Contrary to popular Slashdot opinion it isn't always evil. In a small number of cases, it can be benifical to the customer.
For example you could use DRM to provide people with previews of games and music on their phone so they can understand what they are getting before they puchase it properly.
For example: If I was going to download, say, a java game, then I'd far rather have the full game and can try it out for a couple of minutes or times (restricted by the DRM).
The alternative is for me to base my purchasing decision on a couple of pictures and a review written by someone who uses 3's for his e's.
It is a shame that Tivo pulled out of the UK and haven't come back again. At present, if you don't want to cough up 15 quid to Sky a month (on top of the Sky+ box rental - which actually is pretty damn nice) then you can get a freeview box and a bunch of channels for very little money and no monthly fee.
However the problem comes with a PVR, you either get Tivo and do some jiggery pokery to get it to manage the changing of the channels on the digibox - which is not only a huge hack but means you can only tape one channel at a time and can't change from it during recording.
Or you pick up a box from Digifusion, Humax or two other companies I've forgotten which has twin tuners and a huge hard-drive but has a UI which isn't quite so slick. Oh, and not forgetting that absolutely none of them have season pass/series link so you cannot just push a button and record the entire series. They're nice... but they just don't quite cut it.
Tivo could make a killing if they came up with a twin-tuner freeview box.
(side note: I know that part of the reason on no season pass is because freeview doesn't broadcast the season and episode numbers in its scheduling. However it doesn't take a genius to come up with a simple algorithm that looks for a similar title at around the same time each day and records it if it is on. Not the best solution - but better than having no one-click season pass at all)
Yes you can, however if the usual avenues you have tried then you need to fail. I don't mean you sit there, do nothing and wait till you get fired but produce a list of every single task that you have scheduled and then budget your time so that you do not run around getting stressed.
If something is going to miss a deadline, tell the owner of it. If they complain then tell them that they can escalate it. This will invariably mean that someone will come knocking wanting to know why that person is complaining. So sit them down, show them everything you need to do and what you can achieve in the next day and two days.
Don't let them bully you into doing more so that you end up stressed out. Point out to them that this is as much work as you can do and if they want you to do more then either they can sit with you every week and prioritise your work load or you need extra support.
Chances are they'll go for the prioritising. Let that happen every week. Do not let them dictate by which day you can do something, get them to order the tasks from the most important to the least and budget for the same amount of time. When people complain, you tell them to take it to the manager for re-prioritisation.
It's a long slow process, but eventually your manager will come to realise that you have far too much on your plate and he can't please everyone. When that time comes, you'll get your support.
Final comment: If you always manage to deliver everything on time, your management will assume you are perfectly capable of handling the workload and will not give you the support you require. Don't get stuck in a rut like I did, where I was stressed and overworked but because I delivered, no-one was prepared to give me the additional headcount I desperately required.
yeah my network (02 in the uk) uses those for balance information after each call (pay as you go service).
I know the one. You might be interested to know that O2 actually use USSD to deliver the balance information which, unlike flash SMS, doesn't require use of an SMSC.
There is already support in the protocol for text messages which are never saved in the users inbox. These are generally called "flash sms" and, whilst not being quite the same, work close enough, are supported in the majority of handsets and is here today.
Whilst I don't doubt that this kind of functionality has the potential to be good and bad - anything which requires support from the majority of vendors before it can be used will fail unless there is a significantly compelling reason to have it (eg. T9).
I don't see this as being quite in the same league as T9 though.
When you researched your post, maybe you didn't realize this "bug" was for the Mozilla Suite or possibly for the Gecko engine.
Okay, I stand corrected, the bugs are in Gecko or Mozilla. However since they're both open source and have bugs over 5 years old then my point that open source doesn't necessarily mean faster bugs fixes still stands.
Regardless, since the article said all Firefox security issues had been patched...
To be fair, I never used the word "security" in my posting as I wasn't referring to that but rather that bugs are fixed quicker in the open source model (which may be generally true, but Slashdot always loves an exception to that rule).
However if you want to talk security, according to Secunia, Firefox 1.x has 3 outstanding and Mozilla 1.7.x has 3 outstanding security issues.
I'm not in a position to confirm whether or not they have been patched in the latest version but until another reputable site can confirm that they're closed, then this is the best I (and other people) have to go on.
But making source visible means that the process of modification is more hive-like, rather than boundary-laden. So many can look and consider, rather than one business unit at a time, which slows down the process and creates multiple dependency instances. And, when you donate and fund coders, they seem to often move more quickly. Did you press the PayPal button?
Maybe so, but I still point to my previous comment that there are bugs in Firefox which are 5+ years old and haven't been fixed. 5 years is a long time in anyones books to sit on something and not attempt to allocate anyone to it.
To be fair though, I do understand why there are bugs like this sitting there. Writing free code essentially means you can pick and chose what you want to do. Adding cool new functionality is considered high profile and "sexy". Fixing some annoying bug which occurs when someone does a vaigue set of actions isn't in the slightest. When there is no monetary incentive (or boss) then people don't want to work on those kind of things.
Your comment on funding is, sadly, incorrect though. Unless you offer a bounty on specific bugs, just donating some money will not increase the likelihood of it being fixed as the roadmap for Firefox shows a desire to add more and more functionality.
In fact, I believe there are a couple of bugs in the system which do have bounties on them - and they aren't fixed either.
Finally, I never said you can get bug free sophisticated code.
That's why OSS methodologies have a bit of an edge in this context (and others).
Not much of an edge when you consider that there are at least two bugs in Firefox which haven't been fixed for 5 and 6 years respectivily.
Granted, they aren't as critical as the ones that come out of Microsoft, but I consider a couple of years to fix something more than a reasonable amount of time.
What exactly is different between en_US and en_GB versions?
Not really sure, but you do get problems trying to use some of Google functionality and some financial sites because it thinks you live outside of the UK.
I'm sure you probably could download an extension to fix all of those issues... but given that I have enough installed already, I'd rather not.
I know you are joking but I notice that if you live in the UK you cannot get hold of an en-GB version of Firefox 1.5.
It seems a bit odd that Slovenia (population 2,011,070), Norway (population 4,593,041) and Finland (population 5,223,442) can all have 1.5 produced before us despite the fact that their population numbers combined are significantly less than the 60,441,457 for the UK.
(It's not like we're a backwater either, we have the second highest number of internet users after Germany)
Whats the use of pointless eye-candy (like compositing and transparent xterms) when the underlying windowing system (X) is more broken than a New Orleans levee. The big problems in Linux won't ever be addressed because you can't get enough people to agree on a common vision and work to achieve it (well that and the hostility towards commercial developers).
Actually, I'd say the biggest problem with Open Source is that people who work on it generally want to work on the cool, fun, high profile (ie. visible to the end users) and interesting stuff. Transparent xterms fall into this category.
Unfortunately the essential stuff (like drivers) is considered considerably "less cool" and attract fewer hackers.
Corporate environments don't have this problem quite so much because there are plenty of people happy to do the boring stuff as long as they get paid (which they do). When you're doing it for free in your own time, that incentive is not there.
ps. I find it interesting that some of the people who complained about his term "open sores" use "M$" frequently. Horses for courses...
/* Welcome to Sun Microsystems, can I take your order please? */ if (!hp->happy_flags & HFLAG_FENABLE) return happy_meal_bb_write(hp, tregs, reg, value);
/* Would you like fries with that? */ hme_write32(hp, tregs + TCVR_FRAME, (FRAME_WRITE | (hp->paddr
Mind you, it's not a comment but this one was good for printer status:
Sprint's music store, the first major legal music-download service accessible from cellphones
As someone who set up and managed a major legal music-download service accessible from cellphones over three years ago I really wish the Slashdot editors would actually verify "first" claims like these.
Oh yes, and in case you were wondering, the music tracks were overpriced back then too.
IANAL but I did work in the mobile phone content world for a while (including ringtones) and I believe that producers who assert their rendition to the specific artist had to pay the appropriate rights society for each sale. Those that just said "this is 'baby one more time'" without mentioning Britney didn't have to.
If creating your own midi files/ringtones was illegal then companies such as handy.de, musiwave and WES would not have been able to start out.
(probably worth pointing out for the pedants that handy.de was bought by one of the big producers a couple of years ago and renamed to Arvato)
I tried Google Desktop about 3 months ago and didn't like it. One problem was that I had little use for the sidebar which just took up a load of desktop space. The subscribing to every pages RSS feed sounds like a nice idea until you end up with 3000 subscriptions of which 30+ update every single time the feed is pulled.
But the major problem for me was that *gasp* the searching wasn't very good. No seriously. Here's why:
If you move a file from one location to another, it can take weeks before GDS re-indexes both areas and realises that its moved. During this time you either get pointers to the wrong location or (only slightly better) two entries showing the old location and the new location.
Ditto for email. I move emails from my Outlook inbox into folders according to project. Weeks later, I still can't find the email because GDS claims its still in the inbox (but cannot open it).
When GDS cannot open an indexed file because it no longer exists, GDS doesn't do the sensible thing and remove the database entry so that it no longer appears in subsequent searches. In fact, in an ideal world, GDS should check the existence of all the files before it lists them to you.
Without doing some convoluted stuff, you can't force GDS to re-index everything again. This is essential after a couple of weeks because your index is too inaccurate to be any use.
You can't tell GDS to re-index certain things (email, certain folders) more frequently because they change more often.
Hell, you can't increase the time GDS re-indexes full stop.
In the end I gave up and installed Copernic which is far better. It is most definitely not perfect, for example, it can't just search everything (you have to specify files, emails, contacts etc.), the toolbar search isn't as useful as Google's (you can't just type something and your results start to appear in a menu), the IE and Firefox plugins don't actually search your desktop (only the web) and that there is no integrated search bar for Outlook (I do miss this).
However (and this is the big one), it re-index's far quicker and more often than Google and I can set it to re-index certain things (like my email) once every day which means that my results are always correct.
It wouldn't take much that GDS would need to change for me to revert back because I like the integrated search in Outlook and the toolbar - but the database inaccuracy means that its next to useless for the way I work.
Out of all Gates' billions stolen from you and me and every poor person on the planet
Last time I checked Bill had not deprived me or anyone else of anything, either physically or financially. Whenever I have bought something from Microsoft, I have handed over my money of my own free will and received something back.
The reason people are fawning over his gesture is that he could have quite easily spent all that money on frivillious crap for himself. There are plenty of other multi-millionares who do.
Irrespective of the tax perks that he gets, I (and plenty of others) would prefer that he spent his money in this way rather than on a space trip, a number of islands and a couple of yachts.
with the upcoming release of the first music download service direct to mobile phones.
I know Slashdot is based in the US and has a very large base of individuals who are based there - but I do think it is worth pointing out that in the UK, O2 were the first with direct download of music to mobile phones and T-Mobile were the first with direct download of music which required no additional hardware or software (WAP discovery and OTA download) - both of which were in order of years before this announcement.
I have no doubt that other countries probably were quicker off the mark than the UK too, so it would be only fair that in the future the editors ensured that statements claiming to be the first at something either were verified or stated in which terratory they were first in.
In this case, it implies the first everywhere, which isn't so.
As an owner of a Treo 650, I am sick and tired of going to any website (ahem, slashdot) that takes 2-3 minutes to load... and then after it loads, renders the text like
t
h
i
s.
If you want to read Slashdot on your pda or phone then I don't believe there is currently any better way than by using Avantslash.
Is it me or has Microsoft become highly reactionary? Google says they are going to start hosting things like databases and office applications on the web and *bam* suddenly Microsoft says the same thing.
Every product I've ever worked on has taken months if not years of business cases, planning, design and management before it is even mentioned to the public.
I find it highly doubtful (although possible) that a company like Microsoft, hell any big company, would just announce they too are doing something immediately after a competitor if absolutely no thought had been put into it previously.
It wouldn't surprise me if this service has been in the planning for a hell of a lot longer than people think.
Let us not forget the hardware. Whilst PocketPC's were being produced by 5 or 6 different manufacturers who were constantly trying to out do each other with screens, battery life and form factor, you had Palm with... well... Palm.
Oh and Sony, who bailed out... and that wasn't until they had to go and implement a whole bunch of Sony only API's to support colour screens and higher resolutions because Palm didn't.
I had a Vx, it was great for the time, but now I'm a Windows Mobile person as I haven't seen the Palm camp innovate for a very long time.
In fact, I still consider them to be the classic case of a company that owned the market, dragged their feet and suddenly found that everyone else had overtaken them.
I don't like to track plugins. Firefox is ridiculous in that area. It does very little out of the box, but is so configurable that it is a usability nightmare. You have to spend *hours* drilling into hundreds of extensions, trying them, restarting the browser, to get something that may fit your needs. Upgrade are painfull, as extensions often stop working, and, as the browser is now splitted into dozen of components, you cannot count on functionality beeing always present (extensions come and go). It is a waste of time.
I've always maintained that it would be nice if 5-10 of the most popular plugins were made available during the installation phase rather than people having to get them manually everytime they rebuild. It's not like they don't already do this with the DOM inspector - which has zero use for the majority of people.
I'm sure there would be some contention over which ones to add, but i would consider anything that would appeal to the masses.
In addition, some of the really small and plainly obvious ones could actually be merged into the trunk. For example, it was always silly to make people install a 7kb extension to get tabs drag and droppable when people would expect this from the onset (thankfully, I'm told that 1.5 has this in).
To those who complain about download bloat and customisabilty, the obvious answer would be to make the installer download them during the installation process, therefore it wouldn't matter how big the extensions were, your installer size would only increase by a set size and you wouldn't have to have them if you didn't want.
Whilst we're at it, can some of the hidden settings be turned on? The ability to paste url's broken up over two lines into the address bar is brilliant so I'm unsure why it's off by default and then hidden.
If this is going to be the "copy protection" employed on all Sony disks in the future then it's a damn sight better (read: useless) than some of the other things they've tried.
Oops, missed the part which does have the detailed instructions if you've not held down shift and the Sony software has been installed.
Mind you, I doubt this won't affect a lot of Slashdotters who, I would have hoped, have disabled autorun on CD's.
The band posted a response on their official forum apologizing for the protection and detailing ways to circumvent the protection and rip their songs to PC.
Having read the posting, I think it would be safe to say that this disk doesn't have much "copy protection".
In short, the instructions for Windows PC's are, essentially, insert CD, hold down shift so it doesn't autorun, rip with CDex.
To be honest, I was expecting something a little more complicated although I do accept the fact that:
Most people don't know the hold-shift functionality.
It's nice to see a member of a band advocate ripping it to MP3.
If this is going to be the "copy protection" employed on all Sony disks in the future then it's a damn sight better (read: useless) than some of the other things they've tried.
A profile is put up with a girl's name and picture, and put in "Skype me" mode. Within minutes some seedy guy will invariably try calling/chatting, and there's a little program I made running the whole time which will partner up people 2 at a time, and send messages from the first person to the second, & vice versa.
Very funny that one, but I can beat it.
This is what happens when you call a chinese takeaway, put it on hold, call another chinese takeaway, make an order, unhold the first takeaway and get the second to repeat the order back to the first.
As you can imagine, the second one thinks the first is trying to order. It gets funny when they're trying to work out who will be picking up the food:)
Slashdot Mirror
Contrary to popular Slashdot opinion it isn't always evil. In a small number of cases, it can be benifical to the customer.
For example you could use DRM to provide people with previews of games and music on their phone so they can understand what they are getting before they puchase it properly.
For example: If I was going to download, say, a java game, then I'd far rather have the full game and can try it out for a couple of minutes or times (restricted by the DRM).
The alternative is for me to base my purchasing decision on a couple of pictures and a review written by someone who uses 3's for his e's.
However the problem comes with a PVR, you either get Tivo and do some jiggery pokery to get it to manage the changing of the channels on the digibox - which is not only a huge hack but means you can only tape one channel at a time and can't change from it during recording.
Or you pick up a box from Digifusion, Humax or two other companies I've forgotten which has twin tuners and a huge hard-drive but has a UI which isn't quite so slick. Oh, and not forgetting that absolutely none of them have season pass/series link so you cannot just push a button and record the entire series. They're nice ... but they just don't quite cut it.
Tivo could make a killing if they came up with a twin-tuner freeview box.
(side note: I know that part of the reason on no season pass is because freeview doesn't broadcast the season and episode numbers in its scheduling. However it doesn't take a genius to come up with a simple algorithm that looks for a similar title at around the same time each day and records it if it is on. Not the best solution - but better than having no one-click season pass at all)
[grumble]
Yes you can, however if the usual avenues you have tried then you need to fail. I don't mean you sit there, do nothing and wait till you get fired but produce a list of every single task that you have scheduled and then budget your time so that you do not run around getting stressed.
If something is going to miss a deadline, tell the owner of it. If they complain then tell them that they can escalate it. This will invariably mean that someone will come knocking wanting to know why that person is complaining. So sit them down, show them everything you need to do and what you can achieve in the next day and two days.
Don't let them bully you into doing more so that you end up stressed out. Point out to them that this is as much work as you can do and if they want you to do more then either they can sit with you every week and prioritise your work load or you need extra support.
Chances are they'll go for the prioritising. Let that happen every week. Do not let them dictate by which day you can do something, get them to order the tasks from the most important to the least and budget for the same amount of time. When people complain, you tell them to take it to the manager for re-prioritisation.
It's a long slow process, but eventually your manager will come to realise that you have far too much on your plate and he can't please everyone. When that time comes, you'll get your support.
Final comment: If you always manage to deliver everything on time, your management will assume you are perfectly capable of handling the workload and will not give you the support you require. Don't get stuck in a rut like I did, where I was stressed and overworked but because I delivered, no-one was prepared to give me the additional headcount I desperately required.
I know the one. You might be interested to know that O2 actually use USSD to deliver the balance information which, unlike flash SMS, doesn't require use of an SMSC.
Whilst I don't doubt that this kind of functionality has the potential to be good and bad - anything which requires support from the majority of vendors before it can be used will fail unless there is a significantly compelling reason to have it (eg. T9).
I don't see this as being quite in the same league as T9 though.
Okay, I stand corrected, the bugs are in Gecko or Mozilla. However since they're both open source and have bugs over 5 years old then my point that open source doesn't necessarily mean faster bugs fixes still stands.
Regardless, since the article said all Firefox security issues had been patched...
To be fair, I never used the word "security" in my posting as I wasn't referring to that but rather that bugs are fixed quicker in the open source model (which may be generally true, but Slashdot always loves an exception to that rule).
However if you want to talk security, according to Secunia, Firefox 1.x has 3 outstanding and Mozilla 1.7.x has 3 outstanding security issues.
I'm not in a position to confirm whether or not they have been patched in the latest version but until another reputable site can confirm that they're closed, then this is the best I (and other people) have to go on.
See here and here for two examples.
That's OK, most posts come out of people's posteriors.
Yours too, so it would seem. At least I am capable of being civil when replying to a posting.
Maybe so, but I still point to my previous comment that there are bugs in Firefox which are 5+ years old and haven't been fixed. 5 years is a long time in anyones books to sit on something and not attempt to allocate anyone to it.
To be fair though, I do understand why there are bugs like this sitting there. Writing free code essentially means you can pick and chose what you want to do. Adding cool new functionality is considered high profile and "sexy". Fixing some annoying bug which occurs when someone does a vaigue set of actions isn't in the slightest. When there is no monetary incentive (or boss) then people don't want to work on those kind of things.
Your comment on funding is, sadly, incorrect though. Unless you offer a bounty on specific bugs, just donating some money will not increase the likelihood of it being fixed as the roadmap for Firefox shows a desire to add more and more functionality.
In fact, I believe there are a couple of bugs in the system which do have bounties on them - and they aren't fixed either.
Finally, I never said you can get bug free sophisticated code.
Not much of an edge when you consider that there are at least two bugs in Firefox which haven't been fixed for 5 and 6 years respectivily.
Granted, they aren't as critical as the ones that come out of Microsoft, but I consider a couple of years to fix something more than a reasonable amount of time.
Not really sure, but you do get problems trying to use some of Google functionality and some financial sites because it thinks you live outside of the UK.
I'm sure you probably could download an extension to fix all of those issues ... but given that I have enough installed already, I'd rather not.
I know you are joking but I notice that if you live in the UK you cannot get hold of an en-GB version of Firefox 1.5.
It seems a bit odd that Slovenia (population 2,011,070), Norway (population 4,593,041) and Finland (population 5,223,442) can all have 1.5 produced before us despite the fact that their population numbers combined are significantly less than the 60,441,457 for the UK.
(It's not like we're a backwater either, we have the second highest number of internet users after Germany)
Hopefully it'll be ready after the weekend.
Actually, I'd say the biggest problem with Open Source is that people who work on it generally want to work on the cool, fun, high profile (ie. visible to the end users) and interesting stuff. Transparent xterms fall into this category.
Unfortunately the essential stuff (like drivers) is considered considerably "less cool" and attract fewer hackers.
Corporate environments don't have this problem quite so much because there are plenty of people happy to do the boring stuff as long as they get paid (which they do). When you're doing it for free in your own time, that incentive is not there.
ps. I find it interesting that some of the people who complained about his term "open sores" use "M$" frequently. Horses for courses...
As someone who set up and managed a major legal music-download service accessible from cellphones over three years ago I really wish the Slashdot editors would actually verify "first" claims like these.
Oh yes, and in case you were wondering, the music tracks were overpriced back then too.
If creating your own midi files/ringtones was illegal then companies such as handy.de, musiwave and WES would not have been able to start out.
(probably worth pointing out for the pedants that handy.de was bought by one of the big producers a couple of years ago and renamed to Arvato)
But the major problem for me was that *gasp* the searching wasn't very good. No seriously. Here's why:
In the end I gave up and installed Copernic which is far better. It is most definitely not perfect, for example, it can't just search everything (you have to specify files, emails, contacts etc.), the toolbar search isn't as useful as Google's (you can't just type something and your results start to appear in a menu), the IE and Firefox plugins don't actually search your desktop (only the web) and that there is no integrated search bar for Outlook (I do miss this).
However (and this is the big one), it re-index's far quicker and more often than Google and I can set it to re-index certain things (like my email) once every day which means that my results are always correct.
It wouldn't take much that GDS would need to change for me to revert back because I like the integrated search in Outlook and the toolbar - but the database inaccuracy means that its next to useless for the way I work.
Last time I checked Bill had not deprived me or anyone else of anything, either physically or financially. Whenever I have bought something from Microsoft, I have handed over my money of my own free will and received something back.
The reason people are fawning over his gesture is that he could have quite easily spent all that money on frivillious crap for himself. There are plenty of other multi-millionares who do.
Irrespective of the tax perks that he gets, I (and plenty of others) would prefer that he spent his money in this way rather than on a space trip, a number of islands and a couple of yachts.
I know Slashdot is based in the US and has a very large base of individuals who are based there - but I do think it is worth pointing out that in the UK, O2 were the first with direct download of music to mobile phones and T-Mobile were the first with direct download of music which required no additional hardware or software (WAP discovery and OTA download) - both of which were in order of years before this announcement.
I have no doubt that other countries probably were quicker off the mark than the UK too, so it would be only fair that in the future the editors ensured that statements claiming to be the first at something either were verified or stated in which terratory they were first in.
In this case, it implies the first everywhere, which isn't so.
t
h
i
s.
If you want to read Slashdot on your pda or phone then I don't believe there is currently any better way than by using Avantslash.
However I do admit I am a little biased :)
Every product I've ever worked on has taken months if not years of business cases, planning, design and management before it is even mentioned to the public.
I find it highly doubtful (although possible) that a company like Microsoft, hell any big company, would just announce they too are doing something immediately after a competitor if absolutely no thought had been put into it previously.
It wouldn't surprise me if this service has been in the planning for a hell of a lot longer than people think.
Oh and Sony, who bailed out ... and that wasn't until they had to go and implement a whole bunch of Sony only API's to support colour screens and higher resolutions because Palm didn't.
I had a Vx, it was great for the time, but now I'm a Windows Mobile person as I haven't seen the Palm camp innovate for a very long time.
In fact, I still consider them to be the classic case of a company that owned the market, dragged their feet and suddenly found that everyone else had overtaken them.
I'm away from a computer ATM (writing this on PocketPC) but am happy to correct and keep AvantSlash running if there is the demand.
To be honest I thought the Palm version would have also been updated making AvantSlash worthless - but this doesn't seem to be the case.
Anyway, I won't be able to update it till after the weekend if people still want it. Hope that doesn't cause too much misery
I've always maintained that it would be nice if 5-10 of the most popular plugins were made available during the installation phase rather than people having to get them manually everytime they rebuild. It's not like they don't already do this with the DOM inspector - which has zero use for the majority of people.
I'm sure there would be some contention over which ones to add, but i would consider anything that would appeal to the masses.
In addition, some of the really small and plainly obvious ones could actually be merged into the trunk. For example, it was always silly to make people install a 7kb extension to get tabs drag and droppable when people would expect this from the onset (thankfully, I'm told that 1.5 has this in).
To those who complain about download bloat and customisabilty, the obvious answer would be to make the installer download them during the installation process, therefore it wouldn't matter how big the extensions were, your installer size would only increase by a set size and you wouldn't have to have them if you didn't want.
Whilst we're at it, can some of the hidden settings be turned on? The ability to paste url's broken up over two lines into the address bar is brilliant so I'm unsure why it's off by default and then hidden.
Oops, missed the part which does have the detailed instructions if you've not held down shift and the Sony software has been installed.
Mind you, I doubt this won't affect a lot of Slashdotters who, I would have hoped, have disabled autorun on CD's.
Having read the posting, I think it would be safe to say that this disk doesn't have much "copy protection".
In short, the instructions for Windows PC's are, essentially, insert CD, hold down shift so it doesn't autorun, rip with CDex.
To be honest, I was expecting something a little more complicated although I do accept the fact that:
- Most people don't know the hold-shift functionality.
- It's nice to see a member of a band advocate ripping it to MP3.
If this is going to be the "copy protection" employed on all Sony disks in the future then it's a damn sight better (read: useless) than some of the other things they've tried.Very funny that one, but I can beat it.
This is what happens when you call a chinese takeaway, put it on hold, call another chinese takeaway, make an order, unhold the first takeaway and get the second to repeat the order back to the first.
As you can imagine, the second one thinks the first is trying to order. It gets funny when they're trying to work out who will be picking up the food :)