It might be an overt bribe but the entire games industry runs on greasing the palms of journalists. Those "exclusive" previews and reviews. That expenses-paid trip to Rockstar / Konami / whoever's HQ to see work in progress. That expensive invitation-only junket at the games show. The mountain of crap like t-shirts, posters, backpacks, figurines, pens etc. that are sent out. The lucrative advertising campaign which just so happens to run the same as the review goes out.
Woe betide any outfit which angers a games publisher. All that free shit, exclusives and the advertising will be pulled in an instant. The journo and the site will be blackballed and will have to wait outside the tent like everyone else.
Which is why people with an ounce of sense and self restraint wait for a game to be released and for a general concensus to form before making a purchase. Don't believe exclusive reviews, don't believe some bloggers pants wetting hyperbole after their all expenses paid jolly, don't trust a site which is festooned with ads for the game being reviewed. If a game is THAT GOOD, then it'll still be THAT GOOD a week or two down the line.
Windows 8.x is stable and in many regards is better than Windows 7. It's just that stupid metro front end which scuppers the experience and consequently people hate on it.
8.1 and the SR1 makes it just about tolerable but the most glaring omission is still the lack of a start menu. They could and should have a mini-metro popup that offers functionality analogous to the old start menu. Rumours suggest that one is being worked on but its not in this release.
It's pretty obvious that it was a visual joke rather than a serious representation of a computer on a wrist. Anyway no smart watch has managed to sell well so it's not like what we call a smart watch today is what people want either.
8.1 has received a substantial service release that fixes bugs and enhances the UI (slightly). Why should they support the older version any more? That doesn't excuse them from ensuring the upgrade process is smooth and trouble free but I understand why they are doing this.
Yes glass is potentially useful for certain roles e.g. order fulfilment in a warehouse (meaning someone can have both hands free), or your remote learning. But as a general purpose device, it is lacking any reason for existing. So I can take a picture or do a search without taking a phone out of my pocket? So what? Instead I have to talk issuing instructions to it like some crazy person to make it work. Worse than that, it invites open hostility from people it is pointed at who quite reasonably wonder if I am taking a picture of them, or if my attention is on them or the screen in front of my eye.
It reminds me of Segways and bluetooth headsets. Some technologies simply rub people up the wrong way. They might find themselves a niche to exist in but they're very unlikely to ever enjoy public acceptance.
The problem is educated people are not the customers of quacks. It's the uneducated, the paranoid, the gullible and sometimes the desperate. Cut the quacks off from these people (and their money) and the practice will diminish. The simple way to do that is to ban how these products and services are sold.
For example look how many health insurance plans cover quack treatment. There is no reason this should be permitted by law, at least in countries with a sane health system. If an insurer wants to offer "wellness" cover, then it should be with recognized health clinic where registered practitioners (nurses, dieticians etc.) can treat people and make proper referrals if necessary.
If it's nonsense (it is), and it makes health claims (it does), and it doesn't work (it doesn't work), just ban the sale and promotion of such products or severely restrict its sale, health insurance coverage, and the people who practice this form of "treatment". Same goes for chiro, accupuncture, and other common forms of quackery.
Physical devices slide to unlock. It is no leap of the imagination to virtualize the action.
What's interesting is how other handsets have been forced to circumvent the patent. Samsung currently uses a screen image and lets the user slide any direction to be rewarded with a sparkly effect & noise to unlock. Vanilla Android allows users to draw a dot from the center of the screen to the perimeter of a circle to unlock. Windows Phone (and GNOME 3) have a weighted screen saver which must dragged up to remove it.
So in a sense devices have innovated to circumvent a stupid patent, but the patent shouldn't have been granted in the first place.
A Stradivarius would still have value for its age and rarity. Doesn't mean they are best sounding instruments in the world and there is no reason to suppose they are either.
And presumably missiles are designed to failover to other forms of navigation if the GPS is being disrupted or at odds with other navigational hints the missile might be programmed with such as terrain contours.
Even if that's all they are doing, they're only one lawsuit away from handing over the names of everyone who has a duplicate of that hashed file on their own account. Or any other list they are presented with. I assume the MPAA / RIAA have it in their power to hash up the top 100 downloads from TPB in any given week and go fishing for infringement on cloud services. The likes of Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft also have a good incentive to comply too since they sell content.
Of course this is an issue that could be avoided if cloud providers offered a simple way for users to enable client side encryption, not just of the content but the entire file system. Then they literally have no idea what they are storing and it's hard to see how any court could compel them to reveal it either.
I didn't say it was useful that there was a scare in the first place, but that the silver lining from the debacle it is that the link between autism and vaccination was conclusively negative.
I don't know the timeline of when thimersoal was withdrawn but it's one of the whackamole talking points of antivaxxers - MMR causes autism, mercury causes autism, vaccine schedules cause autism. Due to their constant scaremongering the rates of vaccination have changed significantly that if any of those things were true, that they caused autism then it should be observable in the rates of autism. And it isn't. It still doesn't stop them producing scare stories of course.
Anyone who uploads copyright infringing content to a cloud server and entrusts it to the care of a company is an idiot. There are various ways that files could be scanned simply from looking at the filename or hash all the way through to analysis of the tag / contents / watermark.
And DropBox is probably the most benign of mainstream cloud hosts. Google, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft all sell content and sign voluminous contracts for the sale of said content. It's not hard to imagine that they would or could be obliged to scan for infringing content and notify the content providers when they find any.
The scare over the MMR vaccine did serve one useful purpose - it mean scientists went to considerable trouble to establish if there was a link between that vaccine or any other and did not find one. And the journalist Brian Deer shone a spotlight on Andrew Wakefield's shoddy study, unethical practices, invasive procedures and his massive conflicts of interest and eventually he was struck off.
Secondly, if there were a link, then we should expect to be able to observe it thanks to the activity of celebrity morons like Jenny McCarthy. If vaccination or the minute traces of an antimicrobial called thimerosal (a mercury compound) used in some vaccines were the cause of autism then surely it should observable in the rates of autism? After the scare, less people vaccinated and manufacturers removed thimerosal from childhood vaccines so there should have been an observable effect on autism rates. There wasn't.
Why single out vaccination? Perhaps it's air pollution, or electro magnetic interference, or artificial light bulbs, or noise / vibration, or artificial fabrics, or radon gas, or a more sedentary lifestyle, or residual chemicals from dishwashing tablets, or the age that mothers get pregnant, or the stress of daily life on mother & child, or one of thousands of other things that might affect development of a child's brain in the womb or afterwards.
Or maybe, just maybe it's a combination of factors, each bearing its own small risk and in conjunction increasing the rate. Or maybe it's simply better and more sensitive diagnoses of the condition.
One thing is certain. The link between vaccination and autism has been extensively searched for and there isn't one.
Waze has one good feature - it's far easier to cache maps for offline use. Happens automatically just by browsing around while online. In Google Maps you have to find the option and do it manually. Some of the "social" aspects of Waze seem pretty retarded though. I'm supposed to be driving a car, not "liking" other drivers or their traffic tips.
Developing a drug from scratch would include years of research followed by multi phase, long term clinical trials. It is a vastly expensive and a high risk proposition.
But I wasn't suggesting that. A couple of million could be lobbed at a university or clinic to conduct a well designed study that compared an alt health treatment vs a placebo. If it works as well as the anecdotes would have us believe, then the result would be clear and reproducible and would ultimately legitimize it and lead to mainstream acceptance. Some large alt health companies have turnovers in the billions and the industry itself is enormous. They have deep enough pockets to fund the research.
Slashdot Mirror
Woe betide any outfit which angers a games publisher. All that free shit, exclusives and the advertising will be pulled in an instant. The journo and the site will be blackballed and will have to wait outside the tent like everyone else.
Which is why people with an ounce of sense and self restraint wait for a game to be released and for a general concensus to form before making a purchase. Don't believe exclusive reviews, don't believe some bloggers pants wetting hyperbole after their all expenses paid jolly, don't trust a site which is festooned with ads for the game being reviewed. If a game is THAT GOOD, then it'll still be THAT GOOD a week or two down the line.
I run Windows. I run Linux. I don't really care what the OS is providing I can do the things I want to do with it.
It is supported - upgrade to SR1 when Windows Update tells you. The update from 8.0 to 8.1 was WAY more traumatic.
Faster boot times for one thing. Better task manager. Better file move & copy. Lots of little improvements all over the shop.
8.1 and the SR1 makes it just about tolerable but the most glaring omission is still the lack of a start menu. They could and should have a mini-metro popup that offers functionality analogous to the old start menu. Rumours suggest that one is being worked on but its not in this release.
Some buildings do have slides
It's pretty obvious that it was a visual joke rather than a serious representation of a computer on a wrist. Anyway no smart watch has managed to sell well so it's not like what we call a smart watch today is what people want either.
8.1 has received a substantial service release that fixes bugs and enhances the UI (slightly). Why should they support the older version any more? That doesn't excuse them from ensuring the upgrade process is smooth and trouble free but I understand why they are doing this.
It reminds me of Segways and bluetooth headsets. Some technologies simply rub people up the wrong way. They might find themselves a niche to exist in but they're very unlikely to ever enjoy public acceptance.
For example look how many health insurance plans cover quack treatment. There is no reason this should be permitted by law, at least in countries with a sane health system. If an insurer wants to offer "wellness" cover, then it should be with recognized health clinic where registered practitioners (nurses, dieticians etc.) can treat people and make proper referrals if necessary.
I don't consider that a very good argument for keeping quacks around.
If it's nonsense (it is), and it makes health claims (it does), and it doesn't work (it doesn't work), just ban the sale and promotion of such products or severely restrict its sale, health insurance coverage, and the people who practice this form of "treatment". Same goes for chiro, accupuncture, and other common forms of quackery.
What's interesting is how other handsets have been forced to circumvent the patent. Samsung currently uses a screen image and lets the user slide any direction to be rewarded with a sparkly effect & noise to unlock. Vanilla Android allows users to draw a dot from the center of the screen to the perimeter of a circle to unlock. Windows Phone (and GNOME 3) have a weighted screen saver which must dragged up to remove it.
So in a sense devices have innovated to circumvent a stupid patent, but the patent shouldn't have been granted in the first place.
A Stradivarius would still have value for its age and rarity. Doesn't mean they are best sounding instruments in the world and there is no reason to suppose they are either.
And presumably missiles are designed to failover to other forms of navigation if the GPS is being disrupted or at odds with other navigational hints the missile might be programmed with such as terrain contours.
Of course this is an issue that could be avoided if cloud providers offered a simple way for users to enable client side encryption, not just of the content but the entire file system. Then they literally have no idea what they are storing and it's hard to see how any court could compel them to reveal it either.
How are they going to put food on their plate now?
I don't know the timeline of when thimersoal was withdrawn but it's one of the whackamole talking points of antivaxxers - MMR causes autism, mercury causes autism, vaccine schedules cause autism. Due to their constant scaremongering the rates of vaccination have changed significantly that if any of those things were true, that they caused autism then it should be observable in the rates of autism. And it isn't. It still doesn't stop them producing scare stories of course.
And DropBox is probably the most benign of mainstream cloud hosts. Google, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft all sell content and sign voluminous contracts for the sale of said content. It's not hard to imagine that they would or could be obliged to scan for infringing content and notify the content providers when they find any.
Secondly, if there were a link, then we should expect to be able to observe it thanks to the activity of celebrity morons like Jenny McCarthy. If vaccination or the minute traces of an antimicrobial called thimerosal (a mercury compound) used in some vaccines were the cause of autism then surely it should observable in the rates of autism? After the scare, less people vaccinated and manufacturers removed thimerosal from childhood vaccines so there should have been an observable effect on autism rates. There wasn't.
Or maybe, just maybe it's a combination of factors, each bearing its own small risk and in conjunction increasing the rate. Or maybe it's simply better and more sensitive diagnoses of the condition.
One thing is certain. The link between vaccination and autism has been extensively searched for and there isn't one.
Freely speaking your mind about your boss on Twitter will get your ass fired in a lot of companies.
Waze has one good feature - it's far easier to cache maps for offline use. Happens automatically just by browsing around while online. In Google Maps you have to find the option and do it manually. Some of the "social" aspects of Waze seem pretty retarded though. I'm supposed to be driving a car, not "liking" other drivers or their traffic tips.
I'll wait until they supply DirectX and OpenGL bindings for Brainfuck.
But I wasn't suggesting that. A couple of million could be lobbed at a university or clinic to conduct a well designed study that compared an alt health treatment vs a placebo. If it works as well as the anecdotes would have us believe, then the result would be clear and reproducible and would ultimately legitimize it and lead to mainstream acceptance. Some large alt health companies have turnovers in the billions and the industry itself is enormous. They have deep enough pockets to fund the research.