Ditto. I don't dislike Chrome as a browser, but I hate the UI- its everything I hate in a UI, and more. From replacing labels with abstract pictures, to hiding menus within super-menus instead of having toolbars.
I can only hope the default GNOME version is more sane, as I do hate having to replace "themes".
Once you factor Google's ChromeOS in too, it starts to look even more incestuous.
Of course not all that surprising from Intel's perspective. They make their money from x86 chips, not selling software; they don't care what OS you run, as long as it runs on their hardware. If that means splashing a little cash on porting all the popular OSs to their hardware, I'm sure it's probably worth it for them.
I'm a little worried by the notion that the ads will be targeted , i.e. behavioural. All you'd need to do is buy 1 piece of underwear as an anniversary present, and suddenly your home office printer is churning out "Anne Summers sex toy discount" ads every couple of days...
Sending letters? Believe it or not, plenty of things still need to be sent through the physical post, and I'll be damned if I'm handwriting the accompanying letters in the 21st century.
My GF, who is a teacher, still prints vast amounts of classroom resources too.
Let us not forget the fact, incidentally, that MS still sells XP. You can still buy brand new computers (netbooks and nettops, for example) with XP on. Even if they faze it our right now, there will still be customers who have owned brand new XP-based PCs for mere months.
Let us also not forget that we are still firmly within MS's support period for XP. 60% of desktop users still have a cast iron promise from MS that XP will be supported until, what is it, 2014?
So "should have upgraded, morons!" does look somewhat ridiculous.
They were suing in the wrong flipping jurisdiction.
Spamhaus is a UK organisation. They do not have any business presence in Illinois, or the US in general, as far as I know. Suing them in Illinois is about as useful as suing them in North Korea.
If they really wanted damages then they would have sued them in the UK (a country which incidentally has notoriously strict defamation laws). The fact Spamhaus "didn't bloody care" was because it was a frivolous lawsuit 1000's of miles from home.
I'm guessing the reason they didn't is because the UK legal system isn't so easy to shop for an easy win.
Last I heard, XP still had about 60% market share to Win7's 10%. I'd say that should dictate where their priorities are, seeing as that is where all their customers are.
(Oblig.). If Ford had sold 1 million Focus's which are now being driven, but have now released a new version and sold only a few thousand, which one should be the safety priority? The new one (should have upgraded, you jerks!), or the one which is most used on the road?
If I'm listening to a song, sound is coming out of the device. I can always just hold the speaker up to a microphone and voila, copied content. Movies? Camcorders.
The quality might not be easy to achieve, but give the AV-philes a while with "HD" content and high-quality modern kit, you'd soon end up with something as good as VHS.
Games are trickier, but it's not the gaming industry's lobby we're really talking about here, is it.
All good experts talk about an "energy mix"- any over-dependence on a single source of energy is just asking for trouble- be it market volatility, or resourcing troubles, or whatever.
Solar seems particularly enticing as a micro-generation source. Photovoltaic cells have zero moving parts making them perfect for domestic use, by people who don't want to be on active maintenance alert. If every house in the country had a set of solar panels, that's a whole lot of energy being generated. You're completely right that it won't be 100% of what's needed, or even remotely close, but it still replaces a good swathe of power plants.
Same goes for other "opportunistic" renewables. You might not be able to get 100% of your energy from hydro, but if you've got a good spot for a dam, you might as well dam it and reap the rewards.
Lets say I sell you a car (I know I know, oblig.). You fork over £5000, I fork over the keys, you drive home. 1 month later, you wake up to find the car missing, and £5000 deposited in your bank account. You eventually notice I've emailed you saying "took the car back, cheers".
You'd obviously be pissed, refund or no. Even though no breaking or entering or mugging happened, you'd still be unhappy that something you thought you owned has suddenly up and gone.
Now lets say you complain, I tell you that by buying from me you actually agreed to a great big bundle of terms and conditions that I never forced you to read (but were available on my website, and pinned up on my shop wall, if you'd cared to look). Would you magically be less pissed?
Banner ads on websites only generate revenue if you click through to them. Often, only if you buy something through the referral link.
I tend to block ads on my netbook, because it's slow enough to load pages already, but generally I don't use ad blockers. Yet I can't remember any time I've ever clicked through to one, and I've definitely never ever bought anything through one.
If that fits your pattern, you're actually doing them a favour by blocking the adverts- at least that way they don't have to serve you the ad, eating up their bandwidth and such.
Relatedly, I'd be a lot more sympathetic to ads if they didn't seem to go out of their way to be annoying. Ads with sound effects are evil, and anything resource guzzling (like a heavy Flash ad or similar) is just cruel to anyone surfing on a low power device, or anyone who pays for their downloads by volume (such as mobile users). If they showed more restraint in their ad design, I'm sure a lot fewer people would feel the need to block them.
Can't you just hook a digibox (digital tuner) up to the TV?
In the UK, where the digital switchover is still going on, I'd wager that there are more people running an "old" TV with a digibox than there are who own a digital-ready TV. I haven't spoken to a single person who has replaced their TV for the sole purpose of the digital switchover.
"Alice tweeted about the big project..." "Alice phoned about the big project..." "Alice faxed about the big project..."
I'm not sure I see the pig problem. Don't get me wrong, I find Twitter itself frivolous and irritating. But I don't really see there being a big linguistics problem with the word "tweet" in it's current usage.
My current phone was a replacement for my poor deceased previous phone (which met it's untimely end at the hands of a cup of coffee), purchased for £12 from the supermarket.
Nokia 1661. No camera. But it does have a flashlight, FM radio, usual selection of calculator/calendar/snake/whathaveyou. And it makes phone calls/texts. Cheap, durable, purchased with no contract or anything like that.
Don't get me wrong, I intend to replace it properly soon enough. But just to point out that they are out there in pretty large numbers.
You just have to accept that if you can't have a camera, you're going to have to go without all the other fancy things too.
I've never really got how "viruses from space" would be particularly dangerous. Viruses and germs and such didn't get dangerous by accident- they're highly evolved, highly specialised, purpose built to infect their hosts.
How adapted is something from another world, with completely alien biology, likely to be for infecting humans and other animals?
Played as background music in every shop on the high street. Played on every radio station- even the ones that aren't full music stations. Played over TV adverts. Played in lifts. Played as freaking "on-hold" telephone music. Played as every ringtone of every teenager (and too many adults) for every text and phone call received on mobile phones.
I'm exposed to chart music every day in a hundred ways, and yet I never listen to the chart shows.
Student's in the UK are in an awful catch-22 at the moment. If they do well, people complain that their exams were worthless, and that they've only achieved what they have because everything's so much easier than "back in the day". If they get a mediocre (what might once have been considered "normal") grade, they're made to feel like failures, as A*s are supposedly so common.
Hooliganism is actually the end-stage of a very cunning government plan, whereby the entire British criminal element is imprisoned in foreign countries, at zero cost to the British tax payer.
Think of it as a modern version of the Australia plan.
Re:Bankers would rather eat their young...
on
Time To Dump XP?
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· Score: 1
I work for a bank, and ironically enough our desktops are wonderful little workstations- dual core Athlons with silent cooling, ample RAM, decent hard drives, ATI graphics cards on most. But they still run WinXP. IE6 too (although it's not internet accessing for 99% of employees; information security laws and all that jazz)
It's not the cost of the upgrade or the hardware, it's all the legacy apps that hold up the works. Ancient databases, '90s-era custom mainframe terminals, badly written IE-based progammes. The cost to upgrade is pretty mad.
There is a Win7 upgrade path in place (was a Vista upgrade path until not very long ago), but even then they're talking about MAYBE 2012 for full roll-out. Tricky business.
All we know about life formation is that it happened once. That is to say, we know that life does form, as we've seen it happen the once. Unless there was something UNIQUE about this (and no-one has ever provided any serious suggestions that there was) it is perfectly reasonable to assume it can happen multiple times.
GGGP may have been being a bit unscientific by saying "it will happen",but short of a truly astounding discovery that we haven't made yet (of the unique bit), consensus points to his sentiments being basically right.
Not to say that Titan has life, mind you. As you say, we don't even know if that variety of life is possible yet.
If you're like me (and most serious scientists, I gather) and believe life on Earth formed spontaneously, then it's reasonable enough to assume it can happen again. We have absolutely zero ideas how easy this is to happen, so there's no good reason to claim it can't be happening all the time.
If you're of a spiritual persuasion and believe life was kick started by some ghost or other, then you'll probably have to admit that there's no reason your omnipotent-being-of-choice doesn't do the same thing on every planet that it'd work on. Most holy texts are scrupulously silent on the subject of extraterrestrial life, so we mortals are left to just guess.
In short, it seems more likely that it'd happen again than not. And for all we know, Titan is paradise incarnate for methane-drinking, hydrogen breathing life.
Re:They opensourced the engine, but not the data.
on
Aquaria Goes Open Source
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· Score: 2, Informative
Later is exactly it.
I'm not saying that the developer ever will, but if they were to release it as a free download then it's not going to be now, while the game is still generating a few sales.
There's no saying they won't make it free years down the line. In the meantime, bite the bullet and reward them for their hard work with a little hard cash.
Slashdot Mirror
Ditto. I don't dislike Chrome as a browser, but I hate the UI- its everything I hate in a UI, and more. From replacing labels with abstract pictures, to hiding menus within super-menus instead of having toolbars.
I can only hope the default GNOME version is more sane, as I do hate having to replace "themes".
Just from a simple Google search:
http://www.osnews.com/story/23272/Android_Outsells_iPhone_in_the_US
Once you factor Google's ChromeOS in too, it starts to look even more incestuous.
Of course not all that surprising from Intel's perspective. They make their money from x86 chips, not selling software; they don't care what OS you run, as long as it runs on their hardware. If that means splashing a little cash on porting all the popular OSs to their hardware, I'm sure it's probably worth it for them.
Surely you would type his name "Ochocinco", not "85", though? Thus no problem, from a database point of view.
I'm a little worried by the notion that the ads will be targeted , i.e. behavioural. All you'd need to do is buy 1 piece of underwear as an anniversary present, and suddenly your home office printer is churning out "Anne Summers sex toy discount" ads every couple of days...
Sending letters? Believe it or not, plenty of things still need to be sent through the physical post, and I'll be damned if I'm handwriting the accompanying letters in the 21st century.
My GF, who is a teacher, still prints vast amounts of classroom resources too.
Let us not forget the fact, incidentally, that MS still sells XP. You can still buy brand new computers (netbooks and nettops, for example) with XP on. Even if they faze it our right now, there will still be customers who have owned brand new XP-based PCs for mere months.
Let us also not forget that we are still firmly within MS's support period for XP. 60% of desktop users still have a cast iron promise from MS that XP will be supported until, what is it, 2014?
So "should have upgraded, morons!" does look somewhat ridiculous.
It's OK with us guys. The girls are somewhat less accepting.
They were suing in the wrong flipping jurisdiction.
Spamhaus is a UK organisation. They do not have any business presence in Illinois, or the US in general, as far as I know. Suing them in Illinois is about as useful as suing them in North Korea.
If they really wanted damages then they would have sued them in the UK (a country which incidentally has notoriously strict defamation laws). The fact Spamhaus "didn't bloody care" was because it was a frivolous lawsuit 1000's of miles from home.
I'm guessing the reason they didn't is because the UK legal system isn't so easy to shop for an easy win.
Last I heard, XP still had about 60% market share to Win7's 10%. I'd say that should dictate where their priorities are, seeing as that is where all their customers are.
(Oblig.). If Ford had sold 1 million Focus's which are now being driven, but have now released a new version and sold only a few thousand, which one should be the safety priority? The new one (should have upgraded, you jerks!), or the one which is most used on the road?
If I'm listening to a song, sound is coming out of the device. I can always just hold the speaker up to a microphone and voila, copied content. Movies? Camcorders.
The quality might not be easy to achieve, but give the AV-philes a while with "HD" content and high-quality modern kit, you'd soon end up with something as good as VHS.
Games are trickier, but it's not the gaming industry's lobby we're really talking about here, is it.
All good experts talk about an "energy mix"- any over-dependence on a single source of energy is just asking for trouble- be it market volatility, or resourcing troubles, or whatever.
Solar seems particularly enticing as a micro-generation source. Photovoltaic cells have zero moving parts making them perfect for domestic use, by people who don't want to be on active maintenance alert. If every house in the country had a set of solar panels, that's a whole lot of energy being generated. You're completely right that it won't be 100% of what's needed, or even remotely close, but it still replaces a good swathe of power plants.
Same goes for other "opportunistic" renewables. You might not be able to get 100% of your energy from hydro, but if you've got a good spot for a dam, you might as well dam it and reap the rewards.
Lets say I sell you a car (I know I know, oblig.). You fork over £5000, I fork over the keys, you drive home. 1 month later, you wake up to find the car missing, and £5000 deposited in your bank account. You eventually notice I've emailed you saying "took the car back, cheers".
You'd obviously be pissed, refund or no. Even though no breaking or entering or mugging happened, you'd still be unhappy that something you thought you owned has suddenly up and gone.
Now lets say you complain, I tell you that by buying from me you actually agreed to a great big bundle of terms and conditions that I never forced you to read (but were available on my website, and pinned up on my shop wall, if you'd cared to look). Would you magically be less pissed?
Banner ads on websites only generate revenue if you click through to them. Often, only if you buy something through the referral link.
I tend to block ads on my netbook, because it's slow enough to load pages already, but generally I don't use ad blockers. Yet I can't remember any time I've ever clicked through to one, and I've definitely never ever bought anything through one.
If that fits your pattern, you're actually doing them a favour by blocking the adverts- at least that way they don't have to serve you the ad, eating up their bandwidth and such.
Relatedly, I'd be a lot more sympathetic to ads if they didn't seem to go out of their way to be annoying. Ads with sound effects are evil, and anything resource guzzling (like a heavy Flash ad or similar) is just cruel to anyone surfing on a low power device, or anyone who pays for their downloads by volume (such as mobile users). If they showed more restraint in their ad design, I'm sure a lot fewer people would feel the need to block them.
Can't you just hook a digibox (digital tuner) up to the TV?
In the UK, where the digital switchover is still going on, I'd wager that there are more people running an "old" TV with a digibox than there are who own a digital-ready TV. I haven't spoken to a single person who has replaced their TV for the sole purpose of the digital switchover.
"Alice tweeted about the big project..."
"Alice phoned about the big project..."
"Alice faxed about the big project..."
I'm not sure I see the pig problem. Don't get me wrong, I find Twitter itself frivolous and irritating. But I don't really see there being a big linguistics problem with the word "tweet" in it's current usage.
My current phone was a replacement for my poor deceased previous phone (which met it's untimely end at the hands of a cup of coffee), purchased for £12 from the supermarket.
Nokia 1661. No camera. But it does have a flashlight, FM radio, usual selection of calculator/calendar/snake/whathaveyou. And it makes phone calls/texts. Cheap, durable, purchased with no contract or anything like that.
Don't get me wrong, I intend to replace it properly soon enough. But just to point out that they are out there in pretty large numbers.
You just have to accept that if you can't have a camera, you're going to have to go without all the other fancy things too.
I've never really got how "viruses from space" would be particularly dangerous. Viruses and germs and such didn't get dangerous by accident- they're highly evolved, highly specialised, purpose built to infect their hosts.
How adapted is something from another world, with completely alien biology, likely to be for infecting humans and other animals?
Played as background music in every shop on the high street. Played on every radio station- even the ones that aren't full music stations. Played over TV adverts. Played in lifts. Played as freaking "on-hold" telephone music. Played as every ringtone of every teenager (and too many adults) for every text and phone call received on mobile phones.
I'm exposed to chart music every day in a hundred ways, and yet I never listen to the chart shows.
Student's in the UK are in an awful catch-22 at the moment. If they do well, people complain that their exams were worthless, and that they've only achieved what they have because everything's so much easier than "back in the day". If they get a mediocre (what might once have been considered "normal") grade, they're made to feel like failures, as A*s are supposedly so common.
It's lose-lose.
Hooliganism is actually the end-stage of a very cunning government plan, whereby the entire British criminal element is imprisoned in foreign countries, at zero cost to the British tax payer.
Think of it as a modern version of the Australia plan.
I work for a bank, and ironically enough our desktops are wonderful little workstations- dual core Athlons with silent cooling, ample RAM, decent hard drives, ATI graphics cards on most. But they still run WinXP. IE6 too (although it's not internet accessing for 99% of employees; information security laws and all that jazz)
It's not the cost of the upgrade or the hardware, it's all the legacy apps that hold up the works. Ancient databases, '90s-era custom mainframe terminals, badly written IE-based progammes. The cost to upgrade is pretty mad.
There is a Win7 upgrade path in place (was a Vista upgrade path until not very long ago), but even then they're talking about MAYBE 2012 for full roll-out. Tricky business.
There's no good reason to assume it is.
All we know about life formation is that it happened once. That is to say, we know that life does form, as we've seen it happen the once. Unless there was something UNIQUE about this (and no-one has ever provided any serious suggestions that there was) it is perfectly reasonable to assume it can happen multiple times.
GGGP may have been being a bit unscientific by saying "it will happen",but short of a truly astounding discovery that we haven't made yet (of the unique bit), consensus points to his sentiments being basically right.
Not to say that Titan has life, mind you. As you say, we don't even know if that variety of life is possible yet.
That seems like an Occam-worthy assumption, yes.
If you're like me (and most serious scientists, I gather) and believe life on Earth formed spontaneously, then it's reasonable enough to assume it can happen again. We have absolutely zero ideas how easy this is to happen, so there's no good reason to claim it can't be happening all the time.
If you're of a spiritual persuasion and believe life was kick started by some ghost or other, then you'll probably have to admit that there's no reason your omnipotent-being-of-choice doesn't do the same thing on every planet that it'd work on. Most holy texts are scrupulously silent on the subject of extraterrestrial life, so we mortals are left to just guess.
In short, it seems more likely that it'd happen again than not. And for all we know, Titan is paradise incarnate for methane-drinking, hydrogen breathing life.
Later is exactly it.
I'm not saying that the developer ever will, but if they were to release it as a free download then it's not going to be now, while the game is still generating a few sales.
There's no saying they won't make it free years down the line. In the meantime, bite the bullet and reward them for their hard work with a little hard cash.