I wouldn't have a problem with it either if I knew then what I know now. I would have simply bought from someone else.
My issue is that I didn't know, and there was nothing on their site to suggest they were dropping support. In fact the site lead me to believe that their support was good. They even had an offer to update old devices to the latest Windows Mobile 2003 for a nominal fee. I thought "what great support!" and ordered one. Three weeks later and they announce end of life...
As for being a gadget - no it's not a gadget, it is my PDA. I had a Palm Vx for four years that worked just fine in that capacity but which finally went a bit wonky. I heard good things about the h4150 in reviews in PCW and elsewhere and decided to switch.
I only expected the level of support that the HP brand and their site lead me to believe I was going to get. That doesn't mean constant upgrades, but it does mean bug fixes and upgrade offers for a fee if they are feasible. For example an upgrade to Mobile 2003 Second Edition is feasible but none is forthcoming. Even bug fixes of the temperamental wireless would be nice.
I suspect that HP have pulled the rug on support to shove people onto the new models, but it won't work. If I'm shoved, I'll end up buying a Dell Axim, or maybe another Palm. I certainly won't fork out extra money for service that I don't get. I'm sure others will too.
That's why I said some of their clients do use Gecko. But a more likely scenario is future versions of OS X end up using the KHTML part. After all, why bundle Gecko (8Mb of download) when the machine has a Cocoa component already on it>
On Windows it is a different story. I imagine that the IE browser component is simple enough to flip out (assuming it is encapsulated), but that is only half the battle. The AOL site is probably riddled services and features that rely on MS specific DHTML, ActiveX and whatnot. To switch would require that AOL fixes their content too (and partner sites) *and* support IE for backwards compatibility. Obviously the further down the road things go, with more rich interactive content, the harder that is to do.
AOL has had bad press with buggy releases in the past and are probably paranoid about breaking anything now. Still, that is little excuse for bad coding. If every site and its uncle can code pages that run on any browser then so can AOL.
I bought an iPaq h4150 a couple of months back only to find it was end of lifed 3 weeks later. The device wasn't even selling for a year and it is already obsolete. It was still the #1 seller for HP at the time, I think that's a little raw. No new bios upgrades, no Pocket PC 2003 Second Edition. Zip.
If this is their new policy, I would think seriously before buying anything off them. One year of upgrades is your lot in life, after which you have a paper weight. Besides, it's not like HP are the only manufacter of PDAs - they're just one of the more expensive. If you don't get value for money including adequate support you may as buy from someone else.
AOL has basically stripped Netscape down to the bone. After they got their pound of flesh from Microsoft they weren't interested in maintaining it any more. Whole departments were shitcanned and now it's just a small rump serving up content to Netscape.com.
Which is a shame from AOL's perspective since now their AOL client is stuck with an obsolete browser engine, written by their mortal enemy. They could have gone to Gecko but they chose not to. Oh yes - I'm sure MS will be leaping up and down to add new functionality for AOL's sake - NOT.
The sad thing is there were (and are) AOL products that do use Gecko, including at one stage beta of the AOL client. But rather stupidly they never followed through in any serious manner. If they had shipped an AOL client using Gecko there would now be 25+ million additional non-IE users in the US. Even where they did use it, such as AOL Communicator (a Thunderbird like email client) they basically screwed the pooch by implementing the whole app in C++ and using Gecko just to render HTML mail. How stupid is that given they could have written it in XUL in less time?
AOL just doesn't get it. Technology is for them just the means to stick a big shiny button on the start page. That's as good as it gets. Technical considerations such as standards compliance play second fiddle to marketing and dumb ideas to keep their audience happy. I also reckon there was a lot of infighting between the 'establishment' (who develop against IE) and those who want to try something risky even if it means flux in the short term.
Well that's too bad for them. Their customer base is dwindling - sick of the monolithic client, sick of the AWFUL email, sick of the incestuous links, and sick of the pricing. These days I reckon all but the most helpless of their users would be happier with barebones broadband, Firefox / IE combined with an email app. AOL is going to find itself in a niche if it doesn't change soon.
We levy $7 so that all indignant persons with fringe religious beliefs can have their eyes and ears sealed with superglue, lest they see something that offends their narrow world view.
Re:incorporate zahn's books
on
Star Wars TV Show
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Face it though, this is the person who brought us Jar-Jar Binks - it's going to be a rehash of Young Indy, isn't it?
Young Indiana Jones was fairly good TV - up to a point. What made it so ludicrous by the end of it all was how many 'famous people' were crammed into every episode and the consequent contrivances that had Indy leaping from war to war, continent to continent to fit them all in. If he wasn't meeting Charles De Gaulle it was Ho Chi Minh or Pancho Villa or someone else.
And that's the issue that Star Wars faces. One guest appearance is a pleasant 'twist'. A whole series of them and brings the whole lot crashing down.
We can already see the way it has gone in the so-far shitty prequels. The inclusion of R2D2 & C3PO and other 'famous' characters from the later stories leads to one stupid contrivance after another. For example, we're supposed to believe that Darth Vader *built* C3PO as child, that this robot C3PO travels the entire galaxy, and 20 odd years later while being pursued jettisons over Tattooine and ends up being bought by his son! How more fucking ridiculous can you get?
Re:Ceefax is cool but dated....
on
Ceefax Turns 30
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· Score: 1
I have a Grundig Sky box and I was shocked when I saw the performance my Dad's terrestrial digital TV. He bought it soon after digital came out. While the picture is fine, the channel guide is a joke and interactive content is like watching a prestel page load on a 1200 modem. Even channel hopping takes 2 seconds between channels. I bought him a £65 standalone decoder for Christmas.
I'm guessing later generations of boxes do things they should have done in the first place, such as caching data, and having the signal processors & CPU that actually cope with the content.
I have no idea what the Sky+ boxes are like, but I hear they don't timeshift interactive content at all. That being the case they probably don't cache it either even if it would massively improve the perceived performance.
Re:TeleTekst here in the Netherlands
on
Ceefax Turns 30
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· Score: 1
Re:Ceefax is cool but dated....
on
Ceefax Turns 30
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The problem with "richer digital content" is that it takes frigging ages to load.
If you want to look at the news headlines in Ceefax it'll take you a few seconds on a FastText TV. You'd be lucky for Sky News / BBC Interactive to even loaded after 30 seconds and then prepare to waste more time coping with the ever changing navigational controls scrolling through the headlines.
At least the BBC try their best to keep their digital interactive service fast and useful. The Sky version is so laden with shite such as banner ads that it is pointless to even use it.
But there is one 'feature' that absolutely kills my interest interactive content - that bloody red dot.
This is exactly the problem I've had with KDE for years.
It is basicially a Windows 98/XP ripoff with the kitchen sink thrown in, bad defaults and far too many options presented in a flat format. The control center is an absolute disaster - trying to find a single option amongst the many dozens of pages (each with their own tabs) is a frustrating exercise. The Konq prefs are no better.
Even the basics such as the default 'single click to launch' behaviour are just wrong, wrong, wrong from a usability standpoint. Microsoft got burnt badly from all quarters when it tried it in the IE4 "Active Desktop" and rightly so. Program icons are not 'links' - if you click on an icon by mistake it might 20 seconds of disk grinding and splash screens before you can close the app you didn't want in the first place.
There is nothing wrong with lifting features hither and thither, but you have to know how to play the music rather than stealing the individual notes. Tossing in every feature from Windows (and Mac, and other Unix WMs) is fine, but you have to do it in a structured and logical manner. If you chuck the lot at the user, all at once, they'll simply conclude that the UI is 'too hard' and give up.
By way of comparison GNOME has been actively hiding advanced options, preferring to put them in advanced dialogs or advanced tools. The net result is that the UI is much, much cleaner, easier to pick up for new users and arguably just as powerful once you know what you're doing.
Personally I couldn't care less whether the desktop is GNOME or KDE powered so long as it is easy to use. I recall GNOME used to be an absolute mess of a desktop, but then they got Human Interface Guidelines and started to enforce them. Perhaps KDE should think about doing the same.
That's not necessarily a good thing from a marketing perspective.
Captain Birdseye (logo of a UK food brand) used to be a snowy bearded old gentleman - an old duffer sailing around with a ship full of children. Perhaps because this might be misconstrued, they changed Captain Birdseye to a yound stud with a woman on each arm. It can't have done much good, because after a few years they changed him back again.
AOL has had this capability for a long time - all their employees already use a secure ID to log in, in addition to a password. Now they're just allowing (and charging) the wider world to use the same system.
Far Cry barely runs on my aging 1.8 Ghz box unless I turn down everything to its lowest settings. Doom 3 runs just fine on medium quality. That's what I'm referring to here.
I'm not sure what all the hype is about. I own Doom 3 and I also own Far Cry. I've completed both too. Far Cry, is a much, much, much better game.
It is better for a multitude of technical reasons, but I'll first mention why Doom is worse - the whole thing is flashlights, scripts and triggers. It might have been acceptable to use triggers in the original, but not in this day and age.
Progress through the game consists of a Quick Save, edge forward with the flashlight, Quick Save, step on trigger, look for baddies, fumble for gun, shoot baddies. If successfull repeat. It's just boring and shows little imagination. The baddies simply appear for the most part from nowhere so there is no anticipation, planning or strategy - just step on the trigger and shoot. There is little AI to speak of except for zombie troopers who at least duck behind cover. It's a shame because some of the levels are fantastically designed.
Now compare to Far Cry. First off this has outdoor zones that are truly massive, leading to some interesting play (e.g. you can snipe, attack in a vehicle, from the sea etc.) It also has drivable vehicles. It has a great physics model. The baddies are also fairly intelligent (they do some dumb things but they not are not completely stupid). There is a lot of randomness to the play so the game plays differently each time. Finally, the level design is better again than Doom. It also got there first with the "evil doctor" plot.
On the bad side, Far Cry has few save points but there is a console command to work around that. It also has much higher system requirements but looks gorgeous if you turn the quality up the full way.
Neither has much in the way of network play (capture the flag etc.) but at least Far Cry sets you up with a server list making it easy to join a game.
To me Doom feels a year out of date. And for my money Doom was something of a let down. If you haven't bought it already, play the demo and make up your own minds, but my advice would be to skip it.
I never played the original Half Life, so I'm keen to see what the fuss is about for the sequel, but that would the one I am interested in a demo for.
I don't see the need for any new standard. A USB device already says what things it does (storage, printing etc.), and hands out its manufacturer ID and other useful info.
It should be straightforward enough to extend the USB controller to determine whether to initialise and expose the device based upon some simple whitelist / blacklist.
There are digital TV tuners for PCs, e.g. (Hauppage Nova) but as far as I know they don't support analogue versions. I want one that is backwards compatible and works for NTSC and PAL broadcasts too. Toss in a PVR like control interface, multiple profiles (to support multiple countries), perhaps an online TV guide and it would make a compelling application for travellers.
Who needs a TV / DVD / VCR when a laptop can do the lot?
But digital is critical. BTW, the BBC said some parts of the UK will have their analogue switched off by 2007 so an analogue only device won't much use if you live happen to live there.
Stamping is an example of good security. There is no ulterior motive for doing it - it's simply to protect you and your kids. Neither would I consider RFID to be bad - if it were voluntary. That would imply again, that the park is doing it for the safety and protection of its guests.
What I'm objecting to here is the fact that everyone is required to use RFID whether they have kids or are in groups or not. This casts suspicion on what the point of it is for in the first place.
I wouldn't be so complacent. Firefox will get spyware eventually. In some ways it is even easier to write spyware for Firefox since you can hook into so many things using a chrome overlay and some javascript. We're not talking website Javascript here - we're talking "power of god" javascript with full access to any XPCOM object that Firefox requires to do its job.
Want to sniff urls? No problem. Redirect urls? No problem either. Open popups? Easy peasy (even if the user has disabled popups). Send data to some URL? Trivial. Search your drive for files? Sure thing. Run native code? No brainer.
All through a little extension written in chrome that would even run cross-platform unless it invoked a native DLL. And it can contain native code too if it needs to.
So perhaps users only install signed extensions and have learnt to trust where they install stuff from? Nope. No extensions to my knowledge have been signed because getting a cert to sign an XPI is a pain in the arse that no one bothers. It's a good reason why extensions should use a PGP web of trust model or someone should produce a free root CA for signing extensions.
Consequently users are already trained to ignore the "unsigned" warning and install extensions based upon what they claim to do, not who wrote them.
Now Firefox 1.0PR1 improves things a little by requiring users to add domains to their 'trusted' list before they can install an extension from a site. But this is an even more broken than normal package signing. Users are required to 'trust' the domain, but they have no idea if the package has been tampered with, or they are subject to man in the middle attacks or spoofing.
So the day of spyware will come. And it pays not to be complacent about the supposed security of any software. Firefox might be better than IE, but it isn't perfect.
The only crash I've had on my XP desktop was a bad disk sector that would blue screen XP every time it was touched. In the end I ghosted the info (sans the bad file) to a new hard drive and all has been fine since.
I also have a laptop which is not so stable. This is mostly due to a stinky ATI Radeon 9000 driver Acer can't be bothered updating with bug fixes. Consequently games like Far Cry kill the machine stone dead. I won't be buying Acer again.
I've not had a kernel panic on Linux for years now and only a few on my OS X box and none recently. Both IMHO are far more stable than XP.
"With WannaFinder, each family/group entering Wannado City receives an electronic tracking bracelet linking all members in their party. During their stay, guests can use WannaFinder kiosks throughout the park to locate members of their group in real-time. "
I'm sure the park doesn't advocate leaving children unattended, but it is a bleeding obvious consequence of the system. Just because I'm able to realise that and you are not, does not make me 'out to lunch'.
If it's not their "main push", why is it being touted when their "main push" isn't? If they are lying, then why is it wrong to raise questions about what their real motives might be? Why is it wrong to question the supposed benefits to the guest? That's all I'm saying - they're introducing RFID for a very suspect reason indeed.
As for peace of mind, I suggest that leaving your children unattended (and being encouraged to by the supposed benefits of the system) just because you can track them from afar is bullshit. Yes it might prevent some kids from being (momentarily) lost, but unattended kids are more likely to crack their heads open, or shoplift, or be beat up / be beaten up by other kids, or in the worst case even be molested or abducted.
So you're agreeing with me that everyone must wear RFID tags to find 'lost children' is bullshit? I ask merely because that was what the story was about, yet you're conceding that the park might have ulterior and more likely reasons for expecting everyone to wear them.
Re:And now, for your delectation and delight...
on
RFID Not Just for Kids
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· Score: 2, Funny
Yes I do - I strongly dislike the conveyor belt like layouts in zoos & parks which is what they frequently are these days. Entrance - attraction - concession - attraction - food court - attraction - concession - attraction - gift shop - exit. But that's irrelevant.
The point here is that 'saving kids' is a convenient excuse for something which is more likely being introduced for commercial reasons. It isn't even a good excuse (and quite possibly dangerous) for reasons I pointed out.
And for that everyone who enters the park with a child or not is being made to wear tags just so the park can determine ways to extract more money from people's wallets on their way through.
It's like a real life version of Roller Coaster Tycoon - except you can't pick people up with tongs and drown them in a lake.
Slashdot Mirror
My issue is that I didn't know, and there was nothing on their site to suggest they were dropping support. In fact the site lead me to believe that their support was good. They even had an offer to update old devices to the latest Windows Mobile 2003 for a nominal fee. I thought "what great support!" and ordered one. Three weeks later and they announce end of life...
As for being a gadget - no it's not a gadget, it is my PDA. I had a Palm Vx for four years that worked just fine in that capacity but which finally went a bit wonky. I heard good things about the h4150 in reviews in PCW and elsewhere and decided to switch.
I only expected the level of support that the HP brand and their site lead me to believe I was going to get. That doesn't mean constant upgrades, but it does mean bug fixes and upgrade offers for a fee if they are feasible. For example an upgrade to Mobile 2003 Second Edition is feasible but none is forthcoming. Even bug fixes of the temperamental wireless would be nice.
I suspect that HP have pulled the rug on support to shove people onto the new models, but it won't work. If I'm shoved, I'll end up buying a Dell Axim, or maybe another Palm. I certainly won't fork out extra money for service that I don't get. I'm sure others will too.
On Windows it is a different story. I imagine that the IE browser component is simple enough to flip out (assuming it is encapsulated), but that is only half the battle. The AOL site is probably riddled services and features that rely on MS specific DHTML, ActiveX and whatnot. To switch would require that AOL fixes their content too (and partner sites) *and* support IE for backwards compatibility. Obviously the further down the road things go, with more rich interactive content, the harder that is to do.
AOL has had bad press with buggy releases in the past and are probably paranoid about breaking anything now. Still, that is little excuse for bad coding. If every site and its uncle can code pages that run on any browser then so can AOL.
If this is their new policy, I would think seriously before buying anything off them. One year of upgrades is your lot in life, after which you have a paper weight. Besides, it's not like HP are the only manufacter of PDAs - they're just one of the more expensive. If you don't get value for money including adequate support you may as buy from someone else.
Which is a shame from AOL's perspective since now their AOL client is stuck with an obsolete browser engine, written by their mortal enemy. They could have gone to Gecko but they chose not to. Oh yes - I'm sure MS will be leaping up and down to add new functionality for AOL's sake - NOT.
The sad thing is there were (and are) AOL products that do use Gecko, including at one stage beta of the AOL client. But rather stupidly they never followed through in any serious manner. If they had shipped an AOL client using Gecko there would now be 25+ million additional non-IE users in the US. Even where they did use it, such as AOL Communicator (a Thunderbird like email client) they basically screwed the pooch by implementing the whole app in C++ and using Gecko just to render HTML mail. How stupid is that given they could have written it in XUL in less time?
AOL just doesn't get it. Technology is for them just the means to stick a big shiny button on the start page. That's as good as it gets. Technical considerations such as standards compliance play second fiddle to marketing and dumb ideas to keep their audience happy. I also reckon there was a lot of infighting between the 'establishment' (who develop against IE) and those who want to try something risky even if it means flux in the short term.
Well that's too bad for them. Their customer base is dwindling - sick of the monolithic client, sick of the AWFUL email, sick of the incestuous links, and sick of the pricing. These days I reckon all but the most helpless of their users would be happier with barebones broadband, Firefox / IE combined with an email app. AOL is going to find itself in a niche if it doesn't change soon.
We levy $7 so that all indignant persons with fringe religious beliefs can have their eyes and ears sealed with superglue, lest they see something that offends their narrow world view.
Young Indiana Jones was fairly good TV - up to a point. What made it so ludicrous by the end of it all was how many 'famous people' were crammed into every episode and the consequent contrivances that had Indy leaping from war to war, continent to continent to fit them all in. If he wasn't meeting Charles De Gaulle it was Ho Chi Minh or Pancho Villa or someone else.
And that's the issue that Star Wars faces. One guest appearance is a pleasant 'twist'. A whole series of them and brings the whole lot crashing down.
We can already see the way it has gone in the so-far shitty prequels. The inclusion of R2D2 & C3PO and other 'famous' characters from the later stories leads to one stupid contrivance after another. For example, we're supposed to believe that Darth Vader *built* C3PO as child, that this robot C3PO travels the entire galaxy, and 20 odd years later while being pursued jettisons over Tattooine and ends up being bought by his son! How more fucking ridiculous can you get?
I'm guessing later generations of boxes do things they should have done in the first place, such as caching data, and having the signal processors & CPU that actually cope with the content.
I have no idea what the Sky+ boxes are like, but I hear they don't timeshift interactive content at all. That being the case they probably don't cache it either even if it would massively improve the perceived performance.
Here is Aertel (the one for Ireland).
If you want to look at the news headlines in Ceefax it'll take you a few seconds on a FastText TV. You'd be lucky for Sky News / BBC Interactive to even loaded after 30 seconds and then prepare to waste more time coping with the ever changing navigational controls scrolling through the headlines.
At least the BBC try their best to keep their digital interactive service fast and useful. The Sky version is so laden with shite such as banner ads that it is pointless to even use it.
But there is one 'feature' that absolutely kills my interest interactive content - that bloody red dot.
It is basicially a Windows 98/XP ripoff with the kitchen sink thrown in, bad defaults and far too many options presented in a flat format. The control center is an absolute disaster - trying to find a single option amongst the many dozens of pages (each with their own tabs) is a frustrating exercise. The Konq prefs are no better.
Even the basics such as the default 'single click to launch' behaviour are just wrong, wrong, wrong from a usability standpoint. Microsoft got burnt badly from all quarters when it tried it in the IE4 "Active Desktop" and rightly so. Program icons are not 'links' - if you click on an icon by mistake it might 20 seconds of disk grinding and splash screens before you can close the app you didn't want in the first place.
There is nothing wrong with lifting features hither and thither, but you have to know how to play the music rather than stealing the individual notes. Tossing in every feature from Windows (and Mac, and other Unix WMs) is fine, but you have to do it in a structured and logical manner. If you chuck the lot at the user, all at once, they'll simply conclude that the UI is 'too hard' and give up.
By way of comparison GNOME has been actively hiding advanced options, preferring to put them in advanced dialogs or advanced tools. The net result is that the UI is much, much cleaner, easier to pick up for new users and arguably just as powerful once you know what you're doing.
Personally I couldn't care less whether the desktop is GNOME or KDE powered so long as it is easy to use. I recall GNOME used to be an absolute mess of a desktop, but then they got Human Interface Guidelines and started to enforce them. Perhaps KDE should think about doing the same.
As he narrated the audio books, a fair stab could have been made of turning him into any character.
That's not necessarily a good thing from a marketing perspective.
Captain Birdseye (logo of a UK food brand) used to be a snowy bearded old gentleman - an old duffer sailing around with a ship full of children. Perhaps because this might be misconstrued, they changed Captain Birdseye to a yound stud with a woman on each arm. It can't have done much good, because after a few years they changed him back again.
AOL has had this capability for a long time - all their employees already use a secure ID to log in, in addition to a password. Now they're just allowing (and charging) the wider world to use the same system.
Far Cry barely runs on my aging 1.8 Ghz box unless I turn down everything to its lowest settings. Doom 3 runs just fine on medium quality. That's what I'm referring to here.
It is better for a multitude of technical reasons, but I'll first mention why Doom is worse - the whole thing is flashlights, scripts and triggers. It might have been acceptable to use triggers in the original, but not in this day and age.
Progress through the game consists of a Quick Save, edge forward with the flashlight, Quick Save, step on trigger, look for baddies, fumble for gun, shoot baddies. If successfull repeat. It's just boring and shows little imagination. The baddies simply appear for the most part from nowhere so there is no anticipation, planning or strategy - just step on the trigger and shoot. There is little AI to speak of except for zombie troopers who at least duck behind cover. It's a shame because some of the levels are fantastically designed.
Now compare to Far Cry. First off this has outdoor zones that are truly massive, leading to some interesting play (e.g. you can snipe, attack in a vehicle, from the sea etc.) It also has drivable vehicles. It has a great physics model. The baddies are also fairly intelligent (they do some dumb things but they not are not completely stupid). There is a lot of randomness to the play so the game plays differently each time. Finally, the level design is better again than Doom. It also got there first with the "evil doctor" plot.
On the bad side, Far Cry has few save points but there is a console command to work around that. It also has much higher system requirements but looks gorgeous if you turn the quality up the full way.
Neither has much in the way of network play (capture the flag etc.) but at least Far Cry sets you up with a server list making it easy to join a game.
To me Doom feels a year out of date. And for my money Doom was something of a let down. If you haven't bought it already, play the demo and make up your own minds, but my advice would be to skip it.
I never played the original Half Life, so I'm keen to see what the fuss is about for the sequel, but that would the one I am interested in a demo for.
It should be straightforward enough to extend the USB controller to determine whether to initialise and expose the device based upon some simple whitelist / blacklist.
Lucas was concerned by the fan backlash over the constant re-releases, enough that he issued a press release.
It reads:
"Squeal piggy!"
Who needs a TV / DVD / VCR when a laptop can do the lot?
But digital is critical. BTW, the BBC said some parts of the UK will have their analogue switched off by 2007 so an analogue only device won't much use if you live happen to live there.
What I'm objecting to here is the fact that everyone is required to use RFID whether they have kids or are in groups or not. This casts suspicion on what the point of it is for in the first place.
Want to sniff urls? No problem. Redirect urls? No problem either. Open popups? Easy peasy (even if the user has disabled popups). Send data to some URL? Trivial. Search your drive for files? Sure thing. Run native code? No brainer.
All through a little extension written in chrome that would even run cross-platform unless it invoked a native DLL. And it can contain native code too if it needs to.
So perhaps users only install signed extensions and have learnt to trust where they install stuff from? Nope. No extensions to my knowledge have been signed because getting a cert to sign an XPI is a pain in the arse that no one bothers. It's a good reason why extensions should use a PGP web of trust model or someone should produce a free root CA for signing extensions.
Consequently users are already trained to ignore the "unsigned" warning and install extensions based upon what they claim to do, not who wrote them.
Now Firefox 1.0PR1 improves things a little by requiring users to add domains to their 'trusted' list before they can install an extension from a site. But this is an even more broken than normal package signing. Users are required to 'trust' the domain, but they have no idea if the package has been tampered with, or they are subject to man in the middle attacks or spoofing.
So the day of spyware will come. And it pays not to be complacent about the supposed security of any software. Firefox might be better than IE, but it isn't perfect.
I also have a laptop which is not so stable. This is mostly due to a stinky ATI Radeon 9000 driver Acer can't be bothered updating with bug fixes. Consequently games like Far Cry kill the machine stone dead. I won't be buying Acer again.
I've not had a kernel panic on Linux for years now and only a few on my OS X box and none recently. Both IMHO are far more stable than XP.
During their stay, guests can use WannaFinder kiosks throughout the park to locate members of their group in real-time. "
I'm sure the park doesn't advocate leaving children unattended, but it is a bleeding obvious consequence of the system. Just because I'm able to realise that and you are not, does not make me 'out to lunch'.
As for peace of mind, I suggest that leaving your children unattended (and being encouraged to by the supposed benefits of the system) just because you can track them from afar is bullshit. Yes it might prevent some kids from being (momentarily) lost, but unattended kids are more likely to crack their heads open, or shoplift, or be beat up / be beaten up by other kids, or in the worst case even be molested or abducted.
So you're agreeing with me that everyone must wear RFID tags to find 'lost children' is bullshit? I ask merely because that was what the story was about, yet you're conceding that the park might have ulterior and more likely reasons for expecting everyone to wear them.
The point here is that 'saving kids' is a convenient excuse for something which is more likely being introduced for commercial reasons. It isn't even a good excuse (and quite possibly dangerous) for reasons I pointed out.
And for that everyone who enters the park with a child or not is being made to wear tags just so the park can determine ways to extract more money from people's wallets on their way through.
It's like a real life version of Roller Coaster Tycoon - except you can't pick people up with tongs and drown them in a lake.