If they aren't there are going to be some very bored retail workers that night. Didn't any of these stores read about what happened with the US launch?
Don't build on fault lines. Don't build in swamps. Don't build below sea-level. Don't build on the slopes of a volcano. Don't build at the lowest poing in the general area. Don't completely deforest the surrounding area.
This isn't so obvious to everybody. Many people wouldn't know how to figure out if they were about to move into a flood plane. You can be damned sure it won't be in the real estate ad. Knowing people who decided to move into a house in New Orleans this past Saturday (yes, they physically moved their stuff into a house there when the rest of the city was evacuating, figuring that once the storm blew by everything would be fine) really underscores how uninformed many people are.
Most IrDA interfaces that are difficult to use (trouble connecting, staying connected, etc) are that way because the hardware is as simple as possible, all the operations are handled in software, and the software sucks. Windows IrDA is notorious for this. I would speculate that it's because Windows doesn't have any RT functionality and is unable to service interrupts fast enough to drive a software based IrDA interface, but it could easily be as simple as a crappy driver.
Woah, you got a big screen HDTV and 5.1 for under $500?
I bet my 20.1" widescreen LCD, 5.1 desktop theater, PC, and Aeron combined were cheaper than your Sofa, TV, Reciever and Speakers. It runs at higher resolution too, and I don't care that it's not 50" because I'm not sitting 15' away.
THey have to do that, because if you release a machine where it's even remotely possible to issue patches, developers will ship buggy games and require the patch.
I briefly considered moving the machine connected to the UPS the entire way... The UPS can power it for about 7 hours (APS SmartUPS4000, AMD Athlon XP-M 2400+ with PowerNow enabled), but the UPS alone was heavy enough to carry on the stairs, so it ended up getting switched off... It's not like it would have been connected to the network for those few hours anyway, and unless it's online and serving I don't consider it "up" anyway.
Creative announced the original Nomad in 1999. If the technology in this patent was indeed in the Nomad, this patent should never have been issued and will be overturned, because they waited too long after publicizing the technology to file the patent.
Like the other respondants to your comment, I think the threat to Apple isn't too great, but for a completely different reason.
Apple has been in the computer, and more specifically the computer audio business for much longer than Creative. I'm sure that Apple is sitting on a patent they've been holding to defend themselves from this type of thing.
That removes the 'instant' from instant messaging.
There needs to be some sort of collective trust pool... Something that resembles a PGP keyserver that could be used to create custom rules defining what types of people you trust to message you. Sure, you may have to go to a few key signing parties before you would have a big enough web of trust to reliably be able to e-mail anybody you would like to, but that's a fairly low barrier to entry. Until we have something like that, we need to live with the central database of trust.
Replicating the SMTP model and the hacks that sit on top of it for preventing spam is a terrible way to go. Blacklist, whitelisting, and 'greylisting' are all hacks that either introduce problems that are worse than the problems they're solving, only partially solve the problem, or introduce unnecessicarily recurring inconvinenience.
I always forget about access when Office comes up, which is odd since I programmed Access/VBA databases for 3 years. Perhaps I'm repressing painful memories.
Personally, I find it easier to use Perl with the CGI and DBI modules or PHP/MySql than Access, and before I got my CS degree and moved on to more advanced positions I transitioned all the applications I had written as contract work from Access to those platforms.
My experience has been that people don't use access other than to interact with a database that some resident guru has already pre-configured, and the lack of real database programming knowledge of said guru tends to lead to buggy applications. People who know how to properly code up database applications almost universally dislike using access and prefer other solutions instead. The real simple stuff that your average user might do can all be done in a spreadsheet. Really.
I'd argue that nobody needs access, and that's probably why nobody has bothered to make a feature complete equivalent on any other platform.
You should be sure you're an expert before you pass yourself off as one:
Suppose I install Gnome as default and want to install KDE and use that as the default. How easy is that?
Usually as easy as choosing "Gnome" out of the dropdown box instead of "KDE" but it depends on the distribution. Certainly not any harder than sitting down as an inexperienced windows user and figuring out how to switch between the XP theme and windows 'classic'.
I've never found a recent Linux distro that didn't have patches ready to install as soon as I finished installing to OS.
So you 've never tried a debian based distribution? Or an RPM based distribution with a network installer?
Finally, the price you pay for Microsoft Office is worth the money, if your time is worth anything.
That's only true if you're already familliar with office and not with OpenOffice. Since I haven't used Office regularly since Office 97, and I use OpenOffice all the time, I personally find it frustrating and time consuming to get anything accomplished in Office XP or Office 2000. (What's with the disappearing menu options?) Anyway, to me Office certainly isn't worth the money.
I've never met one with a system configured where they didn't "su - root" to do admin stuff. All administration functions in Linux, whether they technically have to be or not, are done through "root"
Sounds like you've never heard of 'sudo.' Not everybody does administration by changing to root first. Many of us use 'sudo.' Then things get logged correctly. It also lets you limit what actions each of your users is allowed to take by default. If you're skilled enough to run a multi-user system you can set up sudo. (It's a file with a list of usernames in it). If you're on a single user system (like most desktops) then who cares?
Not running with 'Administrator' access for all your users helps prevent the worms that have made Windows so notorious lately.
I know Linux brags support recently for ACLs. My question: Where are they?
Where 'recently' is 1999... Nobody has made them all GUI like, because they types of people who use them tend to prefer the command line.
Linux is only now getting the power management capability to Hibernate, which Windows has had for 5+ years.
Bullshit. My laptop has been hibernating and sleeping under linux for 8 years now. Windows still needs to be rebooted after waking up 1 in 10 times.
There are reasons to use Windows over linux. It's all about using the right tool for the right job. They're not the reasons you mention though. Personally the reasons for me are video editing, Illustrator, and games. Linux is easier for everything else that I do.
Easy, they'll put it all in a database using.NET and write an activeX control for the windows explorer window that queries the database and makes the entries look like icons.
Then they'll patent it.
I've had better ideas over lunch. I wish somebody would give me a few million dollars to build one.
the fact that most stores will be selling in bundle-only format
I would like to think that retailers would have learned from the overpriced bundle disaster that was the PSP launch and one more upcoming failure that people don't want any electronic device enough to be forced to buy a bunch of other crap they don't want with it.
If there aren't stores selling Xbox 360s in a non-bundle format on release day, I predict a large stockpile of them in the cases of every Wal-Mart waiting to be bought a week after launch.
Even with the notorious shortages of the PS2 launch, people without pre-orders were able to get a bare console withing a few days (memory cards were another story). If you can't wait a few days to keep from being forced into buying a bunch of crap you don't really want then you deserve to have wasted a few hundred extra dollars.
I, for one, am never pre-ordering anything videogame related ever again unless they bribe me with free stuff for placing the preorder. Popular stuff is never out of stock long enough for it to matter.
Taking the time you spend getting certs and using it to schmooze and socialize with the higher-ups at your place of employment will get you contacts that are worth 1000x what any certification you can ever get. The old saying that it's not what you know, but who you know is true. If the people you know also know that you can get your job done there's nothing better to have in your arsenal of job finding tools.
When it comes time for a hiring manager to make a decision between the guy with the certs on his resume and the guy his golfing buddy (or whatever) says does a great job and is fun to hang out with, the golfing buddy recommendation will get the job every time. It's a lot more fun than paying to take some stupid test too.
You can't photocopy an airline ticket and use it to get on the plane though. You can copy software and still use it. Your example is not valid.
I would argue that photocopying your plane ticket has the same effect on the revenues of an airline as copying the CD of a game does to the game publisher... But that wasn't the point of the example. The point was that they are both rediculous policies that are enforced for the sole benefit of the seller (the airline / the publisher) and passed off to the consumer with blatent lies as reasoning.
Slashdot Mirror
If they aren't there are going to be some very bored retail workers that night. Didn't any of these stores read about what happened with the US launch?
at least my solution will save him some space 8)
Yeah, I'd say... Throwing away 1 bit out of every byte tends to do that.
Sadly, yes. It's hard to feel sorry for somebody like that.
Please, dear god, tell me you're kidding and don't actually think this is a good idea/will work.
Don't build on fault lines. Don't build in swamps. Don't build below sea-level. Don't build on the slopes of a volcano. Don't build at the lowest poing in the general area. Don't completely deforest the surrounding area.
This isn't so obvious to everybody. Many people wouldn't know how to figure out if they were about to move into a flood plane. You can be damned sure it won't be in the real estate ad. Knowing people who decided to move into a house in New Orleans this past Saturday (yes, they physically moved their stuff into a house there when the rest of the city was evacuating, figuring that once the storm blew by everything would be fine) really underscores how uninformed many people are.
Look, we found a Windows user!
Most IrDA interfaces that are difficult to use (trouble connecting, staying connected, etc) are that way because the hardware is as simple as possible, all the operations are handled in software, and the software sucks. Windows IrDA is notorious for this. I would speculate that it's because Windows doesn't have any RT functionality and is unable to service interrupts fast enough to drive a software based IrDA interface, but it could easily be as simple as a crappy driver.
Woah, you got a big screen HDTV and 5.1 for under $500?
I bet my 20.1" widescreen LCD, 5.1 desktop theater, PC, and Aeron combined were cheaper than your Sofa, TV, Reciever and Speakers. It runs at higher resolution too, and I don't care that it's not 50" because I'm not sitting 15' away.
You're getting updates..
THey have to do that, because if you release a machine where it's even remotely possible to issue patches, developers will ship buggy games and require the patch.
I have another machine for that. This one I like to be, you know, stable.
A running system never changes. A changing system never runs.
Heh. You jest...
I briefly considered moving the machine connected to the UPS the entire way... The UPS can power it for about 7 hours (APS SmartUPS4000, AMD Athlon XP-M 2400+ with PowerNow enabled), but the UPS alone was heavy enough to carry on the stairs, so it ended up getting switched off... It's not like it would have been connected to the network for those few hours anyway, and unless it's online and serving I don't consider it "up" anyway.
Doesn't the FC3 at the end of the version string mean "Fedora Core 3"?
That's not a vanilla kernel, it's a patched up kernel from RedHat.
>uname -a && uptime
Linux maverick 2.6.6 #15 SMP Fri Jun 4 19:58:51 EDT 2004 i686 GNU/Linux
21:47:15 up 92 days, 25 min, 2 users, load average: 1.40, 1.38, 1.37
It would be longer, but that's exactly the amount of time it's been since I moved into my house.
Creative announced the original Nomad in 1999. If the technology in this patent was indeed in the Nomad, this patent should never have been issued and will be overturned, because they waited too long after publicizing the technology to file the patent.
Like the other respondants to your comment, I think the threat to Apple isn't too great, but for a completely different reason.
Apple has been in the computer, and more specifically the computer audio business for much longer than Creative. I'm sure that Apple is sitting on a patent they've been holding to defend themselves from this type of thing.
That removes the 'instant' from instant messaging.
There needs to be some sort of collective trust pool... Something that resembles a PGP keyserver that could be used to create custom rules defining what types of people you trust to message you. Sure, you may have to go to a few key signing parties before you would have a big enough web of trust to reliably be able to e-mail anybody you would like to, but that's a fairly low barrier to entry. Until we have something like that, we need to live with the central database of trust.
Replicating the SMTP model and the hacks that sit on top of it for preventing spam is a terrible way to go. Blacklist, whitelisting, and 'greylisting' are all hacks that either introduce problems that are worse than the problems they're solving, only partially solve the problem, or introduce unnecessicarily recurring inconvinenience.
I always forget about access when Office comes up, which is odd since I programmed Access/VBA databases for 3 years. Perhaps I'm repressing painful memories.
Personally, I find it easier to use Perl with the CGI and DBI modules or PHP/MySql than Access, and before I got my CS degree and moved on to more advanced positions I transitioned all the applications I had written as contract work from Access to those platforms.
My experience has been that people don't use access other than to interact with a database that some resident guru has already pre-configured, and the lack of real database programming knowledge of said guru tends to lead to buggy applications. People who know how to properly code up database applications almost universally dislike using access and prefer other solutions instead. The real simple stuff that your average user might do can all be done in a spreadsheet. Really.
I'd argue that nobody needs access, and that's probably why nobody has bothered to make a feature complete equivalent on any other platform.
You should be sure you're an expert before you pass yourself off as one:
.' Then things get logged correctly. It also lets you limit what actions each of your users is allowed to take by default. If you're skilled enough to run a multi-user system you can set up sudo. (It's a file with a list of usernames in it). If you're on a single user system (like most desktops) then who cares?
Suppose I install Gnome as default and want to install KDE and use that as the default. How easy is that?
Usually as easy as choosing "Gnome" out of the dropdown box instead of "KDE" but it depends on the distribution. Certainly not any harder than sitting down as an inexperienced windows user and figuring out how to switch between the XP theme and windows 'classic'.
I've never found a recent Linux distro that didn't have patches ready to install as soon as I finished installing to OS.
So you 've never tried a debian based distribution? Or an RPM based distribution with a network installer?
Finally, the price you pay for Microsoft Office is worth the money, if your time is worth anything.
That's only true if you're already familliar with office and not with OpenOffice. Since I haven't used Office regularly since Office 97, and I use OpenOffice all the time, I personally find it frustrating and time consuming to get anything accomplished in Office XP or Office 2000. (What's with the disappearing menu options?) Anyway, to me Office certainly isn't worth the money.
I've never met one with a system configured where they didn't "su - root" to do admin stuff. All administration functions in Linux, whether they technically have to be or not, are done through "root"
Sounds like you've never heard of 'sudo.' Not everybody does administration by changing to root first. Many of us use 'sudo
Not running with 'Administrator' access for all your users helps prevent the worms that have made Windows so notorious lately.
I know Linux brags support recently for ACLs. My question: Where are they?
Where 'recently' is 1999... Nobody has made them all GUI like, because they types of people who use them tend to prefer the command line.
Linux is only now getting the power management capability to Hibernate, which Windows has had for 5+ years.
Bullshit. My laptop has been hibernating and sleeping under linux for 8 years now. Windows still needs to be rebooted after waking up 1 in 10 times.
There are reasons to use Windows over linux. It's all about using the right tool for the right job. They're not the reasons you mention though. Personally the reasons for me are video editing, Illustrator, and games. Linux is easier for everything else that I do.
Easy, they'll put it all in a database using .NET and write an activeX control for the windows explorer window that queries the database and makes the entries look like icons.
Then they'll patent it.
I've had better ideas over lunch. I wish somebody would give me a few million dollars to build one.
the fact that most stores will be selling in bundle-only format
I would like to think that retailers would have learned from the overpriced bundle disaster that was the PSP launch and one more upcoming failure that people don't want any electronic device enough to be forced to buy a bunch of other crap they don't want with it.
If there aren't stores selling Xbox 360s in a non-bundle format on release day, I predict a large stockpile of them in the cases of every Wal-Mart waiting to be bought a week after launch.
Even with the notorious shortages of the PS2 launch, people without pre-orders were able to get a bare console withing a few days (memory cards were another story). If you can't wait a few days to keep from being forced into buying a bunch of crap you don't really want then you deserve to have wasted a few hundred extra dollars.
I, for one, am never pre-ordering anything videogame related ever again unless they bribe me with free stuff for placing the preorder. Popular stuff is never out of stock long enough for it to matter.
Taking the time you spend getting certs and using it to schmooze and socialize with the higher-ups at your place of employment will get you contacts that are worth 1000x what any certification you can ever get. The old saying that it's not what you know, but who you know is true. If the people you know also know that you can get your job done there's nothing better to have in your arsenal of job finding tools.
When it comes time for a hiring manager to make a decision between the guy with the certs on his resume and the guy his golfing buddy (or whatever) says does a great job and is fun to hang out with, the golfing buddy recommendation will get the job every time. It's a lot more fun than paying to take some stupid test too.
20 popup windows a day that say "Buy_v1@gra@canadianrx.com wants to add you to their contact list" isn't much better than spam. Worse actually.
[...] using gAIM [...]
;)
Gah! It's 'Gaim', not 'gAIM'! Are you trying to get somebody sued!?
Every IM service that Gaim supports has encryption support whether the IM service provider knows it or not.
I used to use e-mail constantly, but the signal to noise ratio is like 1:300 these days.
Same concept here.
You can't photocopy an airline ticket and use it to get on the plane though. You can copy software and still use it. Your example is not valid.
I would argue that photocopying your plane ticket has the same effect on the revenues of an airline as copying the CD of a game does to the game publisher... But that wasn't the point of the example. The point was that they are both rediculous policies that are enforced for the sole benefit of the seller (the airline / the publisher) and passed off to the consumer with blatent lies as reasoning.