Since scientific and engineering literature is almost always published in SI now, even not having the Yanks on board doesn't really matter to the rest of the world.
Alternatively, you can also switch to another station:D
That's what I came here to post. My favorite station is commercial-free and listener-supported. I encourage people to seek out stations and other business who are employing this business model and support them.
This is really the best response to the idiotic behavior of the MPAA and RIAA. Don't "steal" music and movies, support those who are offering an alternative. They can call us "thieves" all they like, but if we can point to examples like RadioParadise - which exists solely because people voluntarily send them money when they could simply be free-loaders - it really deflates the argument that people are not willing to pay for something they can also get for "free."
And it'll work about as well as the switch to metric, too.
The switch to metric worked just fine for the countries that did it. In fact, the only confusion that exists is a result of the fact that some countries have chosen to hold out.
No, I meant astroturfing. As your link states, astroturfing is an organized campaign disguised "to create the impression of being spontaneous 'grassroots' behavior," and I have no doubt that it goes on plenty around here, as it does on any site that is open to user-generated content.
But you are right, Slashdot is also strongly polarized, and regular users are quick to demonstrate their biases, as the poster I was replying to did when he used the statement "I know this is./" to imply there is only an anti-Microsoft bias on Slashdot.
I think if you want that provider-of-last-resort, you need to be willing to pay for it. I'm sure with some scripting you could automate the process of regularly backing up your important data from these services to (hopefully multiple) online "failsafe" storage sites via scp or whatever. Having multiple, redundant back up sites guards against a catastrophe if they are far enough apart.
As for online services that don't charge their users, I would say you use them at your own risk, and entrust the longevity of your data to the provider at your own peril.
I know this is/. but Windows 7 is much better than Vista and looks to be a decent OS for those who wish to run Windows
The trouble is, XP is also a decent OS for those who wish to run Windows. Vista offered no compelling reason to change, and any benefits it offered were outweighed by the additional training it necessitated. That's the reason a lot of people chose to stick with XP. Unless Windows 7 offers some tangible advantages over XP, I see no reason to change.
And what is "I know this is/." supposed to mean? I see equal astro-turfing by the pro and anti Microsoft camps around here.
We live in an age with media saturation. If Game Company A offers no demos, Companies B, C... X, Y, Z will be more than happy to.
Unless the game A releases has some type of buzz then, B-Z get the sale.
That's true, but it has nothing to do with Rinisari (521266)'s point that one of the reasons a demo may hurt a game's sales is if it demonstrates that the game isn't any good. This statement is also true.
This is easy to fix. I ran into demos like that. The point is to give a taste, not a meal.
Just like a restuarant shouldn't stuff you with free appetizers if it wants to sell product.
Someone mentioned Quake 3 above and I think it's a good example of this. The basic game play of just fragging other players and/or bots made the demo really all the (extremely) casual gamer like myself needed. OTO, giving potential customers the chance to "taste" enough to make them want more can *increase* sales (the Half Life demo made me go right out and purchase the game the next day), but there's got to be the promise of something more than the demo has shown you for this to be successful.
As for using the demo to determine whether the game will run on your system, for me that's huge. I tend to time system upgrades to coincide with fulfilling as many needs as possible. It's very rare that I would go out and buy a new video card just to play one game. If my system is getting long in the tooth and it's time for an upgrade anyway, then sure. The demo might motivate me to stop procrastinating and change the card.
As for the article, I doubt letting people have a taste before buy has ever prevented people from buying something that's worth it. Novelists publish chapters from upcoming novels in magazines; supermarkets and delis let people sample products they are selling; even the idiots at the MPAA allow their members to use movie trailers to promote their movies. If your demo prevents people from buying the game, your game probably sucks.
One thing that demos have stopped me from doing is buying bad games that I would have thought would be good
+1 Insightful.
Roger Ebert likes to point out when a studio doesn't hold screenings for critics. It's usually a sign that the movie sucks real bad, and they're hoping to make as much as they can on the opening weekend, before bad reviews and word-of-mouth let the public in on the fact that it's a dud.
I'm not much of a gamer, but I always check out a game's demo before plunking down sixty or seventy dollars on the full version. If a demo is a "game killer," that's probably because it demonstrated that the game isn't worth the price.
I purchased an "ebook" online a couple of months back. The PDF is password protected with the Gmail address I used to deal with the publisher, and my name and mailing address appear at the top of every page. Entering the password is a bit of a pain - mostly because I need to remember it - but I don't have a problem with them doing it. Having my name and address appear on the pages is fine with me - it's my book.
This is really no different, in fact it's less restrictive as I don't believe you need to enter a password to play the iTunes files.
it's China's fault for not enforcing their own regulations... assuming that it's the US' fault for not enforcing Chinese environmental legislation is kind of odd.
Certainly the Chinese should be enforcing their regulations, but we need to take responsibility as well for the results of our choices. Continuing to knowingly send hazardous materials through channels that ultimately lead to birth defects in China is wrong. I don't think that's what you were suggesting when you said that, but I don't think it's acceptable any more to just dump you garbage on the curb and not give another thought to what happens to it after that.
(BTW, I'm not just pointing a finger at the US, I'm including myself and the rest of the world in the above statement. This is one big pool we're all swimming in; if someone at the other end pisses in it I'm eventually gonna drink some of it).
Re:Another review of this book
on
Using Drupal
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· Score: 1
Much better with hands-on, practical walkthroughs than any others out there.
Check out this one. I found that it filled in the gaps left by the online handbook quite nicely. I also like that the publisher funnels some of their profits back in to the projects their books cover.
You can also use GNU's shred. Just make sure to shred the device, rather than individual files, if you use a journaled file system or it may not be completely effective.
For me, the only downside is screen real estate, but it's sure nice that my girlfriend has one now. We tend to watch a lot of movies and TV on my laptop, but the eee pc does this beautifully and it's half the size, gets five hours of battery life (she's not constantly hammering the wireless the way I do - well, not yet), and it's run every application I've put on it. I don't think I could get by with it alone when traveling for work, but if I was going somewhere on vacation I would be tempted to leave the huge Dell notebook at home.
We purchase most of our machines from Dell, but that's an excellent suggestion. I've been pleasantly surprised at how functional these little machines are. If we end up deploying more of them I'll look in to upgrading them to Pro.
You're giving Intel and Microsoft way too much credit. It was ASUS that destroyed the OLPC, by creating the netbook market when it released the first Eee PC... Microsoft and Intel won't be able to do much to stop that trend
The eee pcs use an Intel Atom processor, and most models can be purchased with XP for an operating system. So I doubt either Microsoft or Intel would care to stop the trend.
By the way, they're sweet little machines. I purchased one for our CFO to take with him while he travels (they fit nicely on the little trays on the back of the seats in airplanes) and we were so impressed I bought a couple more to use for training/loaner purposes. (They only come with XP home, so their usefulness is somewhat limited in an Active Directory environment).
I also picked up one for my girlfriend for Christmas, which allowed me to retire an old iBook that's been nothing but trouble. The keyboard is quite usable (you even get a left and right ctrl key!) but it takes some getting used to the position of the right shift key.
I think Asus has hit the nail square on the head with the eee pc. It's no replacement for a full-blown laptop if that's what you need, but if you have a family member who just wants a small, light, esthetically-pleasing computer to surf the web and play a little Solitaire they're perfect.
If I had a badass scar across my face, I'd be extremely pissed off if it was photoshopped off my ID card
Not to mention the fact that the purpose of an ID card is to identify someone. Altering their appearance in the photo kind of defeats that purpose.
I use Photoshop mostly to make levels adjustments and such to improve the quality of the photo, not change the way a person looks. If the subject of an otherwise good shot has a booger in his nose, or some other "temporary" feature that would embarrass them, I'll touch it up, but other than that I leave it alone. I like to say that I use Photoshop to fix my mistakes, not God's.
Sync tools are plentiful and easier to understand and deal with than 'backup' tools.
That's what DeltaCopy is - a Windows implementation of rsync. After the initial "backup," subsequent runs only copy the files (or portions of a given file) that have changed, so depending on how much new data you generate on a daily basis, it doesn't take very much time. You can use the Windows scheduler to automate the process, and it's quite painless. It can also work with network shares, something the "backup" software that is typically included with the external hard drives can not do. That's why I recommend it to people who aren't savvy enough to manage a proper backup routine.
I have set up a number of these devices at our smaller branches, who don't have a "server" on site. One of the machines runs the DeltaCopy service, and the rest connect to it and synchronize daily. I remote in from time-to-time to make sure everything is running smoothly and usually have someone take the drive home at night so they have an off-site backup. Other than plugging the thing in every morning, the user doesn't have to do a thing.
Just look at paris hilton! What did the 'infamous' sex tape do to her? Shot her popularity through the roof!
Yeah, but I don't see Paris being used to promote the Hilton brand. Oprah is on the cover over every O magazine and is the face of a company worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Even if the publicity wouldn't hurt her, I doubt there is much upside for her in getting involved in a protracted lawsuit. But I guess we'll find out soon enough.
Silly question: Does he buy a new card for every shoot?
No kidding. Silly story, IMO. Are people using SD cards for long-term storage? If they are, they are just asking to lose their photos.
I dump my photos to my file server ASAP after a shoot. I do a nightly incremental backup, and a full backup every week to an external hard drive. "Important" stuff (like someone's wedding photos, for example) get transferred immediately to my storage space at my web host, providing an off-site backup.
But I know, most people don't make multiple, redundant copies of their photos. I suppose it was no different in the past - people would get their film developed and printed and then store the photos and negatives in the same place. Often that would be a cardboard box in the basement, so if their house flooded they would lose their kid's baby pictures.
People take a lot more pictures (and video) these days, so in a sense they have more to lose. My advise to txmadman would be to set up a hierarchy of directories - one for each family member - within the My Pictures directory of their computer and get everyone in the family in the habit of dumping their photos to their directory right away. Buy one of those external hard drives or a regular hard drive and enclosure, and use something like DeltaCopy to do automated, incremental backups (you can use the software that sometimes comes with these backup drives, but DeltaCopy offers more functionality and it's "free software"). As soon as they have transferred their pictures, they should format their memory card using the camera, to avoid confusion over whether or not they have transferred their photos.
Tonight on Larry King live, he had 3 guests, Oprahs personal trainer, her spiritual adviser and some other guy, talk at length about GASP, OPRAH GETTING FAT. What the hell is wrong with our world, I don't know where to begin anymore.
Meanwhile, the new season of Biggest Loser debuted tonight as well. Maybe they should do Biggest Celebrity Loser!
Slashdot Mirror
Unless you're building a house (or baking a cake)
That's what I came here to post. My favorite station is commercial-free and listener-supported. I encourage people to seek out stations and other business who are employing this business model and support them.
This is really the best response to the idiotic behavior of the MPAA and RIAA. Don't "steal" music and movies, support those who are offering an alternative. They can call us "thieves" all they like, but if we can point to examples like RadioParadise - which exists solely because people voluntarily send them money when they could simply be free-loaders - it really deflates the argument that people are not willing to pay for something they can also get for "free."
The switch to metric worked just fine for the countries that did it. In fact, the only confusion that exists is a result of the fact that some countries have chosen to hold out.
No, I meant astroturfing. As your link states, astroturfing is an organized campaign disguised "to create the impression of being spontaneous 'grassroots' behavior," and I have no doubt that it goes on plenty around here, as it does on any site that is open to user-generated content.
But you are right, Slashdot is also strongly polarized, and regular users are quick to demonstrate their biases, as the poster I was replying to did when he used the statement "I know this is ./" to imply there is only an anti-Microsoft bias on Slashdot.
I think if you want that provider-of-last-resort, you need to be willing to pay for it. I'm sure with some scripting you could automate the process of regularly backing up your important data from these services to (hopefully multiple) online "failsafe" storage sites via scp or whatever. Having multiple, redundant back up sites guards against a catastrophe if they are far enough apart.
As for online services that don't charge their users, I would say you use them at your own risk, and entrust the longevity of your data to the provider at your own peril.
The trouble is, XP is also a decent OS for those who wish to run Windows. Vista offered no compelling reason to change, and any benefits it offered were outweighed by the additional training it necessitated. That's the reason a lot of people chose to stick with XP. Unless Windows 7 offers some tangible advantages over XP, I see no reason to change.
And what is "I know this is /." supposed to mean? I see equal astro-turfing by the pro and anti Microsoft camps around here.
This doesn't make any sense. Why didn't Warner just give the offending parties a "stern lecture?"
That's true, but it has nothing to do with Rinisari (521266)'s point that one of the reasons a demo may hurt a game's sales is if it demonstrates that the game isn't any good. This statement is also true.
Someone mentioned Quake 3 above and I think it's a good example of this. The basic game play of just fragging other players and/or bots made the demo really all the (extremely) casual gamer like myself needed. OTO, giving potential customers the chance to "taste" enough to make them want more can *increase* sales (the Half Life demo made me go right out and purchase the game the next day), but there's got to be the promise of something more than the demo has shown you for this to be successful.
As for using the demo to determine whether the game will run on your system, for me that's huge. I tend to time system upgrades to coincide with fulfilling as many needs as possible. It's very rare that I would go out and buy a new video card just to play one game. If my system is getting long in the tooth and it's time for an upgrade anyway, then sure. The demo might motivate me to stop procrastinating and change the card.
As for the article, I doubt letting people have a taste before buy has ever prevented people from buying something that's worth it. Novelists publish chapters from upcoming novels in magazines; supermarkets and delis let people sample products they are selling; even the idiots at the MPAA allow their members to use movie trailers to promote their movies. If your demo prevents people from buying the game, your game probably sucks.
+1 Insightful.
Roger Ebert likes to point out when a studio doesn't hold screenings for critics. It's usually a sign that the movie sucks real bad, and they're hoping to make as much as they can on the opening weekend, before bad reviews and word-of-mouth let the public in on the fact that it's a dud.
I'm not much of a gamer, but I always check out a game's demo before plunking down sixty or seventy dollars on the full version. If a demo is a "game killer," that's probably because it demonstrated that the game isn't worth the price.
You can wipe and disable them from the BES.
I purchased an "ebook" online a couple of months back. The PDF is password protected with the Gmail address I used to deal with the publisher, and my name and mailing address appear at the top of every page. Entering the password is a bit of a pain - mostly because I need to remember it - but I don't have a problem with them doing it. Having my name and address appear on the pages is fine with me - it's my book.
This is really no different, in fact it's less restrictive as I don't believe you need to enter a password to play the iTunes files.
Well he is the ScrewMaster ...
Certainly the Chinese should be enforcing their regulations, but we need to take responsibility as well for the results of our choices. Continuing to knowingly send hazardous materials through channels that ultimately lead to birth defects in China is wrong. I don't think that's what you were suggesting when you said that, but I don't think it's acceptable any more to just dump you garbage on the curb and not give another thought to what happens to it after that.
(BTW, I'm not just pointing a finger at the US, I'm including myself and the rest of the world in the above statement. This is one big pool we're all swimming in; if someone at the other end pisses in it I'm eventually gonna drink some of it).
And marriage is the leading cause of divorce.
Check out this one. I found that it filled in the gaps left by the online handbook quite nicely. I also like that the publisher funnels some of their profits back in to the projects their books cover.
Unfortunately, the US Congress keeps passing legislation that enables these fuckin commie pirates to continue to plunder out culture and destroy anyone who threatens their outdated business model.
You can also use GNU's shred. Just make sure to shred the device, rather than individual files, if you use a journaled file system or it may not be completely effective.
For me, the only downside is screen real estate, but it's sure nice that my girlfriend has one now. We tend to watch a lot of movies and TV on my laptop, but the eee pc does this beautifully and it's half the size, gets five hours of battery life (she's not constantly hammering the wireless the way I do - well, not yet), and it's run every application I've put on it. I don't think I could get by with it alone when traveling for work, but if I was going somewhere on vacation I would be tempted to leave the huge Dell notebook at home.
We purchase most of our machines from Dell, but that's an excellent suggestion. I've been pleasantly surprised at how functional these little machines are. If we end up deploying more of them I'll look in to upgrading them to Pro.
The eee pcs use an Intel Atom processor, and most models can be purchased with XP for an operating system. So I doubt either Microsoft or Intel would care to stop the trend.
By the way, they're sweet little machines. I purchased one for our CFO to take with him while he travels (they fit nicely on the little trays on the back of the seats in airplanes) and we were so impressed I bought a couple more to use for training/loaner purposes. (They only come with XP home, so their usefulness is somewhat limited in an Active Directory environment).
I also picked up one for my girlfriend for Christmas, which allowed me to retire an old iBook that's been nothing but trouble. The keyboard is quite usable (you even get a left and right ctrl key!) but it takes some getting used to the position of the right shift key.
I think Asus has hit the nail square on the head with the eee pc. It's no replacement for a full-blown laptop if that's what you need, but if you have a family member who just wants a small, light, esthetically-pleasing computer to surf the web and play a little Solitaire they're perfect.
Not to mention the fact that the purpose of an ID card is to identify someone. Altering their appearance in the photo kind of defeats that purpose.
I use Photoshop mostly to make levels adjustments and such to improve the quality of the photo, not change the way a person looks. If the subject of an otherwise good shot has a booger in his nose, or some other "temporary" feature that would embarrass them, I'll touch it up, but other than that I leave it alone. I like to say that I use Photoshop to fix my mistakes, not God's.
That's what DeltaCopy is - a Windows implementation of rsync. After the initial "backup," subsequent runs only copy the files (or portions of a given file) that have changed, so depending on how much new data you generate on a daily basis, it doesn't take very much time. You can use the Windows scheduler to automate the process, and it's quite painless. It can also work with network shares, something the "backup" software that is typically included with the external hard drives can not do. That's why I recommend it to people who aren't savvy enough to manage a proper backup routine.
I have set up a number of these devices at our smaller branches, who don't have a "server" on site. One of the machines runs the DeltaCopy service, and the rest connect to it and synchronize daily. I remote in from time-to-time to make sure everything is running smoothly and usually have someone take the drive home at night so they have an off-site backup. Other than plugging the thing in every morning, the user doesn't have to do a thing.
Yeah, but I don't see Paris being used to promote the Hilton brand. Oprah is on the cover over every O magazine and is the face of a company worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Even if the publicity wouldn't hurt her, I doubt there is much upside for her in getting involved in a protracted lawsuit. But I guess we'll find out soon enough.
No kidding. Silly story, IMO. Are people using SD cards for long-term storage? If they are, they are just asking to lose their photos.
I dump my photos to my file server ASAP after a shoot. I do a nightly incremental backup, and a full backup every week to an external hard drive. "Important" stuff (like someone's wedding photos, for example) get transferred immediately to my storage space at my web host, providing an off-site backup.
But I know, most people don't make multiple, redundant copies of their photos. I suppose it was no different in the past - people would get their film developed and printed and then store the photos and negatives in the same place. Often that would be a cardboard box in the basement, so if their house flooded they would lose their kid's baby pictures.
People take a lot more pictures (and video) these days, so in a sense they have more to lose. My advise to txmadman would be to set up a hierarchy of directories - one for each family member - within the My Pictures directory of their computer and get everyone in the family in the habit of dumping their photos to their directory right away. Buy one of those external hard drives or a regular hard drive and enclosure, and use something like DeltaCopy to do automated, incremental backups (you can use the software that sometimes comes with these backup drives, but DeltaCopy offers more functionality and it's "free software"). As soon as they have transferred their pictures, they should format their memory card using the camera, to avoid confusion over whether or not they have transferred their photos.
Meanwhile, the new season of Biggest Loser debuted tonight as well. Maybe they should do Biggest Celebrity Loser!