Maybe so and yes it sucks. However I'd rather it went to lawyers than stay in the hands of Microsoft and validate their opinion that they did nothing wrong.
The reader will supposedly have a 6" screen, but rather than using e-ink like every other reader out there, this one will utilize a color OLED screen.
According to Wikipedia: "OLEDs typically produce only around 200 nits of light leading to poor readability in bright ambient light, such as outdoors"
They're proposing that an OLED E-Reader which cannot be read properly in sunlight will be "game changing". Forgive me for being not quite so optomistic.
I think the main question is why would a glorified router have a GPS built-in? I can see no real reason for a GPS being in a router. Phones? Perhaps. Router? No.
In short, FCC E911 rules.
Most USB modem vendors use Qualcomm chipsets which come with GPSOne as standard. As such, they just need to include an antenna.
USB modems sold in Europe still have GPSOne in there, but the antenna is removed to reduce costs. As such you cannot get a fix.
I know that my experiences of Windows 7 shouldn't be considered as true for all, but in general day to day usage, I've had no problems at all.
Off the top of my head, I can only think of two bugs in Windows Backup. One where it reports that your backup drive is full and that you need to clear space and then presents you with an option to adjust the backup or let windows manage it automatically for you. The problem is that Windows is already managing it automatically for me and therefore it shouldn't be telling me this.
The other issue is that one of the buttons hidden somewhere within backup pops up a windows with a message along the lines of "Not implemented.". Looks like they ran out of time coding that bit!
Particularly before the advent of 'saving,' the completion of even a simple game could take huge amounts of patience, effort and time. The ending, like those last pages of a book, was a key reason why we started playing in the first place.
I have a PSP with custom firmware and I went back and played some of those old games and, for me, the "patience, effort and time" needed to play the same damn levels over and over again (because I kept dying at the same key spot!) began to wear very thin very quickly.
Sometimes I think we look back on old games with too much nostalgia. Whilst there are undoubtedly some really good games, a lot of them were just an exercise in frustration and slow methodical progress - something I don't derive much enjoyment from any more.
Here's the problem; you've never registered for Facebook, but have your friends? Your family? How many pictures of you are on Facebook regardless of your non-participation? Did one of your friends post a picture taken that night you all got drunk and maybe did something you'd prefer you mother (or a potential employer) didn't hear about?
To be honest, this isn't really much different to someone hard-coding a website which contains some photographs of a party and some links back to your own website whenever there is a picture of you. That's what we used to do in 1995 when Facebook wasn't around.
The only thing that has changed is that Facebook makes it easier to do. I have friends on there who do that without needing to host their own website, write HTML, FTP their pictures, update the photos page manually and create the hyperlinks to other people's websites.
If you really want to identify a time when privacy died, it would be when we moved to digital. If someone took a photo of you throwing up with an old 35mm camera, it was pretty hard to share it with the world. Now that we all have digital camera's, email and the internet, it's not so hard any more.
Back in the old days, people were oversharing with information on their personal websites, oversharing on livejournal and oversharing on blogs.
Mark is right in that people tend to share more these days, but that is only really because the tools have made it easier to do so. You could still hand craft a "My friends" page in Vi with links to your friends homepages (and in 95, we did that) but now all it takes is a couple of button clicks and you get not only a link to them, but one back too and a picture of them to boot.
I find it amusing that ISP's give people 5MB of web space with their broadband accounts. For the majority of people, Facebook contains everything they'd want from a personal home page. When I was at uni, my website had some details about me, a picture, some photos scanned in on the uni scanner and a rudimentary "wall". We haven't exactly evolved the functionality much since then.
If Facebook is guilty of anything, it's allowing people who didn't have the skills necessary to set up, design and hack up a homepage and populate it with content, to do that rather easily. Even then, I'm sure Blogger and Livejournal would probably want to claim a first for that honour.
I'm not a "gamer" in much sense of the word, but most of the people I know who have computers have them sitting on a desk usually in a study or on the kitchen table. The very same places where you couldn't stand back, wave a controller and jump around a lot.
The whole motion/natal/full body controller type things work really well on consoles because they're hooked up to a big television and generally in a large room with plenty of space in front of them to allow you to leap up and down and pretend to be shooting hoops.
However in order for this to work on PC's, people would need to move their computers to somewhere with a bigger space. The best room in the house would be the lounge for its space - but if you're going to stick it there then you might as well buy something which suits the purpose better, is designed to actually go there and has a 10 foot user interface for this purpose. Ergo a console.
I'm not convinced. I'm happy to be completely wrong, but the social aspects of gaming on a console and gaming on a PC are completely different and I don't think that you can crowbar the same control method onto both.
Firstly, it's just a trick involving the GUID that points to a shell folder - all of which is documented on MSDN. Ed Bott also concurs in his blog post.
Secondly, Vista had this too although it was then called "Master Control". Same thing so it's not exactly new.
Thirdly, it's doesn't offer you anything more than you would normally find in the Control Panel. Yes, it is all in one place but I can't be the only one that just types a couple of letters into the Start Menu to find the option I want.
Because of all the different currencies. Should everyone in Europe or Asia use dollar? Or should americans use euro or yen?
It's easier when there's a "currency" thats the same everywhere.
Whilst this is true, it also has the "nice" side effect of making it easier for them to bill more in countries that will tolerate it.
I don't know the exact pricing for points, but you could take the price of 1 point in the USA, convert to GBP (using a lousy exchange rate of course), add 17.5% for VAT and then throw an extra markup on top (because you just can) and reflect that in the price of a point in the UK.
So $10's worth of points in the USA at a poor exchange rate should be around £7 + VAT = £8.23. Yet they could get away with also charging £10. A nice 66% markup.
Net result, is that you can screw people in the UK over without them really realising that they're paying far more than they would in the USA - despite the fact that everything is served from servers in the USA and therefore there are no additional costs involved by doing business in the UK*.
(* or if there are, they've already been covered by the business elsewhere. It's not like this is a new country for Microsoft)
Is there any evidence that an open source program is less secure in the short term than a closed source one?
Yes there is evidence, but it goes both ways. It is impossible to make generic statements about the security of open source (either for or against) without being ripped to shreds with counter points. Anyone who tries to make such a generic comment is going to be wrong.
What they appear to be saying is that since the code is open source, it's easier for people to find security flaws. Which would seem (to me) to be true. On the flip side, once it's found, it's going to get patched much quicker because you don't have a wait for the only people who can see the code to do something.
Slashdot loves to use Apache and IIS as examples of the security differences in open vs closed source. The problem is that Apache is not indicative of the quality of open source and Microsoft is not indicate of the quality of closed source.
For every good quality closed source vendor, I can equally find an open source project from Freshmeat riddled with security flaws.
The summary is slightly misleading. Yes, it's DRM but it's an effort by the industry to make it so that content purchased in one way (eg. on your PS3) will work on a multitude of other devices which may or may not be owned by you.
I dislike DRM as much as the next Slashdotter, but this is actually laxer than the current DRM employed on digital content distribution - where you're locked into the device you download it to and the possibility to popping over to a friends house to watch something is minimal.
Being able to give away, bogart, lend or to borrow, pass as inheritance, or roll up and smoke a book is possible because the book is yours because you own it and the Doctrine of First Sale [ucla.edu] formalizes these possibilities.
Whilst I don't disagree with your comments, there is quite a bit of difference between lending a friend your book and shoving it up on the Internet for 5,000 people to download.
The fairest DRM would allow you to share but deprive you of that content whilst it is shared. As we all know, this isn't remotely possible because of the inherant flaws with the ideas of DRM (B and C being the same person and all that) but it would then at least separate those who really want the freedom that a book offers and those that just want stuff for free.
I've just configured a new laptop and told the anti-virus to ignore *.jpg, *.avi and *.mp3 on my understanding that it's not possible to hide malware in them and that it will make the scan significantly quicker.
Am I right? Or is it a good idea to remove those exclusions?
42. They should have stuck with the "Windows Vista Inadequate" ones.
In the face of Vista's delays, Microsoft encourages PC manufacturers to slap "Windows Vista Capable" stickers on XP machines. The stickers turn out only to mean that the computer can run the lower-end versions of Vista, and don't guarantee they're able to use the new OSes' signature Aero interface. Legal hijinks ensue, and internal Microsoft documents suggest the company knew it had a problem on its hands even as it was egging on consumers to buy cheap XP machines with Vista in mind.
I thought it was Intel that pressured Microsoft to reduce the requirements for Vista so that their most popular graphics chip (I can't remember which) which was currently shipping in millions of computers wouldn't be deemed inadequate for running the new operating system?
If true, then had Microsoft refused then they wouldn't have got themselves into this mess but they didn't and it just went to show that Microsoft is actually Intel's bitch.
Slight nitpick, but although there may have been no materials cost, don't forgot that Sony would have had to pay for the 1.43 terrabytes (500,000 x 3GB) worth of data that people used to download it.
It may be cheaper than producing and shipping a product, but this is Slashdot and we shouldn't be getting into the mistake of assuming that a digital download doesn't cost anything.
Whoops, should be MB and not GB. The maths still work out at 1.43 TB though for 500,000 tracks (assuming a 3MB song).
Personally, my eyes are now on Sony UK and, to a lesser extent, Simon Cowell. Sony have profited to the tune of 500,000 digital downloads on the RATM track, plus probably a good 100,000 extra copies of McElderry's bought by X-Factor fans to try and keep RATM off number one spot. Total materials cost: £0. I think it only fair that they make a gesture in kind and make a sizable donation to Shelter as well.
Slight nitpick, but although there may have been no materials cost, don't forgot that Sony would have had to pay for the 1.43 terrabytes (500,000 x 3GB) worth of data that people used to download it.
It may be cheaper than producing and shipping a product, but this is Slashdot and we shouldn't be getting into the mistake of assuming that a digital download doesn't cost anything.
For an alternative point of view, this article is interesting because it claims that the iPhone design isn't very good and that is what is causing the problems.
I don't live in the USA so I have no idea how good or bad AT&T is, but what I do know is that the RF sensitivity of the iPhone isn't very good. I can think of plenty of times (and places) where my iPhone (and not just my iPhone) will disconnect and then can't get a signal again - yet friends on the same network with other phones do just fine.
Hell there are large periods of time on my morning train commute where the iPhone claims "No Service" yet my Blackberry (on the same network) is downloading emails and browsing the web just fine.
It was terrible on the original iPhone and the 3GS is better, but like the camera quality, I do think they need to work at it quite a bit more.
Then how come my bill doesn't go down when I'm done paying off the phone?
Customer apathy.
Or to put it another way, it's the same reason why your bank doesn't phone you up and point out that they have a great new account with a much higher rate of interest.
A lot of operators will either give you a discount or let you move to a SIM only tariff which is much better value. However just because you can't be bothered to find out what your options are, doesn't mean that they are going to make all the effort to tell you.
If you want a future where e-books are DRM free then you need to hope that the same thing happens with e-books as it did with music.
That is, one company having the majority of the market, not licencing their DRM solution and publishers having to resort to DRM free products if they want to sell outside of the walled garden.
Since Adobe will licence their technology to anyone who wants it, there is no incentive for the publishers to give up on DRM. Which, for e-books at least, means it'll be here to stay for a while...
Real developers have trouble getting even small numbers of apps approved, and yet somehow these guys have literally a thousand crappy knockoff apps?
To be fair, when a developer gets their app accepted they don't normally write a blog and then submit it to Slashdot. Our view of the "problems" with the App Store is just distorted because we only see the (very) small number of people who have a problem.
Real developers have no problems getting their application tested and into the store just fine. If the "problems" we see were widespread, there would be nothing in the App Store to download.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe so and yes it sucks. However I'd rather it went to lawyers than stay in the hands of Microsoft and validate their opinion that they did nothing wrong.
Sorry, spelling mistake. On the upside it has made me realise I'd forgotten to install the English dictionary for Firefox! Oops.
Okay...
According to Wikipedia: " OLEDs typically produce only around 200 nits of light leading to poor readability in bright ambient light, such as outdoors "
They're proposing that an OLED E-Reader which cannot be read properly in sunlight will be "game changing". Forgive me for being not quite so optomistic.
In short, FCC E911 rules.
Most USB modem vendors use Qualcomm chipsets which come with GPSOne as standard. As such, they just need to include an antenna.
USB modems sold in Europe still have GPSOne in there, but the antenna is removed to reduce costs. As such you cannot get a fix.
I know that my experiences of Windows 7 shouldn't be considered as true for all, but in general day to day usage, I've had no problems at all.
Off the top of my head, I can only think of two bugs in Windows Backup. One where it reports that your backup drive is full and that you need to clear space and then presents you with an option to adjust the backup or let windows manage it automatically for you. The problem is that Windows is already managing it automatically for me and therefore it shouldn't be telling me this.
The other issue is that one of the buttons hidden somewhere within backup pops up a windows with a message along the lines of "Not implemented.". Looks like they ran out of time coding that bit!
I have no doubt that there are lots more.
I have a PSP with custom firmware and I went back and played some of those old games and, for me, the "patience, effort and time" needed to play the same damn levels over and over again (because I kept dying at the same key spot!) began to wear very thin very quickly.
Sometimes I think we look back on old games with too much nostalgia. Whilst there are undoubtedly some really good games, a lot of them were just an exercise in frustration and slow methodical progress - something I don't derive much enjoyment from any more.
To be honest, this isn't really much different to someone hard-coding a website which contains some photographs of a party and some links back to your own website whenever there is a picture of you. That's what we used to do in 1995 when Facebook wasn't around.
The only thing that has changed is that Facebook makes it easier to do. I have friends on there who do that without needing to host their own website, write HTML, FTP their pictures, update the photos page manually and create the hyperlinks to other people's websites.
If you really want to identify a time when privacy died, it would be when we moved to digital. If someone took a photo of you throwing up with an old 35mm camera, it was pretty hard to share it with the world. Now that we all have digital camera's, email and the internet, it's not so hard any more.
Back in the old days, people were oversharing with information on their personal websites, oversharing on livejournal and oversharing on blogs.
Mark is right in that people tend to share more these days, but that is only really because the tools have made it easier to do so. You could still hand craft a "My friends" page in Vi with links to your friends homepages (and in 95, we did that) but now all it takes is a couple of button clicks and you get not only a link to them, but one back too and a picture of them to boot.
I find it amusing that ISP's give people 5MB of web space with their broadband accounts. For the majority of people, Facebook contains everything they'd want from a personal home page. When I was at uni, my website had some details about me, a picture, some photos scanned in on the uni scanner and a rudimentary "wall". We haven't exactly evolved the functionality much since then.
If Facebook is guilty of anything, it's allowing people who didn't have the skills necessary to set up, design and hack up a homepage and populate it with content, to do that rather easily. Even then, I'm sure Blogger and Livejournal would probably want to claim a first for that honour.
I'm not a "gamer" in much sense of the word, but most of the people I know who have computers have them sitting on a desk usually in a study or on the kitchen table. The very same places where you couldn't stand back, wave a controller and jump around a lot.
The whole motion/natal/full body controller type things work really well on consoles because they're hooked up to a big television and generally in a large room with plenty of space in front of them to allow you to leap up and down and pretend to be shooting hoops.
However in order for this to work on PC's, people would need to move their computers to somewhere with a bigger space. The best room in the house would be the lounge for its space - but if you're going to stick it there then you might as well buy something which suits the purpose better, is designed to actually go there and has a 10 foot user interface for this purpose. Ergo a console.
I'm not convinced. I'm happy to be completely wrong, but the social aspects of gaming on a console and gaming on a PC are completely different and I don't think that you can crowbar the same control method onto both.
Firstly, it's just a trick involving the GUID that points to a shell folder - all of which is documented on MSDN. Ed Bott also concurs in his blog post.
Secondly, Vista had this too although it was then called "Master Control". Same thing so it's not exactly new.
Thirdly, it's doesn't offer you anything more than you would normally find in the Control Panel. Yes, it is all in one place but I can't be the only one that just types a couple of letters into the Start Menu to find the option I want.
Fourthly, the list of them are as follows:
Enjoy.
Whilst this is true, it also has the "nice" side effect of making it easier for them to bill more in countries that will tolerate it.
I don't know the exact pricing for points, but you could take the price of 1 point in the USA, convert to GBP (using a lousy exchange rate of course), add 17.5% for VAT and then throw an extra markup on top (because you just can) and reflect that in the price of a point in the UK.
So $10's worth of points in the USA at a poor exchange rate should be around £7 + VAT = £8.23. Yet they could get away with also charging £10. A nice 66% markup.
Net result, is that you can screw people in the UK over without them really realising that they're paying far more than they would in the USA - despite the fact that everything is served from servers in the USA and therefore there are no additional costs involved by doing business in the UK*.
(* or if there are, they've already been covered by the business elsewhere. It's not like this is a new country for Microsoft)
Yes there is evidence, but it goes both ways. It is impossible to make generic statements about the security of open source (either for or against) without being ripped to shreds with counter points. Anyone who tries to make such a generic comment is going to be wrong.
What they appear to be saying is that since the code is open source, it's easier for people to find security flaws. Which would seem (to me) to be true. On the flip side, once it's found, it's going to get patched much quicker because you don't have a wait for the only people who can see the code to do something.
Slashdot loves to use Apache and IIS as examples of the security differences in open vs closed source. The problem is that Apache is not indicative of the quality of open source and Microsoft is not indicate of the quality of closed source.
For every good quality closed source vendor, I can equally find an open source project from Freshmeat riddled with security flaws.
The summary is slightly misleading. Yes, it's DRM but it's an effort by the industry to make it so that content purchased in one way (eg. on your PS3) will work on a multitude of other devices which may or may not be owned by you.
I dislike DRM as much as the next Slashdotter, but this is actually laxer than the current DRM employed on digital content distribution - where you're locked into the device you download it to and the possibility to popping over to a friends house to watch something is minimal.
(side note: of course this will fail)
Whilst I don't disagree with your comments, there is quite a bit of difference between lending a friend your book and shoving it up on the Internet for 5,000 people to download.
The fairest DRM would allow you to share but deprive you of that content whilst it is shared. As we all know, this isn't remotely possible because of the inherant flaws with the ideas of DRM (B and C being the same person and all that) but it would then at least separate those who really want the freedom that a book offers and those that just want stuff for free.
I've just configured a new laptop and told the anti-virus to ignore *.jpg, *.avi and *.mp3 on my understanding that it's not possible to hide malware in them and that it will make the scan significantly quicker.
Am I right? Or is it a good idea to remove those exclusions?
I thought it was Intel that pressured Microsoft to reduce the requirements for Vista so that their most popular graphics chip (I can't remember which) which was currently shipping in millions of computers wouldn't be deemed inadequate for running the new operating system?
If true, then had Microsoft refused then they wouldn't have got themselves into this mess but they didn't and it just went to show that Microsoft is actually Intel's bitch.
Sorry, typo. I meant to put 3MB. The numbers assumes 3MB too, so they are still right.
Oops, typo on my behalf, should be 3MB per track. The end amount is still the same.
I don't know about the costs of bandwidth, but if it really is only $850 for 5TB then it's a bit of a bargain.
Whoops, should be MB and not GB. The maths still work out at 1.43 TB though for 500,000 tracks (assuming a 3MB song).
Slight nitpick, but although there may have been no materials cost, don't forgot that Sony would have had to pay for the 1.43 terrabytes (500,000 x 3GB) worth of data that people used to download it.
It may be cheaper than producing and shipping a product, but this is Slashdot and we shouldn't be getting into the mistake of assuming that a digital download doesn't cost anything.
For an alternative point of view, this article is interesting because it claims that the iPhone design isn't very good and that is what is causing the problems.
I don't live in the USA so I have no idea how good or bad AT&T is, but what I do know is that the RF sensitivity of the iPhone isn't very good. I can think of plenty of times (and places) where my iPhone (and not just my iPhone) will disconnect and then can't get a signal again - yet friends on the same network with other phones do just fine.
Hell there are large periods of time on my morning train commute where the iPhone claims "No Service" yet my Blackberry (on the same network) is downloading emails and browsing the web just fine.
It was terrible on the original iPhone and the 3GS is better, but like the camera quality, I do think they need to work at it quite a bit more.
Customer apathy.
Or to put it another way, it's the same reason why your bank doesn't phone you up and point out that they have a great new account with a much higher rate of interest.
A lot of operators will either give you a discount or let you move to a SIM only tariff which is much better value. However just because you can't be bothered to find out what your options are, doesn't mean that they are going to make all the effort to tell you.
If you want a future where e-books are DRM free then you need to hope that the same thing happens with e-books as it did with music.
That is, one company having the majority of the market, not licencing their DRM solution and publishers having to resort to DRM free products if they want to sell outside of the walled garden.
Since Adobe will licence their technology to anyone who wants it, there is no incentive for the publishers to give up on DRM. Which, for e-books at least, means it'll be here to stay for a while...
The link to the article might be useful: http://kotaku.com/5421466/ea-ceo-i-think-of-pirates-as-a-marketplace
To be fair, when a developer gets their app accepted they don't normally write a blog and then submit it to Slashdot. Our view of the "problems" with the App Store is just distorted because we only see the (very) small number of people who have a problem.
Real developers have no problems getting their application tested and into the store just fine. If the "problems" we see were widespread, there would be nothing in the App Store to download.