Any guess on how many people share the name "Wang Chen" in all of China? Chances are most people could use their real name and still remain relatively anonymous.
Uh, you are talking about "westernized" names. They're quite different to their real names. Also, a lot of Asian countries tend to shorten their names in casual usage and only use the real long name in official situations. For example Thai people have really long names, but casually everyone shortens it to the first 3-4 letters.
new rules requiring people to use their real names -- when buying mobile phones
Just like Chinese, this is required by Apple too. They say it's so that you cannot buy multiple phones, but you still are required to give them your real name when you want to buy a phone. You are only allowed to buy a device with a credit card and they will record your name and phone IMEI.
The trend in the US seems to be going strongly towards using real names too. Theres Facebook and there just was that Blizzard Forum incident. So it's not really nothing new, but it is just an another "china and communism is bad"-story when pretty much the same is done in the US.
CNet estimates that a A recall would cost them $1.5B
It's not only that cost. In 3 days Apple's stock has gone down a huge 5%, costing Apple and their shareholders millions of dollars and creating huge image problems.
It also look like Apple's PR team completely messed up, from the "learn a new way to hold a phone" to removing of any critical comments from their support forums. Considering PR and marketing is one of Apple's strongest areas and which pushes everything they do forward, they did some incredibly stupid decisions.
Now that they are basically ignoring the problem, any more time they take doing nothing will cost them even more.
And it was not stupid, just old and bad technology before. He is probably thinking the old red-blue glasses. 3D viewing has improved a lot in the recent years, and for example gives a totally new feeling with games. If you have tried Left 4 Dead with NVidia's 3D Vision Kit and a 120hz 3D capable monitor, you know what I'm talking about (it is a lot scarier too).
It really gives a completely new feeling, when done right, and remember this is all along the path for technology that can render the environment completely and realistically around us, with a complete feeling of "being there".
Does a console game tell the user how to set the TV between 4:3 and 16:9 modes
While you can do it manually, at least mine does it automatically.
The thing is, users have already got used to the button that easily takes them to full screen. If you now add an intermediate step in to it, users will just think it's broken or shit. Hell, even I wouldn't want to always take the extra steps when watching some video.
If you want to do it the hard way (majority doesn't), then HTML5 should offer the functionality and browsers should offer an option to turn it off. Just like for the HTML5 local storage and so on. It's not that complicated, and you make it a lot more user friendly. Internet has not been just for the geeks for over 10-15 years now.
That works of course, but how user friendly it is to always tell the user to press F11? How user friendly it is to first make the user click the "full screen" button on YouTube and after that still make them press F11? In top of that there are countless amount of people who probably don't even understand what they should do then, and start moaning that it's "broken".
That beside the fact that one of the purposes of HTML5 is to get every browser support it the same way (including IE), so that developers can write code that works the same in all browsers and devices. Sniffing user agent and acting differently based on it just takes us back to the problem.
Maybe you can do so, but it's way too complicated for the casual user to start messing with it like that. They have got used to just clicking the "full screen" button in their YouTube player. If you're watching videos full screen, it also makes no sense to have huge browser bars and taskbar around the video just taking up space and distracting you.
I just hope someone, eventually, figures out that the "full screen" button we have in web video can also be used in web games.
That is actually one of the most significant problems with HTML5. It provides no way for the video to maximize to full screen and is actually even against such functionality with JavaScript (page could maximize the window automatically and so on).
Currently the only way is to install a Firefox Addon that adds a context menu item to maximize the video object. But that is only for the video object, works only with Firefox and is in no way user-friendly.
Everyone here always says sites should start changing to HTML5 video, but when it lacks basic functionality like that I just don't see it happening.
I hope Microsoft brings back their Courier project or some other device with two screens that you hold like a book.
There is hope for the future of the 'Courier'. On June 30, 2010, Network World posted that Microsoft received a patent on June 29th, which might be for the 'Courier', "[p]atent number D618683 for a 'dual display device'."
It's seriously the only tablet I would feel comfortable to hold and use. A hard single surface tablet is not nice to hold, especially since we have used to hold books in our hands for hundreds of years.
Personally I will be waiting and will not buy a tablet unless I can hold it like that. Otherwise I might just as well use a laptop.
Personally, I'm always looking for ways to make Paypal less relevant.
The funny thing is, PayPal is mostly just relevant in the US and other western countries. Other countries have better online systems with full encyption, added security and several ways to use their system, and people happily use these to pay their phone and tv bills and everything else. You can also top up your account by buying one of the several coupons from the kiosk near you.
It's actually quite funny how US people put up with PayPal and their shitty and insecure system.
Kindly enlighten us with your math skills. Show us how your monthly bill translates to exactly $600 for the hardware? Then enlighten us how that same math doesn't apply to EVERY smartphone on the market. Do you think the cost of the EVO is significantly different? It actually costs the same for the base model but is has less memory (8GB vs 16 GB). Are EVO's magically free from Monthly costs? You argument was pointless and holds no water. The phone costs what it costs. Monthly charges by some random provider are meaningless.
Well, I don't live in the USA but here we tend to buy phones ourself and then get a mobile contract or prepaid sim. No monthly charges, you just pay for calls/sms/internet.
Yeah, it's kind of funny that you get bombed with advertisement when just using your phone that you paid for up to $600 (monthly payments count up too), and still some Apple fanatics twist it as being somehow good and great.
This is also a mobile device where every little thing matters. Imagine the outcry if Microsoft started displaying popup ads while you are using the computer.
If a torrent for the users' info appeared on the site and the admins ignored a community demand to take it down, you bet that community would ditch the site and TPB would die. It's in TPB's best interest to keep user information secret; I do not understand why this is hard to grasp.
Which again would make their actions hypocrisy, especially when they in turn laugh and try to ridicule people who ask them to remove such info from the site.
One only needs to look at price to see why the N900 never caught on. People don't care that its unlocked too much, what they -do- care about is that a price of $650 was something that no one wants to pay for a phone. $100? People would have bought it. $200? People still might have bought it, $650 not subsidized? The average person doesn't want to pay that much for a phone.
That's only because US has got used to telco's cheating that way. Everywhere else in the world a person buys a phone and then gets (a much cheaper) separate contract for it. It was only a few years ago that the operators started offering the US-style subsidized plans, and they always end up costing a lot more.
And it was actually quite widely used in Scandinavia and probably other parts of Europe. USA has always been the secondary market for Nokia. Also remember that this was in the beginning of 2000, times have changed a lot since then.
Nokia has a significant market share in mobile world. Not just the toys. Apple only has one product line while Nokia has many, many different phones suited for quite much everyone, and is generally looked up to in the business world (as is HTC too). Not everyone cares about buying some simple games from the app store, you know.
I think the story would be better worded as "What Nokia Must Do To Compete With Apple", as they already sure as hell know what to do in the mobile world.
Yes, they do. While they say they don't, this was actually one of the major reasons why TPB earlier lost in court, as copyright holders were able to prove that TPB admins monitor and delete the torrents. This put more liability on them.
Which also is my point exactly. TPB has always said it doesn't interfere with the content and is only providing, like you said, a matchmaking service between clients. This content should also be fine then.
Because it conflates privacy issues with intellectual property issues. There is nothing hypocritical in trying to contain private data but not copyrighted works.
Are you saying The Pirate Bay is mostly used for illegally transferring copyrighted works? I thought TPB admins have always tried to make a point that they're solely allowing people to transfer information and files with each other.
After all the other leaked information via The Pirate Bay and Wikileaks (many username, password, email and ip lists like this too), I'd say it's only fair if they upload a torrent of it to The Pirate Bay and additionally send the same info for Wikileaks to publish.
Open information and knowledge is always for the better, right? It would be hypocrisy of them to remove the torrent.
Malware often uses low-level code and tricks which makes them break when they are being run in an emulator. They also often have checks and tricks in place to detect if they are being run in a virtual machine and either crash itself or act differently. How do you run Windows executables with this so that they actually work normally?
For example Mac OSX malware is not yet at the point where it's particularly hard to analyze, they're mostly just shell scripts or executables with no low level tricks.
Slashdot Mirror
Any guess on how many people share the name "Wang Chen" in all of China? Chances are most people could use their real name and still remain relatively anonymous.
Uh, you are talking about "westernized" names. They're quite different to their real names. Also, a lot of Asian countries tend to shorten their names in casual usage and only use the real long name in official situations. For example Thai people have really long names, but casually everyone shortens it to the first 3-4 letters.
new rules requiring people to use their real names -- when buying mobile phones
Just like Chinese, this is required by Apple too. They say it's so that you cannot buy multiple phones, but you still are required to give them your real name when you want to buy a phone. You are only allowed to buy a device with a credit card and they will record your name and phone IMEI.
The trend in the US seems to be going strongly towards using real names too. Theres Facebook and there just was that Blizzard Forum incident. So it's not really nothing new, but it is just an another "china and communism is bad"-story when pretty much the same is done in the US.
Is because Microsoft's source is closed, and a spy might have a chance to find a hole in the source code that's not obvious without the source code
Why go thru that amount of work when they already have the source code.
CNet estimates that a A recall would cost them $1.5B
It's not only that cost. In 3 days Apple's stock has gone down a huge 5%, costing Apple and their shareholders millions of dollars and creating huge image problems.
It also look like Apple's PR team completely messed up, from the "learn a new way to hold a phone" to removing of any critical comments from their support forums. Considering PR and marketing is one of Apple's strongest areas and which pushes everything they do forward, they did some incredibly stupid decisions.
Now that they are basically ignoring the problem, any more time they take doing nothing will cost them even more.
And it was not stupid, just old and bad technology before. He is probably thinking the old red-blue glasses. 3D viewing has improved a lot in the recent years, and for example gives a totally new feeling with games. If you have tried Left 4 Dead with NVidia's 3D Vision Kit and a 120hz 3D capable monitor, you know what I'm talking about (it is a lot scarier too).
It really gives a completely new feeling, when done right, and remember this is all along the path for technology that can render the environment completely and realistically around us, with a complete feeling of "being there".
This is not the usual ancient red-blue glasses, it's for 3D TV's with active shutter glasses. You cannot just feed the video stream normally.
Also, it's not just for 3D movies, it's for games too.
Does a console game tell the user how to set the TV between 4:3 and 16:9 modes
While you can do it manually, at least mine does it automatically.
The thing is, users have already got used to the button that easily takes them to full screen. If you now add an intermediate step in to it, users will just think it's broken or shit. Hell, even I wouldn't want to always take the extra steps when watching some video.
If you want to do it the hard way (majority doesn't), then HTML5 should offer the functionality and browsers should offer an option to turn it off. Just like for the HTML5 local storage and so on. It's not that complicated, and you make it a lot more user friendly. Internet has not been just for the geeks for over 10-15 years now.
That works of course, but how user friendly it is to always tell the user to press F11? How user friendly it is to first make the user click the "full screen" button on YouTube and after that still make them press F11? In top of that there are countless amount of people who probably don't even understand what they should do then, and start moaning that it's "broken".
That beside the fact that one of the purposes of HTML5 is to get every browser support it the same way (including IE), so that developers can write code that works the same in all browsers and devices. Sniffing user agent and acting differently based on it just takes us back to the problem.
Maybe you can do so, but it's way too complicated for the casual user to start messing with it like that. They have got used to just clicking the "full screen" button in their YouTube player. If you're watching videos full screen, it also makes no sense to have huge browser bars and taskbar around the video just taking up space and distracting you.
I just hope someone, eventually, figures out that the "full screen" button we have in web video can also be used in web games.
That is actually one of the most significant problems with HTML5. It provides no way for the video to maximize to full screen and is actually even against such functionality with JavaScript (page could maximize the window automatically and so on).
Currently the only way is to install a Firefox Addon that adds a context menu item to maximize the video object. But that is only for the video object, works only with Firefox and is in no way user-friendly.
Everyone here always says sites should start changing to HTML5 video, but when it lacks basic functionality like that I just don't see it happening.
I hope Microsoft brings back their Courier project or some other device with two screens that you hold like a book.
There is hope for the future of the 'Courier'. On June 30, 2010, Network World posted that Microsoft received a patent on June 29th, which might be for the 'Courier', "[p]atent number D618683 for a 'dual display device'."
It's seriously the only tablet I would feel comfortable to hold and use. A hard single surface tablet is not nice to hold, especially since we have used to hold books in our hands for hundreds of years.
Personally I will be waiting and will not buy a tablet unless I can hold it like that. Otherwise I might just as well use a laptop.
Personally, I'm always looking for ways to make Paypal less relevant.
The funny thing is, PayPal is mostly just relevant in the US and other western countries. Other countries have better online systems with full encyption, added security and several ways to use their system, and people happily use these to pay their phone and tv bills and everything else. You can also top up your account by buying one of the several coupons from the kiosk near you.
It's actually quite funny how US people put up with PayPal and their shitty and insecure system.
Kindly enlighten us with your math skills. Show us how your monthly bill translates to exactly $600 for the hardware? Then enlighten us how that same math doesn't apply to EVERY smartphone on the market. Do you think the cost of the EVO is significantly different? It actually costs the same for the base model but is has less memory (8GB vs 16 GB). Are EVO's magically free from Monthly costs? You argument was pointless and holds no water. The phone costs what it costs. Monthly charges by some random provider are meaningless.
Well, I don't live in the USA but here we tend to buy phones ourself and then get a mobile contract or prepaid sim. No monthly charges, you just pay for calls/sms/internet.
You also claim $600 dollar costs for hardware when it costs you $199.
Ah, the telco's marketing bullshit is strong on this one.
Yeah, it's kind of funny that you get bombed with advertisement when just using your phone that you paid for up to $600 (monthly payments count up too), and still some Apple fanatics twist it as being somehow good and great.
This is also a mobile device where every little thing matters. Imagine the outcry if Microsoft started displaying popup ads while you are using the computer.
If a torrent for the users' info appeared on the site and the admins ignored a community demand to take it down, you bet that community would ditch the site and TPB would die. It's in TPB's best interest to keep user information secret; I do not understand why this is hard to grasp.
Which again would make their actions hypocrisy, especially when they in turn laugh and try to ridicule people who ask them to remove such info from the site.
One only needs to look at price to see why the N900 never caught on. People don't care that its unlocked too much, what they -do- care about is that a price of $650 was something that no one wants to pay for a phone. $100? People would have bought it. $200? People still might have bought it, $650 not subsidized? The average person doesn't want to pay that much for a phone.
That's only because US has got used to telco's cheating that way. Everywhere else in the world a person buys a phone and then gets (a much cheaper) separate contract for it. It was only a few years ago that the operators started offering the US-style subsidized plans, and they always end up costing a lot more.
And it was actually quite widely used in Scandinavia and probably other parts of Europe. USA has always been the secondary market for Nokia. Also remember that this was in the beginning of 2000, times have changed a lot since then.
Nokia has a significant market share in mobile world. Not just the toys. Apple only has one product line while Nokia has many, many different phones suited for quite much everyone, and is generally looked up to in the business world (as is HTC too). Not everyone cares about buying some simple games from the app store, you know.
I think the story would be better worded as "What Nokia Must Do To Compete With Apple", as they already sure as hell know what to do in the mobile world.
Yes, they do. While they say they don't, this was actually one of the major reasons why TPB earlier lost in court, as copyright holders were able to prove that TPB admins monitor and delete the torrents. This put more liability on them.
Which also is my point exactly. TPB has always said it doesn't interfere with the content and is only providing, like you said, a matchmaking service between clients. This content should also be fine then.
Because it conflates privacy issues with intellectual property issues. There is nothing hypocritical in trying to contain private data but not copyrighted works.
Are you saying The Pirate Bay is mostly used for illegally transferring copyrighted works? I thought TPB admins have always tried to make a point that they're solely allowing people to transfer information and files with each other.
Such lists have been many times published on TPB - for other private torrent trackers too.
After all the other leaked information via The Pirate Bay and Wikileaks (many username, password, email and ip lists like this too), I'd say it's only fair if they upload a torrent of it to The Pirate Bay and additionally send the same info for Wikileaks to publish.
Open information and knowledge is always for the better, right? It would be hypocrisy of them to remove the torrent.
Malware often uses low-level code and tricks which makes them break when they are being run in an emulator. They also often have checks and tricks in place to detect if they are being run in a virtual machine and either crash itself or act differently. How do you run Windows executables with this so that they actually work normally?
For example Mac OSX malware is not yet at the point where it's particularly hard to analyze, they're mostly just shell scripts or executables with no low level tricks.