Worked great, right up until I wanted to write an email to someone and cc'd to three other people. Someone needs to be drug out into the street and shot for the user interface around composing/viewing/editing to/cc/bcc headers. *Points to Apple Mail as an example*.
Wait, are you seriously suggesting that Apple Mail has the superior interface here? You gotta be kidding me. The auto-complete is nothing short of pathological. I use both TBird and Mail.app on a daily basis, and neither one is particularly good at entering addresses. I certainly wouldn't view Mail.app as a shining example of a better way to do things.
Back when I was in college some 20-some years ago, one of the organisations I was in occasionally had bake sales to raise funds. We invariably collected much more money when the items were left unpriced and the buyer just donated some amount. It's interesting to see this model being experimented with in the real world.
There's stuff that we block before we even know who it's addressed to. At one point (I haven't checked recently) we had over 1 MILLLION IP addresses that were being blocked from even connecting to our MX servers (for a 24 hour rolling block none less) because of their behavior.
MAILFAIL. I've had problems with other mail providers who do this kind of thing. Somebody sends me a message, but I never receive it because their host fell into the bad behavior block. They never get a bounce, and get pissed at me for not answering their email. Or worse, I miss an opportunity, like "Hey, I'm going to be in town next week, let's get together".
I understand why service providers do this sort of filtering. It's easy, practically free in terms of server resources, and cuts down on a huge volume of unwanted mail. The legitimate mail that also gets filtered out is statistically insignificant.
Of course, what's statistically insignificant on the large scale may be extremely significant on the small scale, such as to the sender and recipient. As the recipient I'm paying for reliable mail delivery. I'm not going to pay a provider which systematically drops a portion of my mail.
I'm pretty sure that even when the Bill of Rights was written, courts would have considered a vehicle (say, a carriage or boat) to be a "place to be searched" for the purposes of issuing a warrant. Even if the vehicle is in motion, "Bob's carriage" or "the good ship Lollipop" describes a particular place to be searched.
No, the last two paragraphs weren't jokes, and I stand by them. You can't just make shit up then bitch about "religious discrimination" when no one else takes you seriously. If you can, I'm going to found the First Church of Chelloveck and start with the basic tenet that God wants us to only work 1 day and have 6 days of rest. Maybe for fun I'll throw in that He also doesn't want us to wear pants, but on special holy days you can cover up your unmentionables with a smiley face cut from the hubcap of a 1966 Ford Mustang.
I don't care if one nutcase claims to be a follower of jedism and says that he has to wear his hooded robe when he's in a grocery store. I don't expect the store to honor that kind of nonsense. And yeah, most (if not all) mainstream religions have equally arbitrary rules. The difference is that of scale. One person claiming special treatment is a nutjob. It's not a religion (in the sense that it can be discriminated against) until that nutjob is backed up by lots of his nutty friends who all believe the same crap.
This must be some fundamentalist Jedi Orthodox sect. I see nothing in the Holy Films that says Jedi must follow a dress code. The robes appear to be a fashion statement, or perhaps a uniform in the same manner as a priest's collar. Hoods are quite obviously optional, as even the most devout Jedi frequently appear without them.
So no, it's not religious discrimination, even if you grant that "Jedi" is a religion. If I were to run around shirtless for religious reasons (and just where in the Bible does it ever say Jesus wore a shirt?) I expect I'd still be kicked out of restaurants and other places with "No Shoes, No Shirt, No Service" signs. And I'd expect to be locked up for public indecency if I practiced the viewpoint that if God hadn't intended for us to be seen naked, He darned well would have given us clothes at birth.
All appearances to the contrary aside, you can't just make up any old shit and claim religious protection. Or rather, you can but don't expect the rest of the world to play along. At the very least you need a substantial number of other whack-jobs with the same belief system to back you up on it.
Why not encourage environmentally friendly behavior, instead of punishing for adhering to the status quo.
Even better, adopt TicketMaster's model and charge extra for the electronic version. Just call it a "convenience fee". Why should the company take a hit for providing convenience? They can go digital and increase your revenues at the same time. Win-win!
Listen guys, you have to know that everything FOX says to you is a lie. We can't go on like this, with one corporation destroying our country. It's time we did something about Murdoch.
"...And then I had this dream that my whole family was just cartoon characters, and that our success had led to some crazy propaganda network called 'Fox News'."
Best. Simpsons. Quote. Ever. (Though IMHO Fox is a symptom of the problem, not the cause.)
Nope, no such luck. This has got to be the lamest thing I've ever seen come out of Google. The "fast flip" is just a bunch of screen shots of articles from various sites. Imagine that someone went to, say, Slashdot, clicked on an article, and took a screen shot of the browser window. Repeat for each article. Then they arranged them all with previous/next buttons to "fast flip" from one to another. That's exactly what Google has done here. Just a bunch of static PNGs. Color me unimpressed.
IMHO any person who sends a child to a private school, or even a neighboring government school, should be exempt from the School Tax for that year (with the tuition receipt used as proof). They should be allowed to keep the money they labored to earn for themselves, and direct it to whatever school they choose, rather than have to pay TWO tuitions. That's called liberty.
Yeah, and people without kids shouldn't have to pay to educate someone else's brats. Why should they be forced to pay school tax? Ditto for people with kids who are not yet of school age, and for people whose kids have graduated. Only people with kids actually going to school should pay. Of course, that will make getting an education far too expensive for a lot of families, so a lot of kids will go without an education. But that's only fair, right? Everyone pays their own way, and gets what they pay for, right?
I just looked, and that is not a $28 game. From the screenshots it seems to be a rehash of Dungeon Master, with a crude isometric perspective instead of first-person. Don't get me wrong, Dungeon Master was a great game -- 20 years ago. I might drop $5 on it now, out of nostalgia.
Okay, this game has a Mac version, so I can try it out without firing up a Windows VM. Cool. I download and install the demo. Fire it up... "GenForge 5 was unable to load any of the graphics. The game is unable to locate the files on the hard drive. Note that GenForge 5 is not compatible with case-sensitive hard drives or devices." Um, Mr. Game Developer, sir? Are you being deliberately stupid? You know that the game has a problem with case-sensitive devices. You can detect it and issue an error message. Would it have been so hard to actually, you know... FIX THE PROBLEM instead of just bitching about it? FAIL.
Of course, you only get that message if you start in windowed mode. If you start the game in full-screen mode (the default) you get a black screen, no mouse cursor, and no response to CMD-tab or other keyboard shortcuts. And no message. I finally got out of it by hitting return, so I'm guessing that the message was in a dialog displayed underneath the full-screen blackness. Fat lot of good that does. EPIC FAIL.
So, graphics 20 years behind the times... Inability to use consistent case for creating and opening files... Trapping the user on a blank screen when a problem arises. Dude, I wouldn't be worried about piracy. It's the least of your problems.
For the record, I'm a cheap bastard when it comes to games. If they're too expensive I don't pirate them, I simply don't play them. I have to be pretty darned interested in a game to pay more than $20 for it. If it's under $20 I might be willing to take a chance if it looks decent and the demo is fun. Bring it down under $10 and there's a good chance I'll buy it just based on screenshots and a description. Once you get under $5 I'll buy it from the description alone, if it sounds interesting.
There are lots of fun, inexpensive games out there. I've bought quite a number of oldies but goodies from GoG, Impulse, and Steam just because they were cheap enough to be worth taking a chance on. Don't waste my time with a game over $20 unless it's something really special.
I became a U.S. citizen sometime before 9/11, and the form for that still asked me whether I had worked for the government of Germany between the years 1933 and 1945. No joke.
Um, and...? You say "sometime before 9/11", so let's guess that this was in 2000. At that point 1945 was only 55 years in the past. It's not inconceivable that someone in their early twenties could have been working for the German government in 1945, and now in their late seventies wants to become a US citizen.
The question itself may or may not be relevant for citizenship, but there were certainly people alive in 2000 who could truthfully answer "yes" to it. Even now it's only about 10 years later; those same people would be in their late eighties. That question will still be applicable for at least the next 20 years.
I don't know about you, but in my school (public school in Michigan, class of '84) we were specifically taught and graded on handwriting, at least through elementary school. In junior high and high school, you're right. It wasn't taught separately. You would be marked down if your writing was illegible, though. Ditto for poor spelling and grammar. In high school I took a typing course (on manual typewriters!) as an elective. Not many boys in my class did, but I knew I was going to need it in college. I wasn't even thinking of programming at the time, just things like term papers. That course paid off in spades later on.
Now my kids are being taught something called "keyboarding" in elementary school. I'm not really familiar with the details. I assume it's typing for the computer age. I'm pretty sure it's not a music class.:-)
I don't think typing (or keyboarding) should be a mandatory course in high school. Will it be useful later in life? Sure. But you can get along without formal knowledge of it. It's about as useful as wood shop or sewing or photography or most of the other general electives. I do think it should be taught at a younger age along side of handwriting, and offered as a formal course in high school, but not forced at that point.
Hell, with any luck we'll have direct neural interfaces by the time my kids have kids of their own in school, and "typing" will be a quaint relic that only old people bother with.
"Back in my day, we didn't have this newfangled "thoughting" nonsense! If we wanted to tell a computer something, we had to enter it letter-by-letter, on a board which had over 100 buttons! We did it so much that we memorized the layout, and could type without even looking at the buttons. And we didn't have 3D views rendered directly onto our retinas, either. We had to look at flat pictures on little glowing screens. And we liked it that way, dad-gummit!"
If I were the original story author, the first thing I would do would be to plug in a Kill-o-watt and determine exactly what the power consumption was, before going through lots of effort to get rid of the card.
Amen, brother. My guess is that the power savings from removing the video card is insignificant compared to the power needs of the rest of the machine. Get a Kill-A-Watt; street price is less than $20. Let the thing run for a few hours with the card and without, and see if there's any noticeable difference.
Unless you think you're going to need a console frequently, or are going to be doing this with a lot of machines, it's almost certainly going to be better to just plug in a monitor. Just keep in mind that PS2 keyboards often can't be hot swapped. You may want to keep one plugged in all the time so you can use it without rebooting.
Regardless of the quality of the book, I can't bring myself to read anything with such a trashy subtitle. Anything claiming that it's "What ${SOMEONE} Doesn't Want You To Know" comes off as paranoid conspiracy-theory crap. ${THEY} don't want you to know about homeopathic remedies or engines that run on water; it's not surprising that ${THEY} don't want you to know the TRUTH about COMPUTER SECURITY either!
I'm ashamed of you, O'Reilly. You used to be good. I do notice that the subtitle in the image of the book's cover (here, on Amazon, and on the O'Reilly site) reads "The Ultimate Insider's Guide to Network Security", which, aside from the hyperbolic "Ultimate", is much better. I hope the paranoid version was a working title, and got changed to the sane one before publication.
Slashdot Mirror
That was exactly my meaning.
Wait, are you seriously suggesting that Apple Mail has the superior interface here? You gotta be kidding me. The auto-complete is nothing short of pathological. I use both TBird and Mail.app on a daily basis, and neither one is particularly good at entering addresses. I certainly wouldn't view Mail.app as a shining example of a better way to do things.
Back when I was in college some 20-some years ago, one of the organisations I was in occasionally had bake sales to raise funds. We invariably collected much more money when the items were left unpriced and the buyer just donated some amount. It's interesting to see this model being experimented with in the real world.
I tried living just on foods without chemicals, but I ended up getting very hungry...
MAILFAIL. I've had problems with other mail providers who do this kind of thing. Somebody sends me a message, but I never receive it because their host fell into the bad behavior block. They never get a bounce, and get pissed at me for not answering their email. Or worse, I miss an opportunity, like "Hey, I'm going to be in town next week, let's get together".
I understand why service providers do this sort of filtering. It's easy, practically free in terms of server resources, and cuts down on a huge volume of unwanted mail. The legitimate mail that also gets filtered out is statistically insignificant.
Of course, what's statistically insignificant on the large scale may be extremely significant on the small scale, such as to the sender and recipient. As the recipient I'm paying for reliable mail delivery. I'm not going to pay a provider which systematically drops a portion of my mail.
I'm pretty sure that even when the Bill of Rights was written, courts would have considered a vehicle (say, a carriage or boat) to be a "place to be searched" for the purposes of issuing a warrant. Even if the vehicle is in motion, "Bob's carriage" or "the good ship Lollipop" describes a particular place to be searched.
You mean trademarks like Gmail(tm) and the Google(tm) logo? Which are almost certainly being distributed as part of those apps?
Wow, that looks great for scrolling through photo album thumbnails. And for... um... No, wait, I'm sure I'll think of something...
No, the last two paragraphs weren't jokes, and I stand by them. You can't just make shit up then bitch about "religious discrimination" when no one else takes you seriously. If you can, I'm going to found the First Church of Chelloveck and start with the basic tenet that God wants us to only work 1 day and have 6 days of rest. Maybe for fun I'll throw in that He also doesn't want us to wear pants, but on special holy days you can cover up your unmentionables with a smiley face cut from the hubcap of a 1966 Ford Mustang.
I don't care if one nutcase claims to be a follower of jedism and says that he has to wear his hooded robe when he's in a grocery store. I don't expect the store to honor that kind of nonsense. And yeah, most (if not all) mainstream religions have equally arbitrary rules. The difference is that of scale. One person claiming special treatment is a nutjob. It's not a religion (in the sense that it can be discriminated against) until that nutjob is backed up by lots of his nutty friends who all believe the same crap.
This must be some fundamentalist Jedi Orthodox sect. I see nothing in the Holy Films that says Jedi must follow a dress code. The robes appear to be a fashion statement, or perhaps a uniform in the same manner as a priest's collar. Hoods are quite obviously optional, as even the most devout Jedi frequently appear without them.
So no, it's not religious discrimination, even if you grant that "Jedi" is a religion. If I were to run around shirtless for religious reasons (and just where in the Bible does it ever say Jesus wore a shirt?) I expect I'd still be kicked out of restaurants and other places with "No Shoes, No Shirt, No Service" signs. And I'd expect to be locked up for public indecency if I practiced the viewpoint that if God hadn't intended for us to be seen naked, He darned well would have given us clothes at birth.
All appearances to the contrary aside, you can't just make up any old shit and claim religious protection. Or rather, you can but don't expect the rest of the world to play along. At the very least you need a substantial number of other whack-jobs with the same belief system to back you up on it.
Even better, adopt TicketMaster's model and charge extra for the electronic version. Just call it a "convenience fee". Why should the company take a hit for providing convenience? They can go digital and increase your revenues at the same time. Win-win!
But can I crank up my Presence stat and force my enemies to surrender just due to my shear godliness?
"...And then I had this dream that my whole family was just cartoon characters, and that our success had led to some crazy propaganda network called 'Fox News'."
Best. Simpsons. Quote. Ever. (Though IMHO Fox is a symptom of the problem, not the cause.)
Nope, no such luck. This has got to be the lamest thing I've ever seen come out of Google. The "fast flip" is just a bunch of screen shots of articles from various sites. Imagine that someone went to, say, Slashdot, clicked on an article, and took a screen shot of the browser window. Repeat for each article. Then they arranged them all with previous/next buttons to "fast flip" from one to another. That's exactly what Google has done here. Just a bunch of static PNGs. Color me unimpressed.
Yeah, and people without kids shouldn't have to pay to educate someone else's brats. Why should they be forced to pay school tax? Ditto for people with kids who are not yet of school age, and for people whose kids have graduated. Only people with kids actually going to school should pay. Of course, that will make getting an education far too expensive for a lot of families, so a lot of kids will go without an education. But that's only fair, right? Everyone pays their own way, and gets what they pay for, right?
I just looked, and that is not a $28 game. From the screenshots it seems to be a rehash of Dungeon Master, with a crude isometric perspective instead of first-person. Don't get me wrong, Dungeon Master was a great game -- 20 years ago. I might drop $5 on it now, out of nostalgia.
Okay, this game has a Mac version, so I can try it out without firing up a Windows VM. Cool. I download and install the demo. Fire it up... "GenForge 5 was unable to load any of the graphics. The game is unable to locate the files on the hard drive. Note that GenForge 5 is not compatible with case-sensitive hard drives or devices." Um, Mr. Game Developer, sir? Are you being deliberately stupid? You know that the game has a problem with case-sensitive devices. You can detect it and issue an error message. Would it have been so hard to actually, you know... FIX THE PROBLEM instead of just bitching about it? FAIL.
Of course, you only get that message if you start in windowed mode. If you start the game in full-screen mode (the default) you get a black screen, no mouse cursor, and no response to CMD-tab or other keyboard shortcuts. And no message. I finally got out of it by hitting return, so I'm guessing that the message was in a dialog displayed underneath the full-screen blackness. Fat lot of good that does. EPIC FAIL.
So, graphics 20 years behind the times... Inability to use consistent case for creating and opening files... Trapping the user on a blank screen when a problem arises. Dude, I wouldn't be worried about piracy. It's the least of your problems.
For the record, I'm a cheap bastard when it comes to games. If they're too expensive I don't pirate them, I simply don't play them. I have to be pretty darned interested in a game to pay more than $20 for it. If it's under $20 I might be willing to take a chance if it looks decent and the demo is fun. Bring it down under $10 and there's a good chance I'll buy it just based on screenshots and a description. Once you get under $5 I'll buy it from the description alone, if it sounds interesting.
There are lots of fun, inexpensive games out there. I've bought quite a number of oldies but goodies from GoG, Impulse, and Steam just because they were cheap enough to be worth taking a chance on. Don't waste my time with a game over $20 unless it's something really special.
The key was "playable frame rate". This rig might be able to support a playable rate for Crysis on a single screen, but six? You gotta be kidding me.
Bah. Even McGyver fans wouldn't be able to do anything with that. At the very least they'd need a roll of duct tape or a paper clip as well.
Um, and...? You say "sometime before 9/11", so let's guess that this was in 2000. At that point 1945 was only 55 years in the past. It's not inconceivable that someone in their early twenties could have been working for the German government in 1945, and now in their late seventies wants to become a US citizen.
The question itself may or may not be relevant for citizenship, but there were certainly people alive in 2000 who could truthfully answer "yes" to it. Even now it's only about 10 years later; those same people would be in their late eighties. That question will still be applicable for at least the next 20 years.
I don't know about you, but in my school (public school in Michigan, class of '84) we were specifically taught and graded on handwriting, at least through elementary school. In junior high and high school, you're right. It wasn't taught separately. You would be marked down if your writing was illegible, though. Ditto for poor spelling and grammar. In high school I took a typing course (on manual typewriters!) as an elective. Not many boys in my class did, but I knew I was going to need it in college. I wasn't even thinking of programming at the time, just things like term papers. That course paid off in spades later on.
Now my kids are being taught something called "keyboarding" in elementary school. I'm not really familiar with the details. I assume it's typing for the computer age. I'm pretty sure it's not a music class. :-)
I don't think typing (or keyboarding) should be a mandatory course in high school. Will it be useful later in life? Sure. But you can get along without formal knowledge of it. It's about as useful as wood shop or sewing or photography or most of the other general electives. I do think it should be taught at a younger age along side of handwriting, and offered as a formal course in high school, but not forced at that point.
Hell, with any luck we'll have direct neural interfaces by the time my kids have kids of their own in school, and "typing" will be a quaint relic that only old people bother with.
"Back in my day, we didn't have this newfangled "thoughting" nonsense! If we wanted to tell a computer something, we had to enter it letter-by-letter, on a board which had over 100 buttons! We did it so much that we memorized the layout, and could type without even looking at the buttons. And we didn't have 3D views rendered directly onto our retinas, either. We had to look at flat pictures on little glowing screens. And we liked it that way, dad-gummit!"
Or maybe I'm thinking of something else...?
Amen, brother. My guess is that the power savings from removing the video card is insignificant compared to the power needs of the rest of the machine. Get a Kill-A-Watt; street price is less than $20. Let the thing run for a few hours with the card and without, and see if there's any noticeable difference.
Unless you think you're going to need a console frequently, or are going to be doing this with a lot of machines, it's almost certainly going to be better to just plug in a monitor. Just keep in mind that PS2 keyboards often can't be hot swapped. You may want to keep one plugged in all the time so you can use it without rebooting.
Aaarrgghhhh!! I didn't need to know there was a sequel! Kiss my afternoon goodbye...
Regardless of the quality of the book, I can't bring myself to read anything with such a trashy subtitle. Anything claiming that it's "What ${SOMEONE} Doesn't Want You To Know" comes off as paranoid conspiracy-theory crap. ${THEY} don't want you to know about homeopathic remedies or engines that run on water; it's not surprising that ${THEY} don't want you to know the TRUTH about COMPUTER SECURITY either!
I'm ashamed of you, O'Reilly. You used to be good. I do notice that the subtitle in the image of the book's cover (here, on Amazon, and on the O'Reilly site) reads "The Ultimate Insider's Guide to Network Security", which, aside from the hyperbolic "Ultimate", is much better. I hope the paranoid version was a working title, and got changed to the sane one before publication.
Final grade: B. Spelling and grammar mistakes undermine your message when discussing spelling and grammar.
If there was ever a time in which I wished Slashdot allowed arbitrary CSS in posts, this is it. My kingdom for some red ink!