That's true, but it's rather ironic that in the end I felt forced to block google-analytics.com with Adblock Plus purely because I got tired to pages taking ages to load because of it...
I think we have to wake up a little and realize that these people chose to live far from populated centres. That luxury comes at a cost, that cost being higher utility charges.
The alternative is that everyone moves to the cities and large towns, which also has an associated cost.
End users in towns and cities tend to have the higher rate ADSL services, some now achieving 24Mbps
That can vary even on a street by street basis though. I live on the outskirts of London (Elm Park, technically Essex but still with a Tube station) and according to my router get a maximum of about 2.7Mbps of my "up to 8Mbps" ADSL connection (and download rates tend to cap out at about 1Mbps, as measured on PCs on the other end of the 54Mbps wifi connection). I appreciate that there are a lot of areas that would kill for even 1Mbps, but saying "those in towns tend to have higher rate services", while true, ignores the fact that an awful lot of us don't.
Doom 3 (required damned good hardware for the time to even play, but you could tweak it to run on a Voodoo3 -- and came with modes which crawled, due to sheer lack of video RAM, even on the biggest card at the time.) Crysis (need I say more? Barely ran on top-of-the-line hardware at the time. Didn't scale down well at all.)
Both of those games - and especially Crysis - are essentially tech demos for the engine. Same goes for UT3; they're designed to get people licencing the engine. Given that games take time to develop even with an off the shelf engine, you need something that will look good when you finally release in 12-18months time.
If all of them adopted fibre, the cost per household would therefore be £1750, which would need to be recouped in ISP charges etc. over the course of this generation of technology's lifetime. Maybe £350 a year over 5 years = £30 a month.
So - I currently pay £19/month for "up to 8Mbps" (really at best 2.5Mbps and I don't get that sustained either) ADSL, or for an extra £30 plus say £10 profit a month (total £60/month) I could have 1Gbps fibre broadband?
For now and the next few years, most people would be more than thrilled to get the 8 to 24Mb/sec that they have paid for. This only needs more backbone, not the ultra-expensive "last mile infrastructure".
In a lot of people's cases, that will mean replacing the ageing, poor-quality phonelines between them and the exchange. If you're going to replace them anyway, might as well do it with something that you're not going to need to replace again in a couple of years time.
That's a big assumption on your part though; for all you know they charge 5% of gross. No I don't know either, but given the wildly varying costs for software, even of the same type (e.g. for web-based commercial CMSs you can be looking at anything from a few tens of thousands to several hundred thousands of pounds) you really can't even begin to guess.
That said, I'd be absolutely fascinated to see some hard numbers.
So, are you saying that I'm free to sign any paper contract I like and then break its terms because I didn't read it? After all, I just signed things until the bit of paper went away.
It's a turn of phrase - "complying with the letter of the law" means doing exactly what you are told, no more and no less, with no regard for what the *intent* might have been.
In this case it means that as they were required to ship the game with Securom, they did - and as they were *not* required not to release a patch that removed it, they were free to do so (and did), despite the intent obviously being that the game would be DRM-encumbered.
But, likewise, a sloppy engineer will prefer a system that lets him configure and operate it by click-and-drag, instead of a carefully designed and tested set of procedures.
Those two things are not mutually exclusive. The degree of care and testing that goes into designing and creating your configuration and change management procedures is completely separate from the tools that those procedures will actually use.
The main point stands - until we know that it was the choice of technology that killed it, there's nothing to be served from blaming MS. By all means blame them if it was their fault, but for all we know someone screwed up and had the entire thing hanging off a single piece of exotic, hard-to-source network hardware (switch, router, whatever) and it was that that died.
While I don't know about drugs, for certain crimes that level of involvement may well get you slapped with either "aiding and abetting" or "accessory before the fact". It is generally at best legally and ethically a grey area to knowingly help someone commit a crime.
Of course the key word there is "knowingly", so no I don't think that the torrent sites et al should necessarily be prosecuted, it really depends on their individual mode of operation.
I noticed that, and disabled it using Windows Defender. Now after a reboot, it's not showing in Windows Defender that I can see, and yet it's running again...
I'm getting pretty sick and tired of companies bundling that sort of thing with their main product - Apple does it (Bonjour, MobileMe, the Apple Updater, a couple of always-running iTunes helper processes), Real does it, Sun does it with Java, and now Google.
I appreciate that it makes things easier for the average, non-technical user, but I'm not one of them and would much prefer the ability to pick and choose what is installed; I'm perfectly capable of checking for updates myself, thank you.
We feel for you man, but it's a beta, nothing we are required to, er, can do.
I wouldn't be too sure about that. I know where you're coming from, and ordinarily I'd agree, but I think if someone wanted to push the point a court would probably be sympathetic to the argument that it really isn't a beta any more - it's been in extensive, public use for far too long, and as another poster points out is probably one of the top 3 email providers. Just slapping on a label that says "this shit might break" doesn't necessarily save you.
We also have some pretty strong data protection and privacy laws.
As long as they cooperate with law enforcement monitoring desires
Law enforcement already have the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and don't need or want Phorm - in fact if you read the linked article, it would most likely be RIPA that would be used against Phorm in this case.
You forget one thing - the last thing most intelligence gathering agencies want is someone else muscling in on their turf.
Now all of Opera, Safari and Firefox support the video element, can we please kill flash already?
You have to support the browsers your target audience uses; until IE drops to single-digit usage figures or implements the video tag, Flash video isn't going anywhere.
I'm pretty sure that if you go to news.google.com often enough it'll start to suggest that over slashdot when you start typing "news" into the address bar. For example when I type "news", I get news.bbc.co.uk first, then slashdot.
Re:BloatWare Continues....
on
Chrome Vs. IE 8
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The sole purpose of the internet is to provide a medium(s) that convey data/information.
The 1970s called, they want their definition of the Internet back.
Ever since the first CGI was written, the Internet (or specifically the Web) has been about more than just conveying information. Your definition would seem to exclude ecommerce, online banking, etc; that would reduce the Internet to what many believe the big content producers are pushing it towards becoming - an almost-exclusively pull medium designed to get content from a producer to a consumer. No thanks.
Re:Non-Tech Percent of Web Traffic from Chrome
on
Google Chrome, Day 2
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· Score: 1
Technically, that's IE 7 on Windows Vista; other combinations of IE version and Windows OS have slightly different user agent strings. They all start with "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE" though, which is the main point./pedant
Y'know, I hear that a lot, but have just never seen any version of FireFox use all that much memory.
You know, *I* hear *that* a lot, and yet here I am with Firefox (3) with 7 tabs open on XP Pro using 323MB (395MB VM). It's been running for a day or so, and has had a fair amount of tab churn, but nothing unusual for my usage.
The plural of anecdote is not data of course, and your mileage clearly does vary.
Not exactly; as I understand it, they're saying that if he pleads guilty as part of a plea bargain they'll go easier on him. If he contests it, they'll throw the book at him.
I've never understood that aspect of the US criminal justice system; it smacks somewhat of deliberate intimidation - "make it easy on yourself, confess - or else...".
Slashdot Mirror
That's true, but it's rather ironic that in the end I felt forced to block google-analytics.com with Adblock Plus purely because I got tired to pages taking ages to load because of it...
I think we have to wake up a little and realize that these people chose to live far from populated centres. That luxury comes at a cost, that cost being higher utility charges.
The alternative is that everyone moves to the cities and large towns, which also has an associated cost.
End users in towns and cities tend to have the higher rate ADSL services, some now achieving 24Mbps
That can vary even on a street by street basis though. I live on the outskirts of London (Elm Park, technically Essex but still with a Tube station) and according to my router get a maximum of about 2.7Mbps of my "up to 8Mbps" ADSL connection (and download rates tend to cap out at about 1Mbps, as measured on PCs on the other end of the 54Mbps wifi connection). I appreciate that there are a lot of areas that would kill for even 1Mbps, but saying "those in towns tend to have higher rate services", while true, ignores the fact that an awful lot of us don't.
Doom 3 (required damned good hardware for the time to even play, but you could tweak it to run on a Voodoo3 -- and came with modes which crawled, due to sheer lack of video RAM, even on the biggest card at the time.)
Crysis (need I say more? Barely ran on top-of-the-line hardware at the time. Didn't scale down well at all.)
Both of those games - and especially Crysis - are essentially tech demos for the engine. Same goes for UT3; they're designed to get people licencing the engine. Given that games take time to develop even with an off the shelf engine, you need something that will look good when you finally release in 12-18months time.
If all of them adopted fibre, the cost per household would therefore be £1750, which would need to be recouped in ISP charges etc. over the course of this generation of technology's lifetime. Maybe £350 a year over 5 years = £30 a month.
So - I currently pay £19/month for "up to 8Mbps" (really at best 2.5Mbps and I don't get that sustained either) ADSL, or for an extra £30 plus say £10 profit a month (total £60/month) I could have 1Gbps fibre broadband?
I'm sold.
For now and the next few years, most people would be more than thrilled to get the 8 to 24Mb/sec that they have paid for. This only needs more backbone, not the ultra-expensive "last mile infrastructure".
In a lot of people's cases, that will mean replacing the ageing, poor-quality phonelines between them and the exchange. If you're going to replace them anyway, might as well do it with something that you're not going to need to replace again in a couple of years time.
If your DRM costs $200,000
That's a big assumption on your part though; for all you know they charge 5% of gross. No I don't know either, but given the wildly varying costs for software, even of the same type (e.g. for web-based commercial CMSs you can be looking at anything from a few tens of thousands to several hundred thousands of pounds) you really can't even begin to guess.
That said, I'd be absolutely fascinated to see some hard numbers.
So, are you saying that I'm free to sign any paper contract I like and then break its terms because I didn't read it? After all, I just signed things until the bit of paper went away.
It's a turn of phrase - "complying with the letter of the law" means doing exactly what you are told, no more and no less, with no regard for what the *intent* might have been.
In this case it means that as they were required to ship the game with Securom, they did - and as they were *not* required not to release a patch that removed it, they were free to do so (and did), despite the intent obviously being that the game would be DRM-encumbered.
Sigged.
But, likewise, a sloppy engineer will prefer a system that lets him configure and operate it by click-and-drag, instead of a carefully designed and tested set of procedures.
Those two things are not mutually exclusive. The degree of care and testing that goes into designing and creating your configuration and change management procedures is completely separate from the tools that those procedures will actually use.
The main point stands - until we know that it was the choice of technology that killed it, there's nothing to be served from blaming MS. By all means blame them if it was their fault, but for all we know someone screwed up and had the entire thing hanging off a single piece of exotic, hard-to-source network hardware (switch, router, whatever) and it was that that died.
Nit-pick - it's "well-heeled", as in "rich enough to afford good (well-heeled) shoes" (though I suspect your mistake was a typo).
While I don't know about drugs, for certain crimes that level of involvement may well get you slapped with either "aiding and abetting" or "accessory before the fact". It is generally at best legally and ethically a grey area to knowingly help someone commit a crime.
Of course the key word there is "knowingly", so no I don't think that the torrent sites et al should necessarily be prosecuted, it really depends on their individual mode of operation.
You do realise that someone with a PhD is a doctor, while medical doctors do not generally have doctorate degrees, don't you?
It almost certainly will be a doctor who solves this problem, just not a medical one.
I keep seeing that excuse used, and while it's fair enough in rural areas it holds absolutely no water whatsoever in the big cities.
Not being able to economically run high-speed net links to the back of beyond has no effect on what you can do in the major population centres.
I noticed that, and disabled it using Windows Defender. Now after a reboot, it's not showing in Windows Defender that I can see, and yet it's running again...
I'm getting pretty sick and tired of companies bundling that sort of thing with their main product - Apple does it (Bonjour, MobileMe, the Apple Updater, a couple of always-running iTunes helper processes), Real does it, Sun does it with Java, and now Google.
I appreciate that it makes things easier for the average, non-technical user, but I'm not one of them and would much prefer the ability to pick and choose what is installed; I'm perfectly capable of checking for updates myself, thank you.
We feel for you man, but it's a beta, nothing we are required to, er, can do.
I wouldn't be too sure about that. I know where you're coming from, and ordinarily I'd agree, but I think if someone wanted to push the point a court would probably be sympathetic to the argument that it really isn't a beta any more - it's been in extensive, public use for far too long, and as another poster points out is probably one of the top 3 email providers. Just slapping on a label that says "this shit might break" doesn't necessarily save you.
We also have some pretty strong data protection and privacy laws.
As long as they cooperate with law enforcement monitoring desires
Law enforcement already have the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and don't need or want Phorm - in fact if you read the linked article, it would most likely be RIPA that would be used against Phorm in this case.
You forget one thing - the last thing most intelligence gathering agencies want is someone else muscling in on their turf.
Now all of Opera, Safari and Firefox support the video element, can we please kill flash already?
You have to support the browsers your target audience uses; until IE drops to single-digit usage figures or implements the video tag, Flash video isn't going anywhere.
I'm pretty sure that if you go to news.google.com often enough it'll start to suggest that over slashdot when you start typing "news" into the address bar. For example when I type "news", I get news.bbc.co.uk first, then slashdot.
The sole purpose of the internet is to provide a medium(s) that convey data/information.
The 1970s called, they want their definition of the Internet back.
Ever since the first CGI was written, the Internet (or specifically the Web) has been about more than just conveying information. Your definition would seem to exclude ecommerce, online banking, etc; that would reduce the Internet to what many believe the big content producers are pushing it towards becoming - an almost-exclusively pull medium designed to get content from a producer to a consumer. No thanks.
Technically, that's IE 7 on Windows Vista; other combinations of IE version and Windows OS have slightly different user agent strings. They all start with "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE" though, which is the main point. /pedant
Y'know, I hear that a lot, but have just never seen any version of FireFox use all that much memory.
You know, *I* hear *that* a lot, and yet here I am with Firefox (3) with 7 tabs open on XP Pro using 323MB (395MB VM). It's been running for a day or so, and has had a fair amount of tab churn, but nothing unusual for my usage.
The plural of anecdote is not data of course, and your mileage clearly does vary.
I guess we just have to accept that seconds are longer in some places than others!
General relativity already told us that - i.e. in an accelerating frame of reference.
Not exactly; as I understand it, they're saying that if he pleads guilty as part of a plea bargain they'll go easier on him. If he contests it, they'll throw the book at him.
I've never understood that aspect of the US criminal justice system; it smacks somewhat of deliberate intimidation - "make it easy on yourself, confess - or else...".