Why would you say that? ZeniMax has to defend their trademarks. Obviously, they would never take actual legal action against Notch for this, but they have to send a cease and desist in order to protect themselves during potential future litigation against companies that DO infringe upon their trademarks in a way that COULD harm ZeniMax. Why this is newsworthy beats me.
Actually, I'll agree that Windows Mobile was the best for a while, I used to use it long before iOS came out, and I stuck with it until Android came along. They just let it stagnate though because that's what MS do when they're the only game in town.
Same, and true. My last phone before my Droid X was a Samsung Omnia. WM6.1 was really showing its age at that point and I was ready to chuck my phone at the wall on several occasions.
Xbox may have done online gaming, but I hardly consider that "revolutionary" considering I'd already been gaming online for years before it. Evolutionary perhaps, but not revolutionary. Consoles such as the Dreamcast and PS2 had online gaming too.
Well perhaps "revolutionary" is too markety and buzzwordy but I was unaware of Dreamcast's online capabilities, and the PS2 required an additional modem part and not many games actually supported real online gameplay. Xbox Live was revolutionary in that it provided a framework that any game could use to provide online play and in which any gamer could use a single login and a single monthly fee to facilitate online play with any game on the console. There wasn't even anything like that (that was particularly successful) for the PC until Steam came around a full year after the Xbox was released.
We'd be a lot further ahead without Windows' effective monopoly on the OS market. It's taken a shift to mobile computing to break the stranglehold and start some innovation again.
There isn't a monopoly when there's competition. Microsoft is ruthless, but there has always been competition, and it's quite visible in various Windows and Macintosh releases. Just compare their releases and you'll see them taking ideas from each other over the years. Don't blame Microsoft just because nobody else had the drive to get their own new OS released. It would have been extremely difficult, but if there ever was something with enough innovation to stir up new competition, that would have happened.
Microsoft have given us.. well, I can't think of anything to be honest.
How about the most popular operating system in the world? The most popular office suite in the world? A PC UI that doesn't suck ass (yes, I'm implying that OS X is ugly and unusable)? The best OS for PDAs (by today's standard, Windows Mobile sucks, but it was the best back in the day). In later years, they revolutionized console gaming with the Xbox and the first major online console gaming service. And now we have Windows Phone 7 and the Metro UI which is basically an orgasm shooting directly into your optic nerves via theoretical syringes. And, perhaps most importantly, they gave all the Linux wannabes something to sling shit at.
Call me a shill or whatever it is you guys call people these days. Microsoft is not a company I adore, but they deserve some respect for how they have advanced personal computing over the last 30-odd years. If it wasn't for ol' Willy Gates and Paul Allen I don't think we would be even close to where we're at today.
Someone fails to understand how MAC cloning works...
If by "someone" you mean "you". I'm assuming you think that by making your router clone your PC's MAC address, you are putting two copies of the same address on the same network, when in fact you are putting a copy of the address on a different network. Ports on a router lead to separate networks. Your "Internet" port (or similar) is the interface that is assigned the cloned address, and all other ports on your average consumer-level home network router are on a network separate from that.
I still don't get where you're going with this. Are you trying to make a point of some sort, or just insulting me in defense of radical Christian nutjobs everywhere?
In short, people who are not trained listeners, who do not have the best available audio equipment, and/or who simply aren't trying very hard, will very quickly make even the crappiest sounding codec appear to be completely transparent. Those people who can actually do a good job of a listening test are completely lost in the (huge) margin of error, as statistical noise.
My quick submit button finger made me forget to mention the fact that the test results will know when an individual couldn't correctly guess which was the codec and which was not, and I'm sure could quite easily filter out those who provided the wrong answers and those who provided no answers and release a set of results for "You audiophiles that spend way too much money on a system that you won't be listening to on these lossy codecs anyway even though you probably wouldn't be able to hear the difference regardless."
- Person B plays it back on his expensive home-theatre system with 0.03% THD, and expensive full-range speakers. He can tell the difference between the original and the encoding 100% of the time.
Ah, but can he? Even professionally-trained listeners on very expensive hi-fi setups have been thwarted by good lossy codecs and double-blind tests.
Perhaps "religious psychopath" isn't the correct phrase for what I'm trying to convey. Maybe "radical Christian nutjob" is more along the right track. "Religious psychopath" implies that all religious people are psychopaths.
Is there a problem with loving my religious psychopath of an aunt or am I supposed to display hatred towards those who disagree with my views, family or not?
but pretending that there must exist a single speciation event, rather than an accumulation of change
Kind of on that note: One day a few years back I was walking along a trail in the jungles of Hawaii with my extremely-religious aunt. As she was admiring all the beautiful flora and fauna she said "This is proof that God must exist. How else could all this beauty just instantly appear out of nowhere?" I wanted to say something but didn't feel like debating with a religious psychopath who also happens to be a family member that I love and don't really want mad at me. But that right there showed me that they really don't understand what evolution means. Perhaps it's because they don't care to investigate and learn about it, or maybe the information is simply overwritten and blocked by their belief in an almighty creator. Who knows? The fact is it's hopeless to try and teach them actual science.
It is impossible to judge audio codecs through subjective tests.
Companies that manufacture loudspeakers have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on audio quality research- not in order to make their speakers better, but to understand the psychology behind the sounds that make people choose speaker A over speaker B in a showroom. They have discovered all sorts of quirks in human psychology and perception that they exploit to boost their sales, and they have little to do with overall 'quality'. Decades of expensive, meticulous, scientifically valid studies are responsible for the range of speakers you find at the average hifi shop, and even when several identical speakers are demonstrated (but the listener is told they are all different) most people will say that speaker number 2 sounds the best.
The same applies to audio codecs. Even if you eliminate all sorts of hardware variables, then just listening to clip A, then B, then C and subjectively deciding which one sounds 'best' is totally unreliable. The results of this type of testing are completely useless. At the very least you would need to set up a triangle test, and to do this properly with 6 codecs in a controlled environment would take a very long time and the results still wouldn't correlate with true 'quality' unless it was repeated many times with different hardware setups.
Ignoring the psychological weaknesses in these types of tests, the playback hardware would colour the sound enough as to make the underlying test - the codec - invalid. The choice of music, the amplifier, the speakers or headphones, and the volume used for playback will all contribute their own distinctive characteristics to the audio so that person A will not be hearing the same test as person B.
Forget codec wars. Just buy a decent pair of earphones.
You're completely missing the point. This test is a comparison between the lossless reference samples and the codecs. You have 3 Play buttons. One is the reference file (and it TELLS you it's the reference file), the other two are randomly assigned to be the identical reference file or the lossy encode and it DOESN'T tell you which. You are supposed to choose which one is the encode and how poor it sounds compared to the reference. It's an objective test that has nothing to do with your hardware because you aren't choosing which one you like best, you are choosing which one is exactly the same as the reference. Most of them I seriously couldn't tell the difference (using a Creative Audio card and Sennheiser HD555s).
I read it as aluminum-cement and said "wtf". Then I read it again and saw "aluminum-helmet" and said "wait WTF". Then I smacked myself in the face and read it right.
We need faster speeds here down on earth before we think of these "multi gigabit" speeds for interplanetary communications..
We HAVE faster speeds here on Earth. Blame your ISP for not utilizing what their network is capable of, preferring to intentionally cripple their services so they can charge through the nose for faster connections. But all that is really totally irrelevant because this Earth-Mars link is not in any way intended for consumer use.
They published an unfinished product on a market that is already established and has the giant pain of trying to get users to move to their service.
They're actually trying to keep users from moving to their service right now. Invites are very limited at the moment while they're slowly increasing capacity and testing scalability. As you can see by OP, they failed to scale properly and ran out of disk space. There's a reason they're not in "beta" but in a "limited field trial." Unfortunately, it's a social network and a social network will never catch on if none of your friends can be on it with you... they have to perform a very delicate balancing act in order to make sure this rollout is successful. Personally, I'm really digging Google+... it takes a lot of things Facebook does and makes them a lot better and cleaner. There are all kinds of bugs, but bugs get fixed. Facebook has a formidable opponent in Google+, and I'm willing to wait as long as it takes for my friends to be granted access.
It seems to me that automating the operation of the BBQ is a Bad Thing as it eliminates the excuse that one needs to be out back drinking because the fire must be tended.
This is also why any respectable recipe that requires beer will ask for one bottle + one tablespoon.
You should try a WRT160N. I got one of those after trying and failing to get 3 old WRT54Gv6's to run DD-WRT properly and with some amount of stability. My WRT160N has been rock-solid. Time since my last power outage:
Firmware: DD-WRT v24-sp2 (12/19/10) mini
Time: 23:27:12 up 38 days, 6:08, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
Will anyone ever create a social network firmly rooted in personal privacy? Are the two mutually exclusive?
How in the hell would a social network work when you keep everything private? That's called a diary. They sell those at Ideal Stationary for $15 if you want a fancy one.
Has anyone reviewed the Google+ Terms of Service? I'm wondering if they can just change this them on a whim. Something tells me that if Google+ were truly successful, then at some point in the future they would change the ToS to incorporate reductions in privacy. However, if the ToS were a two-way, I don't know, 'contract', where users actually have contractual rights to their information, then perhaps that would be something more interesting to those who are concerned about privacy.
9.4 Other than the limited license set forth in Section 11, Google acknowledges and agrees that it obtains no right, title or interest from you (or your licensors) under these Terms in or to any Content that you submit, post, transmit or display on, or through, the Services, including any intellectual property rights which subsist in that Content (whether those rights happen to be registered or not, and wherever in the world those rights may exist). Unless you have agreed otherwise in writing with Google, you agree that you are responsible for protecting and enforcing those rights and that Google has no obligation to do so on your behalf.
11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services.
11.2 You agree that this license includes a right for Google to make such Content available to other companies, organizations or individuals with whom Google has relationships for the provision of syndicated services, and to use such Content in connection with the provision of those services.
11.3 You understand that Google, in performing the required technical steps to provide the Services to our users, may (a) transmit or distribute your Content over various public networks and in various media; and (b) make such changes to your Content as are necessary to conform and adapt that Content to the technical requirements of connecting networks, devices, services or media. You agree that this license shall permit Google to take these actions.
11.4 You confirm and warrant to Google that you have all the rights, power and authority necessary to grant the above license.
It's pretty much the same as every other social network. Facebook used to claim ownership over everything you submitted, but their ToS was modified a while ago to simply grant them license to use the content you submit as they wish. Yes, that license is irrevocable, but that's the Internet for you. You don't have to play if you don't want to.
If Google were to make changes to their Terms of Service and the Google+ Privacy Policy, they would not be able to retroactively apply that to data that was submitted before the change unless you have agreed to the changes (which basically means continuing to use the service). If you contact Google and say that you don't agree to the new terms, they would essentially have to remove your data, or at least not use it in any way that wasn't permitted by the terms at the time you submitted it.
Slashdot Mirror
Why would you say that? ZeniMax has to defend their trademarks. Obviously, they would never take actual legal action against Notch for this, but they have to send a cease and desist in order to protect themselves during potential future litigation against companies that DO infringe upon their trademarks in a way that COULD harm ZeniMax. Why this is newsworthy beats me.
Windows and Office were around before 1998.
What makes 1998 relevant?
Actually, I'll agree that Windows Mobile was the best for a while, I used to use it long before iOS came out, and I stuck with it until Android came along. They just let it stagnate though because that's what MS do when they're the only game in town.
Same, and true. My last phone before my Droid X was a Samsung Omnia. WM6.1 was really showing its age at that point and I was ready to chuck my phone at the wall on several occasions.
Xbox may have done online gaming, but I hardly consider that "revolutionary" considering I'd already been gaming online for years before it. Evolutionary perhaps, but not revolutionary. Consoles such as the Dreamcast and PS2 had online gaming too.
Well perhaps "revolutionary" is too markety and buzzwordy but I was unaware of Dreamcast's online capabilities, and the PS2 required an additional modem part and not many games actually supported real online gameplay. Xbox Live was revolutionary in that it provided a framework that any game could use to provide online play and in which any gamer could use a single login and a single monthly fee to facilitate online play with any game on the console. There wasn't even anything like that (that was particularly successful) for the PC until Steam came around a full year after the Xbox was released.
We'd be a lot further ahead without Windows' effective monopoly on the OS market. It's taken a shift to mobile computing to break the stranglehold and start some innovation again.
There isn't a monopoly when there's competition. Microsoft is ruthless, but there has always been competition, and it's quite visible in various Windows and Macintosh releases. Just compare their releases and you'll see them taking ideas from each other over the years. Don't blame Microsoft just because nobody else had the drive to get their own new OS released. It would have been extremely difficult, but if there ever was something with enough innovation to stir up new competition, that would have happened.
Microsoft have given us.. well, I can't think of anything to be honest.
How about the most popular operating system in the world? The most popular office suite in the world? A PC UI that doesn't suck ass (yes, I'm implying that OS X is ugly and unusable)? The best OS for PDAs (by today's standard, Windows Mobile sucks, but it was the best back in the day). In later years, they revolutionized console gaming with the Xbox and the first major online console gaming service. And now we have Windows Phone 7 and the Metro UI which is basically an orgasm shooting directly into your optic nerves via theoretical syringes. And, perhaps most importantly, they gave all the Linux wannabes something to sling shit at.
Call me a shill or whatever it is you guys call people these days. Microsoft is not a company I adore, but they deserve some respect for how they have advanced personal computing over the last 30-odd years. If it wasn't for ol' Willy Gates and Paul Allen I don't think we would be even close to where we're at today.
If the flash file loads just fine when you visit the page you tested, then there's obviously a problem with webpagetest.
Someone fails to understand how MAC cloning works...
If by "someone" you mean "you". I'm assuming you think that by making your router clone your PC's MAC address, you are putting two copies of the same address on the same network, when in fact you are putting a copy of the address on a different network. Ports on a router lead to separate networks. Your "Internet" port (or similar) is the interface that is assigned the cloned address, and all other ports on your average consumer-level home network router are on a network separate from that.
I still don't get where you're going with this. Are you trying to make a point of some sort, or just insulting me in defense of radical Christian nutjobs everywhere?
In short, people who are not trained listeners, who do not have the best available audio equipment, and/or who simply aren't trying very hard, will very quickly make even the crappiest sounding codec appear to be completely transparent. Those people who can actually do a good job of a listening test are completely lost in the (huge) margin of error, as statistical noise.
My quick submit button finger made me forget to mention the fact that the test results will know when an individual couldn't correctly guess which was the codec and which was not, and I'm sure could quite easily filter out those who provided the wrong answers and those who provided no answers and release a set of results for "You audiophiles that spend way too much money on a system that you won't be listening to on these lossy codecs anyway even though you probably wouldn't be able to hear the difference regardless."
- Person B plays it back on his expensive home-theatre system with 0.03% THD, and expensive full-range speakers. He can tell the difference between the original and the encoding 100% of the time.
Ah, but can he? Even professionally-trained listeners on very expensive hi-fi setups have been thwarted by good lossy codecs and double-blind tests.
Perhaps "religious psychopath" isn't the correct phrase for what I'm trying to convey. Maybe "radical Christian nutjob" is more along the right track. "Religious psychopath" implies that all religious people are psychopaths.
What are you on about?
Is there a problem with loving my religious psychopath of an aunt or am I supposed to display hatred towards those who disagree with my views, family or not?
So far its the only flying vehicle that you can use to go from you home to Walmart and back.
Except for the fact that it would be extremely illegal and you will be fined and could lose your pilot's license.
but pretending that there must exist a single speciation event, rather than an accumulation of change
Kind of on that note: One day a few years back I was walking along a trail in the jungles of Hawaii with my extremely-religious aunt. As she was admiring all the beautiful flora and fauna she said "This is proof that God must exist. How else could all this beauty just instantly appear out of nowhere?" I wanted to say something but didn't feel like debating with a religious psychopath who also happens to be a family member that I love and don't really want mad at me. But that right there showed me that they really don't understand what evolution means. Perhaps it's because they don't care to investigate and learn about it, or maybe the information is simply overwritten and blocked by their belief in an almighty creator. Who knows? The fact is it's hopeless to try and teach them actual science.
It is impossible to judge audio codecs through subjective tests. Companies that manufacture loudspeakers have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on audio quality research- not in order to make their speakers better, but to understand the psychology behind the sounds that make people choose speaker A over speaker B in a showroom. They have discovered all sorts of quirks in human psychology and perception that they exploit to boost their sales, and they have little to do with overall 'quality'. Decades of expensive, meticulous, scientifically valid studies are responsible for the range of speakers you find at the average hifi shop, and even when several identical speakers are demonstrated (but the listener is told they are all different) most people will say that speaker number 2 sounds the best. The same applies to audio codecs. Even if you eliminate all sorts of hardware variables, then just listening to clip A, then B, then C and subjectively deciding which one sounds 'best' is totally unreliable. The results of this type of testing are completely useless. At the very least you would need to set up a triangle test, and to do this properly with 6 codecs in a controlled environment would take a very long time and the results still wouldn't correlate with true 'quality' unless it was repeated many times with different hardware setups. Ignoring the psychological weaknesses in these types of tests, the playback hardware would colour the sound enough as to make the underlying test - the codec - invalid. The choice of music, the amplifier, the speakers or headphones, and the volume used for playback will all contribute their own distinctive characteristics to the audio so that person A will not be hearing the same test as person B. Forget codec wars. Just buy a decent pair of earphones.
You're completely missing the point. This test is a comparison between the lossless reference samples and the codecs. You have 3 Play buttons. One is the reference file (and it TELLS you it's the reference file), the other two are randomly assigned to be the identical reference file or the lossy encode and it DOESN'T tell you which. You are supposed to choose which one is the encode and how poor it sounds compared to the reference. It's an objective test that has nothing to do with your hardware because you aren't choosing which one you like best, you are choosing which one is exactly the same as the reference. Most of them I seriously couldn't tell the difference (using a Creative Audio card and Sennheiser HD555s).
am I the only one who always parses the name of that program as "dwarf the rapist"?
Yeah, and you were almost arrested for those business cards.
I read it as aluminum-helmet :/
I read it as aluminum-cement and said "wtf". Then I read it again and saw "aluminum-helmet" and said "wait WTF". Then I smacked myself in the face and read it right.
Parent is Rick Roll. Here's the real one:
We don't need no stinking badgers!
We need faster speeds here down on earth before we think of these "multi gigabit" speeds for interplanetary communications..
We HAVE faster speeds here on Earth. Blame your ISP for not utilizing what their network is capable of, preferring to intentionally cripple their services so they can charge through the nose for faster connections. But all that is really totally irrelevant because this Earth-Mars link is not in any way intended for consumer use.
How private is Gmail again?
How the shit is that even relevant?
but if they're requiring real names, then I'm not going to use it.
Umm... why not?
They published an unfinished product on a market that is already established and has the giant pain of trying to get users to move to their service.
They're actually trying to keep users from moving to their service right now. Invites are very limited at the moment while they're slowly increasing capacity and testing scalability. As you can see by OP, they failed to scale properly and ran out of disk space. There's a reason they're not in "beta" but in a "limited field trial." Unfortunately, it's a social network and a social network will never catch on if none of your friends can be on it with you... they have to perform a very delicate balancing act in order to make sure this rollout is successful. Personally, I'm really digging Google+... it takes a lot of things Facebook does and makes them a lot better and cleaner. There are all kinds of bugs, but bugs get fixed. Facebook has a formidable opponent in Google+, and I'm willing to wait as long as it takes for my friends to be granted access.
It seems to me that automating the operation of the BBQ is a Bad Thing as it eliminates the excuse that one needs to be out back drinking because the fire must be tended.
This is also why any respectable recipe that requires beer will ask for one bottle + one tablespoon.
You should try a WRT160N. I got one of those after trying and failing to get 3 old WRT54Gv6's to run DD-WRT properly and with some amount of stability. My WRT160N has been rock-solid. Time since my last power outage:
Firmware: DD-WRT v24-sp2 (12/19/10) mini
Time: 23:27:12 up 38 days, 6:08, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
installed hidden software
But I thought Macs were immune to malware...
Will anyone ever create a social network firmly rooted in personal privacy? Are the two mutually exclusive?
How in the hell would a social network work when you keep everything private? That's called a diary. They sell those at Ideal Stationary for $15 if you want a fancy one.
Has anyone reviewed the Google+ Terms of Service? I'm wondering if they can just change this them on a whim. Something tells me that if Google+ were truly successful, then at some point in the future they would change the ToS to incorporate reductions in privacy. However, if the ToS were a two-way, I don't know, 'contract', where users actually have contractual rights to their information, then perhaps that would be something more interesting to those who are concerned about privacy.
Excerpt from Google Terms of Service:
9.4 Other than the limited license set forth in Section 11, Google acknowledges and agrees that it obtains no right, title or interest from you (or your licensors) under these Terms in or to any Content that you submit, post, transmit or display on, or through, the Services, including any intellectual property rights which subsist in that Content (whether those rights happen to be registered or not, and wherever in the world those rights may exist). Unless you have agreed otherwise in writing with Google, you agree that you are responsible for protecting and enforcing those rights and that Google has no obligation to do so on your behalf.
11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services.
11.2 You agree that this license includes a right for Google to make such Content available to other companies, organizations or individuals with whom Google has relationships for the provision of syndicated services, and to use such Content in connection with the provision of those services.
11.3 You understand that Google, in performing the required technical steps to provide the Services to our users, may (a) transmit or distribute your Content over various public networks and in various media; and (b) make such changes to your Content as are necessary to conform and adapt that Content to the technical requirements of connecting networks, devices, services or media. You agree that this license shall permit Google to take these actions.
11.4 You confirm and warrant to Google that you have all the rights, power and authority necessary to grant the above license.
It's pretty much the same as every other social network. Facebook used to claim ownership over everything you submitted, but their ToS was modified a while ago to simply grant them license to use the content you submit as they wish. Yes, that license is irrevocable, but that's the Internet for you. You don't have to play if you don't want to.
If Google were to make changes to their Terms of Service and the Google+ Privacy Policy, they would not be able to retroactively apply that to data that was submitted before the change unless you have agreed to the changes (which basically means continuing to use the service). If you contact Google and say that you don't agree to the new terms, they would essentially have to remove your data, or at least not use it in any way that wasn't permitted by the terms at the time you submitted it.