The only reason Microsoft are growing is because they have a monopoly in a market that is still growing, hence they grow as the market grows. Outside of their monopoly everything the Microsoft does is a total failure. For example:
Windows mobile - Market share dropped from 65% to 15%. Xbox - They're still down about $4billion, the current console has a massive failure rate and at the current rate of sales the PS3 is going to overtake the 360 leaving them in last place and with a massive loss fortune. Search - I think they're down about $14billion and can't get most people to switch from Google even if they pay them. They've have been in an even worse state if they'd managed to buy Yahoo but fortunately their total inability to execute saved them on that occasion. Zune - No impact on the market. Kin - LOL?
Investors look at the company and see that everything they do is a failure so nobody has any confidence in them. Contrast this with Apple:
iPod - Massive success iPhone - Massive success iPad - Massive success Mac - sales growing and setting new records each quarter.
This is why Apple's share price is through the roof while Microsoft's has been static for the past decade. Microsoft either don't know what the customer wants or are too stubborn to give it to them and instead want to continue to force unwanted products on the market through their monopoly. Look at XP - most corporations still want an efficient OS with a consistent interface but Microsoft want to force them to adopt a new OS which adds nothing but flashy visuals and an inferior interface. Why can't they give the customers what they want and put the XP interface into Windows 7 as a second desktop environment thus saving companies a fortune on training and pleasing users who prefer XP? They could easily do this but it's just not they way they do business and instead of listening to what the customer wants Microsoft wants to tell the customer what to do.
At some point Microsoft will face a challenge to their OS monopoly and at that time their inability to deliver desirable products will be the end of them. With the way the company is run things can only go downhill for Microsoft and that's why their share price shows no sign of growth.
Microsoft certainty aren't tanking as the summary said but it's only a matter of time before they are.
O2 offer an "Unlimited" DSL package but by unlimited they mean you should try and use less than 10GB/month and if you use more than 40GB they cut you off:
There are a very limited number of syllables in Japanese and this results in a large numbers of words with identical soundings. If they abandoned Kanji and exclusively used kana or the Roman alphabet you would regularly run into instances were it was impossible to know what the author intended to say.
From things I've read I get the impression that there's a desire to reform the Japanese language, it's just that it can't be done without changing it completely, and at that point they may as well just use English. It's basically a legacy disaster that they're completely stuck with.
On the positive side, once you've learned to read Kanji you can read faster in Japanese than you can in English.
Re:Windows XP is about to lose support
on
Time To Dump XP?
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· Score: 1
Windows XP is supported by Microsoft until April 2014. If you think third party developers will stop supporting XP you have to realise that 69.1% of Windows PCs run XP. Do you really think developers will ignore over two thirds of their potential market?
XP will continue to be supported until people stop using it and people won't stop using it until Microsoft release something better.
Re:Taskbar differences
on
Time To Dump XP?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Very intuitive? The Windows 7 taskbar is a massive productivity roadblock.
For example, imagine have multiple instances of the same application open and you wish to switch between instances. In XP each instance has its own button on the task bar (usually with the file you have open written on it) so you simply click on the instance you want. In Windows 7 there's only one button for each application so first you have to click that to bring up some pretty pictures. You then identify which instance you want and click that. That's two clicks instead of one, additional mouse movement and some time faffing around with pretty pictures. How is this an improvement?
Then there's the situation where you've just started using some new programs and don't know the icons for them. In XP the taskbar buttons have the names of the applications written on them so it's easy to identify your applications. In Windows 7 the taskbar only has abstract icons with no text so if you don't know the icon it can be hard to find your applications. This actually happened to me when using Windows 7 and because I didn't know the icons for some programs I ended up thoroughly pissed of trying to find what I was looking for. How is this an improvement?
The new taskbar also makes it hard to identify if a program is running (of if it's just a quicklaunch shortcut) and impossible to tell how many instances of an application are running.
Despite these reductions in the functionality of the taskbar it is now in fact bigger, so uses more desktop real estate to do less.
Sure, you can switch back to the old taskbar but how long will that last? The old start menu has been removed from Windows 7 so I'm sure the old task bar will probably be gone by Windows 8. Besides, the task bar is only one element of the Windows 7 interface that's thoroughly fucked up.
If they added the XP desktop environment to Windows 8 then I'd happily upgrade. However, there's no way I'll touch Windows 7 or any subsequent version until they provide a decent user interface.
Why boycott BP? Do you think the other oil companies would do anything differently? Do you think "I'll buy from those nice ExxonMobil people because they care far more about the environment than profit"?
It's a bit like boycotting a particular hard disk manufacturer because one of your drives failed. The exact same thing would happen with any other manufacturer so there's no point boycotting one when they're all the same.
That is, of course, unless we're talking bout Samsung. They really do make the most unreliable shit. I'd never buy any of their fucking drives again! Bastards!:)
You're actively broadcasting information about your home network and then complaining when somebody listens. That's like setting up a facebook account and then whining when somebody looks at it or talking very loudly in a room and complaining when people listen. You're being absurd!
Why not just use a wired network? I don't like broadcasting my information to the world so I exclusively use wired network connections. You on the other hand also don't like broadcasting your information to the world but keep doing it and just whine about it.
The only information Google ever collect is the information you give them, be it through using their services or buy specifically buying a wireless rooter to broadcast it to them. If you don't like them collecting information stop giving it to them. Far from Google being your problem it seems to me that you are your own worst enemy.
From the site: "The ‘fact tables’ are approximately 70MB. With a fast broadband link of 8mbps, it will take approximately 10 minutes to download this file."
70MB at 1MB/second = 600 seconds!?!? This left me rather concerned as to the reliability of the figures on the site. I never went on to look at the data but I can imagine it would be something like this:
Why are the more worried about porn than actual crimes? Any logical person can see that banning porn would likely make the rape situation even worse. I'm glad to see they've got their priorities straight.
The whole world seems to be in a state of insanity regarding porn at the moment. We've got the Australia's small breast ban and cartoon laws, Canada's Cartoon laws, the UK's Extreme Pornography laws, the US's Obscenity Laws and Agnes Chan leading the lunacy in Japan. Could I ask these moral crusaders to kindly fuck off.
Basically then if they want to arrest you I'm sure they could find something in your porn collection that's illegal, whether its a girl with small breasts or some cartoon porn.
Much like Canada they're very concerned with "virtual" things down there and far less concerned about real crimes. No doubt they'll be banning virtual murder and virtual dangerous driving in computer games next.
I use Bookmarks menu to access and organise my bookmarks. I use the history menu to open tabs I've recently closed or go back to websites I've recently visited. I use the tools menu to access options, addons and clear history. I use the file menu for print, work offline and occasionally import.
In answer to your question then, yes the menu bar is very useful. It provides rapid and structured access to a lot of functionality. When I use an application with a menu bar I can always find the functionality I'm looking for easily but in applications without a menu bar (Office 2007, Chrome etc) I can never find what I'm looking for.
Menu bars provide a consistent interface across all applications so even if you haven't used an application before you know where to find options and featurs. Removing it gives every application a custom interface, making it very hard to use unfamiliar applications. Put a Office 2003 user in front of Office 2007 or an IE6 user in front of IE7/8 and and they'll struggle to use the application. However if you get an Office 2003 user to use Open Office or an IE6 user to use Firefox they'll be able to adapt very quickly thanks to the consistent interface menu bars offer.
When Microsoft started the trend of removing menu bars with Vista and Office 2007 I believe their aim was not to improve the user experience but to lock users into their applications. An Office 2003 user can adapt rapidly to any other Office suite thanks to the similar interfaces, however if someone is only familiar with Office 2007 it will be very hard for them to adapt to other suits because Office 2007 has a completely custom interface that is inconsistent with all other applications. This way they're locked into MS Office and Microsoft wins again.
The removal of the menu bar is a travesty of interface design but it's a massive win for Microsoft and, bizarrely, organisations such as Mozilla seem happy to help them along.
Most people in the west would probably be happy to pay a few extra dollars for their products. The best solution then would be to increase their hourly rate and cut their working hours, which would have a hugely beneficial impact on their lives while only causing a very small decrease in our spending power.
From your post it seems you have no interest in improving their conditions and just want to put them out of the job. Yes, let's stop buying "all that crap" because I'm sure the KYE workers would much rather be unemployed and starving on the streets.
I think you should tell everyone where you work so we can all help improve your conditions by not buying any products from that company. Would you like it if you lost your job because helpful people put your employer out of business?
There's a reason BIDU hit $630 yesterday having only been $100 a year ago and it's not because Bing will be taking Google's place.
I can't see Google withdrawing because they'd be handing what will be the world's biggest market over to a competitor. The free speech situation would also become worse with BIDU as the main search engine since they'll be far more inclined to do exactly what the government tells them.
It makes no sense financially or socially so Google would have to be completely stupid to pull out.
You: "Officer, I was interested in these so called 'dark nets' so looking around I happened to find a website with child porn on it. Clicking about the site I found there were literally hundreds of images so I thought I best report it to the police."
Police: "Please stay by your computer and we'll be around to arrest you shortly. Enjoy your 25 years in prison."
I think you need to review the "Don't talk to the police" video:
If you see a house being burgled, ignore it and continue on. If you see somebody being raped keep walking. If you see a child in trouble, absolutely never go near them. The last one is particularly important since children are the greatest risk to your freedom in the current political climate and should never be approached under any circumstances.
Am I stupid or is the sign in the article telling people to always park in front of the entrance?
It essentially says to never never never never park there and isn't a quadruple negative a positive? Furthermore if you never never do something then you always do it so it seems he permanently wants somebody blocking his door.
If you don't want to see adverts don't visit any websites that have adverts on them. If you're repeatedly visiting websites that you know to have adverts then you're looking at the adverts voluntarily so it is no way an invasion or an intrusion.
Besides, without adverts the only way websites will be able to fund themselves is through fees. Would you rather pay a few dollars a month for every website you visit?
Philip Campbell was one of the "scientists" selected to join the "independent" review panel for the UEA leaks. He later had to step down when it was revealed that he had already made up his mind before any review:
I'm sure he was replaced by somebody equally independent and impartial and that we can expect the same level of impartiality from the UN's review of the IPCC. This is nothing but a waste of taxpayer's money.
72.54% of Windows users continue to use XP, so it is abundantly clear that the the market prefers XP to 7/Vista. If Microsoft had any competitors they would be forced to continue selling XP in order to avoid losing market share, however their monopoly means they do not have to worry about this since there literally aren't any competitors*. They are therefore abusing their monopoly by forcing 7/Vista onto a market that does not want it. What the judge says is true and Microsoft really aren't benefiting from this since they get a sale whether it's XP or 7, but that doesn't change the fact that this is a clear case of severe monopoly abuse. I certainly feel abused because I want to buy a laptop with Windows XP but all the options in my price range come with Windows 7 Home Premium. How can the judge conclude this isn't monopoly abuse? Somebody get the EU!
*Mac OS is not a direct competitor to Windows since I can't legitimately install Mac OS on my PC. Alternatives like Linux aren't quite ready for the mainstream desktop user yet.
None of Sara Ford's blog posts generate any comments and yet this post had a sizable number of comments. Clearly the people who commented are not regular readers of Sara Ford's blog but are people who have been searching for a way to get VS to revert back to the VS2003 "new tabs on the right" behavior that's used by every other application with tabs (IE, Firefox, Thunderbird, Excel, Kingsoft Office etc). The fact that Microsoft, a company who most definitely don't care in the least about user opinions, has been forced to provide an option in VS2010 to revert back to the VS2003 behavior is evidence enough of the size of the backlash.
As for you not noticing the change; I simply can't imagine what sort of cognitive state you'd have to be in not to notice such a fundamental change to the way the UI worked. Everyone in my office noticed the change independently this leads me to wonder whether you're actually conscious when you use VS?
Well it doesn't matter that nobody commented because they don't actually listen to feedback anyway. Take the example of when they changed the file tab order in VS2005 so that new tabs were added on the right. This change caused all your open file tabs to be pushed along making it impossible to keep track of the location of your file tabs and resulting in users wasting considerable amounts of time looking for files. The person responsible for this was Sara Ford and as you can see from the comments on her blog the response was overwhelmingly negative:
Despite all these negative comments both her and Microsoft failed to take any action and no changes were made in the VS2005 service pack or in VS2008. Microsoft simply do not care what users think and and while the may put up the pretence of taking user feedback they always just do whatever they think is best. Sara Ford is a classic example of this and despite all the negative comments on her blog she was totally unable to accept that the change was for the worse. What's most absurd about this situation is that Sara Ford has written a book called "Microsoft Visual Studio Tips: 251 Ways to Improve Your Productivity". Given the she herself is responsible for considerably reducing the productivity of Visual Studio users through her absurd interface design I suspect the only use for this book would be as toilet paper.
Sara Ford is the personification of everything that is wrong with Microsoft today. When Windows 2000 came out I thought it was extremely good, offering the stability of NT and the software compatibility of 98 while running very fast on the hardware of the day. Since that time Sara Ford Syndrome has set in at Microsoft and the company has been over run with "soft skills" people who have these brilliant ideas to improve usability and in the process have rendered Microsoft's software completely unusable. The user interface changes Windows Vista/7 and Office 2007 have made using the software provably slower, are provably less consistent and are extremely wasteful of desktop space. I'd rather face torture than use Windows 7 or Office 2007 and many others feel the same way but despite the wave of negativity above these new user interface concepts Microsoft continue to push on regardless of their customers' opinions.
This time however it looks like it's going to cost them since they've split their operating system market into two camps with the vast majority in the XP camp. They're suffering revenue declines since people don't want their newer software, they're losing market share to Apple and they were forced to practically give Windows 7 away with their pre-order discount program to try and generate some positive hype. While 14 year olds may be rushing to Windows 7 with it's cool transparent Windows frames the corporate market is staying well away and have clearly indicated they have no interest in the new software Microsoft is trying to force on the market through their monopoly. By refusing to sell the software customers want and trying to force them to use software they don't it looks like Microsoft's latest monopoly abuse may be what finally brings their monopoly to an end.
120fps vs 60fps is like night and day
on
Framerates Matter
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· Score: 1, Informative
For a high speed game like Quake even 60fps is totally unplayable and there's a massive difference between 90fps and 120fps. I consider 120fps the minimum for Quake and for that reason I continue to use a CRT. If you put my CRT at 120Hz+120fps next to a 60Hz+60fps LCD the difference is night and day and the LCD looks extremely choppy. You don't even have to do a side by side comparison and if you're used to playing at 120fps on a daily basis then you'll instantly see the difference when you see the game running at 60fps.
People who think you can't tell above 60fps have obviously never done any sort of valid comparisons because the difference is extremely pronounced. Research done by Sony found that "240Hz is the perception limit for the degradation of motion image quality for the human eye in following natural images" (Journal of the Society for Information Display Vol 15.1). I suspect there would be a noticeable difference between 240fps and 120fps but I've never had the opportunity to compare.
These comments are all in the context of playing Quake which is a very fast moving game so there is a large difference between each frame. If you play a much slower game then the difference between each frame will be significantly less, in which case 30fps might look absolutely fine. However, just because some games look fine at 30fps doesn't justify the whole "the human eye can't perceive above 30fps" idiocy.
If he really is so concerned about the plight of Africa why is he investing so much effort trying to increase his already substantial wealth? Why is he not using this money to help the people of Africa who he claims to care so much about? His hypocrisy is astounding and he seems to know no shame. He is a master of appearing righteous while doing absolutely nothing of any good. Quite simply he is pure evil.
Slashdot Mirror
The only reason Microsoft are growing is because they have a monopoly in a market that is still growing, hence they grow as the market grows. Outside of their monopoly everything the Microsoft does is a total failure. For example:
Windows mobile - Market share dropped from 65% to 15%.
Xbox - They're still down about $4billion, the current console has a massive failure rate and at the current rate of sales the PS3 is going to overtake the 360 leaving them in last place and with a massive loss fortune.
Search - I think they're down about $14billion and can't get most people to switch from Google even if they pay them. They've have been in an even worse state if they'd managed to buy Yahoo but fortunately their total inability to execute saved them on that occasion.
Zune - No impact on the market.
Kin - LOL?
Investors look at the company and see that everything they do is a failure so nobody has any confidence in them. Contrast this with Apple:
iPod - Massive success
iPhone - Massive success
iPad - Massive success
Mac - sales growing and setting new records each quarter.
This is why Apple's share price is through the roof while Microsoft's has been static for the past decade. Microsoft either don't know what the customer wants or are too stubborn to give it to them and instead want to continue to force unwanted products on the market through their monopoly. Look at XP - most corporations still want an efficient OS with a consistent interface but Microsoft want to force them to adopt a new OS which adds nothing but flashy visuals and an inferior interface. Why can't they give the customers what they want and put the XP interface into Windows 7 as a second desktop environment thus saving companies a fortune on training and pleasing users who prefer XP? They could easily do this but it's just not they way they do business and instead of listening to what the customer wants Microsoft wants to tell the customer what to do.
At some point Microsoft will face a challenge to their OS monopoly and at that time their inability to deliver desirable products will be the end of them. With the way the company is run things can only go downhill for Microsoft and that's why their share price shows no sign of growth.
Microsoft certainty aren't tanking as the summary said but it's only a matter of time before they are.
O2 offer an "Unlimited" DSL package but by unlimited they mean you should try and use less than 10GB/month and if you use more than 40GB they cut you off:
http://www.ispreview.co.uk/story/2010/05/26/o2-uk-clarifies-unlimited-broadband-limits-after-heavy-user-cut-off-threats.html
I'm staying well away from any O2 services.
There are a very limited number of syllables in Japanese and this results in a large numbers of words with identical soundings. If they abandoned Kanji and exclusively used kana or the Roman alphabet you would regularly run into instances were it was impossible to know what the author intended to say.
From things I've read I get the impression that there's a desire to reform the Japanese language, it's just that it can't be done without changing it completely, and at that point they may as well just use English. It's basically a legacy disaster that they're completely stuck with.
On the positive side, once you've learned to read Kanji you can read faster in Japanese than you can in English.
Windows XP is supported by Microsoft until April 2014. If you think third party developers will stop supporting XP you have to realise that 69.1% of Windows PCs run XP. Do you really think developers will ignore over two thirds of their potential market?
XP will continue to be supported until people stop using it and people won't stop using it until Microsoft release something better.
Very intuitive? The Windows 7 taskbar is a massive productivity roadblock.
For example, imagine have multiple instances of the same application open and you wish to switch between instances. In XP each instance has its own button on the task bar (usually with the file you have open written on it) so you simply click on the instance you want. In Windows 7 there's only one button for each application so first you have to click that to bring up some pretty pictures. You then identify which instance you want and click that. That's two clicks instead of one, additional mouse movement and some time faffing around with pretty pictures. How is this an improvement?
Then there's the situation where you've just started using some new programs and don't know the icons for them. In XP the taskbar buttons have the names of the applications written on them so it's easy to identify your applications. In Windows 7 the taskbar only has abstract icons with no text so if you don't know the icon it can be hard to find your applications. This actually happened to me when using Windows 7 and because I didn't know the icons for some programs I ended up thoroughly pissed of trying to find what I was looking for. How is this an improvement?
The new taskbar also makes it hard to identify if a program is running (of if it's just a quicklaunch shortcut) and impossible to tell how many instances of an application are running.
Despite these reductions in the functionality of the taskbar it is now in fact bigger, so uses more desktop real estate to do less.
Sure, you can switch back to the old taskbar but how long will that last? The old start menu has been removed from Windows 7 so I'm sure the old task bar will probably be gone by Windows 8. Besides, the task bar is only one element of the Windows 7 interface that's thoroughly fucked up.
If they added the XP desktop environment to Windows 8 then I'd happily upgrade. However, there's no way I'll touch Windows 7 or any subsequent version until they provide a decent user interface.
Why boycott BP? Do you think the other oil companies would do anything differently? Do you think "I'll buy from those nice ExxonMobil people because they care far more about the environment than profit"?
It's a bit like boycotting a particular hard disk manufacturer because one of your drives failed. The exact same thing would happen with any other manufacturer so there's no point boycotting one when they're all the same.
That is, of course, unless we're talking bout Samsung. They really do make the most unreliable shit. I'd never buy any of their fucking drives again! Bastards! :)
You're actively broadcasting information about your home network and then complaining when somebody listens. That's like setting up a facebook account and then whining when somebody looks at it or talking very loudly in a room and complaining when people listen. You're being absurd!
Why not just use a wired network? I don't like broadcasting my information to the world so I exclusively use wired network connections. You on the other hand also don't like broadcasting your information to the world but keep doing it and just whine about it.
The only information Google ever collect is the information you give them, be it through using their services or buy specifically buying a wireless rooter to broadcast it to them. If you don't like them collecting information stop giving it to them. Far from Google being your problem it seems to me that you are your own worst enemy.
From the site: "The ‘fact tables’ are approximately 70MB. With a fast broadband link of 8mbps, it will take approximately 10 minutes to download this file."
70MB at 1MB/second = 600 seconds!?!? This left me rather concerned as to the reliability of the figures on the site. I never went on to look at the data but I can imagine it would be something like this:
Expenses: £100,000,000,000.00
Bureaucracy: £500,000,000,000.00
Propaganda: £25,000,000,000.00
Big Brother: £50,000,000,000.00
Foreign Wars: £10,000,000,000.00
Total: £1.23
Everything in Windows 7 takes four times as many clicks as in XP so that's simply consistent user interface design.
It's a shame that the one and only aspect of the Windows 7 interface that is consistent is somewhat of a negative one.
South Africa is the rape capital of the world:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_statistics#South_Africa
Why are the more worried about porn than actual crimes? Any logical person can see that banning porn would likely make the rape situation even worse. I'm glad to see they've got their priorities straight.
The whole world seems to be in a state of insanity regarding porn at the moment. We've got the Australia's small breast ban and cartoon laws, Canada's Cartoon laws, the UK's Extreme Pornography laws, the US's Obscenity Laws and Agnes Chan leading the lunacy in Japan. Could I ask these moral crusaders to kindly fuck off.
Yes. Pictures of women over 18 with small breasts are illegal on the grounds that it is "virtual child pornography":
http://www.somebodythinkofthechildren.com/australia-bans-small-breasts/
Drawings of girls under 18 are banned because that too is virtual child pornography:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/01/simpsons-powerpuff-girls-porn-nets-jail-time-for-australian.ars
Basically then if they want to arrest you I'm sure they could find something in your porn collection that's illegal, whether its a girl with small breasts or some cartoon porn.
Much like Canada they're very concerned with "virtual" things down there and far less concerned about real crimes. No doubt they'll be banning virtual murder and virtual dangerous driving in computer games next.
With the new auto-breaking system Volvos stop reliably without even the need for a driver:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNi17YLnZpg
Er...okay maybe you have a point.
I use Bookmarks menu to access and organise my bookmarks. I use the history menu to open tabs I've recently closed or go back to websites I've recently visited. I use the tools menu to access options, addons and clear history. I use the file menu for print, work offline and occasionally import.
In answer to your question then, yes the menu bar is very useful. It provides rapid and structured access to a lot of functionality. When I use an application with a menu bar I can always find the functionality I'm looking for easily but in applications without a menu bar (Office 2007, Chrome etc) I can never find what I'm looking for.
Menu bars provide a consistent interface across all applications so even if you haven't used an application before you know where to find options and featurs. Removing it gives every application a custom interface, making it very hard to use unfamiliar applications. Put a Office 2003 user in front of Office 2007 or an IE6 user in front of IE7/8 and and they'll struggle to use the application. However if you get an Office 2003 user to use Open Office or an IE6 user to use Firefox they'll be able to adapt very quickly thanks to the consistent interface menu bars offer.
When Microsoft started the trend of removing menu bars with Vista and Office 2007 I believe their aim was not to improve the user experience but to lock users into their applications. An Office 2003 user can adapt rapidly to any other Office suite thanks to the similar interfaces, however if someone is only familiar with Office 2007 it will be very hard for them to adapt to other suits because Office 2007 has a completely custom interface that is inconsistent with all other applications. This way they're locked into MS Office and Microsoft wins again.
The removal of the menu bar is a travesty of interface design but it's a massive win for Microsoft and, bizarrely, organisations such as Mozilla seem happy to help them along.
Most people in the west would probably be happy to pay a few extra dollars for their products. The best solution then would be to increase their hourly rate and cut their working hours, which would have a hugely beneficial impact on their lives while only causing a very small decrease in our spending power.
From your post it seems you have no interest in improving their conditions and just want to put them out of the job. Yes, let's stop buying "all that crap" because I'm sure the KYE workers would much rather be unemployed and starving on the streets.
I think you should tell everyone where you work so we can all help improve your conditions by not buying any products from that company. Would you like it if you lost your job because helpful people put your employer out of business?
"it is necessary to satisfy mens rea"
The discussion is about child porn not gay porn.
There's a reason BIDU hit $630 yesterday having only been $100 a year ago and it's not because Bing will be taking Google's place.
I can't see Google withdrawing because they'd be handing what will be the world's biggest market over to a competitor. The free speech situation would also become worse with BIDU as the main search engine since they'll be far more inclined to do exactly what the government tells them.
It makes no sense financially or socially so Google would have to be completely stupid to pull out.
"Think it's illegal? Call the cops with details."
You: "Officer, I was interested in these so called 'dark nets' so looking around I happened to find a website with child porn on it. Clicking about the site I found there were literally hundreds of images so I thought I best report it to the police."
Police: "Please stay by your computer and we'll be around to arrest you shortly. Enjoy your 25 years in prison."
I think you need to review the "Don't talk to the police" video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc
If you see a house being burgled, ignore it and continue on. If you see somebody being raped keep walking. If you see a child in trouble, absolutely never go near them. The last one is particularly important since children are the greatest risk to your freedom in the current political climate and should never be approached under any circumstances.
Am I stupid or is the sign in the article telling people to always park in front of the entrance?
It essentially says to never never never never park there and isn't a quadruple negative a positive? Furthermore if you never never do something then you always do it so it seems he permanently wants somebody blocking his door.
If you don't want to see adverts don't visit any websites that have adverts on them. If you're repeatedly visiting websites that you know to have adverts then you're looking at the adverts voluntarily so it is no way an invasion or an intrusion.
Besides, without adverts the only way websites will be able to fund themselves is through fees. Would you rather pay a few dollars a month for every website you visit?
Philip Campbell was one of the "scientists" selected to join the "independent" review panel for the UEA leaks. He later had to step down when it was revealed that he had already made up his mind before any review:
http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/science_technology/aposclimategateapos+review+member+resigns/3536642
I'm sure he was replaced by somebody equally independent and impartial and that we can expect the same level of impartiality from the UN's review of the IPCC. This is nothing but a waste of taxpayer's money.
72.54% of Windows users continue to use XP, so it is abundantly clear that the the market prefers XP to 7/Vista. If Microsoft had any competitors they would be forced to continue selling XP in order to avoid losing market share, however their monopoly means they do not have to worry about this since there literally aren't any competitors*. They are therefore abusing their monopoly by forcing 7/Vista onto a market that does not want it. What the judge says is true and Microsoft really aren't benefiting from this since they get a sale whether it's XP or 7, but that doesn't change the fact that this is a clear case of severe monopoly abuse. I certainly feel abused because I want to buy a laptop with Windows XP but all the options in my price range come with Windows 7 Home Premium. How can the judge conclude this isn't monopoly abuse? Somebody get the EU!
*Mac OS is not a direct competitor to Windows since I can't legitimately install Mac OS on my PC. Alternatives like Linux aren't quite ready for the mainstream desktop user yet.
None of Sara Ford's blog posts generate any comments and yet this post had a sizable number of comments. Clearly the people who commented are not regular readers of Sara Ford's blog but are people who have been searching for a way to get VS to revert back to the VS2003 "new tabs on the right" behavior that's used by every other application with tabs (IE, Firefox, Thunderbird, Excel, Kingsoft Office etc). The fact that Microsoft, a company who most definitely don't care in the least about user opinions, has been forced to provide an option in VS2010 to revert back to the VS2003 behavior is evidence enough of the size of the backlash.
As for you not noticing the change; I simply can't imagine what sort of cognitive state you'd have to be in not to notice such a fundamental change to the way the UI worked. Everyone in my office noticed the change independently this leads me to wonder whether you're actually conscious when you use VS?
Well it doesn't matter that nobody commented because they don't actually listen to feedback anyway. Take the example of when they changed the file tab order in VS2005 so that new tabs were added on the right. This change caused all your open file tabs to be pushed along making it impossible to keep track of the location of your file tabs and resulting in users wasting considerable amounts of time looking for files. The person responsible for this was Sara Ford and as you can see from the comments on her blog the response was overwhelmingly negative:
http://blogs.msdn.com/saraford/archive/2004/05/14/132065.aspx
Despite all these negative comments both her and Microsoft failed to take any action and no changes were made in the VS2005 service pack or in VS2008. Microsoft simply do not care what users think and and while the may put up the pretence of taking user feedback they always just do whatever they think is best. Sara Ford is a classic example of this and despite all the negative comments on her blog she was totally unable to accept that the change was for the worse. What's most absurd about this situation is that Sara Ford has written a book called "Microsoft Visual Studio Tips: 251 Ways to Improve Your Productivity". Given the she herself is responsible for considerably reducing the productivity of Visual Studio users through her absurd interface design I suspect the only use for this book would be as toilet paper.
Sara Ford is the personification of everything that is wrong with Microsoft today. When Windows 2000 came out I thought it was extremely good, offering the stability of NT and the software compatibility of 98 while running very fast on the hardware of the day. Since that time Sara Ford Syndrome has set in at Microsoft and the company has been over run with "soft skills" people who have these brilliant ideas to improve usability and in the process have rendered Microsoft's software completely unusable. The user interface changes Windows Vista/7 and Office 2007 have made using the software provably slower, are provably less consistent and are extremely wasteful of desktop space. I'd rather face torture than use Windows 7 or Office 2007 and many others feel the same way but despite the wave of negativity above these new user interface concepts Microsoft continue to push on regardless of their customers' opinions.
This time however it looks like it's going to cost them since they've split their operating system market into two camps with the vast majority in the XP camp. They're suffering revenue declines since people don't want their newer software, they're losing market share to Apple and they were forced to practically give Windows 7 away with their pre-order discount program to try and generate some positive hype. While 14 year olds may be rushing to Windows 7 with it's cool transparent Windows frames the corporate market is staying well away and have clearly indicated they have no interest in the new software Microsoft is trying to force on the market through their monopoly. By refusing to sell the software customers want and trying to force them to use software they don't it looks like Microsoft's latest monopoly abuse may be what finally brings their monopoly to an end.
For a high speed game like Quake even 60fps is totally unplayable and there's a massive difference between 90fps and 120fps. I consider 120fps the minimum for Quake and for that reason I continue to use a CRT. If you put my CRT at 120Hz+120fps next to a 60Hz+60fps LCD the difference is night and day and the LCD looks extremely choppy. You don't even have to do a side by side comparison and if you're used to playing at 120fps on a daily basis then you'll instantly see the difference when you see the game running at 60fps.
People who think you can't tell above 60fps have obviously never done any sort of valid comparisons because the difference is extremely pronounced. Research done by Sony found that "240Hz is the perception limit for the degradation of motion image quality for the human eye in following natural images" (Journal of the Society for Information Display Vol 15.1). I suspect there would be a noticeable difference between 240fps and 120fps but I've never had the opportunity to compare.
These comments are all in the context of playing Quake which is a very fast moving game so there is a large difference between each frame. If you play a much slower game then the difference between each frame will be significantly less, in which case 30fps might look absolutely fine. However, just because some games look fine at 30fps doesn't justify the whole "the human eye can't perceive above 30fps" idiocy.
Don't forget his Evolution Parters investment vehicle (of which he is the Managing Director) which has assets of $1.9billion:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elevation_Partners
If he really is so concerned about the plight of Africa why is he investing so much effort trying to increase his already substantial wealth? Why is he not using this money to help the people of Africa who he claims to care so much about? His hypocrisy is astounding and he seems to know no shame. He is a master of appearing righteous while doing absolutely nothing of any good. Quite simply he is pure evil.