Alternatives such as Linux have been available with Dell machines off and on now for about a decade. ISTR very recently people still having problems getting refunds for the Microsoft tax. I favor free markets and supply and demand and all that, but with MS the market is hardly free and open.
This is OT so mod me down at will... I hate that Bill Gates Borg pic on the main stories page. It was what prompted me to register here at Slashdot: the ability to customize my front page and turn those story icons off.
I had a bookmark that logged me in and took me right to my customized front page with one click. Now, for some reason, that 1-click logon to custom FP is gone. Site redisgn, cookies, javascript, Ajax, I don't know what the reason is. All I know is this: The inability to bookmark an auto-login front page at/. is causing me to to visit the site less.
When the SCO fiasco is all wrapped up here's a number I'd like to see: How much money did all the lawyers involved earn apiece? There are hundreds involved, to be sure, but the Top Ten would be enough. Then I want to contemplate whether the fucked up Copyright laws in the U.S. make it all worthwhile. SCO's complaint was worthless from day 1 and it should have taken no more than 6 months to get it laughed out of court.
How about Microsoft finally documenting the various system calls for its IEEE 1394 driver stack? They have steadfastly refused to release docs of any type regarding its 61883.sys driver. So not only is there not source code, there's no interface definition either. And no samples. People have been wanting documentation on 61883 out of MS for over 4 years now. Nada. The MSDN library is as lame as ever when it comes to 61883 and the 1394 stack.
Innovate, schminnovate. I want to see them support what they've already got.
My calendar is about to say December 1, not April 1. This is really dumb. I don't bash Bill Gates a lot. I admire him in some ways. But come on, who wants a president whose company has been conviceted of being an illegal monopoly, that has been found gulty of being a predator, that has stifled innovation while claiming the opposite, that has run roughshod over consumer rights and then tried to weasel out of every penalty anyone ever tried to impose on it?
I wish I could rent one of those. I have exactly 6 old vinyl LPs that have never been released on CD and I have no way to listen to them. It would be nice to be able to transfer from vinyl to digital over the course of about a week. But I'm not paying $100 for something I will use for a week and then have no further use for.
Oh yes, this was the same USAF facility that photographed the space shuttle Columbia as it passed overhead minutes before it broke apart during its 2003 entry. They say they took that picture on an 11 year old Mac which would be almost 15 years old now. Not too surprising that this type of research is going on there, although it is pretty close to Albuquerque.
My company is doing driver development for IEEE 1394, i.e. Firewire, devices. Not having 1394 support in VMware is a show stopper for us. Unless and until they get around to including it we'll be sitting here experiencing BSOD crashes several times per day, and sometimes per hour. We've heard the reasons VMware has not virtualized Firewire and, quite frankly, they don't hold water.
nVidia has PureVideo, ATi has whatever. Why are there still no GPU-assisted MPEG2 (or any other format) video encoders? Modern GPUs will do hardware assisted MPEG decoding, but software-only encoding is still too slow. TMPGEnc could be much faster. Same for the others. It seems as though the headlong rush to HD formats have left SD in the dust.
What do they have to worry about? That's the mantra of a large percentage of Americans. Probably the same ones who, over the past couple of decades, in survey after survey, say that Americans have "too much" freedom. These are the people (and companies) that scare me. Not the Republicans.
I know it's a British story but it's pretty scary how much of the same tactics the right uses there as in the U.S. I had a look at the article and the PDF. I'm not so sure I believe in the entire global warming scenario either, and the pdf speaks to some of my reservations. However, and having said that, there are a couple of signs that wing-nuttery is alive and well in Britain.
Ths PDF leads off with a few quotes, among which is one by GK Chesterton: "When men have ceased to believe in Christianity, it is not that they will believe in nothing. They will believe in anything."
What the hell does that quote have to do with anything?
Then the reprot deals with the so-called "consensus" on global warming. It says 41 scientists recently wrote to the Telegraph and said they were not convinced by the "global warming consensus". It then fails to name a single one.
The next part talks about how critics of the global warming theory are often characterized as shills for the oil industry. In a murdoch-esque attempt at "balance" it then points out that most scientists worldwide are state-funded. Doesn't make a lot of sense but probably will be a convincing argument for the thinking challenged. That's what we've come to expect from the wingnuts at Fox news over here in the U.S.
The part about CO2 and pine tree trunk rings is interesting. Until it devolves into hysterical conspiracy theory. Someone found a file of data on a computer marked "CENSORED DATA" that contained details of a warm period in Medieval times that throws off the consensus when factored in. They are censoring data they don't want you to see!
In fact, a good deal of the report bases itself on the work of Steven McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, who it praises as being courageous for daring to go against the standard UN calculations and graphs and suffering the consequences of censorship as a result. They say the UN's 2001 temperature study was grossly flawed and cites a US Senate study from 2005 that backs this up. The 2005 US Senate. I wouldn't trust that bunch to tell me the right time of day.
So this report bears further scrutiny, although the right wing will hail it. As far as research goes, I hope others will chime in on their findings. There are partisan hacks on both sides of this issue. I'm sure the guy who wrote it was paid well.
I know it's a British story but it's pretty scary how much of the same tactics the right uses there as in the U.S. I had a look at the article and the PDF. I'm not so sure I believe in the entire global warming scenario that is around today. I would like to see more research like this. However, and having said that, let me recap a couple of points that pertain to the PDF, and expose the attacks on science I perceive to be in there.
Ths PDF leads off with a few quotes, among which is one by GK Chesterton: "When men have ceased to believe in Christianity, it is not that they will believe in nothing. They will believe in anything." This set off an alarm for me immediately. The tying in of the religion vs. science angle in an otherwise inoccuous manner.
The first part deals with the so-called "consensus" on global warming. It presents a couple of points and then says 41 scientists recently wrote to the Telegraph and said they were not convinced by the "global warming consensus", and then fails to name any of them.
The next part talks about how critics of the global warming theory are often painted as tools of the oil industry since that's who funds them. In an attempt at "balance" the PDF points out that most scientists worldwide are stat-funded. Not sure what the point is here.
The next part talks about pine tree rings and says someone found a file of data on a computer marked "CENSORED DATA" that contained details of a warm period in Medieval times. Aside from the effect of that data on the calculations it is right up the alley of conservative conspiracy theorists. They are censoring data they don't want you to see!
The report goes on to talk about the incomplete historical record. This is what concerns me the most in my own distrust of the global warming theory. I think we simply don't know. We've been keeping records for far too short a time to make sweeping conclusions about climate effects being wrought by modern man in the last 60 years.
There's a lot more, but near the end he says, "Given that Greenland is cooler now than in the mediaeval warm period, and given that most of the Antarctic land-mass including almost all the world's 160,000 glaciers has cooled for 30 years, it is not likely that ice-melt will cause considerable rise in sea levels in the foreseeable future."
There are partisan hacks on both sides of this issue. I'm sure he was paid well.
No nation or other group can seriously try to play mediator in the region re. nuclear weapons without confronting the elephant in the room. Israel must be made to acknowledge its stable of nukes. You can't tell nations they cannot have nukes while Israel is sitting right there in the middle of the lot with its unofficial nuclear arsenal.
Any non-proliferation efforts are doomed to fail in the middle east unless Israel owns up to what they have. To turn a blind eye to their nuclear capability while preaching to other countries about what they can and cannot do is rank hypocrisy.
I haven't seen one in months. Thanks to Firefox and AdBlock Plus. All these advertising types who want to turn the web into a bunch of TV channels can go pound salt as far as I'm concerned. Ads? Block early and block often.
I like Spamhaus. Hell, I USE it daily. It was a bad move to ignore the lawsuit. I understand why they ignored it, but I think it was a foolish decision in the long run.
Principles and ideals like liberty and freedom get sold out all the time in the name of the almighty dollar, or in this case, euro. It's been that way for a while now. Given the choice of retain your privacy and lose a few airlines to bankruptcy, or sell out your principles and keep those airlines in business, which wins? We see it time and again.
I don't see an end any time soon to the controversy between those who want to preserve their own rights and those who want to take those rights away in the name of "protection". I don't see any modern defenders of liberty and freedom anywhere. None who will put their money where their mouths are.
I love Firefox and have used it exclusively (and Mozilla before that and Netscape before that) for over a decade. This 2.0 release of Firefox is leaving me very un-blown away.
1. Visual Refresh - so what? 2. Phishing protection - Good for "ordinary users", does nothing for me. 3. Enhanced search - I can already search pretty well across the internet, so this is bloat. 4. Tabbed browsing - each tab has its own 'x' close button? I call that a step backwards. 5. Resume brosing session - who cares? 6. Web feeds - the ONLY feature I might find useful 7. Inline spell chacking - Many people will benefit from this obviously, but not me, so it's nothing but bloat as far as I'm concerned.
There's more, but you get the idea. I am unimpressed by the new features of Firefox 2.0.
Where denocracy was once an open society where people could speak anonymously and informed citizens made their own choices. Bush has forked America and now the experts rule because only they can be trusted to make the right decisions based on alleged evidence and intelligence nobody else has a right to see.
Another hack I would like to see isn't a virus at all. It would involve a deliberate loading of unauthorized software into the machine, perpetrated by a manufacturer's representative, a poll-watcher with an agenda, or a black bag job the night before an election. The result would be the same as what Felton's paper describes: unauthorized alteration of the data on the machine that records the votes.
From everything I have read and everyone I've spoken to about these machines it wouldn't be a hack at all. It would be a demonstration. And possible even a feature depending on who was doing the rigging and who stood to benefit.
Last year everyone blamed the incredible number of hurricanes on global warming. "Something must be done!" they demanded. Climatologists said we were entering a period of increased hurricane activity that might last a decade or more. The clamor grew to DO SOMETHING about global warming.
Well somebody seems to have taken care of the problem. After all, the number of hurricanes is way down this year, isn't it?
It makes me wonder. Why does anecdotal evidence in support of global warming gloom and doom predictions played up so much, but when that evidence fails to emerge the following year nobody wants to talk about it? At the very least it makes the "killer hurricanes every year" prediction by global warming enthusiasts absolutely BS.
I think global warming deserves serious attention. I am in favor of the Kyoto accord. Having said that I fear that for every wingnut who values profit over human life there is an equally deranged nut on the other side of the political spectrum who spouts nonsense because, out of ignorance, they don't know any better.
Ain't that the truth? Like TV and radio stations. The days when they served the public interest are long gone. Now, their customers are the advertisers and the viewers/listeners are the product. The whole thing has been turned on its head. I agree with another poster above: get rid of all the regulations surrounding broadcasters and their spectrum "rights" and let the free market have at it.
Seriously, where are the good paying jobs going to come from in the next 50-100 years in the US? Assuming not everyone will come up with a brilliant idea to make them rich. Globalization isn't necessarily a bad thing but I would like to see the results of an economic simulation where an entire coutry, like say the US, wraps itself in isolationist economic and trade policies, and see what happens.
If enough of them band together. I hope that's what they do. Not only propose new ones but to uphold and seek enforcement of the older ones, especially the first 10. The gutless cowards in the Congress are never going to do it, that's for sure. Good luck, Maine. Go for it.
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Alternatives such as Linux have been available with Dell machines off and on now for about a decade. ISTR very recently people still having problems getting refunds for the Microsoft tax. I favor free markets and supply and demand and all that, but with MS the market is hardly free and open.
This is OT so mod me down at will... I hate that Bill Gates Borg pic on the main stories page. It was what prompted me to register here at Slashdot: the ability to customize my front page and turn those story icons off.
/. is causing me to to visit the site less.
I had a bookmark that logged me in and took me right to my customized front page with one click. Now, for some reason, that 1-click logon to custom FP is gone. Site redisgn, cookies, javascript, Ajax, I don't know what the reason is. All I know is this: The inability to bookmark an auto-login front page at
Flameproof undies on.
When the SCO fiasco is all wrapped up here's a number I'd like to see: How much money did all the lawyers involved earn apiece? There are hundreds involved, to be sure, but the Top Ten would be enough. Then I want to contemplate whether the fucked up Copyright laws in the U.S. make it all worthwhile. SCO's complaint was worthless from day 1 and it should have taken no more than 6 months to get it laughed out of court.
How about Microsoft finally documenting the various system calls for its IEEE 1394 driver stack? They have steadfastly refused to release docs of any type regarding its 61883.sys driver. So not only is there not source code, there's no interface definition either. And no samples. People have been wanting documentation on 61883 out of MS for over 4 years now. Nada. The MSDN library is as lame as ever when it comes to 61883 and the 1394 stack.
Innovate, schminnovate. I want to see them support what they've already got.
They are applying them to domestic travelers as well and we just don't know about that yet.
My calendar is about to say December 1, not April 1. This is really dumb. I don't bash Bill Gates a lot. I admire him in some ways. But come on, who wants a president whose company has been conviceted of being an illegal monopoly, that has been found gulty of being a predator, that has stifled innovation while claiming the opposite, that has run roughshod over consumer rights and then tried to weasel out of every penalty anyone ever tried to impose on it?
Oh, wait... is he running as a Republican?
I wish I could rent one of those. I have exactly 6 old vinyl LPs that have never been released on CD and I have no way to listen to them. It would be nice to be able to transfer from vinyl to digital over the course of about a week. But I'm not paying $100 for something I will use for a week and then have no further use for.
Oh yes, this was the same USAF facility that photographed the space shuttle Columbia as it passed overhead minutes before it broke apart during its 2003 entry. They say they took that picture on an 11 year old Mac which would be almost 15 years old now. Not too surprising that this type of research is going on there, although it is pretty close to Albuquerque.
My company is doing driver development for IEEE 1394, i.e. Firewire, devices. Not having 1394 support in VMware is a show stopper for us. Unless and until they get around to including it we'll be sitting here experiencing BSOD crashes several times per day, and sometimes per hour. We've heard the reasons VMware has not virtualized Firewire and, quite frankly, they don't hold water.
nVidia has PureVideo, ATi has whatever. Why are there still no GPU-assisted MPEG2 (or any other format) video encoders? Modern GPUs will do hardware assisted MPEG decoding, but software-only encoding is still too slow. TMPGEnc could be much faster. Same for the others. It seems as though the headlong rush to HD formats have left SD in the dust.
What do they have to worry about? That's the mantra of a large percentage of Americans. Probably the same ones who, over the past couple of decades, in survey after survey, say that Americans have "too much" freedom. These are the people (and companies) that scare me. Not the Republicans.
I know it's a British story but it's pretty scary how much of the same tactics the right uses there as in the U.S. I had a look at the article and the PDF. I'm not so sure I believe in the entire global warming scenario either, and the pdf speaks to some of my reservations. However, and having said that, there are a couple of signs that wing-nuttery is alive and well in Britain.
Ths PDF leads off with a few quotes, among which is one by GK Chesterton: "When men have ceased to believe in Christianity, it is not that they will believe in nothing. They will believe
in anything."
What the hell does that quote have to do with anything?
Then the reprot deals with the so-called "consensus" on global warming. It says 41 scientists recently wrote to the Telegraph and said they were not convinced by the "global warming consensus". It then fails to name a single one.
The next part talks about how critics of the global warming theory are often characterized as shills for the oil industry. In a murdoch-esque attempt at "balance" it then points out that most scientists worldwide are state-funded. Doesn't make a lot of sense but probably will be a convincing argument for the thinking challenged. That's what we've come to expect from the wingnuts at Fox news over here in the U.S.
The part about CO2 and pine tree trunk rings is interesting. Until it devolves into hysterical conspiracy theory. Someone found a file of data on a computer marked "CENSORED DATA" that contained details of a warm period in Medieval times that throws off the consensus when factored in. They are censoring data they don't want you to see!
In fact, a good deal of the report bases itself on the work of Steven McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, who it praises as being courageous for daring to go against the standard UN calculations and graphs and suffering the consequences of censorship as a result. They say the UN's 2001 temperature study was grossly flawed and cites a US Senate study from 2005 that backs this up. The 2005 US Senate. I wouldn't trust that bunch to tell me the right time of day.
So this report bears further scrutiny, although the right wing will hail it. As far as research goes, I hope others will chime in on their findings. There are partisan hacks on both sides of this issue. I'm sure the guy who wrote it was paid well.
I know it's a British story but it's pretty scary how much of the same tactics the right uses there as in the U.S. I had a look at the article and the PDF. I'm not so sure I believe in the entire global warming scenario that is around today. I would like to see more research like this. However, and having said that, let me recap a couple of points that pertain to the PDF, and expose the attacks on science I perceive to be in there.
Ths PDF leads off with a few quotes, among which is one by GK Chesterton: "When men have ceased to believe in Christianity, it is not that they will believe in nothing. They will believe
in anything." This set off an alarm for me immediately. The tying in of the religion vs. science angle in an otherwise inoccuous manner.
The first part deals with the so-called "consensus" on global warming. It presents a couple of points and then says 41 scientists recently wrote to the Telegraph and said they were not convinced by the "global warming consensus", and then fails to name any of them.
The next part talks about how critics of the global warming theory are often painted as tools of the oil industry since that's who funds them. In an attempt at "balance" the PDF points out that most scientists worldwide are stat-funded. Not sure what the point is here.
The next part talks about pine tree rings and says someone found a file of data on a computer marked "CENSORED DATA" that contained details of a warm period in Medieval times. Aside from the effect of that data on the calculations it is right up the alley of conservative conspiracy theorists. They are censoring data they don't want you to see!
The report goes on to talk about the incomplete historical record. This is what concerns me the most in my own distrust of the global warming theory. I think we simply don't know. We've been keeping records for far too short a time to make sweeping conclusions about climate effects being wrought by modern man in the last 60 years.
There's a lot more, but near the end he says, "Given that Greenland is cooler now than in the mediaeval warm period, and given that most of the Antarctic land-mass including almost all the world's 160,000 glaciers has cooled for 30 years, it is not likely that ice-melt will cause considerable rise in sea levels in the foreseeable future."
There are partisan hacks on both sides of this issue. I'm sure he was paid well.
No nation or other group can seriously try to play mediator in the region re. nuclear weapons without confronting the elephant in the room. Israel must be made to acknowledge its stable of nukes. You can't tell nations they cannot have nukes while Israel is sitting right there in the middle of the lot with its unofficial nuclear arsenal.
Any non-proliferation efforts are doomed to fail in the middle east unless Israel owns up to what they have. To turn a blind eye to their nuclear capability while preaching to other countries about what they can and cannot do is rank hypocrisy.
I haven't seen one in months. Thanks to Firefox and AdBlock Plus. All these advertising types who want to turn the web into a bunch of TV channels can go pound salt as far as I'm concerned. Ads? Block early and block often.
I like Spamhaus. Hell, I USE it daily. It was a bad move to ignore the lawsuit. I understand why they ignored it, but I think it was a foolish decision in the long run.
Principles and ideals like liberty and freedom get sold out all the time in the name of the almighty dollar, or in this case, euro. It's been that way for a while now. Given the choice of retain your privacy and lose a few airlines to bankruptcy, or sell out your principles and keep those airlines in business, which wins? We see it time and again.
I don't see an end any time soon to the controversy between those who want to preserve their own rights and those who want to take those rights away in the name of "protection". I don't see any modern defenders of liberty and freedom anywhere. None who will put their money where their mouths are.
I love Firefox and have used it exclusively (and Mozilla before that and Netscape before that) for over a decade. This 2.0 release of Firefox is leaving me very un-blown away.
1. Visual Refresh - so what?
2. Phishing protection - Good for "ordinary users", does nothing for me.
3. Enhanced search - I can already search pretty well across the internet, so this is bloat.
4. Tabbed browsing - each tab has its own 'x' close button? I call that a step backwards.
5. Resume brosing session - who cares?
6. Web feeds - the ONLY feature I might find useful
7. Inline spell chacking - Many people will benefit from this obviously, but not me, so it's nothing but bloat as far as I'm concerned.
There's more, but you get the idea. I am unimpressed by the new features of Firefox 2.0.
Where denocracy was once an open society where people could speak anonymously and informed citizens made their own choices. Bush has forked America and now the experts rule because only they can be trusted to make the right decisions based on alleged evidence and intelligence nobody else has a right to see.
I hope they fail miserably.
Another hack I would like to see isn't a virus at all. It would involve a deliberate loading of unauthorized software into the machine, perpetrated by a manufacturer's representative, a poll-watcher with an agenda, or a black bag job the night before an election. The result would be the same as what Felton's paper describes: unauthorized alteration of the data on the machine that records the votes.
From everything I have read and everyone I've spoken to about these machines it wouldn't be a hack at all. It would be a demonstration. And possible even a feature depending on who was doing the rigging and who stood to benefit.
These things have got to go.
Last year everyone blamed the incredible number of hurricanes on global warming. "Something must be done!" they demanded. Climatologists said we were entering a period of increased hurricane activity that might last a decade or more. The clamor grew to DO SOMETHING about global warming.
Well somebody seems to have taken care of the problem. After all, the number of hurricanes is way down this year, isn't it?
It makes me wonder. Why does anecdotal evidence in support of global warming gloom and doom predictions played up so much, but when that evidence fails to emerge the following year nobody wants to talk about it? At the very least it makes the "killer hurricanes every year" prediction by global warming enthusiasts absolutely BS.
I think global warming deserves serious attention. I am in favor of the Kyoto accord. Having said that I fear that for every wingnut who values profit over human life there is an equally deranged nut on the other side of the political spectrum who spouts nonsense because, out of ignorance, they don't know any better.
"sedentary, screen-based entertainment" TV has been around for 50 years now so this is nothing new.
Ain't that the truth? Like TV and radio stations. The days when they served the public interest are long gone. Now, their customers are the advertisers and the viewers/listeners are the product. The whole thing has been turned on its head. I agree with another poster above: get rid of all the regulations surrounding broadcasters and their spectrum "rights" and let the free market have at it.
Seriously, where are the good paying jobs going to come from in the next 50-100 years in the US? Assuming not everyone will come up with a brilliant idea to make them rich. Globalization isn't necessarily a bad thing but I would like to see the results of an economic simulation where an entire coutry, like say the US, wraps itself in isolationist economic and trade policies, and see what happens.
If enough of them band together. I hope that's what they do. Not only propose new ones but to uphold and seek enforcement of the older ones, especially the first 10. The gutless cowards in the Congress are never going to do it, that's for sure. Good luck, Maine. Go for it.