Re:Changing the licenses and refunds..
on
Windows Refund Day II
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Personally, I think it would be much easier to move to a service model -- but the cost can't come at purchase time. It has to come at activation time. If the first thing you do is reformat, there's no service charge at all.
Sounds great, but why would Microsoft buy into this? They currently has a stranglehold on the PC industry, so they can force the big PC makers to pay for the service up front, and they get their cut no matter what OS you choose to run on your laptop after you buy it.
About the only reason the big PC makers would consider this is that they could charge less by forcing the user to enter a CC# the minute they register their PC, thus making their PC's look cheaper to the end user. I can envision this being a nightmare to support. For example, I buy a Dell PC, bring it home, and instead of paying the $199 up front for 3 years of MS OS rental, I format the drive and put, for example, the Plan 9 operating system on it. Suddenly the modem goes. Does Dell customer service want to troubleshoot every existing OS I can install on their hardware? Do they want to "take my word" that the problem is hardware-related and not a Plan 9 driver problem?
More likely, a casual end user will skip the $199 registration and install their old version of 2000 or WinME/9x on the box - something Microsoft would very much not want to see happen.
They invest in a wood stove and allow the snail-mail spammers to heat their house for the winter - like I did.
Unfortunately, a certain percentage of the material in junk mail is not cleanly burnable, so you'll have to toss that. If you live in an area where you're required to pay per-bagload for trash disposal, this is probably a losing proposition.
On the flip side: I have Charter.net. Modem rental fees were $10/month for a cable modem priced at ~$100. I've had mine for 2 years, saving myself $140 by buying the unit. However, the price of rental just went from $10 to $3. So it seems to vary from situation to situation. You alos have to wonder how many extras (PVR being a good eaxmple) a third-party box might have.
Do you believe, in whole or in part, that the Americans with Disabilities Act should apply to the internet (or that part of the internet (if any!) that belongs under US jurisdiction)? If so, why? If in part, what part? If not, do you see avenues other than legal ones as the best way to pursue alternative access to the internet, and what would those avenues be?
Last year I didn't burn any audio CD's, but I burned quite a few data CD's for backups, Lnux distro's et. al. And the RIAA got a cut from the sale of every blank CD I used...
Open Office under SuSE 8.1 Personal crashes when you try to open even a vanilla MSWord document in it. I thought I must have misconfigured something until I read Thomas C. Greene's review of the distro in the Reg mentioned he had the same problem, and had to download the original from OpenOffice.org to get it to run. Forget MSOffice; personally, I'd be just as happy to be able to run OpenOffice under SuSE.
Re:Just Call it a LIBRARY, Please!
on
Libraries Are 31337
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I think the reason that you are seeing more and more libraries given titles like "resource information center" is because most people think of a library as nothing more than a book repository. Many libraries today also have microfiche, videotapes, CD's, DVD's, software, and a network of computers with high-speed internet. Since many people will never discover any of this other good stuff because they think of the library as a place to go if you're looking for books, some libraries have taken to changing their title to more accurately reflect what they are.
And how long will it be before users start losing privileges for things that they "potentially might do" (with a 94% accuracy rate). About one in 20 of us is really going to suffer for this one.
I just put in my subscription, and had no trouble with the website in Mozilla. I'm set to enable first-person cookies, and have both Java and Flash; any of those could make a difference.
I find I am almost always in a position where I have more to do than I'll ever finish. Sometimes, someone comes up with an idea that doesn't make sense but they're in a position to push for it to happen anyway. At that point I don't argue about whether it should happen, but rather say, "Okay, I'll add it to my list of things to do", and always find other things that are higher priority until the submittor forgets they ever asked for it. If the submittor keeps asking about it and you're their direct report, this won't work, and you'll need to take care of it. But hey, that's what they're paying you to do, right?
...as in "Zinf is NOT Freeamp". A great music player that supports both MP3's and OGG's. I use it on my Win98 box to play OGG's from my Linux box across the network.
I figure this is a test. They want to see if people will copy it.
Of course it's a test! Look at their choices of movies to release: The only major maovie is Harry Potter, which is famous for the fact that it doesn't have any copy prevention mechanism attached to it anyway. The others are movies that are making next to nothing in retail channels. You notice they don't have any other major titles, because they don't want to see those titles popping up on alt.warez three days after they become available online, after some 16-year old Scandanavian hacker reverse engineers the DRM on them. This way, they have little to lose if someone breaks the encryption earlier than expected (at this point, I have to think they know that eventually pretty much any DRM they throw out there is going to be cracked).
Re:lexmark/the "X" series multifunction printers
on
Printer Makers' Ploys
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I got a Lexmark X73 multifunction printer/scanner/copier from my wife as a Christmas gift last year. The "X" series of multifunction printers (X63, X73, and X83) don't have ANY Linux support whatsoever. Much of their output is driven through (Windows) software. I e-mailed them asking about PCL support, postscript, or raw ouput support I couold use for Linux. I also offered to work on a driver for it if they sent me specs. What I got was the e-mail equivalent of a form letter telling me that the X73 had no support for any platform except Windows, and that the interface to it was proprietary (ie, locked up tighter than a drum).
After hooking it up to my wife's Windows PC, I also found I couldn't write to it from any other box on a network, even another Windows box, as the driver for it won't install or run correctly unless it finds the printer hanging off a USB port on the box you're installing or printing from.
I stayed with my battle-scarred HP Deskjet 400, which happily prints from Windows or Linux, and across the network via Samba, etc. Meanwhile, my wife loves the X73...although it does cost us a fortune in cartridges...
Most routers (including my Netgear wireless) allow you to restrict wireless acess by the MAC address of the connecting wireless card. Just restrict your router to the MAC addresses of the wirelss cards in your laptop(s) and/or wireless desktop(s) and you should be all set.
If it weren't for SPAM, We could not feed our army. -Nikita Kruschev
Re:Ticketmaster Example
on
Perl & LWP
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· Score: 2
You can picture someone writing a script to tag the Ticketmaster site until they can get in to purchase tickets to a hard-to-buy event, like a Bruce Springsteen concert, for example. The second tickets like these go on sale, the web site gets slashdotted, so why not automate the "try" process in a script? Because Ticketmaster will detect this and block your IP...
Of course it's a spammer's dream tool. Spammers have been using tools like this for years, to harvest e-mail addresses from web pages. That's why people use such funky email addresses on Slashdot (except one user I remember who's.sig cleverly read "of course it's my real email address - what kind of idiot would spider Slashdot?").
As a college senior I did an independent study course on Utopias. Here's the ones I remember referencing off the top of my head:
Utopia - Thomas Moore Dispossessed - Ursula K. LeGuin Ecotopia - Ernest Callenbech (sp?) Looking Backward - Edward Bellamy City of God - St. Augustine The Republic - Plato State and Republic - V.I. Lenin (not a utopia per se, but an example of someone trying to implement one in the real world...).
There are a lot of utopias that are not central the book they're in, but are there nonetheless. An obvious one that spring to mind is the Lotus-Eaters in Homer's Odyssey. Mythology has an abundance of them: Shangri-La? Xanadu? Atlantis?
Many of these are a little more historical than the ones I've seen posted so far. In many of them what you're reading is the author trying to tell you that they've figured out what society should be like, and postulating that if we all ran out and implemented their proposed society we'd have heaven on earth. Half the fun of reading them is figuring out whether they will work, or why they won't.
"...while I'd like to see the Stars and Stripes posted all over the galaxy,..."
Ya know, I never understood this. It seems to me the the "space race" should be humankind against itself, not each country against the other. Speaking as both a citizen of both the US and the world, If India or China or anyone else reaches Mars before the US, I'll be damn proud that my race made it to Mars.
What sort of technical qualifications are required for someone to be given the authority to judge whether something as techincal as, say, a software patent, is acceptable? Do you need a bachelor of science degree? A masters? In what fields of study? Is experience in the software field required?
Good point. This becomes significantly more complicated if you can't get ahold of a broadband adaptor for the Dreamcast. The last time I looked they were for sale on eBay for at least twice what you would pay for the unit itself! I just looked, in fact, and neither eBay nor Half.com had one for sale at any price.
Alternatively, you could run a coder's cable (they run about $20 US) from the serial port on the unit to the serial port of a standard PC, but at that point, you might as well just lug in a laptop. A coder's cable is a a good way to network your DC if it runs Linux or BSD, though. You can then mount a different machine as a network drive using NFS.
At the time, Joe Biden was a presidential candidate. He blatantly stole a speech from then British Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock. Word leaked out (or, actually, a member of Mike Dukakis' campaign team (I think it was Joe Sasso) discovered this and "leaked it out"), and Biden was forced to withdraw his candidacy.
*Listen* to a human conversation some time. It's full of awkward moments and silences, etc, and it breaks down when one of the participants asks a question that the other participant can't, or won't, answer. What do *you* do when someone asks you a question you can't or won't answer, or is completely out of context? Most people have their own set of "stock responses". For example, at my work, if someone crosses "the line" and makes a remark that might be construed as offensive or sexually explicit, someone else will jump in with "How about them Red Sox/Celtics/Patriots/Bruins/Revolution"? In fact, about 75% of the responses are either that or something about the weather. How long would it take Dr. Rich to code for that in AIML? Not long, I'd wager (in fact, he probably already has). Granted, the example is an overobvious attempt at hand-waving to drive the conversation in a different direction - something that humans do all the time when a conversation isn't going their way.
I especially got a kick out of his mention of the concept of pick-up lines. An age-old response to the problem of having to start a conversation from scratch. What I thought about when reading this was the concept of goals. When human beings engage in conversation, more often then not it's for a reason. People don't build a list of pick-up phrases just to have conversation - they wanna get laid! You can picture a future ALICE with an agenda - perhaps even something as simple as driving the conversation in a direction she's not as familiar with in order to "learn" more. Of course, this would mean you'd need to implement both a set of goals and a list of rules for those goals - something that would make the underlying model for A.L.I.C.E. much more obsfucated.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, I think it would be much easier to move to a service model -- but the cost can't come at purchase time. It has to come at activation time. If the first thing you do is reformat, there's no service charge at all.
Sounds great, but why would Microsoft buy into this? They currently has a stranglehold on the PC industry, so they can force the big PC makers to pay for the service up front, and they get their cut no matter what OS you choose to run on your laptop after you buy it.
About the only reason the big PC makers would consider this is that they could charge less by forcing the user to enter a CC# the minute they register their PC, thus making their PC's look cheaper to the end user. I can envision this being a nightmare to support. For example, I buy a Dell PC, bring it home, and instead of paying the $199 up front for 3 years of MS OS rental, I format the drive and put, for example, the Plan 9 operating system on it. Suddenly the modem goes. Does Dell customer service want to troubleshoot every existing OS I can install on their hardware? Do they want to "take my word" that the problem is hardware-related and not a Plan 9 driver problem?
More likely, a casual end user will skip the $199 registration and install their old version of 2000 or WinME/9x on the box - something Microsoft would very much not want to see happen.
They invest in a wood stove and allow the snail-mail spammers to heat their house for the winter - like I did.
Unfortunately, a certain percentage of the material in junk mail is not cleanly burnable, so you'll have to toss that. If you live in an area where you're required to pay per-bagload for trash disposal, this is probably a losing proposition.
On the flip side: I have Charter.net. Modem rental fees were $10/month for a cable modem priced at ~$100. I've had mine for 2 years, saving myself $140 by buying the unit. However, the price of rental just went from $10 to $3. So it seems to vary from situation to situation. You alos have to wonder how many extras (PVR being a good eaxmple) a third-party box might have.
Do you believe, in whole or in part, that the Americans with Disabilities Act should apply to the internet (or that part of the internet (if any!) that belongs under US jurisdiction)? If so, why? If in part, what part? If not, do you see avenues other than legal ones as the best way to pursue alternative access to the internet, and what would those avenues be?
Last year I didn't burn any audio CD's, but I burned quite a few data CD's for backups, Lnux distro's et. al. And the RIAA got a cut from the sale of every blank CD I used...
Open Office under SuSE 8.1 Personal crashes when you try to open even a vanilla MSWord document in it. I thought I must have misconfigured something until I read Thomas C. Greene's review of the distro in the Reg mentioned he had the same problem, and had to download the original from OpenOffice.org to get it to run. Forget MSOffice; personally, I'd be just as happy to be able to run OpenOffice under SuSE.
I think the reason that you are seeing more and more libraries given titles like "resource information center" is because most people think of a library as nothing more than a book repository. Many libraries today also have microfiche, videotapes, CD's, DVD's, software, and a network of computers with high-speed internet. Since many people will never discover any of this other good stuff because they think of the library as a place to go if you're looking for books, some libraries have taken to changing their title to more accurately reflect what they are.
And how long will it be before users start losing privileges for things that they "potentially might do" (with a 94% accuracy rate). About one in 20 of us is really going to suffer for this one.
I just put in my subscription, and had no trouble with the website in Mozilla. I'm set to enable first-person cookies, and have both Java and Flash; any of those could make a difference.
I find I am almost always in a position where I have more to do than I'll ever finish. Sometimes, someone comes up with an idea that doesn't make sense but they're in a position to push for it to happen anyway. At that point I don't argue about whether it should happen, but rather say, "Okay, I'll add it to my list of things to do", and always find other things that are higher priority until the submittor forgets they ever asked for it. If the submittor keeps asking about it and you're their direct report, this won't work, and you'll need to take care of it. But hey, that's what they're paying you to do, right?
...as in "Zinf is NOT Freeamp". A great music player that supports both MP3's and OGG's. I use it on my Win98 box to play OGG's from my Linux box across the network.
I figure this is a test. They want to see if people will copy it.
Of course it's a test! Look at their choices of movies to release: The only major maovie is Harry Potter, which is famous for the fact that it doesn't have any copy prevention mechanism attached to it anyway. The others are movies that are making next to nothing in retail channels. You notice they don't have any other major titles, because they don't want to see those titles popping up on alt.warez three days after they become available online, after some 16-year old Scandanavian hacker reverse engineers the DRM on them. This way, they have little to lose if someone breaks the encryption earlier than expected (at this point, I have to think they know that eventually pretty much any DRM they throw out there is going to be cracked).
I got a Lexmark X73 multifunction printer/scanner/copier from my wife as a Christmas gift last year. The "X" series of multifunction printers (X63, X73, and X83) don't have ANY Linux support whatsoever. Much of their output is driven through (Windows) software. I e-mailed them asking about PCL support, postscript, or raw ouput support I couold use for Linux. I also offered to work on a driver for it if they sent me specs. What I got was the e-mail equivalent of a form letter telling me that the X73 had no support for any platform except Windows, and that the interface to it was proprietary (ie, locked up tighter than a drum).
After hooking it up to my wife's Windows PC, I also found I couldn't write to it from any other box on a network, even another Windows box, as the driver for it won't install or run correctly unless it finds the printer hanging off a USB port on the box you're installing or printing from.
I stayed with my battle-scarred HP Deskjet 400, which happily prints from Windows or Linux, and across the network via Samba, etc. Meanwhile, my wife loves the X73...although it does cost us a fortune in cartridges...
Most routers (including my Netgear wireless) allow you to restrict wireless acess by the MAC address of the connecting wireless card. Just restrict your router to the MAC addresses of the wirelss cards in your laptop(s) and/or wireless desktop(s) and you should be all set.
If it weren't for SPAM,
We could not feed our army.
-Nikita Kruschev
You can picture someone writing a script to tag the Ticketmaster site until they can get in to purchase tickets to a hard-to-buy event, like a Bruce Springsteen concert, for example. The second tickets like these go on sale, the web site gets slashdotted, so why not automate the "try" process in a script? Because Ticketmaster will detect this and block your IP...
Of course it's a spammer's dream tool. Spammers have been using tools like this for years, to harvest e-mail addresses from web pages. That's why people use such funky email addresses on Slashdot (except one user I remember who's .sig cleverly read "of course it's my real email address - what kind of idiot would spider Slashdot?").
As a college senior I did an independent study course on Utopias. Here's the ones I remember referencing off the top of my head:
Utopia - Thomas Moore
Dispossessed - Ursula K. LeGuin
Ecotopia - Ernest Callenbech (sp?)
Looking Backward - Edward Bellamy
City of God - St. Augustine
The Republic - Plato
State and Republic - V.I. Lenin (not a utopia per se, but an example of someone trying to implement one in the real world...).
There are a lot of utopias that are not central the book they're in, but are there nonetheless. An obvious one that spring to mind is the Lotus-Eaters in Homer's Odyssey. Mythology has an abundance of them: Shangri-La? Xanadu? Atlantis?
Many of these are a little more historical than the ones I've seen posted so far. In many of them what you're reading is the author trying to tell you that they've figured out what society should be like, and postulating that if we all ran out and implemented their proposed society we'd have heaven on earth. Half the fun of reading them is figuring out whether they will work, or why they won't.
I'll be at CompUSA purchasing NWN the day the Linux client comes out (assuming I can buy the Windoze package and download the Linux client gratis).
Thank you for the screenshot. Progress is good!
Thank you for porting your game to Linux, and when you're done, I'll reward you with my business.
Sincerely looking forward to NWN on Linux,
Zoward
"...while I'd like to see the Stars and Stripes posted all over the galaxy,..."
Ya know, I never understood this. It seems to me the the "space race" should be humankind against itself, not each country against the other. Speaking as both a citizen of both the US and the world, If India or China or anyone else reaches Mars before the US, I'll be damn proud that my race made it to Mars.
What sort of technical qualifications are required for someone to be given the authority to judge whether something as techincal as, say, a software patent, is acceptable? Do you need a bachelor of science degree? A masters? In what fields of study? Is experience in the software field required?
Good point. This becomes significantly more complicated if you can't get ahold of a broadband adaptor for the Dreamcast. The last time I looked they were for sale on eBay for at least twice what you would pay for the unit itself! I just looked, in fact, and neither eBay nor Half.com had one for sale at any price.
Alternatively, you could run a coder's cable (they run about $20 US) from the serial port on the unit to the serial port of a standard PC, but at that point, you might as well just lug in a laptop. A coder's cable is a a good way to network your DC if it runs Linux or BSD, though. You can then mount a different machine as a network drive using NFS.
ROTFLMAO! Damn where's my mod points when I really need them!
At the time, Joe Biden was a presidential candidate. He blatantly stole a speech from then British Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock. Word leaked out (or, actually, a member of Mike Dukakis' campaign team (I think it was Joe Sasso) discovered this and "leaked it out"), and Biden was forced to withdraw his candidacy.
*Listen* to a human conversation some time. It's full of awkward moments and silences, etc, and it breaks down when one of the participants asks a question that the other participant can't, or won't, answer. What do *you* do when someone asks you a question you can't or won't answer, or is completely out of context? Most people have their own set of "stock responses". For example, at my work, if someone crosses "the line" and makes a remark that might be construed as offensive or sexually explicit, someone else will jump in with "How about them Red Sox/Celtics/Patriots/Bruins/Revolution"? In fact, about 75% of the responses are either that or something about the weather. How long would it take Dr. Rich to code for that in AIML? Not long, I'd wager (in fact, he probably already has). Granted, the example is an overobvious attempt at hand-waving to drive the conversation in a different direction - something that humans do all the time when a conversation isn't going their way.
I especially got a kick out of his mention of the concept of pick-up lines. An age-old response to the problem of having to start a conversation from scratch. What I thought about when reading this was the concept of goals. When human beings engage in conversation, more often then not it's for a reason. People don't build a list of pick-up phrases just to have conversation - they wanna get laid! You can picture a future ALICE with an agenda - perhaps even something as simple as driving the conversation in a direction she's not as familiar with in order to "learn" more. Of course, this would mean you'd need to implement both a set of goals and a list of rules for those goals - something that would make the underlying model for A.L.I.C.E. much more obsfucated.