Where are you getting this information? I've never seen a bill for an app update (even a $0 bill) and I've not seen any mention of this anywhere else.
Actually, Apple did send out $0 receipts for updates in the early days. I have a few that list for-pay apps as 'Free' because they're updates. But I haven't received one of those in quite some time, so it looks like they've stopped doing it.
Whether they counted those 'sales' towards their billion is another matter.
Sycraft-fu wrote: For example I have problems with American Express's website with my browser of choice (Firefox 1.5). It's not that they won't use it, it's that FF renders something wrong. IE works fine, FF 1.0.7 works fine, but 1.5 screws up the HTML.
It doesn't seem to be delibrate or anything, just some snag they hit. I doubt changing user agent would do anything.
fyngyrz wrote: Personally, I accept that the precept "all (wo)men are created equal" was never true. I think what they should have said (and what they would have said if they had thought a little harder) would be something along the lines of "all (wo)men shall be afforded equal opportunity in line with their capabilities -- and what they make of those opportunities and capabilities shall be their own business."
Oh, I think that was thought out well enough. But 'equal' here means 'of equal value', not 'identical in every way'.
Sentry21 wrote: Maybe it's just my browser, but when I click that link I end up at Microsoft.com. Perhaps this is thinly-veiled criticism on the part of the parent? Still weird though.
The URL starts 'http://http//...', presumably because the poster left a ':' out of the original URL.
Your browser is probably using Google as a 'keyword' service: if a host doesn't resolve in DNS, it's looked up on Google instead, and you're sent to the first result. Firefox seems to do this by default.
www.microsoft.com is Google's first result for 'http'.
MrAndrews wrote: The problem of course is that no one will pay to watch a show they don't trust to be good, so this scenario only works for established shows everyone likes. Not that you implied it, but purely on its own, you'll never get innovation in drama this way, because everyone will be trying to make cookie cutter projects to make the pre-payment a safe investment for consumers. So there has to be a first part to this theory that makes it possible to get to what you describe...
Then put out a free pilot or two to generate interest. You'd probably have to do that to sell it to a network anyway, unless you've got a reputation to trade on. The only thing that's changed is the customer.
Whether end-users will make better or more discerning customers than the established networks is another question entirely.:)
Dizzle wrote: Now, I know those definitions are techincally correct, but who thinks these ideas are easily applicable? I mean, the point of having a definition is to be able to calibrate everything else, right? So how on earth is a watch manufacturer or repair person going to say "alright, the cesium atom vibrated 9,192,631,769... 9,192,631,770 times. That's a second."
Is there actually a method of directly using these definitions?
National standards laboratories, like the UK's NPL, use these definitions to calibrate standards for their own use and for that of commercial calibration laboratories. It's a lot of work, but it's reproducible and doesn't depend on any particular set of instruments. The watchmaker's equipment may be another couple steps removed from this process, but ultimately any instruments of any real accuracy can trace their calibration back to a reference standard somewhere.
Blakey Rat wrote: I literally avoid using crontab on the commandline on my Macintosh, because I *know* that VI will come up, and I *know* that there's no way to close it without doing a half-hour of research. My time is more valuable to me than your half-assed "cc$24c" command.
Then set EDITOR to something you like.:)
However, there's a distinction between interfaces that are easy to *learn* and those that make for efficient work once learned. For something you only do once in a blue moon you want the former, but an everyday tool is worth some investment of time if it saves you in the long run.
If you're venturing into the Terminal, chances are you use an editor for more than just crontab. In that case, half an hour learning the basics of vi won't hurt, even if you end up deciding you don't like it.
deltwalrus wrote: I seem to recall hearing about an election process somewhere whereby you could choose from the candidates given, or vote "none of the above."
We had a 're-open nominations' option for student union elections. Always seemed like a good idea to me, but I've never heard of it used at a national level. If it is somewhere, it'd be interesting to see what effects it has.
'R.O.N.' rarely scored highly. I can only remember one active campaign to get people to vote that way, and that was by a girl who'd missed the deadline to get on the ballot. She wanted a chance to run, so R.O.N. became a vote for her.
I don't *think* previous candidates were disqualified from trying again. Parties might think twice about re-endorsing a failed candidate in any case.
Further, it's been a while since I read a 409 scam, but I don't recall any of the ones I'd received in the past saying, "Here is a way you can get rich quick, but it's illegal." Rather they try to establish tragic circumstances that will see a lot of money going to either some cruel government, or being lost by its rightful owners due only to red tape. Thus these scams play on the victim's own compassion as well as their sense of greed.
This one's from a couple of days ago.
I am Mr Sam Mark, Administrative Officer with the
Union
Bank Of Nigeria PLC, Lagos. I came to know you in my
private search for a reliable and reputable person to
handle this confidential transaction, which involves
the transfer of huge sum of money to a foreign account
requiring maximum confidence.
[...]
I now seek your permission to have you stand as next
of kin to late Engr. John Creek (Snr.) so that the
fund US$10 million will be released and paid
into your account as the beneficiary's next of kin.
All documents and proves to enable you get this fund
will be carefully worked out. And more so we are
assuring you that the business is 100% risk free
involvement.Your share stays while the rest be for
myself for investment purpose in your country or
anywhere in the world.
Let's see. He's posing as an officer of the bank, looking to divert funds for his own personal use, and asking me to lie in order to help him. I'll grant you he doesn't actually use the word 'illegal', but it shouldn't require any special expertise to know that he's up to no good.
I'd have some sympathy for anyone who fell for this, but it would be hard to describe them as 'innocent'.
say i have abracadabra.com and you have abracadabra.net - which one of us gets abracadabra.mail? Or are we talking abracadabra.com.mail and abracadabra.org.mail?
According to the proposal, you'd get abracadabra.com.mail:
The names registered will be of the form "key.mail" where "key" is of the form
"sld.tld" and where "tld" is an ICANN top-level-domain with certain attributes
and where "sld" is a second-level-domain which is already registered in "tld".
The registrant of the "key" domain must be the same as for "key.sTLD"
MushMouth wrote: Then the plural would be vira, there is no second I to get the Nomanative plural. Virii is wrong no matter what.
http://www.perl.com/language/misc/virus.html discusses the question in more detail. Second-declension neuter in -um has a plural in -a, but it's far from undisputed that the same would apply to words in -us. In fact, according to that page, it's far from undisputed that virus was even second-declension. Classical writers were so inconsiderate not to leave us footnotes about that sort of thing.:)
But also from that page: Virii is still completely silly, so don't do that; otherwise, everyone will know you're just a blathering script kiddie. You won't find any disagreement from me there. The English plural is 'viruses', and that's the end of the matter, or should be. But you'll note that the (originally incorrect) plural 'octopi' *has* made it into dictionaries, which does give it some veneer of acceptability. It's possible that 'virii' could end up going the same way, though I do hope not. I'll still frown on both of them, but I doubt that'll change anything.
My, that's more Latin than I thought I'd remember.
BWJones wrote: So, examining the html, it appears that it actually references microsoft.com.
If I were microsoft, it appears there is a simple way to defeat this by inserting html in the referenced source that warns recipients of this sort of thing.
It contains links to appropriate Microsoft pages. Microsoft could place notices at those URLs warning users not to install the 'update'. But those users who would run the program probably wouldn't click on the links in the first place. Still, some warnings wouldn't do any harm.
MushMouth wrote: If it were latin the plural would be viri, where does that second i come from?
Not necessarily even that. Virus was *neuter* in Latin, unlike the second-declension *masculine* nouns we're for some reason more familiar with.
From an old alt.usage.english FAQ file:
Not all Latin words ending in "-us" had plurals in "-i". "Apparatus", "cantus", "coitus", "hiatus", "impetus", "Jesus", "lapsus linguae", "nexus", "plexus", "prospectus", "sinus", and "status" were 4th declension in Latin, and had plurals in "-us" with "genus", and "opus" were 3rd declension, with plurals "corpora", "genera", and "opera". "Virus" is not attested in the plural in Latin, and is of a rare form (2nd declension neuter in -us) that makes it debatable what the Latin plural would have been; the only plural in English is "viruses". "Omnibus" and "rebus" were not nominative nouns in Latin. "Ignoramus" was not a noun in Latin.
Not all classical words ending in "-a" had plurals in "-ae". "Anathema", "aroma", "bema", "carcinoma", "charisma", "diploma", "dogma", "drama", "edema", "enema", "enigma", "lemma", "lymphoma", "magma", "melisma", "miasma", "sarcoma", "schema", "soma", "stigma", "stoma", and "trauma" are from Greek, where they had plurals in "-ata". "Quota" was not a noun in Latin. (It comes from the Latin expression quota pars, where quota is the feminine form of an interrogative pronoun meaning "what number". In *that* use, it did have plural quotae, but in English the only plural is "quotas".)
Not all classical-sounding words ending in "-um" have plurals in "-a". "Factotum", "nostrum", "quorum", and "variorum" were not nouns in Latin. (Totus = "everything" and noster = "our" were conjugated like nouns in Latin; but "factotum" comes from fac totum = "do everything", and "nostrum" comes from nostrum remedium = "our remedy".) "Conundrum", "panjandrum", "tantrum", and "vellum" are not Latin words.
If in doubt, consult a dictionary (or use the English plural in "-s" or "-es"). One plural that you *will* find in U.S. dictionaries, "octopi", raises the ire of purists (the Greek plural is "octopodes").
The classical-style plurals of "penis" and "clitoris" are "penes"/'pi:ni:z/ and "clitorides"/klI'tOrIdi:z/.
asmithmd1 wrote: By the way they logged the bug, "first actual case of bug being found" the term was already in use and they were pointing out the irony that the bug in this case was a real bug
True. The article suggests, however, that this incident was the origin of the verb 'to debug'. The Slashdot writeup manages to confuse the two.
The article said: It is important to note that even Microsoft Office has trouble opening some versions of Microsoft Office programs, as forward compatibility has often been a problem. We used Office 2000, which succeeded in opening all Office files, but we venture to guess that Office 98, say, would have had difficulties with some of them.
It's a pity they didn't include a couple versions of Microsoft Office in the comparison, so that this effect could actually be measured rather than relegated to a footnote.
paladin_tom wrote: Actually, in Canada, we use a somewhat inconsistent mix of British and American spellings, ie.:
We must defend the honour of our organization.
'organization' isn't *really* a US spelling in the way that 'honor' is. It's considered acceptable in the UK, though less common than the spelling with an 's'.
You do, however, write 'tire' for the rubbery things on wheels. I think that's because you don't believe there are people spell it with a 'y', though.:).
Macbeast wrote: Uh-huh. There's no such thing as BST (British Standard time, I assume). The name of the timezone is GMT (Greenwich Meridian Time).
It's British Summer Time, and it's GMT+1. Rather like daylight saving time in North America.
For those outside the UK, BBC Two's Newsnight programme also carried a segment tonight about Microsoft's anti-spam crusade. It's available to view online at http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsnight/ (but only for the day after broadcast). The spam segment was about two thirds of the way through.
blowdart wrote: You may want to read up at easyprotest2.com and consider if this is the sort of person geeks should be backing.
True, but we should also be able to move beyond tribal politics and recognise that we can support someone on one issue, and oppose them on another.
There's a wide variety of views here at Slashdot (though it's sometimes tempting to assume everyone thinks the same), but many here don't have much time for abusive monopolies. It's entirely consistent to support easyCinema on this, without condoning the company's actions in other areas.
Slashdot Mirror
Where are you getting this information? I've never seen a bill for an app update (even a $0 bill) and I've not seen any mention of this anywhere else.
Actually, Apple did send out $0 receipts for updates in the early days. I have a few that list for-pay apps as 'Free' because they're updates. But I haven't received one of those in quite some time, so it looks like they've stopped doing it.
Whether they counted those 'sales' towards their billion is another matter.
Valdrax wrote: I kind of like the UK's rules better for buying goods at a store, but I'd hate to be seller on eBay or their equivalent of craigslist.
Those requirements only apply to sales by traders. Items sold by private individuals only have to be 'as described'.
A particularly active eBay seller might be considered a trader, but people trying to get rid of their old stuff don't need to worry.
Sycraft-fu wrote: For example I have problems with American Express's website with my browser of choice (Firefox 1.5). It's not that they won't use it, it's that FF renders something wrong. IE works fine, FF 1.0.7 works fine, but 1.5 screws up the HTML.
0 1.
It doesn't seem to be delibrate or anything, just some snag they hit. I doubt changing user agent would do anything.
Firefox 1.5 fixed a rendering bug, but amex.com were relying on the wrong behaviour. It looks like they're in the process of fixing that. See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2942
So yes, for that site changing your user-agent won't do any good at all.
fyngyrz wrote: Personally, I accept that the precept "all (wo)men are created equal" was never true. I think what they should have said (and what they would have said if they had thought a little harder) would be something along the lines of "all (wo)men shall be afforded equal opportunity in line with their capabilities -- and what they make of those opportunities and capabilities shall be their own business."
Oh, I think that was thought out well enough. But 'equal' here means 'of equal value', not 'identical in every way'.
Whafro wrote: "The Jones's House" (said "The Joneses House" ...which is not right, unless the house belongs to a person known as 'The Jones'.
The home of the Jones family is "the Joneses' house".
Total_Wimp wrote: Now this one comes along with karate bunnys. Now that's cool. And you can be sure I haven't seen it anywhere else.
:)
It has bunnies?
I wasn't going to look at it before, but *now*...
iocat wrote:
I appreciate the outrage, but why would you let someone store encrypted data on your PC? I mean, honestly, wtf? -Chris
The obvious case would be a personal mail server, but there are plenty of other situations where it would be entirely reasonable.
Sentry21 wrote: Maybe it's just my browser, but when I click that link I end up at Microsoft.com. Perhaps this is thinly-veiled criticism on the part of the parent? Still weird though.
The URL starts 'http://http//...', presumably because the poster left a ':' out of the original URL.
Your browser is probably using Google as a 'keyword' service: if a host doesn't resolve in DNS, it's looked up on Google instead, and you're sent to the first result. Firefox seems to do this by default.
www.microsoft.com is Google's first result for 'http'.
The problem of course is that no one will pay to watch a show they don't trust to be good, so this scenario only works for established shows everyone likes. Not that you implied it, but purely on its own, you'll never get innovation in drama this way, because everyone will be trying to make cookie cutter projects to make the pre-payment a safe investment for consumers. So there has to be a first part to this theory that makes it possible to get to what you describe...
Then put out a free pilot or two to generate interest. You'd probably have to do that to sell it to a network anyway, unless you've got a reputation to trade on. The only thing that's changed is the customer.
Whether end-users will make better or more discerning customers than the established networks is another question entirely.
Dizzle wrote: Now, I know those definitions are techincally correct, but who thinks these ideas are easily applicable? I mean, the point of having a definition is to be able to calibrate everything else, right? So how on earth is a watch manufacturer or repair person going to say "alright, the cesium atom vibrated 9,192,631,769... 9,192,631,770 times. That's a second."
Is there actually a method of directly using these definitions?
National standards laboratories, like the UK's NPL, use these definitions to calibrate standards for their own use and for that of commercial calibration laboratories. It's a lot of work, but it's reproducible and doesn't depend on any particular set of instruments. The watchmaker's equipment may be another couple steps removed from this process, but ultimately any instruments of any real accuracy can trace their calibration back to a reference standard somewhere.
Blakey Rat wrote: I literally avoid using crontab on the commandline on my Macintosh, because I *know* that VI will come up, and I *know* that there's no way to close it without doing a half-hour of research. My time is more valuable to me than your half-assed "cc$24c" command.
:)
Then set EDITOR to something you like.
However, there's a distinction between interfaces that are easy to *learn* and those that make for efficient work once learned. For something you only do once in a blue moon you want the former, but an everyday tool is worth some investment of time if it saves you in the long run.
If you're venturing into the Terminal, chances are you use an editor for more than just crontab. In that case, half an hour learning the basics of vi won't hurt, even if you end up deciding you don't like it.
deltwalrus wrote: I seem to recall hearing about an election process somewhere whereby you could choose from the candidates given, or vote "none of the above."
We had a 're-open nominations' option for student union elections. Always seemed like a good idea to me, but I've never heard of it used at a national level. If it is somewhere, it'd be interesting to see what effects it has.
'R.O.N.' rarely scored highly. I can only remember one active campaign to get people to vote that way, and that was by a girl who'd missed the deadline to get on the ballot. She wanted a chance to run, so R.O.N. became a vote for her.
I don't *think* previous candidates were disqualified from trying again. Parties might think twice about re-endorsing a failed candidate in any case.
This one's from a couple of days ago.
Let's see. He's posing as an officer of the bank, looking to divert funds for his own personal use, and asking me to lie in order to help him. I'll grant you he doesn't actually use the word 'illegal', but it shouldn't require any special expertise to know that he's up to no good.I'd have some sympathy for anyone who fell for this, but it would be hard to describe them as 'innocent'.
say i have abracadabra.com and you have abracadabra.net - which one of us gets abracadabra.mail? Or are we talking abracadabra.com.mail and abracadabra.org.mail?
According to the proposal, you'd get abracadabra.com.mail:
http://www.icann.org/tlds/stld-apps-19mar04/mail.MushMouth wrote: Then the plural would be vira, there is no second I to get the Nomanative plural. Virii is wrong no matter what.
:)
http://www.perl.com/language/misc/virus.html discusses the question in more detail. Second-declension neuter in -um has a plural in -a, but it's far from undisputed that the same would apply to words in -us. In fact, according to that page, it's far from undisputed that virus was even second-declension. Classical writers were so inconsiderate not to leave us footnotes about that sort of thing.
But also from that page: Virii is still completely silly, so don't do that; otherwise, everyone will know you're just a blathering script kiddie. You won't find any disagreement from me there. The English plural is 'viruses', and that's the end of the matter, or should be. But you'll note that the (originally incorrect) plural 'octopi' *has* made it into dictionaries, which does give it some veneer of acceptability. It's possible that 'virii' could end up going the same way, though I do hope not. I'll still frown on both of them, but I doubt that'll change anything.
My, that's more Latin than I thought I'd remember.
BWJones wrote: So, examining the html, it appears that it actually references microsoft.com.
If I were microsoft, it appears there is a simple way to defeat this by inserting html in the referenced source that warns recipients of this sort of thing.
It contains links to appropriate Microsoft pages. Microsoft could place notices at those URLs warning users not to install the 'update'. But those users who would run the program probably wouldn't click on the links in the first place. Still, some warnings wouldn't do any harm.
MushMouth wrote: If it were latin the plural would be viri, where does that second i come from?
/'pi:ni:z/ and "clitorides" /klI'tOrIdi:z/.
Not necessarily even that. Virus was *neuter* in Latin, unlike the second-declension *masculine* nouns we're for some reason more familiar with.
From an old alt.usage.english FAQ file:
Not all Latin words ending in "-us" had plurals in "-i".
"Apparatus", "cantus", "coitus", "hiatus", "impetus", "Jesus",
"lapsus linguae", "nexus", "plexus", "prospectus", "sinus", and
"status" were 4th declension in Latin, and had plurals in "-us" with
"genus", and "opus" were 3rd declension, with plurals "corpora",
"genera", and "opera". "Virus" is not attested in the plural in
Latin, and is of a rare form (2nd declension neuter in -us) that
makes it debatable what the Latin plural would have been; the only
plural in English is "viruses". "Omnibus" and "rebus" were not
nominative nouns in Latin. "Ignoramus" was not a noun in Latin.
Not all classical words ending in "-a" had plurals in "-ae".
"Anathema", "aroma", "bema", "carcinoma", "charisma", "diploma",
"dogma", "drama", "edema", "enema", "enigma", "lemma", "lymphoma",
"magma", "melisma", "miasma", "sarcoma", "schema", "soma", "stigma",
"stoma", and "trauma" are from Greek, where they had plurals in
"-ata". "Quota" was not a noun in Latin. (It comes from the
Latin expression quota pars, where quota is the feminine
form of an interrogative pronoun meaning "what number". In *that*
use, it did have plural quotae, but in English the only plural
is "quotas".)
Not all classical-sounding words ending in "-um" have plurals in
"-a". "Factotum", "nostrum", "quorum", and "variorum" were not
nouns in Latin. (Totus = "everything" and noster = "our" were
conjugated like nouns in Latin; but "factotum" comes from fac
totum = "do everything", and "nostrum" comes from nostrum
remedium = "our remedy".) "Conundrum", "panjandrum", "tantrum",
and "vellum" are not Latin words.
If in doubt, consult a dictionary (or use the English plural in
"-s" or "-es"). One plural that you *will* find in U.S.
dictionaries, "octopi", raises the ire of purists (the Greek plural
is "octopodes").
The classical-style plurals of "penis" and "clitoris" are "penes"
asmithmd1 wrote: By the way they logged the bug, "first actual case of bug being found" the term was already in use and they were pointing out the irony that the bug in this case was a real bug
True. The article suggests, however, that this incident was the origin of the verb 'to debug'. The Slashdot writeup manages to confuse the two.
The article said: It is important to note that even Microsoft Office has trouble opening some versions of Microsoft Office programs, as forward compatibility has often been a problem. We used Office 2000, which succeeded in opening all Office files, but we venture to guess that Office 98, say, would have had difficulties with some of them.
It's a pity they didn't include a couple versions of Microsoft Office in the comparison, so that this effect could actually be measured rather than relegated to a footnote.
Saeger wrote: Is it standard BBC practice to repackage and resell what the public already paid for?
Yes.
And does allowing something to be viewed for free exclude it from ALSO being sold (*cough**linux*).
Doesn't exclude it, but does reduce its commercial value.
They also have bonnets and boots, rather than hoods and trunks. It's not all just different spelling.
paladin_tom wrote: Actually, in Canada, we use a somewhat inconsistent mix of British and American spellings, ie.:
:).
We must defend the honour of our organization.
'organization' isn't *really* a US spelling in the way that 'honor' is. It's considered acceptable in the UK, though less common than the spelling with an 's'.
You do, however, write 'tire' for the rubbery things on wheels. I think that's because you don't believe there are people spell it with a 'y', though.
Macbeast wrote: Uh-huh. There's no such thing as BST (British Standard time, I assume). The name of the timezone is GMT (Greenwich Meridian Time).
It's British Summer Time, and it's GMT+1. Rather like daylight saving time in North America.
For those outside the UK, BBC Two's Newsnight programme also carried a segment tonight about Microsoft's anti-spam crusade. It's available to view online at http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsnight/ (but only for the day after broadcast). The spam segment was about two thirds of the way through.
blowdart wrote: You may want to read up at easyprotest2.com and consider if this is the sort of person geeks should be backing.
True, but we should also be able to move beyond tribal politics and recognise that we can support someone on one issue, and oppose them on another.
There's a wide variety of views here at Slashdot (though it's sometimes tempting to assume everyone thinks the same), but many here don't have much time for abusive monopolies. It's entirely consistent to support easyCinema on this, without condoning the company's actions in other areas.