Steve Ballmer seems to be much more for DRM then Gates ever was, all Gates wanted to do was make some cash and make the computer easy to use, the same vision as Apple. That's a creative version of history and maybe if you repeat it enough times, some day it might even be true.
DRM/copy protection has never been much more than a strip of police tape across an open door saying "um don't cross this line, or ur, um, bad things may happen to you, at least maybe". It's only been in the most recent past that technology has upgraded it to at least duct tape assisted with draconian legislation. It's difficult to conclude anything based on adoption of such a feature.
The vision of GUI to drive a computer came from Xerox/PARC and starting with Apple & Sun[1] and then Microsoft, most of the people who used it proceeded to ignore its findings. After millions of dollars of research[2], the Xerox folk selected three buttons on a mouse as optimal for the easiest to use user interface. Apple decided on its own that was too hard, so they removed two buttons. Microsoft had to one-up Apple, so they added one back. Sun listened and Suns are still with shipped with mice that the original research said was optimal.
After the Apple ][ [3], which was the ultimate hacker's machine of the time both software and hardware Apple has had its ups and downs, but has mostly been playing catchup to other (more expensive and ultimately commercially unsuccessful) technology. The Lisa was nice, but technically was not superior and easier to use than a Symbolics.
Both Apple first and then Microsoft have been wildly successful mass marketing the technology thought up by others. But to think of Microsoft and Apple as anything other than McDonald's and Burger Kings in a different market is a mistake.
Attribution of innovation to either Apple or Microsoft on the terms of "vision of easy to use" is a mistake. They are the most successful of the folks who have tried to mass market the research of others. They have a "vision" of making money and I have no problem with that and I'm typing this on a Mac.
Those who are inclined to ignore the past will reimplement it badly. And where Microsoft has made its worst mistakes is where it has ignored its past and attempted to innovate.
[1] Leaving out other worthies like Symbolics which were also derivatives.
[2] This was the same kind of ergonomics research that came up with 7-digit telephone numbers. Seven numbers was like a sweet spot for short term human memory. It was one of the best decisions ever made in user interface design.
[3] With the Integer BASIC ROMs. The Apple ][+ which came with Applesoft Basic (rebranded Microsoft BASIC) was the start of a long ways down for them.
The day Microsoft actually listens to what their consumers want is the day Linux dies. Nope. There are certain features in a aystem like Linux that Microsoft (or any other commercial company, even one like Red Hat cannot provide) that we can't live without. The main one being that we insist on a system that can never be end-of-life'd out of existence and taken away from us. Market share is irrelevant.
Oh, and we're breeding. Be afraid, be very afraid.
The day that a linux fanboi actually uses vista and gives it a chance they will realize there is nothing wrong with it. Does that mean that Vista finally allows one to fix the big key to the left of the "a" key to be control, instead of capslock? That Vista allows one to replace all the weird keybindings with something familiar like the bog-standard emacs key bindings we've used for decades? That Vista finally has multiple virtual desktops? That Vista finally supports a reasonable mouse cursor/keyboard focus model like Focus follows Mouse? Just asking.
Also, people need to remember whose market share is being eaten away by this particular 'win' by Linux: the legacy Unix market is being eroded. Not Microsoft at all. It sort of puts a different light on those "Linux considered too risky" ads Microsoft runs. What are they going to do now? Tell everyone to boycott the stock market for their own safety and avoid any and all stock transactions until the NYSE switches over to Microsoft Windows Server?
I would have said "thanks" but your post contains many weasel words.
Google is the only search engine I use lately, and I find their sponsored ads quite useful. I was recently searching for monogrammed towels to buy for my brother for Christmas, and searching for them on Google resulted in more relevant content among the sponsored ads than than among the search results. I got what I wanted and was satisfied. I'm not sure what you think I was weaseling out of, but O.K. I have experience like yours. Perhaps the most spectacular "hit" I got was a side bar ad from gmail when I writing someone with regards to the current state of affairs of preinstalled-Linux notebook computers in the US. I didn't buy anything, but the ads pointed to sites which pretty much had everything I wanted to know on the subject.
The California-only home mortgage ads were from Yahoo! served up to me whenever my mother sent me email. There's no word other than "stupid" for targeted ads like that being aimed at a computer in the middle of the jungle in Mindanao. Heh, Yahoo! always serves me up US Green Card lottery ads when I login to webmail outside of the US. That's a wonderful bit of targeting too.
I'm not against advertising in general - I've seen it proven in economic experiments I participated in as a lab rat in college that advertising when it includes pricing results in lower prices for purchasers.
But look. There are webmasters who consider it verging on criminal when AdBlock is in use calling it "theft of service". (That seems to be the general consensus on webmasterworld.com, there are a fair number of people here who do as well). There are also those who call clicking on ads without intent to buy "click fraud". I can't find my original reference on this now, maybe they've toned it down and maybe I'm thinking of the most radical people on webmasterworld. The current definition on Wikipedia is more reasonable that what I first read. At any rate, "theft" and "fraud" is pretty strong language and I do object to that.
Your thinking about this issue is deeply flawed. Nobody buys "whatever Microsoft is peddling at the moment". Nothing on the web makes it possible to share "share everything about you with whomever". Nobody accepts what is given to them without running it through some process of critical thought. What you've done is draw a caricature of a person that does not exist in real life, Look at yesterday and today's dupe articles on the EU/Opera and Microsoft dispute (read at -1) and consider what many people are writing there. Many people here disagree with you.
There is a reason why the most used browser by percentage is Internet Exporer v6. There is a reason why eventually the most used PC O/S will be Microsoft Vista. Neither of them have anything to do with the quality of the product (one way or the other) or critical thinking.
and are implying that the caricature is the only possibility other than being just like yourself. Nope, that was not my intent. Sorry to give you that impression.
My opinion, in case anyone cares: I dislike MS and IE as much as anyone else here, but I think Opera is full of shit on this one. Actions speak louder than words. I took one look at their download page (they offer a javascript-less webpage and look at all the distros that are supported!) and I'm going to give it a try.
I'm sorry, but blaming the west coast for not having the concorde doing the SF to tokyo is just wrong. Both LA and SF are on the coast, even at subsonic speeds it takes practically no time at all to go far enough out to sea that sonic booms don't become a problem. Well let's see. If California does not permit the Concorde to land in the state, it's going to be awfully tough flying SF <=> Tokyo in one.
The lack of range of the Concorde makes the most sense why it was never pushed hard. If you could fly somewhere civilized like say Vancouver BC to points in Asia it would still drastically reduce the time even with the extra time it would take to get to Vancouver.
Both LAX and SFO already use the ocean side for takeoffs unless the weather is really strange. Vandenberg doesn't mind subjecting the Central Coast to sonic booms, but we've never counted for much anyway.
direct flight from Chicago to Amsterdam on a 777 is a hell of a lot quicker than Chic -> NYC -> CDG -> Amst when you add in lay over times. It's only gotten worse. I think by law now, layover stages in international flight must be scheduled for a minimum of three hours.
A superfast plane makes the most sense crossing the Pacific. When you're looking at ten hours minimum just for getting across the ocean, let alone getting to where you really want to go, there's a lot of room for improvement.
Concorde didn't have the range to go cross the Pacific - to even go trans-Atlantic, it had to be given landing priority at the airports it serviced. Ah, I didn't know that. I do remember the many idiots screaming "keep those things out of California".
What was the reason for that? NIMBY - Not In My Back Yard. Nobody it seems wants to live next to an airport. California residents strenuously resist any attempt to expand them.
John Wayne had particularly bad problems when I lived in Orange County, mostly because Irvine was becoming quite popular for wealthier people to live. Well duh, if you move next to an airport, you're going to hear airplanes. I flew out out of there once and at that time (this was almost 20 years ago and I haven't followed it much since) they were using special steep takeoffs and landings to reduce ground noise.
I suppose they can consider themselves lucky the local neighbors don't shoot back, like the farmers did in Chiba protesting having their farms annexed for Narita.
I just got back from Asia on a 13-14 hour flight from Taipei and it was absolutely horrible and uncomfortable. I "commute" to the San Francisco area to work. SFO to NAIA takes 15 1/2 hours with a refueling stop in Guam. If the plane isn't loaded too heavy, they can skip refueling and go directly to Manila knocking about two hours off. Going the other way is "easier" and is always non-stop but still takes over 11 hours.
I for one would have welcomed a Concorde-bearing Overlord. Bring on the Scramjet-bearing Overlord...
One of the things that was always controversial about Concorde was the sonic noise. I don't see how they intend to address this problem with their new scramjet. You have it right here, stop.
Not only that, Concorde went out of business. Because they had so much NIMBY they couldn't get the best flights across the Pacific - no West coast airport allowed them to fly. Give me a choice between 15+ hours flight time to Manila from the West coast of the United States and a couple of hours or so and I'll pay a whole lot more for the shorter flight.
Concorde failed in part because of US West coast NIMBY. LA/SF to Tokyo/Taipei/Singapore/Manila/Hong Kong could have been most profitable, except that LA & SF didn't allow them to land there.
As I speak I am typing "beagle" into the google box in Konqueror. 1st result: beagle-project.org, the open source search indexer. Try it from Windows, you get dogs. I'll leave trying it from Microsoft Windows as an exercise for the reader as I can't do that. On Mac OS X with Firefox and via Google (and I'm logged into my gmail account all of the time), I get beagle-org as my first hit and via ask.com where I have the privacy thingie checked, I get dogs as the first hit and gnome.org as the 2nd hit. (All of the paid ads are for dogs both places). I'll try it from work tomorrow on my workstation and see if I get different results.
My point remains valid even with a hardcoded IP. I'm going to tend to do more searches about Microsoft because I have as little direct experience with them as I can manage and don't know what I'm looking for - that's the whole point of a search engine, right? I make Linux and Unix related searches very seldom because I *know* what I'm looking for and can narrow the search myself if I have to resort to a search engine at all. Presenting me with Microsoft hits when I'm looking for something else isn't useful. Likewise if I'm searching from work on something, it isn't useful to give me preferential Linux-related hits when I'm trying to figure how to work around breakage when interfacing to corporate Microsoft-based infrastructure.
Keeping search history and using it to base results on is a *stupid* idea.
That is one butt-ugly and distracting wallpaper, but why should I care? I always customize that away with digital photos. Oh wait, you were referring to something else that can also be customized away?
Maybe that's why there's so many KDE users when Gnome comes as default on damn near everything. Maybe. I had long passionate arguments about that when I was at Turbolinux (I argued against making GNOME a default).
KDE is Just Plain More Fun to run than any other windowing environment I've ever experienced. It's just not politically correct because it wasn't originally True Believer GPL. It's been fully GPL for ages, but the taint in distro bias apparently continues. XEmacs is similar[1] - not politically correct because Stallman hates us - even though we're GPL.
[1] Trivia question - what was the first emacsen to offer official RPMs from developers when RPM was largely RedHat-only (and proprietary Unix usage was higher than Linux usage)?
Good job KDE! It sure sounds like it. I hope I'm allowed to install it at work.
Between hitting myself in the head with a hammer, using Microsoft Windows XP or Microsoft Office or GNOME, and using KDE with its defaults, I'll take hitting myself in the head with a hammer for the most pleasant user experience. But what I've always loved about KDE is that with a bit of customization it's my dream working environment.
I like eye candy if it doesn't get in the way of doing real work. I was drawn to XEmacs when it was still the Microsoft Windows of Unix editors. A smaller memory footprint is going to make everything else run faster and that's Good just so long as you can still customize it...
Google uses your origin IP in addition to your browser agent when trying to rank results. Nothing sinister about it. I'm always behind a public NAT of some sort, my interests don't bear any general resemblance to any others who may be using it. I don't object to that on grounds of paranoia (you would be paranoid too, if everyone was out to get you), but it's kind of stupid.
I'm irritated at "targeted" home mortgage ads for California residents only popping up.
I'm irritated at "targeted" ads for social networking sites when I'm reading email from my wife.
I'm irritated that there is even a concept called "click fraud" (and the only thing that irritates me more than that, is reading sites who defend the use of the word "fraud" in it).
I'm irritated at most things internet nowadays, but keeping search history and using that as special sauce on the results just doesn't work for me. I haven't been at a unique naked IP address since 1998.
I added ask.com to my search engine list thingie in Firefox and have been using it as my first choice search engine after I read about their privacy feature. So long as advertisers support the term "click fraud" and have a degree of hostility towards someone who does not shop on the internet (like blocking content to people who use AdBlock), I don't mind blocking content and I will never click on a random ad that pops up because if I clicked on it, it would be "click fraud" because I never buy things that way.
I do buy things over the internet and in fact spent several thousand dollars towards my family's Christmas/New Year's travel (plane/boat/hotel) that way, but I did it my way.
And yes, I do expect advertisers and those who depend upon them to cater to me. I can live without your content or your good will. You cannot survive without paying customers of which you just lost (a potential) one if you're annoying me. Don't bug me, but I'll call you if you have something I want to buy.
You folks who are happy with whatever Microsoft is peddling at the moment, or Google, or whomever... you folks who are happy to share everything about you with whomever... you foks who are happy to accept whatever is given to you... I'm happy for you man! Enjoy! Some of us are different, O.K.?
And that's why this unbundling crap is so retarded and has been since the American antitrust case. OEMs will go right ahead and install the full suite of MS freebies anyway, even if they install others as well. It seems like it was planned that way. Take a look at all the screenshots here http://toastytech.com/guis/index.html The thing that jumped out at me most as I was looking at the historical Microsoft screenshots is how diversity has slowly been squeezed out of the market as Microsoft pushes more and more (of their own version of) things into the "core O/S".
I think diversity in O/S's, hardware architectures, standardized components of the system like browsers, shells, players, etc., and graphical environments is A Good Thing. All of the competition in the Microsoft Windows world has been extinguished over time and no amount of laws, complaints like Opera's are going to bring it back. In my opinion.
Since this is slashdot, I'll use a car analogy. Look at all the different colors, models, types of cars people buy when they're given a chance. Microsoft is like the Model T of cars. You can have any color of Model T you want, just so long as it is black. The monopoly part is that you can have any kind of car you want, just so long as it is a Model T, or you buy a Model T first.
There are lots of other companies that are in competition with the smaller A320 and B737 models and make commuter and shuttle sized commercial aircraft, including Embraer, Bombardier, DeHavilland, Gulfstream, and several others. I guess it's been too long since I've been on a small plane and now that you mention it, I even knew about Gulfstream being a going concern but had forgotten. I stand corrected and I'll go crawl back under my rock now. Thanks for the info.
Wait for one hour after uninstalling software! When the time comes, packet sniff everything coming out of the box and watch everything that's running. If I cared, which I don't, I'd bet you that you will see nothing at all.
A one hour delay sounds like propagation time through a distributed data base. So all that it probably is waiting for is whatever implements Microsoft Windows registration to fully recognize that the machine in question is legal to switch to Microsoft Vista SP1. I.e. it's perfectly normal and there's nothing to see here, move along.
Yeah, that's true. I first encountered it after spending several years in Japan where if you're 30 seconds late to a scheduled bus/train stop, you've missed it. It was quite a shock.
Time does seem to move differently there. I want one of those test boxes to try out on myself.
Since that article was written, they've started working on the next generation. One of the songs they teach children in elementary school now goes in part "Be on time, be on time, that's the true Filipino Time...". Of course, some things will never change. The AL in PAL still means Always Late.
Except there wasn't any scientific evidence back then to know whether the Earth really was flat or not. Sorry, no. As the other posters wrote, the Greeks measured the curvature of the earth to a pretty good estimate 2000 years ago. It was this reason that Columbus couldn't find funding. Everyone who knew better, knew you couldn't possibly sail all the way to Asia without killing everyone and they were correct. Finding something in the middle was an accident.
The speed of light in a vacuum may be constant, but once other effects start getting involved the picture changes. I think this was an interesting experiment, though I'd like to see it repeated under the same and different conditions. You can't prove anything scientifically unless the experiment is repeatable (by other people).
The Etymology according to the wiktionary. W00t! Never heard of that one before. I'll have to check it out.
Of the possible etymologies, the one I encountered on the WoW forums was the first one:
an acronym from "we own the other team"; although
a leetspeak mutation of whoo, what or root; makes sense too.
I use it due to my own frustration over the perversion of the once honorable term "hacker". If you can't beat them, join them.
-sb ("Miskol me when you're ready to go down, let's do lunch")
Slashdot Mirror
DRM/copy protection has never been much more than a strip of police tape across an open door saying "um don't cross this line, or ur, um, bad things may happen to you, at least maybe". It's only been in the most recent past that technology has upgraded it to at least duct tape assisted with draconian legislation. It's difficult to conclude anything based on adoption of such a feature.
The vision of GUI to drive a computer came from Xerox/PARC and starting with Apple & Sun[1] and then Microsoft, most of the people who used it proceeded to ignore its findings. After millions of dollars of research[2], the Xerox folk selected three buttons on a mouse as optimal for the easiest to use user interface. Apple decided on its own that was too hard, so they removed two buttons. Microsoft had to one-up Apple, so they added one back. Sun listened and Suns are still with shipped with mice that the original research said was optimal.
After the Apple ][ [3], which was the ultimate hacker's machine of the time both software and hardware Apple has had its ups and downs, but has mostly been playing catchup to other (more expensive and ultimately commercially unsuccessful) technology. The Lisa was nice, but technically was not superior and easier to use than a Symbolics.
Both Apple first and then Microsoft have been wildly successful mass marketing the technology thought up by others. But to think of Microsoft and Apple as anything other than McDonald's and Burger Kings in a different market is a mistake.
Attribution of innovation to either Apple or Microsoft on the terms of "vision of easy to use" is a mistake. They are the most successful of the folks who have tried to mass market the research of others. They have a "vision" of making money and I have no problem with that and I'm typing this on a Mac.
Those who are inclined to ignore the past will reimplement it badly. And where Microsoft has made its worst mistakes is where it has ignored its past and attempted to innovate.
[1] Leaving out other worthies like Symbolics which were also derivatives.
[2] This was the same kind of ergonomics research that came up with 7-digit telephone numbers. Seven numbers was like a sweet spot for short term human memory. It was one of the best decisions ever made in user interface design.
[3] With the Integer BASIC ROMs. The Apple ][+ which came with Applesoft Basic (rebranded Microsoft BASIC) was the start of a long ways down for them.
Oh, and we're breeding. Be afraid, be very afraid.
Google is the only search engine I use lately, and I find their sponsored ads quite useful. I was recently searching for monogrammed towels to buy for my brother for Christmas, and searching for them on Google resulted in more relevant content among the sponsored ads than than among the search results. I got what I wanted and was satisfied. I'm not sure what you think I was weaseling out of, but O.K. I have experience like yours. Perhaps the most spectacular "hit" I got was a side bar ad from gmail when I writing someone with regards to the current state of affairs of preinstalled-Linux notebook computers in the US. I didn't buy anything, but the ads pointed to sites which pretty much had everything I wanted to know on the subject.
The California-only home mortgage ads were from Yahoo! served up to me whenever my mother sent me email. There's no word other than "stupid" for targeted ads like that being aimed at a computer in the middle of the jungle in Mindanao. Heh, Yahoo! always serves me up US Green Card lottery ads when I login to webmail outside of the US. That's a wonderful bit of targeting too.
I'm not against advertising in general - I've seen it proven in economic experiments I participated in as a lab rat in college that advertising when it includes pricing results in lower prices for purchasers.
But look. There are webmasters who consider it verging on criminal when AdBlock is in use calling it "theft of service". (That seems to be the general consensus on webmasterworld.com, there are a fair number of people here who do as well). There are also those who call clicking on ads without intent to buy "click fraud". I can't find my original reference on this now, maybe they've toned it down and maybe I'm thinking of the most radical people on webmasterworld. The current definition on Wikipedia is more reasonable that what I first read. At any rate, "theft" and "fraud" is pretty strong language and I do object to that. Your thinking about this issue is deeply flawed. Nobody buys "whatever Microsoft is peddling at the moment". Nothing on the web makes it possible to share "share everything about you with whomever". Nobody accepts what is given to them without running it through some process of critical thought. What you've done is draw a caricature of a person that does not exist in real life, Look at yesterday and today's dupe articles on the EU/Opera and Microsoft dispute (read at -1) and consider what many people are writing there. Many people here disagree with you.
There is a reason why the most used browser by percentage is Internet Exporer v6. There is a reason why eventually the most used PC O/S will be Microsoft Vista. Neither of them have anything to do with the quality of the product (one way or the other) or critical thinking. and are implying that the caricature is the only possibility other than being just like yourself. Nope, that was not my intent. Sorry to give you that impression.
The lack of range of the Concorde makes the most sense why it was never pushed hard. If you could fly somewhere civilized like say Vancouver BC to points in Asia it would still drastically reduce the time even with the extra time it would take to get to Vancouver.
Both LAX and SFO already use the ocean side for takeoffs unless the weather is really strange. Vandenberg doesn't mind subjecting the Central Coast to sonic booms, but we've never counted for much anyway. direct flight from Chicago to Amsterdam on a 777 is a hell of a lot quicker than Chic -> NYC -> CDG -> Amst when you add in lay over times. It's only gotten worse. I think by law now, layover stages in international flight must be scheduled for a minimum of three hours.
A superfast plane makes the most sense crossing the Pacific. When you're looking at ten hours minimum just for getting across the ocean, let alone getting to where you really want to go, there's a lot of room for improvement.
John Wayne had particularly bad problems when I lived in Orange County, mostly because Irvine was becoming quite popular for wealthier people to live. Well duh, if you move next to an airport, you're going to hear airplanes. I flew out out of there once and at that time (this was almost 20 years ago and I haven't followed it much since) they were using special steep takeoffs and landings to reduce ground noise.
I suppose they can consider themselves lucky the local neighbors don't shoot back, like the farmers did in Chiba protesting having their farms annexed for Narita. I just got back from Asia on a 13-14 hour flight from Taipei and it was absolutely horrible and uncomfortable. I "commute" to the San Francisco area to work. SFO to NAIA takes 15 1/2 hours with a refueling stop in Guam. If the plane isn't loaded too heavy, they can skip refueling and go directly to Manila knocking about two hours off. Going the other way is "easier" and is always non-stop but still takes over 11 hours.
I for one would have welcomed a Concorde-bearing Overlord. Bring on the Scramjet-bearing Overlord...
Other people besides me have posted why they wouldn't be flying "to this day" even if there hadn't been an accident.
Concorde failed in part because of US West coast NIMBY. LA/SF to Tokyo/Taipei/Singapore/Manila/Hong Kong could have been most profitable, except that LA & SF didn't allow them to land there.
My point remains valid even with a hardcoded IP. I'm going to tend to do more searches about Microsoft because I have as little direct experience with them as I can manage and don't know what I'm looking for - that's the whole point of a search engine, right? I make Linux and Unix related searches very seldom because I *know* what I'm looking for and can narrow the search myself if I have to resort to a search engine at all. Presenting me with Microsoft hits when I'm looking for something else isn't useful. Likewise if I'm searching from work on something, it isn't useful to give me preferential Linux-related hits when I'm trying to figure how to work around breakage when interfacing to corporate Microsoft-based infrastructure.
Keeping search history and using it to base results on is a *stupid* idea.
That is one butt-ugly and distracting wallpaper, but why should I care? I always customize that away with digital photos. Oh wait, you were referring to something else that can also be customized away?
KDE is Just Plain More Fun to run than any other windowing environment I've ever experienced. It's just not politically correct because it wasn't originally True Believer GPL. It's been fully GPL for ages, but the taint in distro bias apparently continues. XEmacs is similar[1] - not politically correct because Stallman hates us - even though we're GPL.
[1] Trivia question - what was the first emacsen to offer official RPMs from developers when RPM was largely RedHat-only (and proprietary Unix usage was higher than Linux usage)?
Between hitting myself in the head with a hammer, using Microsoft Windows XP or Microsoft Office or GNOME, and using KDE with its defaults, I'll take hitting myself in the head with a hammer for the most pleasant user experience. But what I've always loved about KDE is that with a bit of customization it's my dream working environment.
I like eye candy if it doesn't get in the way of doing real work. I was drawn to XEmacs when it was still the Microsoft Windows of Unix editors. A smaller memory footprint is going to make everything else run faster and that's Good just so long as you can still customize it...
I'm irritated at "targeted" home mortgage ads for California residents only popping up.
I'm irritated at "targeted" ads for social networking sites when I'm reading email from my wife.
I'm irritated that there is even a concept called "click fraud" (and the only thing that irritates me more than that, is reading sites who defend the use of the word "fraud" in it).
I'm irritated at most things internet nowadays, but keeping search history and using that as special sauce on the results just doesn't work for me. I haven't been at a unique naked IP address since 1998.
I added ask.com to my search engine list thingie in Firefox and have been using it as my first choice search engine after I read about their privacy feature. So long as advertisers support the term "click fraud" and have a degree of hostility towards someone who does not shop on the internet (like blocking content to people who use AdBlock), I don't mind blocking content and I will never click on a random ad that pops up because if I clicked on it, it would be "click fraud" because I never buy things that way.
I do buy things over the internet and in fact spent several thousand dollars towards my family's Christmas/New Year's travel (plane/boat/hotel) that way, but I did it my way.
And yes, I do expect advertisers and those who depend upon them to cater to me. I can live without your content or your good will. You cannot survive without paying customers of which you just lost (a potential) one if you're annoying me. Don't bug me, but I'll call you if you have something I want to buy.
You folks who are happy with whatever Microsoft is peddling at the moment, or Google, or whomever
I think diversity in O/S's, hardware architectures, standardized components of the system like browsers, shells, players, etc., and graphical environments is A Good Thing. All of the competition in the Microsoft Windows world has been extinguished over time and no amount of laws, complaints like Opera's are going to bring it back. In my opinion.
Since this is slashdot, I'll use a car analogy. Look at all the different colors, models, types of cars people buy when they're given a chance. Microsoft is like the Model T of cars. You can have any color of Model T you want, just so long as it is black. The monopoly part is that you can have any kind of car you want, just so long as it is a Model T, or you buy a Model T first.
A one hour delay sounds like propagation time through a distributed data base. So all that it probably is waiting for is whatever implements Microsoft Windows registration to fully recognize that the machine in question is legal to switch to Microsoft Vista SP1. I.e. it's perfectly normal and there's nothing to see here, move along.
describes the speedhack source code virus hoax. It certainly could work.
No, they don't. For commercial fixed wing aircraft, which is what I'm referring to, they devote a special page to it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competition_between_Airbus_and_Boeing
Yeah, that's true. I first encountered it after spending several years in Japan where if you're 30 seconds late to a scheduled bus/train stop, you've missed it. It was quite a shock.
...". Of course, some things will never change. The AL in PAL still means Always Late.
Time does seem to move differently there. I want one of those test boxes to try out on myself.
Since that article was written, they've started working on the next generation. One of the songs they teach children in elementary school now goes in part "Be on time, be on time, that's the true Filipino Time
The speed of light in a vacuum may be constant, but once other effects start getting involved the picture changes. I think this was an interesting experiment, though I'd like to see it repeated under the same and different conditions. You can't prove anything scientifically unless the experiment is repeatable (by other people).
Of the possible etymologies, the one I encountered on the WoW forums was the first one: an acronym from "we own the other team"; although a leetspeak mutation of whoo, what or root; makes sense too.
I use it due to my own frustration over the perversion of the once honorable term "hacker". If you can't beat them, join them.
-sb ("Miskol me when you're ready to go down, let's do lunch")