I just wonder how many out of those "inactive" downloads is via Google affiliated links that give website owners some money. Yes, people will click on it. No, they're not really interested in using it. Yes, it's probably caught by the "click-fraud" algorithm but did they subtract it from the statistics?
Unless there's a world-wide conspiracy or a single supplier of "police spyware" in the world, Anti-Spyware products from other countries will not follow "don't detect us" order (and, I bet, there would be one or two posts with "would you look at that?!" notes, listing exactly what "please don't detect us" not says). Of course it also implies that gov-spyware is used in such mass quantities that at least one or more somewhat knowledgeable people find that something is wrong and involve anti-virus/spyware vendors. So... those who believe in world-wide conspiracy -- there is nothing to protect you (otherwise it wouldn't be ww-c;) ) Those who are paranoid -- use anti-virus/spyware kits from different countries. Kill everything suspicious (perhaps including one or two of those anti-virus programs that point at each other as a threat) Everyone else... panic for a week, then move on to the new threat/panic/book/movie:)
Did he say 10 Earth years? Well how do you know he did not mean 10 Mercury years?:) Plus, financial analysts should have pretty much taught everyone not to trust most analysts:)
Standard Windows phones will show phone numbers in messages underlined, clicking on them would result in dial out. And if you keep address with your contacts, then after installing google maps you'd get Map Location link as one of the menu options. So, it's all there. Just ugly and not very polished, which is the number one thing that Apple does well -- take ideas floating around in ugly implementations and polish them well enough to make it easy to use
So when your girlfriend mother (sorry, forgot it's a Slashdot for a moment) will scream at the top of her lungs OH MY GOD!! LOOK OUT!!! You will be so much more alert to the fact that truck on the right started to switch the lanes, instead of car on the left or car in front of you? Or you only count cases of people driving with a borg drone, that announces calmly "Truck on the right changing lanes, switch to the right lane". I've seen many many people turn their head toward the passenger while talking which is much worse than hands free conversation. Face the facts. Any conversation will distract you. So, outlaw talking and driving at the same time (put the microphone with transmitter alerting police of violation while moving). Remove audio and all other gadgets (because car audio was number one reason for creash as of 5 years ago). And then have a safe and boring trip. Well... then snoozing behind the weel will become number one reason.
Given how "well" Russian Government organizes things it'd be an utter failure. Please remember, there are many people and groups in the whole world that are quite capable of doing it by themselves. What, do you think the government has nothing else to do than to issue covert demands for every dial-up user to ping particular Estonian servers? Estonia (and some mass media) simply find it useful to blame everything on Russian government now. Russian companies refuse to buy their products because customers stopped buying them? Blame Kremlin. If a giant meteor were to strike the capital right now, there'd be a couple of experts saying that "Nobody can prove it wasn't a covert Kremlin operation".
Of course you also have to think about it from the other point of view. If there was a symbol for all US soldiers that died in combat, that marked their graves in another country, and that country would then decided to just move it somewhere else, because they want to put a highway on top of that last resting place... Would Americans grin and bear it? No? Loud screams from politicians asking for sanctions? Regular people doing everything they can to protest it? Net bot herders making statement and then bragging about "squashing the embassy N servers" between themselves? Would the US government have to encourage people to do it?
At the beginning Opie and Anthony were a premium channel (High Voltage 202) with $1.99 price tag -- right along with the Playboy Channel. Subscription was cheaper back then too. So, anybody who wanted to hear then had to pay. Then XM moved them into "regular" block of channels (along with some sports stuff) and raised the subscription. I don't know why they did it -- I guess there weren't enough paying subscribers so they decided to force everyone to have OandA on the dial. As a result XM has no idea how many people actually listen to them, and pretty much have to do "censoring" because there's a bigger chance that "some poor innocent child" will hear it (even though there is a way to block certain channels, which requires calling customer support and "manually" blocking them).
If we really want to treat copyright as "physical property" then once you sell me a CD/Book/Movie you can't claim you only sold me "limited license". We're dealing with physical thing now, so I can disassemble, sell and re-sell, rent it out, share it with anybody I want. Because if someone tries to sell you a horse that you can ONLY ride on your lawn you call that person nuts.
So far all I see is slightly screwed up interface with another extra "top bar" added on top of "iGoogle". I don't need it there. I like the way it worked before. But on top of that, Google has been so adamant at killing off search spam, that lately my search results started to become less and less relevant. So I switched to the Russian search system Yandex instead. While they may have lesser part of the interned indexed, I have a better luck with their results. Heck, even Live.com seems to become more pleasant results-wise.
Will NRA provide any help to him? A lawyer, perhaps? A big compensation and all? After all, if people will get fired left and right because they were talking about weapons, that'd pretty much kill NRA, no?
Oh wait, there already were attempts to put smart card on credit card in US. Amex Blue, for example, started out as one. Practically same "dongle on the chip" but without readable display, and with an interface for terminal to read. Instead they threw it out and switched to "RFID" chip on the card. So you can use the chip for additional verification, and copying card becomes much harder. If the contactless payment system (Exxon stations, fast food places, and some other point of sale terminals are running trials) spreads any further, this new proposal of VeriSign chip on the credit card becomes almost irrelevant (especially when combined with solution like Verified by Visa, where you can add extra verification for online-only orders).
Just FYI, nForce 860i SLI for LGA775 uses HyperTransport Link between north and south bridge. So, essentially you have Intel system that uses AMD HT bus:)
I always thought that kerning of installed (and injected) fonts is pretty much OS responsibility. So if you have kerning enabled (see, for example, Typography.Kerning in.NET, as we're talking mostly about Windows) adjustments of the font will be done automatically. So I guess if you force browser to download font via CSS2 that has kerning information it should "just work".
Alas, I always thought that forcing downloading of custom font is a bad idea (jut like forcing user to use some fixed font size) as not everyone may be a big fan of new fancy font. Oh well.
Add to the list one thing: sorting. No matter how Google would like to claim that Search is better than Sort, it isn't. If you don't know exactly what you're looking for, you're doomed. Was the email from John/James/Juhn ? How do you search for something so vague? While desktop client allows you to easily re-order inbox, and then filter out with flexible searches. Plus the regular advantages of offline storage, better security, integration with other applications (though new Google agents allow integration where sending email from an app results in a web browser window being opened) For all I know the desktop email app should be compared with Yahoo Mail Beta. But being online is still slower. And, in some cases, extremely expensive (for example when you only have access to cellphone-based internet connection with no unlimited tethering -- I was in this situation while being in Europe, prepaid plan charged per KB and easy Gmail session on a laptop can cost about 15 Euros)
I decided to look for 64-bit and 32-bit comparison charts. So I googled and found one at PCStats.com. So what does zlib Mini-GZIP 1.2.3 32-bit vs. 64-bit benchmark says? It still says Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 (WinXP 64/64 Bit) beats AMD Athlon64 FX-62 (WinXP 64/64 Bit) by roughly 30%. So does 64-bit DivX encoding. And even at Science Mark 2.0 at which Intel C2Duo is slower than FX-62, switching into 64 bit reduces time needed to run the test from 66.241sec to 21.36.
At least provide some sort of sources when claiming performance drop in 64 bit mode. According to the above benchmark I do want to buy C2Duo and run it in 64-bit mode to do all the gzipping.
By the time consumers will start to care about PCI DMA eating more than 4GB of memory, the new revision of Intel CPU will be out with on-die controller;)
AMD is the best choice for budget customers right now
Especially if Vonage will stop their advertising cash fountain. Given how much they spend to get each new customer and how much they throw away at pop-up/banner/tv ads, this would be a good thing. And if they manage to concentrate on making things more efficient there is a hope of break-even state. Which would make them an attractive acquisition target for anyone who wants to add to customer base.
It's probably more of a measure of coordination and activity of Serenity online community. The poll was an online poll (SFX's circulation is 32,672, so having 3000 responses would mean 10% response rate) which just showed what we all already know. That there is a fan base that is absolutely fanatically in love with Serenity. Good for Serenity. Now if only that would result in bigger box office success... But its domestic gross is less than Blade Runner and much less than Star Wars, so I don't think top 3 can be compared on an equal footing.
This is simply a CDMA version of an old Samsung F300 Ultra Music GSM phone. While form factor is new, music component in F300 is kinda bleh (and it was not positioned as iPhone competitor). I doubt this has changed in CDMA version. But any new CDMA phone is good, given how few interesting phones are available.
After all NFL sent their lawyers after a church (russian translation) for violation of copyright on broadcast rights and it did not cause waves of protests from fans. And all of those stories of building property for games using local tax money? Prohibitions to translate games when they are in town (want to see it, go buy a ticket, instead of your paid cable subscription). Football IMHO is getting up there in *AA league these days.
So do you want J2ME for MIDP 2.0? Or MIDP 1.0? Or do you want BREW from Qualcomm? 1.x or 2.x or 3.x? No matter what you choose your APIs will multiply like rabbits. Because people want something better, something that was not thought about during development of previous revision/version/variant of API, something that cause a giant in-fight leading to exclusion from current standard etc. While it would be lovely to have one standard platform I doubt industry would agree to restrictions that come with it. You have people running around with old phones, do you think they'd agree to give up their "precccioussss" for a new model, even if it's better and runs standard API (whichever that may be?) I don't think so. So, it'll remain in "Oh wouldn't it be nice to have NNN" folder, unless some extra-hyper successful platform/API wins them all at once.
What really makes me mad is there's no big buttun "BUY" with a price next to it. I spent 5 minutes clicking everywhere on OpenMoko trying to find a way to buy it, simple and easy (I remember they used to say somewhere about how/when I can buy it but it's buried in their wiki with no hit on the word "buy"). If it can't be bought now it should be marked on the first page as "coming soon/preorder" or something. Same goes for Green phone thing, that doesn't even have a mentioning in the list of the devices. I think if more linux phones are to appea[l|r] to general public, there should be easy ways to get them:)
I wonder why they wouldn't use Bluetooth glove controllers instead (like that Ultra Power Glove concept, except there's no need for feedback). That way you don't need to hold your cellphone away to be able to sign, you can pretty much just put it on the desk and sign and see the response at the same time. Small app would stream the accelerometers data to make wire model of other party's hands signing, and even regular EDGE speeds should probably be fine (ok, throw in compression if you want to). Most normal phones have bluetooth connectivity anyways, so it'd be mostly off-the-shelf components. Of course this probably wouldn't be the killer app for 3G connectivity but...
Slashdot Mirror
I just wonder how many out of those "inactive" downloads is via Google affiliated links that give website owners some money.
Yes, people will click on it. No, they're not really interested in using it. Yes, it's probably caught by the "click-fraud" algorithm but did they subtract it from the statistics?
Unless there's a world-wide conspiracy or a single supplier of "police spyware" in the world, Anti-Spyware products from other countries will not follow "don't detect us" order (and, I bet, there would be one or two posts with "would you look at that?!" notes, listing exactly what "please don't detect us" not says). ;) ) :)
Of course it also implies that gov-spyware is used in such mass quantities that at least one or more somewhat knowledgeable people find that something is wrong and involve anti-virus/spyware vendors.
So... those who believe in world-wide conspiracy -- there is nothing to protect you (otherwise it wouldn't be ww-c
Those who are paranoid -- use anti-virus/spyware kits from different countries. Kill everything suspicious (perhaps including one or two of those anti-virus programs that point at each other as a threat)
Everyone else... panic for a week, then move on to the new threat/panic/book/movie
Did he say 10 Earth years? Well how do you know he did not mean 10 Mercury years? :) :)
Plus, financial analysts should have pretty much taught everyone not to trust most analysts
Standard Windows phones will show phone numbers in messages underlined, clicking on them would result in dial out. And if you keep address with your contacts, then after installing google maps you'd get Map Location link as one of the menu options.
So, it's all there. Just ugly and not very polished, which is the number one thing that Apple does well -- take ideas floating around in ugly implementations and polish them well enough to make it easy to use
So when your girlfriend mother (sorry, forgot it's a Slashdot for a moment) will scream at the top of her lungs OH MY GOD!! LOOK OUT!!! You will be so much more alert to the fact that truck on the right started to switch the lanes, instead of car on the left or car in front of you? Or you only count cases of people driving with a borg drone, that announces calmly "Truck on the right changing lanes, switch to the right lane".
I've seen many many people turn their head toward the passenger while talking which is much worse than hands free conversation.
Face the facts. Any conversation will distract you. So, outlaw talking and driving at the same time (put the microphone with transmitter alerting police of violation while moving). Remove audio and all other gadgets (because car audio was number one reason for creash as of 5 years ago). And then have a safe and boring trip. Well... then snoozing behind the weel will become number one reason.
Given how "well" Russian Government organizes things it'd be an utter failure. Please remember, there are many people and groups in the whole world that are quite capable of doing it by themselves. What, do you think the government has nothing else to do than to issue covert demands for every dial-up user to ping particular Estonian servers?
Estonia (and some mass media) simply find it useful to blame everything on Russian government now. Russian companies refuse to buy their products because customers stopped buying them? Blame Kremlin. If a giant meteor were to strike the capital right now, there'd be a couple of experts saying that "Nobody can prove it wasn't a covert Kremlin operation".
Of course you also have to think about it from the other point of view. If there was a symbol for all US soldiers that died in combat, that marked their graves in another country, and that country would then decided to just move it somewhere else, because they want to put a highway on top of that last resting place... Would Americans grin and bear it? No? Loud screams from politicians asking for sanctions? Regular people doing everything they can to protest it? Net bot herders making statement and then bragging about "squashing the embassy N servers" between themselves?
Would the US government have to encourage people to do it?
Now tell me, what's the difference?
I would think the more important thing would be Pentagon's readiness to bomb the source of cyberattacks, which means that a group of bot herders can decide which country Pentagon will be bombing next.
At the beginning Opie and Anthony were a premium channel (High Voltage 202) with $1.99 price tag -- right along with the Playboy Channel. Subscription was cheaper back then too. So, anybody who wanted to hear then had to pay.
Then XM moved them into "regular" block of channels (along with some sports stuff) and raised the subscription. I don't know why they did it -- I guess there weren't enough paying subscribers so they decided to force everyone to have OandA on the dial.
As a result XM has no idea how many people actually listen to them, and pretty much have to do "censoring" because there's a bigger chance that "some poor innocent child" will hear it (even though there is a way to block certain channels, which requires calling customer support and "manually" blocking them).
If we really want to treat copyright as "physical property" then once you sell me a CD/Book/Movie you can't claim you only sold me "limited license". We're dealing with physical thing now, so I can disassemble, sell and re-sell, rent it out, share it with anybody I want.
Because if someone tries to sell you a horse that you can ONLY ride on your lawn you call that person nuts.
So far all I see is slightly screwed up interface with another extra "top bar" added on top of "iGoogle". I don't need it there. I like the way it worked before.
But on top of that, Google has been so adamant at killing off search spam, that lately my search results started to become less and less relevant. So I switched to the Russian search system Yandex instead. While they may have lesser part of the interned indexed, I have a better luck with their results. Heck, even Live.com seems to become more pleasant results-wise.
Or newly broken nano-lamp will lead to "Hello my mutant, hello my carcass"...
See Ruthenium Tetroxide
Will NRA provide any help to him? A lawyer, perhaps? A big compensation and all?
After all, if people will get fired left and right because they were talking about weapons, that'd pretty much kill NRA, no?
Oh wait, there already were attempts to put smart card on credit card in US. Amex Blue, for example, started out as one. Practically same "dongle on the chip" but without readable display, and with an interface for terminal to read.
Instead they threw it out and switched to "RFID" chip on the card. So you can use the chip for additional verification, and copying card becomes much harder.
If the contactless payment system (Exxon stations, fast food places, and some other point of sale terminals are running trials) spreads any further, this new proposal of VeriSign chip on the credit card becomes almost irrelevant (especially when combined with solution like Verified by Visa, where you can add extra verification for online-only orders).
People don't want to pay for music either :) Unless they really-really have to, or love the artist
Just FYI, nForce 860i SLI for LGA775 uses HyperTransport Link between north and south bridge. So, essentially you have Intel system that uses AMD HT bus :)
I always thought that kerning of installed (and injected) fonts is pretty much OS responsibility. So if you have kerning enabled (see, for example, Typography.Kerning in .NET, as we're talking mostly about Windows) adjustments of the font will be done automatically. So I guess if you force browser to download font via CSS2 that has kerning information it should "just work".
Alas, I always thought that forcing downloading of custom font is a bad idea (jut like forcing user to use some fixed font size) as not everyone may be a big fan of new fancy font.
Oh well.
Add to the list one thing: sorting. No matter how Google would like to claim that Search is better than Sort, it isn't. If you don't know exactly what you're looking for, you're doomed. Was the email from John/James/Juhn ? How do you search for something so vague?
While desktop client allows you to easily re-order inbox, and then filter out with flexible searches.
Plus the regular advantages of offline storage, better security, integration with other applications (though new Google agents allow integration where sending email from an app results in a web browser window being opened)
For all I know the desktop email app should be compared with Yahoo Mail Beta. But being online is still slower. And, in some cases, extremely expensive (for example when you only have access to cellphone-based internet connection with no unlimited tethering -- I was in this situation while being in Europe, prepaid plan charged per KB and easy Gmail session on a laptop can cost about 15 Euros)
I decided to look for 64-bit and 32-bit comparison charts. So I googled and found one at PCStats.com. So what does zlib Mini-GZIP 1.2.3 32-bit vs. 64-bit benchmark says? It still says Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 (WinXP 64/64 Bit) beats AMD Athlon64 FX-62 (WinXP 64/64 Bit) by roughly 30%. So does 64-bit DivX encoding.
;)
And even at Science Mark 2.0 at which Intel C2Duo is slower than FX-62, switching into 64 bit reduces time needed to run the test from 66.241sec to 21.36.
At least provide some sort of sources when claiming performance drop in 64 bit mode. According to the above benchmark I do want to buy C2Duo and run it in 64-bit mode to do all the gzipping.
By the time consumers will start to care about PCI DMA eating more than 4GB of memory, the new revision of Intel CPU will be out with on-die controller
AMD is the best choice for budget customers right now
Especially if Vonage will stop their advertising cash fountain.
Given how much they spend to get each new customer and how much they throw away at pop-up/banner/tv ads, this would be a good thing. And if they manage to concentrate on making things more efficient there is a hope of break-even state. Which would make them an attractive acquisition target for anyone who wants to add to customer base.
Say, in 2009 and you get the top billing. :)
Greenpeace is weird. But we already know that
It's probably more of a measure of coordination and activity of Serenity online community.
The poll was an online poll (SFX's circulation is 32,672, so having 3000 responses would mean 10% response rate) which just showed what we all already know. That there is a fan base that is absolutely fanatically in love with Serenity. Good for Serenity.
Now if only that would result in bigger box office success... But its domestic gross is less than Blade Runner and much less than Star Wars, so I don't think top 3 can be compared on an equal footing.
This is simply a CDMA version of an old Samsung F300 Ultra Music GSM phone. While form factor is new, music component in F300 is kinda bleh (and it was not positioned as iPhone competitor). I doubt this has changed in CDMA version.
But any new CDMA phone is good, given how few interesting phones are available.
After all NFL sent their lawyers after a church (russian translation) for violation of copyright on broadcast rights and it did not cause waves of protests from fans. And all of those stories of building property for games using local tax money? Prohibitions to translate games when they are in town (want to see it, go buy a ticket, instead of your paid cable subscription).
Football IMHO is getting up there in *AA league these days.
So do you want J2ME for MIDP 2.0? Or MIDP 1.0? Or do you want BREW from Qualcomm? 1.x or 2.x or 3.x?
No matter what you choose your APIs will multiply like rabbits. Because people want something better, something that was not thought about during development of previous revision/version/variant of API, something that cause a giant in-fight leading to exclusion from current standard etc.
While it would be lovely to have one standard platform I doubt industry would agree to restrictions that come with it. You have people running around with old phones, do you think they'd agree to give up their "precccioussss" for a new model, even if it's better and runs standard API (whichever that may be?) I don't think so.
So, it'll remain in "Oh wouldn't it be nice to have NNN" folder, unless some extra-hyper successful platform/API wins them all at once.
What really makes me mad is there's no big buttun "BUY" with a price next to it. I spent 5 minutes clicking everywhere on OpenMoko trying to find a way to buy it, simple and easy (I remember they used to say somewhere about how/when I can buy it but it's buried in their wiki with no hit on the word "buy"). If it can't be bought now it should be marked on the first page as "coming soon/preorder" or something. Same goes for Green phone thing, that doesn't even have a mentioning in the list of the devices. :)
I think if more linux phones are to appea[l|r] to general public, there should be easy ways to get them
I wonder why they wouldn't use Bluetooth glove controllers instead (like that Ultra Power Glove concept, except there's no need for feedback). That way you don't need to hold your cellphone away to be able to sign, you can pretty much just put it on the desk and sign and see the response at the same time. Small app would stream the accelerometers data to make wire model of other party's hands signing, and even regular EDGE speeds should probably be fine (ok, throw in compression if you want to). Most normal phones have bluetooth connectivity anyways, so it'd be mostly off-the-shelf components.
Of course this probably wouldn't be the killer app for 3G connectivity but...