what about film adaptations of books where they might not even look like how you imagined them?
That's different. The game was supposed to be a sort of "interactive comic." The cutscenes were all 2D and involved "panels" just like a comic would. The entire look and feel of the game was designed to match Penny Arcade's style. If they'd gone for a more cinematic experience, voice acting would likely have been more appropriate. But they were trying to create an interactive comic experience, and part of a comic book is that it doesn't have a voice track.
If they were going to create a Penny Arcade animation, then I would expect it to have voice acting. But the style of the game just works better without one. Games have worked without voice acting for ages.
I was terrified that they'd give them voices. I was actually quite relieved to discover that they never did.
It's based on a comic. You shouldn't hear their voices. You've presumably already got an idea of how they sound in your mind. So, no, they never do have any voice acting in the full version, thankfully.
Another good reason not to do any voice acting is that your character is supposed to represent you. Either your character would have no voice acting or it wouldn't really be "you."
You're supposed to be playing through the comic. I was rather glad to discover that there is no voice acting in the game. I think it works better that way.
So that's a no, there is no voice acting in the full version.
I remember getting to the end of the game and having a halo.
Which was annoying, because I'd tried to play as "neutral" as possible. But apparently killing thieves was considered "good" so, even though I had gone out of my way to hunt them down and mercilessly kill as many as I could, I was apparently the paragon of goodness. Mindless vigilantism for Fable sainthood!
Apparently to be evil you had to go on killing sprees amongst villagers. (Or just dump a lot of money at evil temples.)
I still find it strange that sniping bandits who can't even see you is considered good. Seems to be a bit of a strange moral to Fable.
I'm pretty sure they are talking about buying things other than music and movies. I been able to get music (via MusicChoice) and movies (via Amazon Unbox) on my HD Tivo for quite some time.
Well... yes and no.
You know how some ads have those little popups in the upper-right-hand corner? That chime and display when you're fast-forwarding through them?
Now TiVo owners will get those during shows too.
So when Stephen Colbert holds up a copy of I Am America And So Can You, a little pop-up will appear with a link to buy it on Amazon.com.
Apparently you won't be able to browse Amazon.com from your TiVo (except, of course, for the parts you already can), just receive Amazon.com ads through it.
Which I wouldn't really mind all that much if I weren't paying $15/month on top of the cost of the box for the privilege...
That cross-domain security doesn't really solve a damned thing?
Remember the "Samy is my hero" MySpace virus? OK, the Wikipedia article calls it a "cross-site scripting vulnerability" but it wasn't, exactly. It was in the sense that MySpace was allowing JavaScript from user-supplied text to be sent to the client. But once inserted into his profile, it no longer crossed domains. It used AJAX to act with the user's credentials on the same domain.
Cross-domain security didn't do anything to protect against that because it was running on the same domain.
In short, it doesn't really solve anything and creates hosts of problems when you want to share data across domains. Yes, you can resort to sending all the data through the server, but that's fairly silly when there's no real reason the client couldn't access the data.
What really needs to be done is to figure out ways of securing the data coming back from requests, not creating this silly cross-domain rule that really doesn't solve anything and just creates problems. For example, "tainting" data returned from an AJAX request and disallowing it from being used in "eval" statements. Obviously there'd need to be a new "parseJSON" command to make up for that loss, but it would make receiving data from other domains safer. (Not perfectly safe, of course, but safer.)
Of course, that still wouldn't have protected against the "Samy is my hero" bug, but that demonstrates that even today we're moving to a web where you can wreak havoc without crossing domains.
I don't really have a "perfect answer" but loosening the cross-domain restrictions allows for new, more interesting web applications without resorting to same-domain proxy hacks.
It didn't work for me the last time I tried. I got an error that, when I looked it up online, indicated that the DRM check had failed.
Trying through the PC PlayStation store worked first time, although I should probably have mentioned that "PC" in this case means "Windows XP/Vista."
I don't have my PSP available to try again, so I dunno if it works now. I loaned my PSP out, since I wasn't currently using it for anything other than a paperweight.
The article said "handhelds". Which handhelds have shareware, other than perhaps Pocket PC?
The PSP does. Sort of. The PSP can download games from the PlayStation store, and these can be free demos if the publisher allows it. Due to DRM, you can't share them, so they're not exactly shareware. This requires either a PC or a PS3, unless the built-in PSP browser has been fixed since the last time I tried to download a demo through it.
The DS also allows Download Play which can be used to access demos, although this is even less like shareware since you can't keep these downloads once the device powers off. This restriction is because the demos are downloaded into RAM and not any sort of permanent storage. This means that the demo has even less memory available to it than it otherwise would, so not all games can really have demos made for them.
Downloading DS titles requires either a Wii through the free Nintendo Channel, or a Download Station that most stores that sell DS games have.
So yes, modern handhelds do allow free demos. Sort of. It's not quite the same thing as shareware, but hey, a free downloadable demo is better than nothing.
I should also mention that most of these demos aren't quite the full episode that old Apogee shareware games were. But on the PSP at least, it's theoretically possible to release a single episode as a free download. Not so much on the DS.
I, for one, prefer having the most frequently used button always be put in the same place relative to the bottom right corner.
And I, for one, prefer having the most frequently used option always be first in the read order. You know, left-to-right? The way English is read?
Unless you read English from right-to-left, placing the most frequently used option on the right seems a bit silly, since it means you'll always come to it last when reading through the dialog.
It's useful for people who want to generate Word documents. A project I worked on wanted to generate Excel spreadsheets as a way to download reports from a web application. We got it to work using Apache POI's HSSF, which while it doesn't implement everything reverse-engineered enough for it to work.
...Wait a moment. Allowing people to generate documents using old formats that work with the current Office actually helps Microsoft's Office monopoly, doesn't it? And here I thought they were just being kind.
condemning someone for doing what may be necessary doesn't seem very productive especially when the alternative is someone who works toward very sinister ends as well (looking at you, Mr. McCain). I'm not saying Obama can't be evil, but I will say he seems like a better (if slightly) chance at some forward progress.
I agree, Obama is probably a better choice than McCain. (Although it's still a little early to be making decisions now, especially with no VP picks yet.)
That doesn't mean he shouldn't be called on his bullshit, though. If he's going to change his mind, that's fine, but he needs a reason. The reasoning here appears to be "the Republicans called me weak on terrorists" which is a rather lame reason.
After claiming to be against immunity and against this bill, will Obama actually show up and participate in the voting? Or is he "too busy campaigning?"
Right now this is being advertised as performance and security increases, not "a new desktop theme," as people keep saying it.
You do realize that literally every single version of Windows since 98 at the least has claimed to be "the fastest, most secure version of Windows" while installing, right? Including Vista. Before the Internet became a big deal, they were just the "fastest version of Windows" since security wasn't really a large issue.
It's come to be a bit of a joke, since just about every Microsoft product will inform you that it's the "fastest, most secure" whatever it is while installing if the install takes long enough for it to display that message. (For example, Visual Studio contains a similar line while installing.)
Or it could be the disc defragger running. I've learned that I can't expect to use my Vista machine on Tuesday evenings, since the defragger automatically runs every Wednesday at midnight. (Really. Open Properties on a disc, move to the Tools tab, and select "Defragment Now." (Allow it.) Instead of bringing up the disc defragger, it will tell you its schedule.)
And I'm sure there are more things beyond those two that Vista runs that cause massive hard drive use. For example, the Shadow Copy thing apparently runs every night at 4AM, even on Vista editions that don't allow you to use it.
Plus disabling the search service can apparently cause massive breakage if you ever do wind up searching for anything. (For example, using the Start menu search.) Evidently Vista spawns off threads for every single keystroke that search all drives if the Search service is disabled. I've never tried it, though.
It's even more obnoxious because the stupid Open Office installer comes with a JRE by default, too.
If you don't want to download the installer which is bundled with a JRE, you have to hunt through links on the OO.o site. The download link silently includes a JRE. Instead you have to click on "Get more platforms and languages" if you don't want the JRE.
But wait! Note the anchor on that more platforms link? By default, it jumps you to your current language. So now you need to scroll up and then uncheck the checkbox that tells it to include the JRE.
But wait! What checkbox? Oh, you need to enable JavaScript to see the checkbox. So enable JavaScript and then clear the checkbox. Now you can finally download OpenOffice.org without a JRE.
Why would you want to download OO.o without a JRE? Well, as they say in bold text: If you already have Java installed there is no need to download the OpenOffice.org installer with Java.
I agree completely. If you already have Java installed, there's no need to download a second copy. But then why is it so stupidly hard to do so?! And if they're going to use JavaScript to auto-detect your OS, why not add in a quick check to see if you already have a JRE through the Java plugin?
Of course, skipping the JRE download only saves 13MB, so for people on broadband, it's probably not worth the time jumping through the hoops just to skip the JRE. But if you do that, you need to make sure that you choose a "Custom" install so you can tell it not to install the JRE. Which you'll want to make sure you do, because at least with the copy of OOo I just downloaded, the bundled JRE is a couple of patches out of date anyway. (6u4 versus 6u6.)
I suppose just blindly downloading the OOo copy from the Java installer is the "preferred" way of not getting a second JRE? Or does that include it anyway? Maybe I'll have to reinstall Java to check...
and the insane part about it all, is that it's not stopping piracy. it NEVER will. whole seasons are still on bittorrent in HD.
It never will stop piracy. It can't: the people doing the "real" piracy, the people making copies of the discs and selling them illegally don't need to break the "copy protection," they just copy them as-is and press complete copies. You don't need to decrypt a message to make a complete bit-for-bit copy.
But what it does stop is people from doing things like taking the Blu-ray they bought and copying it onto their PC and then re-encoding it for their iPod or PSP or other mobile device. It stops people from copying their DVD movies onto their PC and then playing them through streaming media devices like the Xbox or PS3. It stops people from being able to take a Blu-ray and burn a SD DVD copy to use in their portable DVD player. It stops people from being able to watch movies before they're "officially" released in their region.
In the end, it makes the copy you can download off the Pirate Bay flat-out more useful than the copy you can buy in stores. Because that copy you can reencode to watch on your mobile device, you can burn to DVD, you can stream to media devices.
So if it doesn't stop people making counterfeits and doesn't prevent copies from showing up on the Pirate Bay, why go through the whole dance to harm their paying customers? And how long are we paying customers willing to put up with this crap?
However, you'll still be typing in the blue "reply" format unless you've changed that style, so the only queue that it's a reply is that it's not indented.
See, top-posting really does cause brain damage. I do know better, really.
Because Outlook's text editor sucks to the point that top-posting is basically the only way to make it work.
Outlook has two default text styles: "compose" and "reply." Assuming nobody bothers changing them, after the second reply everyone will be typing in the same font and color.
This means that you have to manually alter you text to make it stand out if you're replying to a reply.
Plus, as an added bonus, Outlook's quote is just an indent and a set of email headers. There's no nice ">" at the start of each quoted line or nice blue line like there is in Thunderbird.
And, because as already mentioned, Outlook's email editor sucks, Outlook really doesn't handle inserting new lines of text into quoted sections that well. Assuming nobody's done anything fancy with formatting it will simply unindent the line of text. However, you'll still be typing in the blue "reply" format unless you've changed that style, so the only queue that it's a reply is that it's not indented. Unless you're the first reply after an email is sent, then by default you'll be typing blue and their text will remain black. But after one round, this is lost.
But there's still that "assuming nobody's done anything fancy with formatting" thing I just mentioned. Throw in bullets or numbered lists (and keep in mind, Outlook like Word loves auto-formatting things) and things can get a little screwy. Those generally will prevent your text from being indented.
I actually did do an "inline reply" to an email that used a numbered list in Outlook, and that had the effect of resetting the numbered list numbers - instead of keeping the number from the original email, it started counting over again from 1. Not a problem if you're replying to all the original items, but...
In short, it's because Outlook's email editor basically sucks. It wants to be an embedded Word instead of an email editor.
For those who've never used Outlook, I've essentially formatted my post in a general "Outlook reply" format. Keep in mind that the quoted section would just be indented, without the little quote lines that Slashdot has added.
From: Imsdal (930595) Sent: Tuesday, June 10 2008 01:05 PM To: slashdot.org Subject: Re:As well they shoouldn't
I hate having to figure out who said what in which e-mail when I'm at work (using Outlook).
Whatever happened to quoting and proper mail etiquette, anyway? When I started using message boards in the early '80s, almost everyone quickly learned to quote properly, to cut out the unnecessary stuff and so on. Now it seems to be a completely lost art. I have had people at work ask me, in all seriousness, why I didn't top post and what those strange ">" characters meant.
I agree that threading is important now, but it is (IMNSHO) a technological solution to a social problem. I find hat unfortunate..
About half that. According to the Department of Energy, the US average gas price is $4.039/gallon as of, uh, yesterday. (Which matches what I see, for what it's worth.)
OK, so that's less than half by $0.40, but that's still about half.
Pretty much every cable company does that in the US. I'm fairly sure it's allowed by contract, though, since cable companies have some form of contract between the broadcasters and themselves. I think.
On cable it's not necessarily a "bad" thing - generally the ads that are placed over the existing ads are local ads over nation-wide ads. For example, ads for local supermarkets or furniture stores versus generic ads for Sonic.
(This is a specific example. According to the Sonic store locator, the closest Sonic to me is in New Jersey. I live near Boston, Massachusetts. Sonic is a fast food joint. Somehow, I don't really feel like driving to New Jersey for fast food. In other words: Sonic ads don't really apply to me. However ads for local businesses might.)
So the cable analogy doesn't really apply - the ads are usually more targeted than the ads they're replacing, and more importantly, the channels know about it.
Although I can't let this slide without one final Comcast bash: I wouldn't mind them replacing generic ads with targeted local ads, if only the targeted ads were shown during the commercial break and not during the show! Incompetence and not malice, but still...
I've always heard it as "Commercial Off The Shelf" - and Google seems to agree with me. (Yes, even Linux use would generally be commercial, because it usually comes with support contracts from someone.)
But anyway, part of the reason for using COTS products in general is that people bitch about "government waste" and things like "$500 hammers" - so in response, the government and the DOD started a mandate to use more COTS products.
The idea is to save money by not reinventing the wheel where it isn't needed. Quite a lot of the government and the military is paper pushing, and when COTS software can be used instead of custom designed software, it's a win in cost - which means spending less taxpayer money, which means taxpayers are less upset.
Which isn't to say everything is COTS, but the government likes the idea of using products that are easy to obtain and have a wide knowledge base of users to draw on. That way, if a COTS product breaks, it's easier to replace or repair, since it may be possible to have it fixed/replaced without going back to the original vendor.
Using COTS products where possible saves government money, which is taxpayer money, which is likely your money. It's a good thing.
You mean multiple files? Technically the "completed" message is sent when a peer becomes a seed - in other words, when it has all the data in the torrent.
So if you're only selecting a single file out of a larger torrent and only download that, your client will never send the "completed" message.
This doesn't matter in the "count number of Firefox downloads" scenario since there is only one file to download, namely the installer. It probably doesn't matter in the "count times the show was downloaded" scenario as, again, there will likely be only a single file to download.
Not to mention that picking single files out of a torrent isn't exactly common usage.
The place I work requires you to swipe your badge to unlock the exit doors, and doesn't run into any fire code issues.
This is because the door will also open if you just push on it. But doing that will set off the door alarm, alerting security. (Not the fire alarm - that's only set off on fire exit only doors.)
So if the building is actually on fire, all the exits can be used as fire exits. Sure, the security alarm will be blaring, but in a real fire, so will the fire alarm.
Assuming the BitTorrent client is using a standard tracker and isn't doing anything screwy, clients most certainly do inform the tracker when they've completed the download.
There are four types of events that cause the tracker to be queried:
When a client starts a torrent and is joining the swarm
Generic "give me more peers" at regular intervals
When a client completes the download
When the client stops a torrent and is leaving the swarm
This is how trackers can keep track of how many complete downloads there are: the clients tell them.
Sorry, but no: the Vista license only allows for using up to two cores. If you want to run Windows Vista today, your best bet remains liquid nitrogen cooling while overclocking.
Slashdot Mirror
what about film adaptations of books where they might not even look like how you imagined them?
That's different. The game was supposed to be a sort of "interactive comic." The cutscenes were all 2D and involved "panels" just like a comic would. The entire look and feel of the game was designed to match Penny Arcade's style. If they'd gone for a more cinematic experience, voice acting would likely have been more appropriate. But they were trying to create an interactive comic experience, and part of a comic book is that it doesn't have a voice track.
If they were going to create a Penny Arcade animation, then I would expect it to have voice acting. But the style of the game just works better without one. Games have worked without voice acting for ages.
I was terrified that they'd give them voices. I was actually quite relieved to discover that they never did.
It's based on a comic. You shouldn't hear their voices. You've presumably already got an idea of how they sound in your mind. So, no, they never do have any voice acting in the full version, thankfully.
Another good reason not to do any voice acting is that your character is supposed to represent you. Either your character would have no voice acting or it wouldn't really be "you."
You're supposed to be playing through the comic. I was rather glad to discover that there is no voice acting in the game. I think it works better that way.
So that's a no, there is no voice acting in the full version.
I remember getting to the end of the game and having a halo.
Which was annoying, because I'd tried to play as "neutral" as possible. But apparently killing thieves was considered "good" so, even though I had gone out of my way to hunt them down and mercilessly kill as many as I could, I was apparently the paragon of goodness. Mindless vigilantism for Fable sainthood!
Apparently to be evil you had to go on killing sprees amongst villagers. (Or just dump a lot of money at evil temples.)
I still find it strange that sniping bandits who can't even see you is considered good. Seems to be a bit of a strange moral to Fable.
I'm pretty sure they are talking about buying things other than music and movies. I been able to get music (via MusicChoice) and movies (via Amazon Unbox) on my HD Tivo for quite some time.
Well... yes and no.
You know how some ads have those little popups in the upper-right-hand corner? That chime and display when you're fast-forwarding through them?
Now TiVo owners will get those during shows too.
So when Stephen Colbert holds up a copy of I Am America And So Can You, a little pop-up will appear with a link to buy it on Amazon.com.
Apparently you won't be able to browse Amazon.com from your TiVo (except, of course, for the parts you already can), just receive Amazon.com ads through it.
Which I wouldn't really mind all that much if I weren't paying $15/month on top of the cost of the box for the privilege...
That cross-domain security doesn't really solve a damned thing?
Remember the "Samy is my hero" MySpace virus? OK, the Wikipedia article calls it a "cross-site scripting vulnerability" but it wasn't, exactly. It was in the sense that MySpace was allowing JavaScript from user-supplied text to be sent to the client. But once inserted into his profile, it no longer crossed domains. It used AJAX to act with the user's credentials on the same domain.
Cross-domain security didn't do anything to protect against that because it was running on the same domain.
In short, it doesn't really solve anything and creates hosts of problems when you want to share data across domains. Yes, you can resort to sending all the data through the server, but that's fairly silly when there's no real reason the client couldn't access the data.
What really needs to be done is to figure out ways of securing the data coming back from requests, not creating this silly cross-domain rule that really doesn't solve anything and just creates problems. For example, "tainting" data returned from an AJAX request and disallowing it from being used in "eval" statements. Obviously there'd need to be a new "parseJSON" command to make up for that loss, but it would make receiving data from other domains safer. (Not perfectly safe, of course, but safer.)
Of course, that still wouldn't have protected against the "Samy is my hero" bug, but that demonstrates that even today we're moving to a web where you can wreak havoc without crossing domains.
I don't really have a "perfect answer" but loosening the cross-domain restrictions allows for new, more interesting web applications without resorting to same-domain proxy hacks.
It didn't work for me the last time I tried. I got an error that, when I looked it up online, indicated that the DRM check had failed.
Trying through the PC PlayStation store worked first time, although I should probably have mentioned that "PC" in this case means "Windows XP/Vista."
I don't have my PSP available to try again, so I dunno if it works now. I loaned my PSP out, since I wasn't currently using it for anything other than a paperweight.
The article said "handhelds". Which handhelds have shareware, other than perhaps Pocket PC?
The PSP does. Sort of. The PSP can download games from the PlayStation store, and these can be free demos if the publisher allows it. Due to DRM, you can't share them, so they're not exactly shareware. This requires either a PC or a PS3, unless the built-in PSP browser has been fixed since the last time I tried to download a demo through it.
The DS also allows Download Play which can be used to access demos, although this is even less like shareware since you can't keep these downloads once the device powers off. This restriction is because the demos are downloaded into RAM and not any sort of permanent storage. This means that the demo has even less memory available to it than it otherwise would, so not all games can really have demos made for them.
Downloading DS titles requires either a Wii through the free Nintendo Channel, or a Download Station that most stores that sell DS games have.
So yes, modern handhelds do allow free demos. Sort of. It's not quite the same thing as shareware, but hey, a free downloadable demo is better than nothing.
I should also mention that most of these demos aren't quite the full episode that old Apogee shareware games were. But on the PSP at least, it's theoretically possible to release a single episode as a free download. Not so much on the DS.
I, for one, prefer having the most frequently used button always be put in the same place relative to the bottom right corner.
And I, for one, prefer having the most frequently used option always be first in the read order. You know, left-to-right? The way English is read?
Unless you read English from right-to-left, placing the most frequently used option on the right seems a bit silly, since it means you'll always come to it last when reading through the dialog.
It's useful for people who want to generate Word documents. A project I worked on wanted to generate Excel spreadsheets as a way to download reports from a web application. We got it to work using Apache POI's HSSF, which while it doesn't implement everything reverse-engineered enough for it to work.
...Wait a moment. Allowing people to generate documents using old formats that work with the current Office actually helps Microsoft's Office monopoly, doesn't it? And here I thought they were just being kind.
I agree, Obama is probably a better choice than McCain. (Although it's still a little early to be making decisions now, especially with no VP picks yet.)
That doesn't mean he shouldn't be called on his bullshit, though. If he's going to change his mind, that's fine, but he needs a reason. The reasoning here appears to be "the Republicans called me weak on terrorists" which is a rather lame reason.
After claiming to be against immunity and against this bill, will Obama actually show up and participate in the voting? Or is he "too busy campaigning?"
Oh, wait. He supports the bill now. Can't you just fell the change we can believe in?
And on that first question, apparently Obama is currently campaigning in Las Vegas, although given the second point, maybe that's just as well.
You do realize that literally every single version of Windows since 98 at the least has claimed to be "the fastest, most secure version of Windows" while installing, right? Including Vista. Before the Internet became a big deal, they were just the "fastest version of Windows" since security wasn't really a large issue.
It's come to be a bit of a joke, since just about every Microsoft product will inform you that it's the "fastest, most secure" whatever it is while installing if the install takes long enough for it to display that message. (For example, Visual Studio contains a similar line while installing.)
Or it could be the disc defragger running. I've learned that I can't expect to use my Vista machine on Tuesday evenings, since the defragger automatically runs every Wednesday at midnight. (Really. Open Properties on a disc, move to the Tools tab, and select "Defragment Now." (Allow it.) Instead of bringing up the disc defragger, it will tell you its schedule.)
And I'm sure there are more things beyond those two that Vista runs that cause massive hard drive use. For example, the Shadow Copy thing apparently runs every night at 4AM, even on Vista editions that don't allow you to use it.
Plus disabling the search service can apparently cause massive breakage if you ever do wind up searching for anything. (For example, using the Start menu search.) Evidently Vista spawns off threads for every single keystroke that search all drives if the Search service is disabled. I've never tried it, though.
It's even more obnoxious because the stupid Open Office installer comes with a JRE by default, too.
If you don't want to download the installer which is bundled with a JRE, you have to hunt through links on the OO.o site. The download link silently includes a JRE. Instead you have to click on "Get more platforms and languages" if you don't want the JRE.
But wait! Note the anchor on that more platforms link? By default, it jumps you to your current language. So now you need to scroll up and then uncheck the checkbox that tells it to include the JRE.
But wait! What checkbox? Oh, you need to enable JavaScript to see the checkbox. So enable JavaScript and then clear the checkbox. Now you can finally download OpenOffice.org without a JRE.
Why would you want to download OO.o without a JRE? Well, as they say in bold text: If you already have Java installed there is no need to download the OpenOffice.org installer with Java.
I agree completely. If you already have Java installed, there's no need to download a second copy. But then why is it so stupidly hard to do so?! And if they're going to use JavaScript to auto-detect your OS, why not add in a quick check to see if you already have a JRE through the Java plugin?
Of course, skipping the JRE download only saves 13MB, so for people on broadband, it's probably not worth the time jumping through the hoops just to skip the JRE. But if you do that, you need to make sure that you choose a "Custom" install so you can tell it not to install the JRE. Which you'll want to make sure you do, because at least with the copy of OOo I just downloaded, the bundled JRE is a couple of patches out of date anyway. (6u4 versus 6u6.)
I suppose just blindly downloading the OOo copy from the Java installer is the "preferred" way of not getting a second JRE? Or does that include it anyway? Maybe I'll have to reinstall Java to check...
It never will stop piracy. It can't: the people doing the "real" piracy, the people making copies of the discs and selling them illegally don't need to break the "copy protection," they just copy them as-is and press complete copies. You don't need to decrypt a message to make a complete bit-for-bit copy.
But what it does stop is people from doing things like taking the Blu-ray they bought and copying it onto their PC and then re-encoding it for their iPod or PSP or other mobile device. It stops people from copying their DVD movies onto their PC and then playing them through streaming media devices like the Xbox or PS3. It stops people from being able to take a Blu-ray and burn a SD DVD copy to use in their portable DVD player. It stops people from being able to watch movies before they're "officially" released in their region.
In the end, it makes the copy you can download off the Pirate Bay flat-out more useful than the copy you can buy in stores. Because that copy you can reencode to watch on your mobile device, you can burn to DVD, you can stream to media devices.
So if it doesn't stop people making counterfeits and doesn't prevent copies from showing up on the Pirate Bay, why go through the whole dance to harm their paying customers? And how long are we paying customers willing to put up with this crap?
See, top-posting really does cause brain damage. I do know better, really.
Because Outlook's text editor sucks to the point that top-posting is basically the only way to make it work.
Outlook has two default text styles: "compose" and "reply." Assuming nobody bothers changing them, after the second reply everyone will be typing in the same font and color.
This means that you have to manually alter you text to make it stand out if you're replying to a reply.
Plus, as an added bonus, Outlook's quote is just an indent and a set of email headers. There's no nice ">" at the start of each quoted line or nice blue line like there is in Thunderbird.
And, because as already mentioned, Outlook's email editor sucks, Outlook really doesn't handle inserting new lines of text into quoted sections that well. Assuming nobody's done anything fancy with formatting it will simply unindent the line of text. However, you'll still be typing in the blue "reply" format unless you've changed that style, so the only queue that it's a reply is that it's not indented. Unless you're the first reply after an email is sent, then by default you'll be typing blue and their text will remain black. But after one round, this is lost.
But there's still that "assuming nobody's done anything fancy with formatting" thing I just mentioned. Throw in bullets or numbered lists (and keep in mind, Outlook like Word loves auto-formatting things) and things can get a little screwy. Those generally will prevent your text from being indented.
I actually did do an "inline reply" to an email that used a numbered list in Outlook, and that had the effect of resetting the numbered list numbers - instead of keeping the number from the original email, it started counting over again from 1. Not a problem if you're replying to all the original items, but...
In short, it's because Outlook's email editor basically sucks. It wants to be an embedded Word instead of an email editor.
For those who've never used Outlook, I've essentially formatted my post in a general "Outlook reply" format. Keep in mind that the quoted section would just be indented, without the little quote lines that Slashdot has added.
From: Imsdal (930595)Sent: Tuesday, June 10 2008 01:05 PM
To: slashdot.org
Subject: Re:As well they shoouldn't
I hate having to figure out who said what in which e-mail when I'm at work (using Outlook).
Whatever happened to quoting and proper mail etiquette, anyway? When I started using message boards in the early '80s, almost everyone quickly learned to quote properly, to cut out the unnecessary stuff and so on. Now it seems to be a completely lost art. I have had people at work ask me, in all seriousness, why I didn't top post and what those strange ">" characters meant.
I agree that threading is important now, but it is (IMNSHO) a technological solution to a social problem. I find hat unfortunate..
About half that. According to the Department of Energy, the US average gas price is $4.039/gallon as of, uh, yesterday. (Which matches what I see, for what it's worth.)
OK, so that's less than half by $0.40, but that's still about half.
Don't forget the Doctor and his keynote speech on using a sonic screwdriver to break into any computer system ever created.
Pretty much every cable company does that in the US. I'm fairly sure it's allowed by contract, though, since cable companies have some form of contract between the broadcasters and themselves. I think.
On cable it's not necessarily a "bad" thing - generally the ads that are placed over the existing ads are local ads over nation-wide ads. For example, ads for local supermarkets or furniture stores versus generic ads for Sonic.
(This is a specific example. According to the Sonic store locator, the closest Sonic to me is in New Jersey. I live near Boston, Massachusetts. Sonic is a fast food joint. Somehow, I don't really feel like driving to New Jersey for fast food. In other words: Sonic ads don't really apply to me. However ads for local businesses might.)
So the cable analogy doesn't really apply - the ads are usually more targeted than the ads they're replacing, and more importantly, the channels know about it.
Although I can't let this slide without one final Comcast bash: I wouldn't mind them replacing generic ads with targeted local ads, if only the targeted ads were shown during the commercial break and not during the show! Incompetence and not malice, but still...
I've always heard it as "Commercial Off The Shelf" - and Google seems to agree with me. (Yes, even Linux use would generally be commercial, because it usually comes with support contracts from someone.)
But anyway, part of the reason for using COTS products in general is that people bitch about "government waste" and things like "$500 hammers" - so in response, the government and the DOD started a mandate to use more COTS products.
The idea is to save money by not reinventing the wheel where it isn't needed. Quite a lot of the government and the military is paper pushing, and when COTS software can be used instead of custom designed software, it's a win in cost - which means spending less taxpayer money, which means taxpayers are less upset.
Which isn't to say everything is COTS, but the government likes the idea of using products that are easy to obtain and have a wide knowledge base of users to draw on. That way, if a COTS product breaks, it's easier to replace or repair, since it may be possible to have it fixed/replaced without going back to the original vendor.
Using COTS products where possible saves government money, which is taxpayer money, which is likely your money. It's a good thing.
You mean multiple files? Technically the "completed" message is sent when a peer becomes a seed - in other words, when it has all the data in the torrent.
So if you're only selecting a single file out of a larger torrent and only download that, your client will never send the "completed" message.
This doesn't matter in the "count number of Firefox downloads" scenario since there is only one file to download, namely the installer. It probably doesn't matter in the "count times the show was downloaded" scenario as, again, there will likely be only a single file to download.
Not to mention that picking single files out of a torrent isn't exactly common usage.
The place I work requires you to swipe your badge to unlock the exit doors, and doesn't run into any fire code issues.
This is because the door will also open if you just push on it. But doing that will set off the door alarm, alerting security. (Not the fire alarm - that's only set off on fire exit only doors.)
So if the building is actually on fire, all the exits can be used as fire exits. Sure, the security alarm will be blaring, but in a real fire, so will the fire alarm.
Assuming the BitTorrent client is using a standard tracker and isn't doing anything screwy, clients most certainly do inform the tracker when they've completed the download.
There are four types of events that cause the tracker to be queried:
This is how trackers can keep track of how many complete downloads there are: the clients tell them.
Sorry, but no: the Vista license only allows for using up to two cores. If you want to run Windows Vista today, your best bet remains liquid nitrogen cooling while overclocking.