The Sharp Actius RD3D, which has been available for more than 5 years, has a spectacularly cool lenticular display that produces a pretty convincing and definitely bright & colorful illusion of 3D without the need for any accoutrements.
Turns out it's not a great laptop in and of itself - pitiful battery life - too heavy - and a few users I've known just don't seem to "get" the 3d effect.
Nonetheless - summary and TFA are completely wrong.
Er... and as for software which converts movies into 3d on the fly... haha! Gag of the day right there.
Hoho - I know it's sad but I can't help but go "awww!" when I read anything about the quaint old gear of my childhood when a kilobyte was a big deal. The (relatively) simplistic technological feats of those days which were the bleeding-edge marvels of their time now made to seem awfully twee against even the most commoditised of modern computing.
It's through the wonder of 8-bit assembly languages, or software on audio cassette or "color screen" being something to crow about that I dimly understand why some folks get misty eyed about classic cars.
That wasn't the whole challenge. The challenge was to access an account on their allegedly super-secure webmail service. If the software is fairly solid but the staff are easily duped/bribed... how secure is the service?
Even if social engineering alone resulted in getting access to the prize data, then the challenge has still been met: StrongWebmail.com - the service - is not secure.
I'm thinking - if the hackers actually bribed/tricked the CEO's PA into just telling them what what in the calendar record then the guy is going to try to weasel out of paying.
...to a rational geek. Sure. But to the unique brand of crazy-go-nuts we call "lawyer" or "lawmaker", squinting at the screen to read a CAPTCHA can be considered "circumvention of encryption" and land you in DCMA-Gitmo.;-)
And that's assuming that the act of trying to defend your individual sovreignty doesn't just make them trump up a whole bunch more charges to keep you out of the way for much longer since you're obviously in league with the terrorists/pedos/catholics.
make everything functional but, generally, it's a lesser experience.
Right on, couldn't agree more. I've been doing the same ever since IE7 went out as a Windows Update "critical".
Any good little clueless Windows user should now automatically find themselves in IE7 hence - anyone who is running IE6 has deliberately refused to upgrade with the times.
If someone complains a site doesn't work on Netscape 3.2 Gold - you tell them upgrade already! Same with IE6 now.
That doesn't mean that you put a flashing GIF on the site saying "This site only works with something better than IE6" but it also doesn't mean you have to make the IE6 experience as perfectly tuned as you would for modern browsers. If it's functional and tidy, good enough. Save slick and sleek for browsers that can handle it without requiring floods of css hacks and conditional comments.
So yes, IE6 hasn't died exactly, but I think many web devs are finding that the amount of effort that needs to go into ensuring sites work right with it is starting to come down as it becomes simply a less important browser.
Whilst I must salute some quality semantic pedantry there - hats off! - if you read the extensive statements, blog posts and forum messages of the Last.fm team in response to this issue you'll see that there is no "wiggle room" in their wording. They have emphatically denied this in absolutely every sense that some data might have gone somewhere.
So, Last.fm have denied it. CBS have denied it. The RIAA have denied it.
TechCrunch have provided no evidence of any kind. What they have come out with is a long-running stream of unsupported, often transparently vitriolic whinges, whines and allegations about Last.fm with never a scrap of evidence or a hint at how they'd have access to it if there ever were any.
Add to that the fact that the original allegation makes no sense anyway since scrobbler data (containing a list of the track- & artist-name ID3 tags of the media files you've played... tags which are freely editable) would seem to be of no value as either evidence of "theft" or probable cause for further discovery of evidence. This data doesn't say where the track name came from - only that you played a media file with that label. Bought/resold/leant/borrowed/mislabelled... the genuine explanations are endless and nothing in the data should be grounds for any suspicion of "piracy".
What you end up with is a picture that seems to suggest there's whilst there's definitely a lying douchebag of RIAA-standard involved in this story... it's probably not the RIAA for once.
It's not even that bad is it? They still have access, they just can't edit... from IP addresses belonging to CoS... from home IPs is fine.
So yes, obviously Mr Miscavige is being repellantly disingenuous here.
If any block of IPs - regardless of who owns it - is routinely responsible for sabotaging the encyclopedia then it seems appropriate that the admins should ban that block of IPs.
Man, those were the freaking days doing support. I lost track of how many times various reports of "my PC is too slow" were magically remedied when it was noticed the turbo button had been accidentally poked/kicked/nudged.
On Windows, Chrome's window decorations are always in a horrible bubbly Fisher-Price style that somewhat mirrors the default XP/Vista themes. The application does not honor system-wide windowing theme settings. This is stupid. You've kinda come to expect media players to do this (it's still annoying, but it's become the accepted convention) but serious applications like a browser that I'm going to be looking at all day should not lock themselves out of the OS's visual theme system. I'm stuck with one app which seems like an alien on my system because all the colors and widgets are completely different to everything else. It's as bad as bloody Apple!
Another thing I suspect the GP is talking about is the menu. Oh, I mean the toolbar button. Or do I mean menu? Who knows. Take any normal application on Windows that has a menu - press ALT. Now you can navigate the menu option with the cursors or with menu shortcut keys. Google decided that I didn't need this ability and hacked out the well understood, standard concept menu and replaced it with a little popup off of two toolbar buttons. And for a cherry on top, put those icons at the opposite side of the window from where you'd go hunting for a missing menu anyway.
Ooo lessee... how about allowing the application's controls (in this case, the tab bar) to impinge upon the applications titlebar and moving the apps title from the left to the right. This is just more of the kind of utterly pointless "gloatware" interface decisions that often characterises Apple software on Windows. "Our scrap of software is the single most important thing you'll ever use on your computer so - obviously - it's important that it break established visual style and usage conventions to remind you how important is is!". Gloatware.
These seem like trivial things but interface conventions are of huge value to users who lack confidence in front of a computer. Once you've learned that there's always a Menu and it always has File, Edit, View and Help on it - you've got a huge head-start on getting to know any new bit of software.
There are other things that annoy me about Chrome like that stupid is-it-or-isn't-it-status-bar; curiously referring to its SSL preferences as "computer-wide" in the options page (it's going to change SSL behaviour across all apps and OS?); Bookmark interface; yadda yadda AdBlock, NoScript, yadda.
If it does function as the government intends then making "install / confirm function of GPS speed limiter" will just be made part of the legally required annual vehicle safety check (popularly known as the "M.O.T." for Ministry of Transport).
Within a year of the decision to do so you can ensure that all legal cars on the road have this fitted.
Sadly, your humble, kindly engineers will just build and maintain the thing. It'll be a committee of politico-military-management-morons that decide what instructions the thing is given.:-(
Fascinating. Can we see the evidence you base this opinion on? If Skype is indeed being "massively" hacked, there must surely be a massive mountain of readily available evidence?
A quick google finds me plenty of angry, barely coherent forum posts by folks warning all their school friends about trojan-hacker-virusses spreading via Skype calls. I also find a not-unsurprising crowd of unfortunate users who blame Skype for genuine problems on their unpatched, unfirewalled XP-Home box.
The most serious looking warnings I find are mostly of two types. (1) warnings to businesses about the dangers of letting your employees install a secure, encrypted, peer-to-peer, file-transfer system (Skype) on work computers and thereby leak company information. (2) a whole bunch of scam sites using the same cut'n'paste text to misleadingly label the W32.Warezov email trojan as some kind of Skype-based virus.
I don't find - at first glance - a whole lot of serious articles from trusted sources claiming that Skype is a wide-open gateway to malware hell.
Nonetheless - as a Skype user and general security-concerned geek - I'd always be interested to hear genuine evidence that Skype is a security hazard to users who would not accept random file-transfers of from unknown Skype contacts.
Lets not forget that FUD is FUD even when it's not directed against Linux.
It's one of the few components they routinely hear about which is usually referred to with words rather than letters and is therefore easier to remember. Since it becomes the only known (though not understood) technical term, a certain class of users will invoke it at every opportunity they get to make themselves sound as if they know what they're talking about and thereby deserve some preferential treatment.
This is not something specific to computing. The same type of people will constantly refer their mechanic to their "carburetor" or their plumber to their "ball cock";-)
Placing a physical ad in proximity to a plot of land belonging to a competitor does not specifically depend on the exploitation of the competitor's trademark - a mark which they have to pay for and which supposedly affords them a degree of legal protection versus others exploiting it to their benefit.
Placing a web ad effectively "on" a competitor's trademark does - it could be argued (and seems likely to be the thrust of the lawsuit) - does mean that the ad's existence entirely depends on that trademark. The party selling the keyword is - again it could be argued - effectively selling the misuse of competitor's protected trademarks - definitely a no-no.
The fact that earlier one-to-one cases with Google vs large corporates resulted in settlements would seem to suggest to (IANAL) me that Google themselves may be concerned that there could be a case to answer here.
The London Olympic opening ceremony is going to be so embarrassingly, cringe-inducingly awful that the kinetic energy involved in hundreds of millions of folks turning away from the TV screen to gag, all at the same time, is going to shift the Earth off its axis and send the planet plummeting into the Sun.
Unfortunately no. Banning their product effectively fines huge numbers of completely innocent smaller organizations who rely - in whole or part, directly or indirectly - on Intel's products for their income.
I don't think it's fair that little guy should suffer just because the big guy who's scraps he scavenges is a douchebag?
Hoho - I have almost the same cupboard. A tear to the eye indeed - yes it does. I guess - albeit Amiga users no-more - this makes us exactly the crazy cultists the article was talking about XD
Slashdot Mirror
Absolutely! "First ever" my foot!
The Sharp Actius RD3D, which has been available for more than 5 years, has a spectacularly cool lenticular display that produces a pretty convincing and definitely bright & colorful illusion of 3D without the need for any accoutrements.
Turns out it's not a great laptop in and of itself - pitiful battery life - too heavy - and a few users I've known just don't seem to "get" the 3d effect.
Nonetheless - summary and TFA are completely wrong.
Er... and as for software which converts movies into 3d on the fly... haha! Gag of the day right there.
Job losses in the bouncy-castle-manufacture industry due to the credit crunch?
Hoho - I know it's sad but I can't help but go "awww!" when I read anything about the quaint old gear of my childhood when a kilobyte was a big deal. The (relatively) simplistic technological feats of those days which were the bleeding-edge marvels of their time now made to seem awfully twee against even the most commoditised of modern computing.
It's through the wonder of 8-bit assembly languages, or software on audio cassette or "color screen" being something to crow about that I dimly understand why some folks get misty eyed about classic cars.
That wasn't the whole challenge. The challenge was to access an account on their allegedly super-secure webmail service. If the software is fairly solid but the staff are easily duped/bribed... how secure is the service?
Even if social engineering alone resulted in getting access to the prize data, then the challenge has still been met: StrongWebmail.com - the service - is not secure.
I'm thinking - if the hackers actually bribed/tricked the CEO's PA into just telling them what what in the calendar record then the guy is going to try to weasel out of paying.
They make great mice.
And I hate them for it!
...to a rational geek. Sure. But to the unique brand of crazy-go-nuts we call "lawyer" or "lawmaker", squinting at the screen to read a CAPTCHA can be considered "circumvention of encryption" and land you in DCMA-Gitmo. ;-)
A little time eh? Failure to surrender your encryption keys to the UK authorities will net you two years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_of_Investigatory_Powers_Act
And that's assuming that the act of trying to defend your individual sovreignty doesn't just make them trump up a whole bunch more charges to keep you out of the way for much longer since you're obviously in league with the terrorists/pedos/catholics.
make everything functional but, generally, it's a lesser experience.
Right on, couldn't agree more. I've been doing the same ever since IE7 went out as a Windows Update "critical".
Any good little clueless Windows user should now automatically find themselves in IE7 hence - anyone who is running IE6 has deliberately refused to upgrade with the times.
If someone complains a site doesn't work on Netscape 3.2 Gold - you tell them upgrade already! Same with IE6 now.
That doesn't mean that you put a flashing GIF on the site saying "This site only works with something better than IE6" but it also doesn't mean you have to make the IE6 experience as perfectly tuned as you would for modern browsers. If it's functional and tidy, good enough. Save slick and sleek for browsers that can handle it without requiring floods of css hacks and conditional comments.
So yes, IE6 hasn't died exactly, but I think many web devs are finding that the amount of effort that needs to go into ensuring sites work right with it is starting to come down as it becomes simply a less important browser.
Whilst I must salute some quality semantic pedantry there - hats off! - if you read the extensive statements, blog posts and forum messages of the Last.fm team in response to this issue you'll see that there is no "wiggle room" in their wording. They have emphatically denied this in absolutely every sense that some data might have gone somewhere.
So, Last.fm have denied it. CBS have denied it. The RIAA have denied it.
TechCrunch have provided no evidence of any kind. What they have come out with is a long-running stream of unsupported, often transparently vitriolic whinges, whines and allegations about Last.fm with never a scrap of evidence or a hint at how they'd have access to it if there ever were any.
Add to that the fact that the original allegation makes no sense anyway since scrobbler data (containing a list of the track- & artist-name ID3 tags of the media files you've played... tags which are freely editable) would seem to be of no value as either evidence of "theft" or probable cause for further discovery of evidence. This data doesn't say where the track name came from - only that you played a media file with that label. Bought/resold/leant/borrowed/mislabelled... the genuine explanations are endless and nothing in the data should be grounds for any suspicion of "piracy".
What you end up with is a picture that seems to suggest there's whilst there's definitely a lying douchebag of RIAA-standard involved in this story... it's probably not the RIAA for once.
Welp... no prior art here.
It's not even that bad is it? They still have access, they just can't edit... from IP addresses belonging to CoS... from home IPs is fine.
So yes, obviously Mr Miscavige is being repellantly disingenuous here.
If any block of IPs - regardless of who owns it - is routinely responsible for sabotaging the encyclopedia then it seems appropriate that the admins should ban that block of IPs.
Oh but Java is a plodding, stumbling, lumbering, slug of slowness. All thoroughly indoctrinated Slashdotters know that already. No need to RTFA...
And to a some degree Stylish too, yeah. Like how I use it to kill of the pointless and ugly tagging system here. Yay for Stylish!
Man, those were the freaking days doing support. I lost track of how many times various reports of "my PC is too slow" were magically remedied when it was noticed the turbo button had been accidentally poked/kicked/nudged.
Simpler times!
On Windows, Chrome's window decorations are always in a horrible bubbly Fisher-Price style that somewhat mirrors the default XP/Vista themes. The application does not honor system-wide windowing theme settings. This is stupid. You've kinda come to expect media players to do this (it's still annoying, but it's become the accepted convention) but serious applications like a browser that I'm going to be looking at all day should not lock themselves out of the OS's visual theme system. I'm stuck with one app which seems like an alien on my system because all the colors and widgets are completely different to everything else. It's as bad as bloody Apple!
Another thing I suspect the GP is talking about is the menu. Oh, I mean the toolbar button. Or do I mean menu? Who knows. Take any normal application on Windows that has a menu - press ALT. Now you can navigate the menu option with the cursors or with menu shortcut keys. Google decided that I didn't need this ability and hacked out the well understood, standard concept menu and replaced it with a little popup off of two toolbar buttons. And for a cherry on top, put those icons at the opposite side of the window from where you'd go hunting for a missing menu anyway.
Ooo lessee... how about allowing the application's controls (in this case, the tab bar) to impinge upon the applications titlebar and moving the apps title from the left to the right. This is just more of the kind of utterly pointless "gloatware" interface decisions that often characterises Apple software on Windows. "Our scrap of software is the single most important thing you'll ever use on your computer so - obviously - it's important that it break established visual style and usage conventions to remind you how important is is!". Gloatware.
These seem like trivial things but interface conventions are of huge value to users who lack confidence in front of a computer. Once you've learned that there's always a Menu and it always has File, Edit, View and Help on it - you've got a huge head-start on getting to know any new bit of software.
There are other things that annoy me about Chrome like that stupid is-it-or-isn't-it-status-bar; curiously referring to its SSL preferences as "computer-wide" in the options page (it's going to change SSL behaviour across all apps and OS?); Bookmark interface; yadda yadda AdBlock, NoScript, yadda.
I feel better now XD
If it does function as the government intends then making "install / confirm function of GPS speed limiter" will just be made part of the legally required annual vehicle safety check (popularly known as the "M.O.T." for Ministry of Transport).
Within a year of the decision to do so you can ensure that all legal cars on the road have this fitted.
Who pays for the work? Have a guess ;-)
Sadly, your humble, kindly engineers will just build and maintain the thing. It'll be a committee of politico-military-management-morons that decide what instructions the thing is given. :-(
Fascinating. Can we see the evidence you base this opinion on? If Skype is indeed being "massively" hacked, there must surely be a massive mountain of readily available evidence?
A quick google finds me plenty of angry, barely coherent forum posts by folks warning all their school friends about trojan-hacker-virusses spreading via Skype calls. I also find a not-unsurprising crowd of unfortunate users who blame Skype for genuine problems on their unpatched, unfirewalled XP-Home box.
The most serious looking warnings I find are mostly of two types. (1) warnings to businesses about the dangers of letting your employees install a secure, encrypted, peer-to-peer, file-transfer system (Skype) on work computers and thereby leak company information. (2) a whole bunch of scam sites using the same cut'n'paste text to misleadingly label the W32.Warezov email trojan as some kind of Skype-based virus.
I don't find - at first glance - a whole lot of serious articles from trusted sources claiming that Skype is a wide-open gateway to malware hell.
Nonetheless - as a Skype user and general security-concerned geek - I'd always be interested to hear genuine evidence that Skype is a security hazard to users who would not accept random file-transfers of from unknown Skype contacts.
Lets not forget that FUD is FUD even when it's not directed against Linux.
It's one of the few components they routinely hear about which is usually referred to with words rather than letters and is therefore easier to remember. Since it becomes the only known (though not understood) technical term, a certain class of users will invoke it at every opportunity they get to make themselves sound as if they know what they're talking about and thereby deserve some preferential treatment.
This is not something specific to computing. The same type of people will constantly refer their mechanic to their "carburetor" or their plumber to their "ball cock" ;-)
Placing a physical ad in proximity to a plot of land belonging to a competitor does not specifically depend on the exploitation of the competitor's trademark - a mark which they have to pay for and which supposedly affords them a degree of legal protection versus others exploiting it to their benefit.
Placing a web ad effectively "on" a competitor's trademark does - it could be argued (and seems likely to be the thrust of the lawsuit) - does mean that the ad's existence entirely depends on that trademark. The party selling the keyword is - again it could be argued - effectively selling the misuse of competitor's protected trademarks - definitely a no-no.
The fact that earlier one-to-one cases with Google vs large corporates resulted in settlements would seem to suggest to (IANAL) me that Google themselves may be concerned that there could be a case to answer here.
The London Olympic opening ceremony is going to be so embarrassingly, cringe-inducingly awful that the kinetic energy involved in hundreds of millions of folks turning away from the TV screen to gag, all at the same time, is going to shift the Earth off its axis and send the planet plummeting into the Sun.
The Mayans predicted it apparently.
Sadly, unless you're part of the cartel of industry organizations which bought and paid for this "legislation" - your complaints will be ignored.
It's not the words on the paper that define the law.
It's the money that paid for them.
Unfortunately no. Banning their product effectively fines huge numbers of completely innocent smaller organizations who rely - in whole or part, directly or indirectly - on Intel's products for their income.
I don't think it's fair that little guy should suffer just because the big guy who's scraps he scavenges is a douchebag?
Hoho - I have almost the same cupboard. A tear to the eye indeed - yes it does. I guess - albeit Amiga users no-more - this makes us exactly the crazy cultists the article was talking about XD