There is now a handy little executable called killnotes.exe floating around IBM (not sure if it's official), but it is unofficially standard for IBM employees on their computers. It just kills all notes processes so that it can start back up again. (after crashing notes would leave processes still open which is the reason for not being able to start back up. or at least its that way now - versions 7 and 8).
Problems with notes are the bane of my workday
I'm not really sure when google first added this feature, but you have been able to add a background picture for awhile now. I'm just not sure if that feature was introduced before or after bing. However, up until today you had to be signed into google to see the background picture and had to find the options and customize your google homepage before.
In fact the customized google homepage can add a lot of the different things you see on the yahoo homepage like news and weather, but with customization as to what you do and don't see. This seemed more like an attempt to promote an already existing feature of personalized google search. Though it is probably not a well liked feature, i would imagine. I stay away from it myself.
Most places I've been will accept $100 bills for even smaller payments of $10-$20. The one place I've found that won't is the DMV. Why a government office is the one place that won't accept $100 bills is beyond me.
That would require Gamestop to actually know whether or not the code for it had already been used. While, unlikely there is a possibility that the original owner never used the code for dlc in which case the packaging would be correct. It can't be expect for gamestop to know whether the code had been redeemed or not. This is also why I've seen a lot of used game stores not carry PC games because they have no way of knowing whether a cd key in a used game is still valid.
I wonder why you would find suck a law hideously broken. There was a story in montana of an 11 year old girl who shot and killed 2 intruders in her home. She didn't even know it at the time, but one was armed with a handgun and the two had stabbed a guy to death in a previous break-in. The fact that they probably would have killed her has nothing to do with the fact that hadn't threatened her with a weapon and I doubt you'd suggest we put an 11 year old girl in court and executed for murder charges for that.
I'm not normally in the process of defending MS, but in this case MS is leagues ahead of EA. I was able to run a complete version of windows 7 beta for months before it came out without paying a dime.
"'In this case, we did not ask that this site be taken down, only that Microsoft copyrighted content be removed,' said a Microsoft spokeswoman."
This is total, exquisite bullshit. The fact is, a DMCA request in this case triggers a site takedown if the owner disagrees with taking down the material.
Did MS verbally utter the request, "Will you please take down the site?" No, they didn't.
Did they press a bright green legal button labelled, "Push here to initiate site takedown process"? Yes, they did.
As far as I know a DMCA request does not trigger a site takedown if the owner disagrees and files a counter-DMCA notice. The fact that sites have been taken down from it has been more from companies going above and beyond what is required by law, which unfortunately seems to be the standard rather than the exception right now.
the only console based FPS of the time to even offer local multiplayer and co-op.. there were a few years where games developers just seemed to stop doing that for whatever reason.
I'm not really sure what years you are talking about. Timesplitters and Perfect Dark were both released in 2000 for the PS2 and N64. Gamecube and xbox were released at the end of 2001. Halo I guess would have been the first one released for the xbox, since it was released with the launch. Timesplitters 2 was released in 2002 for the xbox, gamecube, and PS2, had a ton of multiplayer modes, weapons, character stats, bots, and a mapmaker. Tribes Aerial Assault was also released in 2002. I also seem to recall various bond games released over that time period as bond games seem to keep getting made in order to recreate the success of goldeneye. The only way Halo might have been the only unique game of the time with that is if you wanted a good FPS during the first few months the xbox was released and that was the only console you were looking at.
I wouldn't really put super mario galaxy into any kind of a hard category. I had a few friends trading off with me through that, but we still managed to get every star in under a week. Deaths were more from just screwing up and were few and far between.
In response to both you and the GP, there is also a difference, at least in my mind, between the difficulty to beat a game and the difficulty to to achieve some kind of 100% completion. I've felt quite a few games have been easy to complete, but spending hours hunting down some hidden object gets to be both annoying, and frustrating.
Mario Kart took a few hours to get used to using a wiimote, but after that the mirror cups were not that hard to beat. With a gamecube controller the mirror cups were easy, well, unless you count random blue shells 10ft from the finish line as a difficulty. I don't really consider the staff ghosts part of the games difficulty, though they are incredibly hard to beat (and yes I did manage to beat the expert staff ghost on rainbow road).
The New Super Mario Bros is definitely a challenge though. I haven't had the time to make it all the way through that yet though. But that game is enough of a challenge even without needing to collect all of the 3 large coins in every level.
Even games that are usually considered to be hard games have a difference between being hard and having 100% completion. I've managed to beat both Halo and COD4 on their hardest difficulties and enjoyed the challenge. However, spending hours hunting down skulls and intelligence pieces and completing every achievement is not something I would enjoy spending hours doing. Beating a game is one thing. Spending hours hunting down some arbitrary challenge just so your screen says 100% instead of 98% is another entirely. Even though I have spent the time to get that 100% completion on some games, I usually don't factor extra challenges in as the majority of gamers, even hardcore gamers, are often ok without extra random challenges.
I don't really know what the specifics were, but this is the quote from the end of the article (yeah, I guess I never should have expected slashdot users to read the article)
"You can make any part of the phone not work. You definitely don't get to run code, but there's lots of nasty things you can do. You can make applications not work, make it so that you can't remove this config file,"
Of course this does all rely on the user being stupid enough to trust the certificate and install the new config file just to get that far.
The other part of the attack deals with the iphone in that it can change the mobileconfig file and allow the attacker to set the HTTP proxy. Then make is so you cannot remove the new config file.
If I remember the articles what you said is correct. There were accounts that were hacked through phishing and bugs in IE6. Actual attacks on google did not succeed and had nothing to do with IE6.
The iPad is not a general-purpose computing device. It cannot be compared to, nor can it show the direction of, the market for general-purpose computers.
While this is true that it is not meant to be a general-purpose computer device, that is the market that it is competing with. I can easily find netbooks that are similar in size that have all the functionality and then some for a lower or similar price. I understand that I am not in the target market for this device, but I fail to see how this is not in direct competition to netbooks. Does a touchscreen and being locked down somehow take it into its own market? For the price am I somehow missing how this provides any benefit over a cheaper product?
While I do agree with most of what you said and 99.9% of toolbars are nothing but useless spyware, there are a few actual useful ones. Just because so many companies have built useless toolbars doesn't mean that there can't be a legitimately useful one amoung the clutter. The Web Developer toolbar is a favorite I usually have installed in firefox as it has a lot of useful tools/shortcuts. Then again I also usually even disable the bookmarks toolbar as the dropdown menu works quite well and i don't like giving up screen space.
Also, a lot of those users with 4-6 toolbars usually manage to hide at least a few of them in the browser window without uninstalling them. Pulling up add-remove programs while removing something else and seeing a list of toolbars is alway an unwelcome surprise. Especially when they need to be convinced that they really don't need all 6 toolbars...
Troll? I know the parent missed the point of the GP that the operating system should not depend on an html rendering engine of a buggy browser, but is quite far from a troll. He brings up a good point. There are a lot of apps that for right or wrong use the IE rendering engine, including plenty of in house applications.
As far as removing IE goes, iexplorer.exe will get rid of the gui leaving just the engine behind it. However, removing an html rendering engine should not break an operating system. Years ago I mistakenly tried to forcibly remove the rest of the engine from windows xp and ended up with more errors and problems than I could figure out. It breaks windows explorer and if I remember correctly causes internet connection problems since connection properties are configured through IE.
Though I would have to call into question how much any modern OS depends on an HTML renderer. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe both KDE and GNOME would be able to operate with only minor lost functionality without an html rendering engine. I know khelp uses an html library (that oddly is not installed in opensuse by default). GTK+ and QT can both use webkit, but are in no way dependent on it.
Well, I guess you could say the US government has already done that. In fact for the capturing, killing, or providing information leading to the capturing or killing of Osama bin Laden could net you the nice amount of $50 million dollars. I guess wired just has a better marketing campaign.
Actually, I probably would say that directly to 3 police officers. I'd be joking of course, and believe it or not there are many officers with a sense of humor. Very dark humor at that. Hell, for part of the joke I'd probably even ask if I could borrow their gun. I think I actually have had a conversation like that with a police officer. Context can make all the difference, as a phrase like that can have very different meanings based off nothing more than inflection of voice.
Umm, taste like its supposed to? This has already been covered to death, but for optimum flavor coffee is supposed to be brewed at around 200 degrees F.
Not only that, but slashdot covered the release of galaxy zoo and covered it again when it found a rare specimen. I spent quite a bit of time going through pictures when it first launched, but the interest had died off before it changed to Galaxy Zoo 2. It seems to have improved quite a bit since the original, but I wouldn't have imagined adding extra pictures to every page is enough to get to the front page of slashdot. Especially since as you said that change was made back in February.
I came just to suggest ultravnc single-click as well. Works wonders for people behind firewalls and restrictive routers. Dyndns helps so you don't have to recreate the executable all the time. Mix that in with a home server and all you need to do is have somebody click a link and run the software. Also, I've been kicked off XP computers when the user hits ctrl+alt+delete. Vista + Aero causes some issues, but does work with a very delayed response and hitting the refresh screen button after every command. It slipped my mind to try with aero disabled the one time I tried it with aero, but I was on the phone with someone competent enough to follow simple instructions when I could see occasional update on her screen. And for the more paranoid users it can be setup to kick you out after a certain amount of time (default is 5 minutes i believe). The customizable pictures and phrases is nice too.
You are even more right than you know.
*Possible Spoiler Warning*
In the book it was the Higgs-Boson experiment at the LHC at the exact time certain radiation passed through earth that caused the flashforward that killed so many crows. It looks like the birds just want to save their own lives and prevent us from knowing our possible futures.
Slashdot Mirror
There is now a handy little executable called killnotes.exe floating around IBM (not sure if it's official), but it is unofficially standard for IBM employees on their computers. It just kills all notes processes so that it can start back up again. (after crashing notes would leave processes still open which is the reason for not being able to start back up. or at least its that way now - versions 7 and 8).
Problems with notes are the bane of my workday
Oddly enough just after reading I stumbled upon this article: Driving a Real World Car like a Video Game Car.
I'm not really sure when google first added this feature, but you have been able to add a background picture for awhile now. I'm just not sure if that feature was introduced before or after bing. However, up until today you had to be signed into google to see the background picture and had to find the options and customize your google homepage before.
In fact the customized google homepage can add a lot of the different things you see on the yahoo homepage like news and weather, but with customization as to what you do and don't see. This seemed more like an attempt to promote an already existing feature of personalized google search. Though it is probably not a well liked feature, i would imagine. I stay away from it myself.
Most places I've been will accept $100 bills for even smaller payments of $10-$20. The one place I've found that won't is the DMV. Why a government office is the one place that won't accept $100 bills is beyond me.
That would require Gamestop to actually know whether or not the code for it had already been used. While, unlikely there is a possibility that the original owner never used the code for dlc in which case the packaging would be correct. It can't be expect for gamestop to know whether the code had been redeemed or not. This is also why I've seen a lot of used game stores not carry PC games because they have no way of knowing whether a cd key in a used game is still valid.
and now I feel like an idiot. My post links to a page saying that my original article was a fake.
I wonder why you would find suck a law hideously broken. There was a story in montana of an 11 year old girl who shot and killed 2 intruders in her home. She didn't even know it at the time, but one was armed with a handgun and the two had stabbed a guy to death in a previous break-in. The fact that they probably would have killed her has nothing to do with the fact that hadn't threatened her with a weapon and I doubt you'd suggest we put an 11 year old girl in court and executed for murder charges for that.
I'm not normally in the process of defending MS, but in this case MS is leagues ahead of EA. I was able to run a complete version of windows 7 beta for months before it came out without paying a dime.
They have identified our signal, but the problem is that nobody wants meet meat.
"'In this case, we did not ask that this site be taken down, only that Microsoft copyrighted content be removed,' said a Microsoft spokeswoman."
This is total, exquisite bullshit. The fact is, a DMCA request in this case triggers a site takedown if the owner disagrees with taking down the material.
Did MS verbally utter the request, "Will you please take down the site?" No, they didn't.
Did they press a bright green legal button labelled, "Push here to initiate site takedown process"? Yes, they did.
As far as I know a DMCA request does not trigger a site takedown if the owner disagrees and files a counter-DMCA notice. The fact that sites have been taken down from it has been more from companies going above and beyond what is required by law, which unfortunately seems to be the standard rather than the exception right now.
the only console based FPS of the time to even offer local multiplayer and co-op.. there were a few years where games developers just seemed to stop doing that for whatever reason.
I'm not really sure what years you are talking about. Timesplitters and Perfect Dark were both released in 2000 for the PS2 and N64. Gamecube and xbox were released at the end of 2001. Halo I guess would have been the first one released for the xbox, since it was released with the launch. Timesplitters 2 was released in 2002 for the xbox, gamecube, and PS2, had a ton of multiplayer modes, weapons, character stats, bots, and a mapmaker. Tribes Aerial Assault was also released in 2002. I also seem to recall various bond games released over that time period as bond games seem to keep getting made in order to recreate the success of goldeneye. The only way Halo might have been the only unique game of the time with that is if you wanted a good FPS during the first few months the xbox was released and that was the only console you were looking at.
I wouldn't really put super mario galaxy into any kind of a hard category. I had a few friends trading off with me through that, but we still managed to get every star in under a week. Deaths were more from just screwing up and were few and far between.
In response to both you and the GP, there is also a difference, at least in my mind, between the difficulty to beat a game and the difficulty to to achieve some kind of 100% completion. I've felt quite a few games have been easy to complete, but spending hours hunting down some hidden object gets to be both annoying, and frustrating.
Mario Kart took a few hours to get used to using a wiimote, but after that the mirror cups were not that hard to beat. With a gamecube controller the mirror cups were easy, well, unless you count random blue shells 10ft from the finish line as a difficulty. I don't really consider the staff ghosts part of the games difficulty, though they are incredibly hard to beat (and yes I did manage to beat the expert staff ghost on rainbow road).
The New Super Mario Bros is definitely a challenge though. I haven't had the time to make it all the way through that yet though. But that game is enough of a challenge even without needing to collect all of the 3 large coins in every level.
Even games that are usually considered to be hard games have a difference between being hard and having 100% completion. I've managed to beat both Halo and COD4 on their hardest difficulties and enjoyed the challenge. However, spending hours hunting down skulls and intelligence pieces and completing every achievement is not something I would enjoy spending hours doing. Beating a game is one thing. Spending hours hunting down some arbitrary challenge just so your screen says 100% instead of 98% is another entirely. Even though I have spent the time to get that 100% completion on some games, I usually don't factor extra challenges in as the majority of gamers, even hardcore gamers, are often ok without extra random challenges.
I don't really know what the specifics were, but this is the quote from the end of the article (yeah, I guess I never should have expected slashdot users to read the article)
"You can make any part of the phone not work. You definitely don't get to run code, but there's lots of nasty things you can do. You can make applications not work, make it so that you can't remove this config file,"
Of course this does all rely on the user being stupid enough to trust the certificate and install the new config file just to get that far.
The other part of the attack deals with the iphone in that it can change the mobileconfig file and allow the attacker to set the HTTP proxy. Then make is so you cannot remove the new config file.
If I remember the articles what you said is correct. There were accounts that were hacked through phishing and bugs in IE6. Actual attacks on google did not succeed and had nothing to do with IE6.
The iPad is not a general-purpose computing device. It cannot be compared to, nor can it show the direction of, the market for general-purpose computers.
While this is true that it is not meant to be a general-purpose computer device, that is the market that it is competing with. I can easily find netbooks that are similar in size that have all the functionality and then some for a lower or similar price. I understand that I am not in the target market for this device, but I fail to see how this is not in direct competition to netbooks. Does a touchscreen and being locked down somehow take it into its own market? For the price am I somehow missing how this provides any benefit over a cheaper product?
While I do agree with most of what you said and 99.9% of toolbars are nothing but useless spyware, there are a few actual useful ones. Just because so many companies have built useless toolbars doesn't mean that there can't be a legitimately useful one amoung the clutter. The Web Developer toolbar is a favorite I usually have installed in firefox as it has a lot of useful tools/shortcuts. Then again I also usually even disable the bookmarks toolbar as the dropdown menu works quite well and i don't like giving up screen space.
Also, a lot of those users with 4-6 toolbars usually manage to hide at least a few of them in the browser window without uninstalling them. Pulling up add-remove programs while removing something else and seeing a list of toolbars is alway an unwelcome surprise. Especially when they need to be convinced that they really don't need all 6 toolbars...
Troll? I know the parent missed the point of the GP that the operating system should not depend on an html rendering engine of a buggy browser, but is quite far from a troll. He brings up a good point. There are a lot of apps that for right or wrong use the IE rendering engine, including plenty of in house applications.
As far as removing IE goes, iexplorer.exe will get rid of the gui leaving just the engine behind it. However, removing an html rendering engine should not break an operating system. Years ago I mistakenly tried to forcibly remove the rest of the engine from windows xp and ended up with more errors and problems than I could figure out. It breaks windows explorer and if I remember correctly causes internet connection problems since connection properties are configured through IE.
Though I would have to call into question how much any modern OS depends on an HTML renderer. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe both KDE and GNOME would be able to operate with only minor lost functionality without an html rendering engine. I know khelp uses an html library (that oddly is not installed in opensuse by default). GTK+ and QT can both use webkit, but are in no way dependent on it.
I think you meant this comic. Though I doubt the fact that they both mention drawing graphs is pure chance.
Well, I guess you could say the US government has already done that. In fact for the capturing, killing, or providing information leading to the capturing or killing of Osama bin Laden could net you the nice amount of $50 million dollars. I guess wired just has a better marketing campaign.
Actually, I probably would say that directly to 3 police officers. I'd be joking of course, and believe it or not there are many officers with a sense of humor. Very dark humor at that. Hell, for part of the joke I'd probably even ask if I could borrow their gun. I think I actually have had a conversation like that with a police officer. Context can make all the difference, as a phrase like that can have very different meanings based off nothing more than inflection of voice.
Umm, taste like its supposed to? This has already been covered to death, but for optimum flavor coffee is supposed to be brewed at around 200 degrees F.
Not only that, but slashdot covered the release of galaxy zoo and covered it again when it found a rare specimen. I spent quite a bit of time going through pictures when it first launched, but the interest had died off before it changed to Galaxy Zoo 2. It seems to have improved quite a bit since the original, but I wouldn't have imagined adding extra pictures to every page is enough to get to the front page of slashdot. Especially since as you said that change was made back in February.
I came just to suggest ultravnc single-click as well. Works wonders for people behind firewalls and restrictive routers. Dyndns helps so you don't have to recreate the executable all the time. Mix that in with a home server and all you need to do is have somebody click a link and run the software. Also, I've been kicked off XP computers when the user hits ctrl+alt+delete. Vista + Aero causes some issues, but does work with a very delayed response and hitting the refresh screen button after every command. It slipped my mind to try with aero disabled the one time I tried it with aero, but I was on the phone with someone competent enough to follow simple instructions when I could see occasional update on her screen. And for the more paranoid users it can be setup to kick you out after a certain amount of time (default is 5 minutes i believe). The customizable pictures and phrases is nice too.
You are even more right than you know.
*Possible Spoiler Warning*
In the book it was the Higgs-Boson experiment at the LHC at the exact time certain radiation passed through earth that caused the flashforward that killed so many crows. It looks like the birds just want to save their own lives and prevent us from knowing our possible futures.