But I do think going after the stores would be the way to go, with their thinner margins, it would hurt them a lot more.
I like this line of thinking. It ties in with the recent WalMart story as well -- in order to make a change in the world, you need to leverage your position.
We're solitary consumers. Citizens. But how do we change the system, without the system breaking us? Ally yourself with bigger guns. If OEM/VARs won't sell PCs without Microsoft software, petition a large retailer who isn't beholden to Microsoft to do just that.
In this case, I would imagine if enough people (through petition, or legal means) bother retailers who sell broken materials, the retailers will decide it's not economically viable to continue to sell broken merchandise.
Note that nowhere in there do I say it's "wrong" to purchase or sell Microsoft software or broken CDs. The decisions will be made based on economics; so spin the choices such that "the right thing to do" also turns out to be the economical thing to do.
Finally, I agree that initiating a lawsuit is one of the fastest ways to get a company to pay you attention. In this case, it's also preferable. I'm going out to buy a Celine Dion CD tonight, and I'll make sure that the receipt says "CD" somewhere on it. Expect a class-action to follow.
I have used CloneCD or Undisker to create an.ISO image, and then mounted that as a CD drive in a virtual machine under VMware.
Yes, it's a bit more work, and the daemon-tools that everyone's mentioning look nice, but TMTOWTDI, and for me one of the other ways is with VMware.
The other benefit being, if you set it up right, the critter will have his own "sandbox" and can blown up the VM but it's really easy to back up the VM's directory, so when s/he does take the machine down, you can bring it back in a couple minutes of copying, rather than a couple hours of reinstalling.
Second, plugging an electric car into the wall is more efficient and cleaner than burning gasoline to power a generator. This is because it is easier to clean up the emissions from a large plant, it's all in one place, than it is to clean up the tailpipe of many cars that move all over the place.
This gave me an idea: How about creating "power mats" that the owner parks the car over, which provide an inductive trickle charge to the electric-only car overnight?
They could even provide "keys", encrypted, so other drivers couldn't steal energy (for, say, such a device buried in a driveway).
The idea being, of course, to make the user experience more enjoyable/less frustrating.
Until Cyc is allowed to self-generate rules this will limite Cyc's growth to the abilites of humans to feed it information on fact at a time. This will greatly limit the database's access to less popular or more technical topics and will slow down the process of learning.
I think it'd be cool to teach Cyc to program. "A bubble sort is less efficient than a quicksort."
Perhaps it could fix all Microsoft's bugs, without access to the source!
Oh, btw there's another couple projects similar to Cyc:
I went shopping at my local Walmart (Margate, FL for those Walmart employees listening who want to fix the situation), and checked in the Electronics section. They have a bunch of brand-names (Compaq, HP), but the salespeople looked at me funny when I mentioned what I had read here.
What percentage of Walmarts actually carry this PC? Any sightings?
This bug is why mozilla insists on adding.exe extensions to anything delivered as application/octet-stream,.txt to text/plain, and likes to fool around with lots of other extensions depending on your exact setup
I've noticed that Mozilla adds ".tar" to a file named "xxx.tar.gz". However, WinRAR opens it successfully (I'm using Win2K, and get Perl modules from source occasionally).
I'd rather spend half an hour every fifteen years to learn something new than put up with the inferior old scheme for another decade or more.
Would it be that difficult for you to learn something new while others could continue to play with their toys the way they knew how?
I mean, just invent a new regex delimiter for the new regexes, and leave the old ones alone.
A similar thing happened in South Florida, which is extremely irritating: BellSouth, in their infinite wisdom, decided everyone should learn to dial 10 digits instead of 7, because they're adding a new area code.
Monopolies suck. It would have been better for the users (and probably more expensive for the equipment) to leave 7-digit dialing for the 954 area code, and have calls to the new 754 area code be 10 (or 11) digits.
But no, they had to go and fuck it up for everyone. At least my cell phone (Nextel) doesn't require 10 digits. This screwed up my internet connection, and I lost some shows while I was out of the country because my ReplayTV wasn't informed.
That rant leads to my first paragraph: legacy code should execute unchanged. New code should be identified as such, either with a "#!/usr/bin/perl -v6" (or similar) as a first line, or a separate extension (".pl6"), or some other delimiter for regexes, such as "regex(... )" (the regex in the "...") or "[/.../]". (No, I didn't read the whole 24 pages, so he may have mentioned some reason why these ideas suck.)
We clearly see that a spider silk can easily lift a human up in the sky and around buildings, from the movie Spiderman. So your theory of linear scalability is inaccurate.
There was an article here recently on inaccuracies in movies. One I didn't see mentioned was -- if Spiderman was truly affected by a spider's genetic materials, wouldn't his spinnerettes be located near his... anus? The movie wouldn't have gotten a PG rating, though.;-)
Fire up Office-Xbox on the console. Modem or broadband connection to MSN (only) checks...
Modem or broadband. How quaint.;-)
Seriously, I see a future with every consumer device containing a cell phone, or a WiFi card. The manufacturer will know the moment you bought it, the path you traveled to your home, where you live, when you use it, and if you try to disable or jam the device, they'll send someone to check on it.
You think TiVo not having a 30-second skip button is bad...
I always liked the question "Why are manhole covers round?"
There are several answers; the goal is to test for creativity: "So they don't fall down the manholes"; "So they're easier to transport (you can roll them rather than carry them)"; "So they don't have corners -- if they did, and were not seated properly, they could puncture a car's tires"; other answers?
As soon as Lucas said he was waiting for the new three to be released before putting the originals on DVD, I said he was going to do this. What will it be called, Super Special Edition? Speciai Edition Pro? 32-Bit Special Edition Turbo?
Well, just look at the bright side -- Lucas waited.
He could just as easily have milked close to twice the amount out of DVD owners (release now, then release again with new scenes).
In specific, he examined the amount of time it takes the avg. person to read a display or press a button, vs. how much distance a car would travel at about 40 mph, 60, or 70 mph.
My car has a heads-up display. This can be enhanced to give the driver additional information -- while the driver keeps his/her eyes on the road.
I also installed an after-market stereo which has a remote control, mounted on the steering wheel. This could be used to answer questions posed by the heads-up display -- while the driver keeps his/her hands on the steering wheel.
Other cars have similar buttons built-in -- the Jeep Grand Cherokee has buttons behind the steering wheel, where your fingertips would be when holding the wheel. Right hand is volume, left hand is frequency (radio) or track (CD).
The only other concern is the driver's attention, which I cannot solve with the devices in my car.
You really don't want to upgrade, since the new SP1 will make your WinXP unusable, as MS knows about illegal keys (like the one which escaped from a company who are good friends of MS and their name starts with D) (thats according to the-register)...
Which key? This one?
FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT-8TG6W-2B7Q8
I always thought it hilarious that the first block is an insult to our current president.
It's just like legistlating the internet. Legistlators have to realize that just because there is a law doesn't mean that people will follow it.
Is it just me, or does anyone else think we've got enough laws?
The 10 commandments appear to be almost enough laws.
Why do we need more laws? In most cases, it appears to be "to protect/advance profitability."
This is not right. But what can be done about it? It's like the drug war -- it's profitable both for law enforcement and law breakers (dealers, not users) -- so nobody wants to stop it, even if it destroys citizens' rights.
Me, I'm glad that China has decided to take the moon. It gets the rest of us up off our butts. Especially as another response said -- China didn't sign the treaty making the moon unclaimable -- so they will make it theirs.
There are two areas we could build self-sustaining colonies on Earth that would be able to hunker down through just about anything, be it nuclear, cosmic or biological... under the sea and under the ground.
Not to invoke the "T" word (Godwin's got a new law), but...
If we have colonies on other planets, then it'll be harder for those whose goals are destruction to eliminate the colony.
Underground or undersea, it's reachable with much less resources than having to escape the gravity well.
Also, a space-based colony would have advanced warning -- "something just launched from Earth, let's take a good look and make sure it's not dangerous." The moon would have a couple hours to prepare; Mars would have months.
We run a web interface to a com object of MS Word/Excel, and people can upload files in MS format and download in a more-open format (eg, RTF/CSV).
Someone please combine this with the latest Outlook/Windows exploit, and convert the Earth's entire repository of proprietary documents into open formats.
Yes, you'd be prosecuted, so no, I didn't tell you.;-)
"In a demonstration of its redesign for The Associated Press, Microsoft deleted all its Internet Explorer icons from one of the company's laptop computers, which preventing the Web browser from starting, then restored the icons later."
Also, if you haven't checked already, it's often cheaper to make long-distance calls out of state than it is to make long-distance calls in state. You may be able to halve or better your long-distance by making it dial somewhere else.
I own a ReplayTV, so I'm not sure if TiVo can do this but I'd be surprised if it can't: you should be able to set "dialing rules" and have it dial arbitrary numbers before/after the phone number.
A service I use (and am not affiliated with otherwise) is 10-15-335 -- this gives $4c/minute in the US and 17c/minute to Brazil (the reason we found it).
If your situation is like the parent's parent, just configure it to add "1015335" before the long distance number, and it should save you a bunch.
You had said you figured out "<" and ">", but your "start sarcasm" tag looked like this:
<sarcasm>
The full specification for the commonly-used symbols:
"<" is "<"
">" is ">"
"&" is "&"
Many people leave off the closing ";", and most of the time it displays correctly (except for when there's an alpha-numeric character where the ";" would be).
Please don't mod this as Offtopic -- many people attempt to use these symbols and fail. This should actually be part of the Slashdot FAQ I suppose...
An idea I think the OSS community needs to explore in greater detail is the possibility of defeating Microsoft in its own home turf without making Linux a desktop. In public schools you'd have Mozilla, Abiword, a Win32 version of Gnumeric, etc competing with their Microsoft counterparts.
Check out the OpenCD project . This will do exactly what you say -- produce a CD of open/free software which can be used on Windows systems.
Slashdot Mirror
I like this line of thinking. It ties in with the recent WalMart story as well -- in order to make a change in the world, you need to leverage your position.
We're solitary consumers. Citizens. But how do we change the system, without the system breaking us? Ally yourself with bigger guns. If OEM/VARs won't sell PCs without Microsoft software, petition a large retailer who isn't beholden to Microsoft to do just that.
In this case, I would imagine if enough people (through petition, or legal means) bother retailers who sell broken materials, the retailers will decide it's not economically viable to continue to sell broken merchandise.
Note that nowhere in there do I say it's "wrong" to purchase or sell Microsoft software or broken CDs. The decisions will be made based on economics; so spin the choices such that "the right thing to do" also turns out to be the economical thing to do.
Finally, I agree that initiating a lawsuit is one of the fastest ways to get a company to pay you attention. In this case, it's also preferable. I'm going out to buy a Celine Dion CD tonight, and I'll make sure that the receipt says "CD" somewhere on it. Expect a class-action to follow.
Yes, it's a bit more work, and the daemon-tools that everyone's mentioning look nice, but TMTOWTDI, and for me one of the other ways is with VMware.
The other benefit being, if you set it up right, the critter will have his own "sandbox" and can blown up the VM but it's really easy to back up the VM's directory, so when s/he does take the machine down, you can bring it back in a couple minutes of copying, rather than a couple hours of reinstalling.
The drawback? Fast games won't be.
This gave me an idea: How about creating "power mats" that the owner parks the car over, which provide an inductive trickle charge to the electric-only car overnight?
They could even provide "keys", encrypted, so other drivers couldn't steal energy (for, say, such a device buried in a driveway).
The idea being, of course, to make the user experience more enjoyable/less frustrating.
I think it'd be cool to teach Cyc to program. "A bubble sort is less efficient than a quicksort."
Perhaps it could fix all Microsoft's bugs, without access to the source!
Oh, btw there's another couple projects similar to Cyc:
OpenMind and MindPixel .
What percentage of Walmarts actually carry this PC? Any sightings?
I've noticed that Mozilla adds ".tar" to a file named "xxx.tar.gz". However, WinRAR opens it successfully (I'm using Win2K, and get Perl modules from source occasionally).
Didn't realize this was a Mozilla bug. Thanks!
Would it be that difficult for you to learn something new while others could continue to play with their toys the way they knew how?
I mean, just invent a new regex delimiter for the new regexes, and leave the old ones alone.
A similar thing happened in South Florida, which is extremely irritating: BellSouth, in their infinite wisdom, decided everyone should learn to dial 10 digits instead of 7, because they're adding a new area code.
Monopolies suck. It would have been better for the users (and probably more expensive for the equipment) to leave 7-digit dialing for the 954 area code, and have calls to the new 754 area code be 10 (or 11) digits.
But no, they had to go and fuck it up for everyone. At least my cell phone (Nextel) doesn't require 10 digits. This screwed up my internet connection, and I lost some shows while I was out of the country because my ReplayTV wasn't informed.
That rant leads to my first paragraph: legacy code should execute unchanged. New code should be identified as such, either with a "#!/usr/bin/perl -v6" (or similar) as a first line, or a separate extension (".pl6"), or some other delimiter for regexes, such as "regex( ... )" (the regex in the "...") or "[/ ... /]". (No, I didn't read the whole 24 pages, so he may have mentioned some reason why these ideas suck.)
There was an article here recently on inaccuracies in movies. One I didn't see mentioned was -- if Spiderman was truly affected by a spider's genetic materials, wouldn't his spinnerettes be located near his ... anus? The movie wouldn't have gotten a PG rating, though. ;-)
Modem or broadband. How quaint. ;-)
Seriously, I see a future with every consumer device containing a cell phone, or a WiFi card. The manufacturer will know the moment you bought it, the path you traveled to your home, where you live, when you use it, and if you try to disable or jam the device, they'll send someone to check on it.
You think TiVo not having a 30-second skip button is bad...
There are several answers; the goal is to test for creativity: "So they don't fall down the manholes"; "So they're easier to transport (you can roll them rather than carry them)"; "So they don't have corners -- if they did, and were not seated properly, they could puncture a car's tires"; other answers?
Well, just look at the bright side -- Lucas waited.
He could just as easily have milked close to twice the amount out of DVD owners (release now, then release again with new scenes).
The only difference is the poster has done some trolling. Let's expose it:
From the 7th paragraph, inserted after "fit in this category.":
From the 8th paragraph, inserted after "not waived during prosecution.":
And finally, the poster replaced the final paragraph, which was:
with:Please mod the parent back down, and mod one of the responses to this post up (I will post as AC the actual text). Thanks.
My car has a heads-up display. This can be enhanced to give the driver additional information -- while the driver keeps his/her eyes on the road.
I also installed an after-market stereo which has a remote control, mounted on the steering wheel. This could be used to answer questions posed by the heads-up display -- while the driver keeps his/her hands on the steering wheel.
Other cars have similar buttons built-in -- the Jeep Grand Cherokee has buttons behind the steering wheel, where your fingertips would be when holding the wheel. Right hand is volume, left hand is frequency (radio) or track (CD).
The only other concern is the driver's attention, which I cannot solve with the devices in my car.
Which key? This one?
I always thought it hilarious that the first block is an insult to our current president.Is it just me, or does anyone else think we've got enough laws?
The 10 commandments appear to be almost enough laws.
Why do we need more laws? In most cases, it appears to be "to protect/advance profitability."
This is not right. But what can be done about it? It's like the drug war -- it's profitable both for law enforcement and law breakers (dealers, not users) -- so nobody wants to stop it, even if it destroys citizens' rights.
Me, I'm glad that China has decided to take the moon. It gets the rest of us up off our butts. Especially as another response said -- China didn't sign the treaty making the moon unclaimable -- so they will make it theirs.
Not to invoke the "T" word (Godwin's got a new law), but...
If we have colonies on other planets, then it'll be harder for those whose goals are destruction to eliminate the colony.
Underground or undersea, it's reachable with much less resources than having to escape the gravity well.
Also, a space-based colony would have advanced warning -- "something just launched from Earth, let's take a good look and make sure it's not dangerous." The moon would have a couple hours to prepare; Mars would have months.
Someone please combine this with the latest Outlook/Windows exploit, and convert the Earth's entire repository of proprietary documents into open formats.
Yes, you'd be prosecuted, so no, I didn't tell you. ;-)
Sounds like clever use of the Recycle Bin.
I own a ReplayTV, so I'm not sure if TiVo can do this but I'd be surprised if it can't: you should be able to set "dialing rules" and have it dial arbitrary numbers before/after the phone number.
A service I use (and am not affiliated with otherwise) is 10-15-335 -- this gives $4c/minute in the US and 17c/minute to Brazil (the reason we found it).
If your situation is like the parent's parent, just configure it to add "1015335" before the long distance number, and it should save you a bunch.
Silly okvol, you should know there's no worth in Hollings (D, Disney).
You had said you figured out "<" and ">", but your "start sarcasm" tag looked like this:
The full specification for the commonly-used symbols:Many people leave off the closing ";", and most of the time it displays correctly (except for when there's an alpha-numeric character where the ";" would be).
Please don't mod this as Offtopic -- many people attempt to use these symbols and fail. This should actually be part of the Slashdot FAQ I suppose...
Oh, wait, that was Libya.
Check out the OpenCD project . This will do exactly what you say -- produce a CD of open/free software which can be used on Windows systems.
Frontal bidets. (You've never been to France? They've got centuries to make up for.)