn't stop the likes of Bill Gates mixing up the two. Seriously though if Ellison has to stump up the cash, he should strategically give it to open source projects where it would be the most benefit to Oracle.
Thunderbird is a great email application but it is sorely lacking in a corporate setting. It does POP3 & IMAP just fine, but it needs support for Exchange (hint: port the Evolution plugin), and calendaring. Eventually it will get there, but for now it's not much good for many large enterprises.
Now personally I think MS Exchange is a piece of shit and I can't fathom why any business would favour it over IMAP + LDAP, but the simple fact is that many do. So until you can work out a way to support those business, you're not going to persuade them to use Linux. So far Evolution is about the only viable solution. It would be great to see the Exchange support opened up since you might see Thunderbird, KMail and no doubt others opened up as a result.
You could just give Red Hat or Novell a call and either one will be more than happy to give you their dog-and-pony show for their desktop offerings. I mean, they do do this kind of thing for a living these days.
The funny thing is that for companies who do this for a living, where are the migration tools? Microsoft provide a shit load of migration tools for moving away from competing products and even old versions of their own products. Why doesn't Novell or Red Hat?
Think how attractive it would be if RH / Novell could back up and install over an NT server. If it could replicate all file & printer shares and take the existing NT PDC / Active Directory settings and implement the Linux equivalent. Think how damned cool it would be if they even converted the NTFS partition to ext3 while they were at it so data remained in-place. Or if they printed out a handy checklist of things to be done after installation to complete the conversion. In other words make conversion from NT / W2K / XP as simple and painless as possible.
This wouldn't be a magic bullet, but even if it meant that 60% of installs could be automated, it would be a very, very good thing for Linux.
I can only use SonicStage to interface with the player
Ugh. Are you saying that when you plug the device into a computer, it doesn't even act like a removable storage device? If so, then that is a really, really, REALLY rotten piece of hardware.
I hope that no one is insinuating that every XBox 360 has problems, however the point is that anyone who queues up in the first days of a brand new launch and hands over a lot of money sight unseen for a largely untested piece of hardware, an untested online service and a paltry selection of games is ASKING FOR TROUBLE. It doesn't matter if it's an XBox 360, a PS2, a PSP or even an iPod Nano. You might be lucky, or you might be the proud owner of a piece of crap and then have the stress of returning it and hoping MS deign to ship you another one this side of Christmas.
Let the chumps do the beta testing and wring out the bugs. Not just hardware bugs, but software bugs since the system is extremely software intensive. It's not like the XBox 360 is going anywhere anyway. Microsoft are allegedly restricting the supply for release. Some think it is some cunning marketing ploy, but perhaps it's because of the flaws - restricting the number of boxes minimizes the fallout and gives them some breathing space to produce a new revision that fixes the issues.
Re:Know and love GCC
on
GCC 4.1 Released
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
In other words, GCC would be exactly where it is today, had it not been for Linux.
I doubt that. GCC was seriously stagnated way before 2.95/3.0 (hence the reason egcs appeared for a while) and was no match at all compared to various commercial compilers. Linux was about the only popular OS which *needed* a modern gcc and thus most of the development came from Linux stakeholders - Red Hat etc. Without Linux I fully expect that the compiler would be an also-ran by now, along with most commercial Unices.
I've been running via BOINC for about six months now. The biggest pain for SETI score whores is that the scoring system between the old and new models is different. Now you get "credits" based on your CPU usage rather than how many results you produced. Therefore your BOINC scores are held separately from the "classic" values.
In operation BOINC works fairly well but on Windows XP it kills performance in some apps. What I mean by this is that BOINC runs at low priority. Any other app on your system which also runs at low priority, (e.g. cygwin, or a backup app like Nero Backitup) just CRAWLS when BOINC is running. The solution is to stop BOINC while they're running but it can still take a moment to click why some app is set in stone.
And seriously, how many console models have you seen in your life that had this kind of failure after the initial launch?
Not this kind of failure, but new launches always seem to be accompanied by problem reports - dead pixels, dead DVD drives, etc. I'm fully expecting that this is not the last problem for the XBox 360 and I'm looking forward to reading how good (or how bad) the legacy XBox emulation is.
People with a teaspoon or more of sense in their head wait a few weeks or more before buying a new system. And preferably a few months yet since there are precious few games to play anyway. I have to say I have a PS2 & a PSP but I think I'll wait until the chumps have proven the PS3 is not a lemon out of their own pockets before I would be interested. At least Sony have the luxury of an additional 5 or 6 months to make sure things are right.
Slashdot Mirror
The thing is, that councils in Britain put in speed bumps / ramps all over urban areas to slow (calm) traffic and to stop joyriders. If they're putting in the ramps anyway, why not make a bit of power from it at the same time?
And therein lies the exciting field of usability - figure out what fields most people are likely to want to change and those fields that very few people want to change. Then proceed to design a user interface which pushes the commonly used settings forward in a task-oriented, logically presented fashion and holds back the advanced settings either in advanced dialogs, or even hides them from the UI altogether.
It is quite conceivable that you might have a normal user who wants to touch some advanced setting. But I would argue that it is better that they visit a secondary dialog or read a HOWTO to change it rather than confuse the hell out of everyone else who doesn't by lumping it in with other actions.
KDE is too keen to put every single bloody option whether advanced or not straight in your face, rendering it a pain to find the simple settings. Not only that but the defaults are horrible including the single-click-to-launch paradigm. I spent a good while looking to change that behaviour, foolishly thinking it might set be somewhere desktop prefs which it isn't - it's in the mouse settings. On top of that, you only have to look at Konq or KMail and you'll see six or seven menu items in a row starting with Configure.
The one thing you can hand to KDE is that it is consistent, but it sorely needs to be streamlined. It's not hard to see why enterprise versions of Linux use GNOME - it's so much simpler and cleaner. I truly expect that supporting 100 KDE users would be significantly more work work than 100 GNOME users.
And if MS have learnt anything from the likes of the PSP (as they undoubtedly have). Any exploit will be quickly patched, either when you install a new game or next go online.
This is absurd. Discs can't be mated to a player unless they are rewritable. The fact is that a Blu-Ray disc will play on any player.
Anyway, any regional / disc encryption they may employ is a waste of time. The image quality from these discs will be so good that you could rip and reencode from the video out and it would be virtually indistinguishable from the original.
I might buy a PSP or PS3 since those are unique devices with unique selling points but I see little reason at all to risk buying Sony branded television, DVD player, audio system, MP3 player etc. These are not unique devices and there are literally hundreds of models and brands to choose from. In virtually every case Sony kit costs more than that from competing brands and is not significantly better. In some ways it is actively worse. Why buy a Sony DVD player if I can't region unlock it? Why buy their MP3 player if I must run some shitty DRM'd software to download tracks to it? Why buy any of the products when they use a memory card that no other manufacturer uses? Why buy Sony music if it's going to royally fuck up my PC?
The net result of such shennanigans is that techo savvy people don't trust Sony. I'm sure it hasn't dented them at the box shifting bottom end of their market, but it sure as hell has at the other end. People who read reviews, compare features and so forth know that Sony has lost it's golden boy image. Once upon a time Sony could do no wrong and commanded a premium price on its products. These days all that remains is the premium price.
GET A CLUE SONY! YOUR MUSIC / FILM INTERESTS ARE SCREWING YOUR PRODUCT COMPANY INTO THE GROUND.
To go back to my point about "click fraud", I would say that it is possible to detect blatant fraud, but so long as someone is operating within the background noise, they are entirely safe from discovery.
With google, you pay when someone clicks on your link rather than how often the ad appears. You name your price for how much you'll pay for each click and that governs where and how often your ad appears. Obviously the more you'll pay for your keywords, the more Google will show it and the more impressions it will make. A part of that price you pay goes to the site that hosts it. Therefore I can reward a host site simply by clicking on their ads. I suppose in a way this classifies as "click fraud" since I rarely have the intention of buying whatever is being sold.
Another bonus (or detriment depending on your POV) of pay-per-click is that you can "punish" advertisers that you don't like. A real-life example is the word "evolution". Fundamentalist religious outfits have paid for that word and consequently you see their ads all over biology and scientific sites that mention it. I click on the links since the concept of religious crazies paying scientists is deliciously ironic. This too could classify as "click fraud".
Until the day that Google installs mind probes in every human being, it seems unlikely that they can do anything about either of these common situations. As long as such "click fraud" is essentially random and indistinguishable from background noise there is nothing they could do to stop it. Nothing at all.
If these guys have the single IP in their logs, perhaps they be looking to see who it is and sue them instead of google.
It might do in the US. Does it in Europe?
Still, HDTV is coming to the UK. Lots of TVs are tagging themselves as "HDTV Ready" though what that means is highly questionable. There are a lot of different HDTV resolutions and progressive & interlaced modes to choose from. The labelling is confusing as hell and I would be extremely wary of buying a TV now when there is nothing to test it against. I truly expect some chumps will buy their HDTV now and the warranty will have expired before they discover what the quality is truly like. On top of that Sky are touting some HDTV channels but where is the pricing for them? When is the service and the HDTV rolling out? How many channels are there? When will Sky+ go HDTV? I wouldn't put it past Sky to bend the early adopters over and rape them for every penny they have. The only other use for HDTV at present is the XBox 360 and next year the PS3. That hardly seems worth it either.
Better to wait a few years until there is a market and channels that actually justify the price of these things.
While I'm sure a manual phisher could go after a (high net worth) individual based on their blog, I suspect the effort and perceived risk would be far greater than an automated and anonymous trawling operation.
Or that a great many domain owners see no reason to post their personal data up on the web where it is available to spammers, phishers or other net criminals. Not to mention random psychos who have some beef with the site's contents.
I disagree. I don't know about anyone else but if I resigned with notice and was immediately paid that notice on the spot, I would be delighted. Absolutely, positively thrilled. It means a free paid holiday, or being able to start in a new position much earlier and being paid by old company for doing so.
I might feel bad that my old employees were left holding the bag, but it's company policy and not my fault that things are the way they are.
It's just too bad that my company doesn't do that. If I resigned I would be required to work every damned day until it was time to leave. Bah.
After all, Bayliss did something similar with their clockwork radios. The original idea was to sell something that worked in Africa, yet they found a market for them in developed countries too.
The point is that Microsoft rolls out the next big version of Windows every 4 or 5 years meaning there are always hundreds if not millions of NT / W2K / XP servers sitting out there. The owners of such systems are faced with either keeping what they got or attempting an upgrade of some kind.
Since Microsoft offers such an upgrade and Linux doesn't, you can bet which one they will choose each time. Microsoft even produce Small Business Server version of Windows which even touts its ability to install over NT 4.0 and W2K.
Porting to Linux is not going to be easy but I truly believe that the big dists could produce a tool which generates a manifest from an existing NT / W2K deployment - the user names, shares, printers, drivers, network cards, IP addresses, DHCP settings, web content etc. and then replicates that when Linux is installed. I even believe it would be possible to convert the filesystem, or even run natively over NTFS.
As I said before, it wouldn't be a magic bullet, but if it could automate even half of the tasks it would be a good thing.
Not the same thing at all, though it doesn't stop the likes of Bill Gates mixing up the two. Seriously though if Ellison has to stump up the cash, he should strategically give it to open source projects where it would be the most benefit to Oracle.
Now personally I think MS Exchange is a piece of shit and I can't fathom why any business would favour it over IMAP + LDAP, but the simple fact is that many do. So until you can work out a way to support those business, you're not going to persuade them to use Linux. So far Evolution is about the only viable solution. It would be great to see the Exchange support opened up since you might see Thunderbird, KMail and no doubt others opened up as a result.
The funny thing is that for companies who do this for a living, where are the migration tools? Microsoft provide a shit load of migration tools for moving away from competing products and even old versions of their own products. Why doesn't Novell or Red Hat?
Think how attractive it would be if RH / Novell could back up and install over an NT server. If it could replicate all file & printer shares and take the existing NT PDC / Active Directory settings and implement the Linux equivalent. Think how damned cool it would be if they even converted the NTFS partition to ext3 while they were at it so data remained in-place. Or if they printed out a handy checklist of things to be done after installation to complete the conversion. In other words make conversion from NT / W2K / XP as simple and painless as possible.
This wouldn't be a magic bullet, but even if it meant that 60% of installs could be automated, it would be a very, very good thing for Linux.
Ugh. Are you saying that when you plug the device into a computer, it doesn't even act like a removable storage device? If so, then that is a really, really, REALLY rotten piece of hardware.
Let the chumps do the beta testing and wring out the bugs. Not just hardware bugs, but software bugs since the system is extremely software intensive. It's not like the XBox 360 is going anywhere anyway. Microsoft are allegedly restricting the supply for release. Some think it is some cunning marketing ploy, but perhaps it's because of the flaws - restricting the number of boxes minimizes the fallout and gives them some breathing space to produce a new revision that fixes the issues.
I doubt that. GCC was seriously stagnated way before 2.95/3.0 (hence the reason egcs appeared for a while) and was no match at all compared to various commercial compilers. Linux was about the only popular OS which *needed* a modern gcc and thus most of the development came from Linux stakeholders - Red Hat etc. Without Linux I fully expect that the compiler would be an also-ran by now, along with most commercial Unices.
That Erminem and Mardonna are the new hot searches on the Kaaza network
In operation BOINC works fairly well but on Windows XP it kills performance in some apps. What I mean by this is that BOINC runs at low priority. Any other app on your system which also runs at low priority, (e.g. cygwin, or a backup app like Nero Backitup) just CRAWLS when BOINC is running. The solution is to stop BOINC while they're running but it can still take a moment to click why some app is set in stone.
Not this kind of failure, but new launches always seem to be accompanied by problem reports - dead pixels, dead DVD drives, etc. I'm fully expecting that this is not the last problem for the XBox 360 and I'm looking forward to reading how good (or how bad) the legacy XBox emulation is.
People with a teaspoon or more of sense in their head wait a few weeks or more before buying a new system. And preferably a few months yet since there are precious few games to play anyway. I have to say I have a PS2 & a PSP but I think I'll wait until the chumps have proven the PS3 is not a lemon out of their own pockets before I would be interested. At least Sony have the luxury of an additional 5 or 6 months to make sure things are right.