As a sibling of a Michgian Grad, and a resident of Ann Arbor (meaning, I speak with no authority since I graduated from MSU):
I'm pretty sure Michigan didn't respond like that. I was just informed by my little bro (a Mich grad) that the RIAA just sent 30 notes to students at Michigan. IP tracking is in place, and it looks like the University is cooperating, at least at some level.
Becuase you can't kill some commies as a British soldier, and run all the way to the middle east, change your uniform to the US Marines and waste terrorists there...
Well... You can't without taking a break, or a hell of an in-game flight.
Of course, the article just seems to be a linkfest for someone who just finds the PJ v. Lyons story interesting. It's fluff. Even if Lyons actually does like Linux (or Open Source, or Free Software, etc...) he's enough of a flamethrower to write off anything positive he writes. Treat him no differently. He wrote what he wrote, take it as you will (or did).
Parent is right in that 25 good admins will out-do 180, 200, 1000, etc bad admins. In fact, the reliability will go down for each bad admin... Based on my experience at least.
But.. Given patches, and installation of software, security fixes, etc, reboots "several times per year" isn't necessarily a bad thing... assuming they're all planned.
My concern isn't necessarily the client self-update. My concern is the lack of documentation thereof. For technical concerns, warn the user if there needs to be an update to the client itself. That way I can schedule that and plan on my own.
My real problem, though, has to do with why this isn't documented. Is there a reason MS won't publish this? Can this be a potential attack vector? If an IIS/WSUS system is compromised, can you 'simulate' a client update and use it to install whatever you want to the clients that are listening?
That's pretty simple. Lying under oath to a judge. Perjury is a felony outright. You lie to a grand jury or judge you're a felon. Same to Mr. Gonzales. Same to Hillary's "I don't recall" statements that made forgetfulness famous.
It was also driven by the lawsuit of a private citizen. You may or may not remember that it was Paula Jones's suit that caused the whole mess to begin with. But Clinton lied, under oath, to a judge. Felony = High crime. He didn't get convicted though. The right back stabbed their own house managers in the Senate. The only people who really paid for that crime were the members of the House Committee.
By the way, thanks CNN for driving home the point that it's okay to lie to grand juries as long as it's marital.
IMHO - That's the disadvantage of buying a file instead of a CD. Sure, you can sell or gift your files. If you're paranoid that your buddy is going to throw your songs on a P2P network, then just convert them to another format. Chances are, you aren't going to go sell the files to a friend anyway. I mean, you *could* but I find transfer of ownership of anthing that isn't solid to be difficult anyway. Especially in the legal sense.
If you're looking to gifting, then it may not be as personal, but you could get a gift card... or whatever Apple lets you buy for that purpose. I'd guess that for the price of a CD ($15-20 in some cases) your friend could likely get 2 discs worth or more, and you're still giving them something that has substance (a card) and no DRM mess.
That or buy the songs yourself and make a mix CD a la John Cusack. Classy in a personal sort of way. If you make an Audio CD, no worries about your friend ripping and putting on their internet eyepatch.
As for other issues with music services -
If I don't make a backup of that file and my hard drive gets wiped out, how do I legally get it back? Pay again, or see if my friends have the song so I can replace it that way. I still paid for it, I just need to recover it right?
If the song gets corrupted cause of some NTFS screw up, or I accidentally create a tarball on it (I did that once), and I don't notice and eventually I don't have my backup anymore what do I do?
I know that the parent didn't want to address the other issues, but the point that I'm trying to make is that there are advantages and disadvantages to certain formats. Sure, you could resell your CD to a store... After ripping it to your PC. And sure, you could sell a bunch of music files to your friends... and not delete them.
Reselling or gifting is all based on the honor system. If you're afraid of your non-DRM files ending up all over the internet... Get new friends that you trust or just buy the CD and had it to them.
The first thought that went through my head was - Worm.
I wonder if someone could blast through their bandwidth cap due to malware, then get shut off? I'm sure they'd notice a slow computer, or slow connection, but maybe not if they have a high speed but low cap?
I like the intention. In a sue happy culture that has developed, to throw some chance of losing your arse would definitely force a suing party to carefully consider the case, and force a law team to do the same.
The thing is, that's already in the system. If you lose, those attorney fees aren't anything to scoff at. if you check the links, you'll see $125-250 an hour for your attorney to think about you, let alone when they're actually spending time in court defending or plantiffing (add that to the Becktionary). So as it stands, you're looking at a standard high risk-high reward investment from the plantiff's side... And high capital means it's easier to take the hit... See RIAA.
Lawyers know this. They've known it since day 2 of law school. You take a case you think you can win (unless you're court appointed). If you can get a lawyer to represent you who isn't listed in HR, then that means you should have a winnable case. If you're defending yourself with company law, then there aren't any *new* costs right? Please correct me if I'm wrong. So, to make action against another, you should have a winnable case. The problem here isn't the costs of attorneys, it's the general feeling of juries and judges that your average citizen shouldn't require any knowledge to survive day to day. We're sue happy, because the people in the system have allowed it to be that way, and there are plenty of folks who will take advantage of any exploitable system.
So - If you bring that formula into the equation... How much does it help the private consumer of law services (defending or offending)? It doesn't. That formula would not really hurt the AAs with their suits against grannies, 10 year olds and grad students.
Still though, I'm glad that people are looking at fixing the system. The intention is great, let's tweak that...
X sues Y for $Z+$F ($F = fees which will be part of the case.) Y spends $D defending itself X wins receives $Z.
Court then compares $D to $F.
If $D is smaller than $F
$F will become $D or ( ($D/$F) * $Z) up to $F.
If $F is smaller than $D
Award $F Y wins
use formulas above but switch $F with $D.
In cases where you have in house representation, figure out effective cost by multiplying the salary per day by the number of days.
It's complicated... Sure... But I hope it all comes out to balancing costs of representation. If you have a grad student who wins a multi-million dollar case, then you deserve a bonus.
I figured it was only a matter of time before this happened. Has AOL been sued for their chatrooms? Actually, yes they have...
One thing that upsets me is that MySpace is already taking steps to correct this.
But it doesn't matter because these parents are teaching their kids that it's okay to not take responsibility for their own actions. Do whatever you want, and if something goes bad, sue someone for letting you screw up. It's not your fault that you stuck your hand in the outlet, there was nothing stopping you.
We are now operating on the assumption that people lack the basic instinct of self preservation. It's one thing to lie or mislead. It's another to give people something with good intentions, but hold them responsible when others abuse it. It's a whole other thing when the owners are already trying to curb the abuse and are doing what I consider *due diligence.*
It's stupid, and these parents are stupid for blaming the service for their kids' screwups. I'm sorry this happened to your kids. I'm sorry that *you* didn't teach your kids that strangers can be dangerous. Own up and hold those actually responsible accountable.
My Girlfriend is what I might consider a bit of a hippy. Her brother is definitely what I would consider a hippy.
They (of course) introduced me to these lights a while back. My girl has them all over her condo, and I found out from her (and from seeing them in action) that there are different color lights available. She has the typical white light in her closets, but there are some more yellow bulbs out there too that give more natural light.
I have them all over my condo. Bathroom, living room, dining room, and basement. I keep my house a bit cooler, and there is about a 1/2 delay between switch and turn on. Also, there is about 15 seconds of 'warm up' time where the lights get brighter. I may have older gen bulbs, but I have yet to have an issue with them, and I can tell you that they've just about paid for themselves already (I've had them since summer). I love these things.
And parent is right since the LED would instantly put off customers that are thinking 'cheap light.' It's quite typical... And I'd know, I was like that. I could easily see CFLs being a gateway light though. If the CFL works as advertised, and the end customers are happy, or even *really happy,* 5-6 years down the road they might be keen on switching to an LED, even if it's $40. I'd rather see the price on something like that come down a bit further. That might happen too, especially if the manufacturers can find enough demand from the flashlight industry to start really producing them.
With statement from parent - He's right, we're not talking about saving the world, we're talking about the life currently here. The climate will be pushed, and balance (with more or less rain, more or less CO2, whatever). Something that I've been yelling for years is:
How about not freaking out? Regardless if there's a ton of warming from our evil vehicles or not, we can at least take a bit of ownership and reduce our individual effects and do it with some intelligence. Drive a car that gets better mileage cause it'll save you cash at the pump. Use those halogen bulbs cause you only have to change them every 3-5 years, and they use less energy... etc etc...
The people I hang out with aren't living in constant fear of Earth striking us down for killing the planet, but I think that if I can make less of an impact... Then cool. If you can't, fine, no big deal.
I'm sure we have *some* effect on the overall climate, I'll just do what I can to cut that down. While I'm at it, I might as well see if there's a way to save some cash doing it too.
Actually, I can think of a couple perfectly legit reasons involving things that I want to do.
1. I have been unable to listen to my music on my XP x64 installation. I've been using this as my primary PC for a while now, and I've been unable to play any of my M4Ps since iTunes won't even install (until today). I spent a long time looking for an older iTunes 6 installation, but to no avail. I'll see if I can get things working again tonight. If I could strip the DRM, I'd just open up any number of other players and listen in Media Player or Winamp.
2. I have a car MP3-CD player. I cannot convert my M4Ps to MP3 without wasting a bunch of CDs. iTunes doesn't let you create an MP3 CD with your protected songs. If iTunes allowed me to burn an MP3 CD with those protected songs, or if I stripped the DRM, I could make that MP3 CD and have my music with me in the car.
Yes, I know that if the DRM was easily removed the *AA would be all over them... I understand that this isn't all on Apple, and they have to at least try to keep their music locked down. And no, I'm not going to go spend $400+ just to listen to music I already bought.
I thought that the point of those services was to provide a subscription model so that you never *BUY* the music. You're supposed to pay for access to their library. In this case, you aren't buying the music, you're renting it from the provider.
In this case, removing the DRM is more like making a copy of a DVD or VHS tape that you rent from Blockbuster.
I'm more interested in converting my iTunes m4p files (that I bought and paid for to own) to MP3 so I can play them in my car. This is illegal, and qualified as illegal before any DMCA. You're copying something you don't own if you use it on Napster.
Almost true, with Windows upgrades, you only need to provide the installation media of a "qualifying" previos Windows version. Namely, the XP installer will see a blank hard drive, and ask you to insert a 98 CD to make sure you're upgrading.
Since then, I've been trying to figure out what drives I should get for home. I mean, 250GB is nice and all... but the last WD I got lasted about a year, and then outright died with no warning...
Well, not really *no* warning... there were 3 entries in the system log saying the disk had a bad sector. I guess the 4th was the first sector.
It was a VERY sad day too. It was only a 60 GB Drive... but I'm sure (since I'm a typical slashdot reader) you all know what 55GB of that drive contained.
I now have a RAID 1 array setup with Seagate drives, with a 5 year warranty on them. I can't lose that again.
I couldn't care less what happens to my OS... I can get that back easy.
What are the legal implications of going through that process?
I'm pretty sure that JHymn, and iRevolt, etc, are all DMCA violators... But to use a functionality that's built into iTunes to essentially remove the DRM from a song... Is that okay?
For those of us who like a good cherry coke slurpee:
1. Put your lid on first.
2. Put in a little cherry flavor (amount to preference).
3. Tap cup to settle everything.
4. Place up to coke dispenser, and open it up immediately, release when it gets a little past halfway between the top of cup and lid opening.
It's a blantant disregard for the "open slowly" rule, but when properly executed, you get a perfect mix of cherry and coke, otherwise unattainable without copious stirring.
Interesting note: The farthest I've ever lived from a 7-11 is where I live now. 1 full mile.
I pretty well agree with parent on XP, except I don't think Office 2000 was that good at all.
My major gripes with Office 2000 was Outlook and the installer... Outlook: No IMAP, profile interface sucked, but it was a hell of a lot quicker than XP. Installer: Every time you sneezed, office would ask for the CD. If you opened Outlook Web access, you needed the CD... If you opened Quickbooks... CD.. Patches, service packs, even programs that seemed completely unrelated required the CD.
Oh, and it had to be that one specific CD too.
I had a case where there was an Office 2000 installation that broke, and it was deployed by policy. Before the break, someone updated the MST file to go with the configuration... The thing would use the installer anymore since it didn't have the "correct" transform.
I had to use the Windows Installer utility to remove the registry settings, then go through the registry manually, then wipe out the program files, and the Office folders in the Local Settings and App Data... Only to find out later that the whole cause of the problem was the user wanted to enable the office assistant.
I much prefer 2003... Or better yet: Word and Excel 2.0b. Now those were good programs.
Slashdot Mirror
As a sibling of a Michgian Grad, and a resident of Ann Arbor (meaning, I speak with no authority since I graduated from MSU):
I'm pretty sure Michigan didn't respond like that. I was just informed by my little bro (a Mich grad) that the RIAA just sent 30 notes to students at Michigan. IP tracking is in place, and it looks like the University is cooperating, at least at some level.
Becuase you can't kill some commies as a British soldier, and run all the way to the middle east, change your uniform to the US Marines and waste terrorists there...
Well... You can't without taking a break, or a hell of an in-game flight.
Oh.. The flashbacks suck in real-time too.
First a Score -1: Insightful
Now a Score 1: Flamebait? For a "Nothing to see here?"
Mods... Meeting please. If you're forcing us to conform to the collective, at least get the collective part down.
But if that mission statement (or idea) was already in mission statements, or just followed by our corps...
What would the anti-trust committees in congress do? They'd have nobody to yell at and promptly throw out their cases on.
That'd be SOOOOOO boring!
Agreed.
Of course, the article just seems to be a linkfest for someone who just finds the PJ v. Lyons story interesting. It's fluff. Even if Lyons actually does like Linux (or Open Source, or Free Software, etc...) he's enough of a flamethrower to write off anything positive he writes. Treat him no differently. He wrote what he wrote, take it as you will (or did).
Move along, move along, nothing to see here.
Parent is right in that 25 good admins will out-do 180, 200, 1000, etc bad admins. In fact, the reliability will go down for each bad admin... Based on my experience at least.
But.. Given patches, and installation of software, security fixes, etc, reboots "several times per year" isn't necessarily a bad thing... assuming they're all planned.
1. Idle car
2. remove passengers
3. de-idle car
4. destroy antenna
5. take to chop-shop
6. profit...
Wait... I didn't need a ???
OH NOES!
What about the first karma whore?
My concern isn't necessarily the client self-update. My concern is the lack of documentation thereof. For technical concerns, warn the user if there needs to be an update to the client itself. That way I can schedule that and plan on my own.
My real problem, though, has to do with why this isn't documented. Is there a reason MS won't publish this? Can this be a potential attack vector? If an IIS/WSUS system is compromised, can you 'simulate' a client update and use it to install whatever you want to the clients that are listening?
That's pretty simple. Lying under oath to a judge. Perjury is a felony outright. You lie to a grand jury or judge you're a felon. Same to Mr. Gonzales. Same to Hillary's "I don't recall" statements that made forgetfulness famous.
It was also driven by the lawsuit of a private citizen. You may or may not remember that it was Paula Jones's suit that caused the whole mess to begin with. But Clinton lied, under oath, to a judge. Felony = High crime. He didn't get convicted though. The right back stabbed their own house managers in the Senate. The only people who really paid for that crime were the members of the House Committee.
By the way, thanks CNN for driving home the point that it's okay to lie to grand juries as long as it's marital.
IMHO - That's the disadvantage of buying a file instead of a CD. Sure, you can sell or gift your files. If you're paranoid that your buddy is going to throw your songs on a P2P network, then just convert them to another format. Chances are, you aren't going to go sell the files to a friend anyway. I mean, you *could* but I find transfer of ownership of anthing that isn't solid to be difficult anyway. Especially in the legal sense.
If you're looking to gifting, then it may not be as personal, but you could get a gift card... or whatever Apple lets you buy for that purpose. I'd guess that for the price of a CD ($15-20 in some cases) your friend could likely get 2 discs worth or more, and you're still giving them something that has substance (a card) and no DRM mess.
That or buy the songs yourself and make a mix CD a la John Cusack. Classy in a personal sort of way. If you make an Audio CD, no worries about your friend ripping and putting on their internet eyepatch.
As for other issues with music services -
If I don't make a backup of that file and my hard drive gets wiped out, how do I legally get it back? Pay again, or see if my friends have the song so I can replace it that way. I still paid for it, I just need to recover it right?
If the song gets corrupted cause of some NTFS screw up, or I accidentally create a tarball on it (I did that once), and I don't notice and eventually I don't have my backup anymore what do I do?
I know that the parent didn't want to address the other issues, but the point that I'm trying to make is that there are advantages and disadvantages to certain formats. Sure, you could resell your CD to a store... After ripping it to your PC. And sure, you could sell a bunch of music files to your friends... and not delete them.
Reselling or gifting is all based on the honor system. If you're afraid of your non-DRM files ending up all over the internet... Get new friends that you trust or just buy the CD and had it to them.
18,000 emails every hour.
The first thought that went through my head was - Worm.
I wonder if someone could blast through their bandwidth cap due to malware, then get shut off? I'm sure they'd notice a slow computer, or slow connection, but maybe not if they have a high speed but low cap?
Discuss.
But.. Drinking is a foundation of moral behavior.
Water to.. Wine?
Trappist monks making beer?
Quite tasty too if you can find it near your home. It may cost you twice as much for a drink, but you'll get 3 times the alcohol.
I like the intention. In a sue happy culture that has developed, to throw some chance of losing your arse would definitely force a suing party to carefully consider the case, and force a law team to do the same.
The thing is, that's already in the system. If you lose, those attorney fees aren't anything to scoff at. if you check the links, you'll see $125-250 an hour for your attorney to think about you, let alone when they're actually spending time in court defending or plantiffing (add that to the Becktionary). So as it stands, you're looking at a standard high risk-high reward investment from the plantiff's side... And high capital means it's easier to take the hit... See RIAA.
Lawyers know this. They've known it since day 2 of law school. You take a case you think you can win (unless you're court appointed). If you can get a lawyer to represent you who isn't listed in HR, then that means you should have a winnable case. If you're defending yourself with company law, then there aren't any *new* costs right? Please correct me if I'm wrong. So, to make action against another, you should have a winnable case. The problem here isn't the costs of attorneys, it's the general feeling of juries and judges that your average citizen shouldn't require any knowledge to survive day to day. We're sue happy, because the people in the system have allowed it to be that way, and there are plenty of folks who will take advantage of any exploitable system.
So - If you bring that formula into the equation... How much does it help the private consumer of law services (defending or offending)? It doesn't. That formula would not really hurt the AAs with their suits against grannies, 10 year olds and grad students.
Still though, I'm glad that people are looking at fixing the system. The intention is great, let's tweak that...
X sues Y for $Z+$F ($F = fees which will be part of the case.)
Y spends $D defending itself
X wins receives $Z.
Court then compares $D to $F.
If $D is smaller than $F
$F will become $D or ( ($D/$F) * $Z) up to $F.
If $F is smaller than $D
Award $F
Y wins
use formulas above but switch $F with $D.
In cases where you have in house representation, figure out effective cost by multiplying the salary per day by the number of days.
It's complicated... Sure... But I hope it all comes out to balancing costs of representation. If you have a grad student who wins a multi-million dollar case, then you deserve a bonus.
I figured it was only a matter of time before this happened. Has AOL been sued for their chatrooms? Actually, yes they have...
One thing that upsets me is that MySpace is already taking steps to correct this.
But it doesn't matter because these parents are teaching their kids that it's okay to not take responsibility for their own actions. Do whatever you want, and if something goes bad, sue someone for letting you screw up. It's not your fault that you stuck your hand in the outlet, there was nothing stopping you.
We are now operating on the assumption that people lack the basic instinct of self preservation. It's one thing to lie or mislead. It's another to give people something with good intentions, but hold them responsible when others abuse it. It's a whole other thing when the owners are already trying to curb the abuse and are doing what I consider *due diligence.*
It's stupid, and these parents are stupid for blaming the service for their kids' screwups. I'm sorry this happened to your kids. I'm sorry that *you* didn't teach your kids that strangers can be dangerous. Own up and hold those actually responsible accountable.
My Girlfriend is what I might consider a bit of a hippy.
Her brother is definitely what I would consider a hippy.
They (of course) introduced me to these lights a while back. My girl has them all over her condo, and I found out from her (and from seeing them in action) that there are different color lights available. She has the typical white light in her closets, but there are some more yellow bulbs out there too that give more natural light.
I have them all over my condo. Bathroom, living room, dining room, and basement. I keep my house a bit cooler, and there is about a 1/2 delay between switch and turn on. Also, there is about 15 seconds of 'warm up' time where the lights get brighter. I may have older gen bulbs, but I have yet to have an issue with them, and I can tell you that they've just about paid for themselves already (I've had them since summer). I love these things.
And parent is right since the LED would instantly put off customers that are thinking 'cheap light.' It's quite typical... And I'd know, I was like that. I could easily see CFLs being a gateway light though. If the CFL works as advertised, and the end customers are happy, or even *really happy,* 5-6 years down the road they might be keen on switching to an LED, even if it's $40. I'd rather see the price on something like that come down a bit further. That might happen too, especially if the manufacturers can find enough demand from the flashlight industry to start really producing them.
If I was a mod, that'd be a +1.
With statement from parent - He's right, we're not talking about saving the world, we're talking about the life currently here. The climate will be pushed, and balance (with more or less rain, more or less CO2, whatever). Something that I've been yelling for years is:
How about not freaking out? Regardless if there's a ton of warming from our evil vehicles or not, we can at least take a bit of ownership and reduce our individual effects and do it with some intelligence.
Drive a car that gets better mileage cause it'll save you cash at the pump.
Use those halogen bulbs cause you only have to change them every 3-5 years, and they use less energy... etc etc...
The people I hang out with aren't living in constant fear of Earth striking us down for killing the planet, but I think that if I can make less of an impact... Then cool. If you can't, fine, no big deal.
I'm sure we have *some* effect on the overall climate, I'll just do what I can to cut that down. While I'm at it, I might as well see if there's a way to save some cash doing it too.
Actually, I can think of a couple perfectly legit reasons involving things that I want to do.
1. I have been unable to listen to my music on my XP x64 installation. I've been using this as my primary PC for a while now, and I've been unable to play any of my M4Ps since iTunes won't even install (until today). I spent a long time looking for an older iTunes 6 installation, but to no avail. I'll see if I can get things working again tonight. If I could strip the DRM, I'd just open up any number of other players and listen in Media Player or Winamp.
2. I have a car MP3-CD player. I cannot convert my M4Ps to MP3 without wasting a bunch of CDs. iTunes doesn't let you create an MP3 CD with your protected songs. If iTunes allowed me to burn an MP3 CD with those protected songs, or if I stripped the DRM, I could make that MP3 CD and have my music with me in the car.
Yes, I know that if the DRM was easily removed the *AA would be all over them... I understand that this isn't all on Apple, and they have to at least try to keep their music locked down. And no, I'm not going to go spend $400+ just to listen to music I already bought.
I thought that the point of those services was to provide a subscription model so that you never *BUY* the music. You're supposed to pay for access to their library. In this case, you aren't buying the music, you're renting it from the provider.
In this case, removing the DRM is more like making a copy of a DVD or VHS tape that you rent from Blockbuster.
I'm more interested in converting my iTunes m4p files (that I bought and paid for to own) to MP3 so I can play them in my car. This is illegal, and qualified as illegal before any DMCA. You're copying something you don't own if you use it on Napster.
Almost true, with Windows upgrades, you only need to provide the installation media of a "qualifying" previos Windows version. Namely, the XP installer will see a blank hard drive, and ask you to insert a 98 CD to make sure you're upgrading.
Just an FYI - Point still relatively valid.
For some reason, I always thought that a pint was 2 cups, and a cup was 8 ounces... Anyone have some documentation? Links?
Wait... Ego-centric american here... move along, move along..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pint
I did lose some critical data on my last WD...
Since then, I've been trying to figure out what drives I should get for home. I mean, 250GB is nice and all... but the last WD I got lasted about a year, and then outright died with no warning...
Well, not really *no* warning... there were 3 entries in the system log saying the disk had a bad sector. I guess the 4th was the first sector.
It was a VERY sad day too. It was only a 60 GB Drive... but I'm sure (since I'm a typical slashdot reader) you all know what 55GB of that drive contained.
I now have a RAID 1 array setup with Seagate drives, with a 5 year warranty on them. I can't lose that again.
I couldn't care less what happens to my OS... I can get that back easy.
What are the legal implications of going through that process?
I'm pretty sure that JHymn, and iRevolt, etc, are all DMCA violators... But to use a functionality that's built into iTunes to essentially remove the DRM from a song... Is that okay?
For those of us who like a good cherry coke slurpee:
1. Put your lid on first.
2. Put in a little cherry flavor (amount to preference).
3. Tap cup to settle everything.
4. Place up to coke dispenser, and open it up immediately, release when it gets a little past halfway between the top of cup and lid opening.
It's a blantant disregard for the "open slowly" rule, but when properly executed, you get a perfect mix of cherry and coke, otherwise unattainable without copious stirring.
Interesting note: The farthest I've ever lived from a 7-11 is where I live now. 1 full mile.
But it's on the way to/from work!
I pretty well agree with parent on XP, except I don't think Office 2000 was that good at all.
My major gripes with Office 2000 was Outlook and the installer...
Outlook: No IMAP, profile interface sucked, but it was a hell of a lot quicker than XP.
Installer: Every time you sneezed, office would ask for the CD. If you opened Outlook Web access, you needed the CD... If you opened Quickbooks... CD.. Patches, service packs, even programs that seemed completely unrelated required the CD.
Oh, and it had to be that one specific CD too.
I had a case where there was an Office 2000 installation that broke, and it was deployed by policy. Before the break, someone updated the MST file to go with the configuration... The thing would use the installer anymore since it didn't have the "correct" transform.
I had to use the Windows Installer utility to remove the registry settings, then go through the registry manually, then wipe out the program files, and the Office folders in the Local Settings and App Data... Only to find out later that the whole cause of the problem was the user wanted to enable the office assistant.
I much prefer 2003... Or better yet: Word and Excel 2.0b. Now those were good programs.