Now I remember what program that was: Windows Task Manager. The contents of the menus changed depending on which Task Manager tab you had selected at the moment. Now most of these menu changes were context-sensitive (selecting columns that were only displayed in the Processes menu, for instance), but if I recall correctly, the "Shut Down..." option was available in the menu if ONE of the three tabs was selected, but not the other two.
What seems like an extension of Microsoft's "Do more with less" mantra appears to me to be dishonesty and inconsistency. If you've witnessed a relatively computer-unsavvy person trying to hunt around for a menu option that has "disappeared", then you know that consistency is the most important property of a UI. It should stay as it appeared before; not vanish suddenly, presenting you with less options, or suddenly moving options around behind your back.
In my opinion, Steve Ballmer needs to wrangle up his UI "developers, developers, developers, developers", and have a little talk about "consistency, consistency, consistency, consistency..."
I remember using some Microsoft program, and the contents of the File menu changed depending on which sub-window was highlighted at any particular moment. I don't quite remember which program it was; it might've been Microsoft Query Analyzer, but then again it might've been Microsoft Nightmare.;-)
The sad part is that Microsoft has started discouraging the use of keyboard combinations since Windows XP, and Apple has encouraged the use of keyboard combinations since OS X. There are some XP programs and features that have no keyboard shortcuts, and won't allow the use of the system caret (the highlight over a button, text field, or other UI object that helps you use the keyboard to manipulate and use GUI objects), while in OS X 10.4, there's an option in "System Preferences -> Keyboard & Mouse" that lets you "press Tab to move the keyboard focus between:... All controls".
We have come full circle, ladies and gentlemen. Combine this with Quicksilver and other utilities, and the Mac is now more keyboard-friendly than the Windows PC, and can be used more efficiently than the Windows PC. What has this world come to?
Not just potential employees, but entire families. My family has lived in the greater Boston area for over 140 years, and exorbitant housing costs are going to force the youngest generation to either rent all our lives, or move farther west of Boston, perhaps even out of the state entirely. A family-sized house is worth $0.5 million when 20 miles away from Boston, and only goes up as you get closer. And guess where a lot of the tech jobs are? Within a 20 mile radius of Boston. Burlington has many office buildings with such residents as Adobe Systems, Sun Microsystems, and Oracle. Farther out west are companies like EMC, Hewlett-Packard, and Intel. It's like a miniature Silicon Valley.
But outsourcing, rising housing costs, rising taxes, rising healthcare, rising auto insurance (arguably the worst in the country; I'm a step 9 and pay over $900 per year for a Corolla) are driving people elsewhere. And since the average salary for any position is higher here than in places like the Midwest, Tobacco Road, and so on, companies won't want to move in or grow here. There are already companies that are moving out or considering moving out. And the rolling blackouts are a death knell for anyone who wants to run a datacenter: the mostly natural-gas-fired electrical power plants have exposed a weakness in the infrastructure here. The writing is on the wall.
Re:How about an OS that just plays a music CD
on
Bad Day To Be Sony
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· Score: 2, Informative
One now-odious trend that was started around 1995 was the "Enhanced CD", which was a multisession music CD with a primary redbook music session, and a data session that would be recognized as a CD-ROM when inserted into multisession-capable CD-ROM drives. I'm not that versed in how Enhanced CD tells the computer to recognize the data session, but I do know that the CD-ROM drive must be multisession capable (every drive after about 1996 is capable). When you inserted the CD into a Windows 95 computer, the data session would be loaded, and whatever was scripted in AUTORUN.INF would run. I'm inclined to believe that Microsoft had a hand in this by creating autorun, as that would not only make installing software easier, but would create the impression of a hands-free multimedia experience for all the luddites. Some Enhanced CDs contained things like music videos, movie cast interviews, and so on, but much more of this was devoted to promotional advertising.
One other way to have music and data on the same disc was to have a "mixed-mode CD", which would have track 1 as the data and tracks 2-99 as music. Many PC games from 1996 onward did this, as having the CD play presented less CPU overhead than WAV/MP3/MOD music, and sounded better and more consistent from system to system than MIDI. Of course, these CDs ended up having track 1 used for data, which would sound like either silence or noise when played on a regular CD player, depending on whether the CD player would screen out the data track as noise.
When the copy protection rush started to develop, music companies used the multisession hole combined with AUTORUN.INF in Windows to present "media players" that would obscure the music track and force the user to agree to a EULA and load some proprietary player to play less-than-CD-quality tracks with a monitored player that would phone home. When combined with a non-redbook CD-audio track that had spurious errors injected, this provided the "ultimate unrippable CD". Well, throw in Linux and Mac users either getting around the autorun hole or having their systems crash due to the protection, along with consumer outrage at not being able to play the "spurious error" CDs in any multi-speed CD player, along with this new debacle, and you have a big conundrum.
Apple's OS X already has an option to show all sessions on a CD as different CD icons when a disc is loaded. Microsoft still hasn't done anything like this for Windows, nor have they considered ditching the security vulnerability that is Autorun.
If I remember correctly, Macromedia was responsible for the whole "Enhanced CD" craze.
1. PHB sees Microsoft adverspamming for Windows Computer Cluster 2003, and believes the drivel. 2. PHB makes case to execs, gets capital for an 80-node WCC2K3 cluster for eleventy billion dollars, thanks to Licensing 7. 3. Admins shake their heads in disdain, get the thing running, and walk away. 4. Developers waste time and resources reinventing the wheel. 5. Nodes start to get rooted because the admins didn't harden the system. 6. Organized crime groups use nodes to DDoS websites in the name of extortion. 7.... 8. Profit! (for Microsoft, at least).
Re:Criminal charges against Microsoft too.
on
Bad Day To Be Sony
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· Score: 1
By my count, Microsoft, Sophos, Symantec, and the Department of Homeland Security have "violated the DMCA".
I've also personally worked with an HP bladecenter, and its AC power supply unit runs off of 3-phase. The bladecenter itself takes two 48VDC lines, and there's a DC power kit so you can run the bladecenter in a 48VDC-powered facility.
So here's the list of application crashes not fatal to general system stability, with OS version. And of course, the newer version had "No more ($errorname)s!", because they were no longer called $errorname.
- Windows 3.0: Uninterruptible Application Error - Windows 3.1: General Protection Fault - Windows 95/98/ME: Illegal Operation - Windows NT/2K/XP: Access Violation
I wonder what the new, re-euphemised name for this in Windows Vista will be. Unapproved Boondoggle Cessation?
Driver annoyances are the main reason why I went for a 12" PowerBook. Wi-Fi worked out of the box (but I had to connect via ethernet initially so I could get past the intro screens, enter a terminal, and do a quick ifconfig to print en1's MAC address, since Apple only prints the ethernet MAC on the sticker instide the battery chamber). Video was rock solid, and already at the proper resolution (which is more than can be said for wrestling with X, especially if your video chipset has a restricted driver). Sound worked fine. Hard drives worked fine (I've seen firsthand the issues with using Fedora on some Dell Latitude laptops that use SATA hard drives). Browsers were relatively mature (I threw on Camino and Opera in addition to Safari; the browse-out continues). I have working Quake 3 and Quake 1. CD burning is fully functional without driver issues. Perl and ruby are already installed (now it's time to learn 'em!); the C compiler is on the utilities CD in case I need to use it. And, most importantly, the manufacturer will support the *nix OS that's installed if I have problems, so I'm not lost looking on forums if something stupid happens.
This is how a *nix laptop should be. Not wrestling with drivers all over the place. Unfortunately, too many of the manufacturers out there are too obstinate to support non-profit driver development.
Oh, GREAT. If there was one piece of software that I wanted to see starved off by Microsoft's monopoly, it was RealPlayer. I don't like how Windows Media Player 8/9/10 promotes DRM, installs a DRM service in every Windows XP computer (mspmspsv.exe), and may potentially install more DRMware at the driver or kernel level, but Real is no better. Their software is harder to install, and more bloated and cumbersome than Windows Media Player 9. Their software uses an even worse "web portal" interface than WMP, and performs worse in erratic stream playback than WMP. And their RealOne player is one of the most invasive pieces of software when installed. It's basically spyware and malware.
From what I've seen, support for streaming media is heading away from Real and toward Windows Media merely because all the computers with Windows XP preinstalled can play WM files already, as opposed to having to download and run the Real installer. The fact that many media sites already have to deal with enterprise MS software licensing may have something else to do with it. Despite being an ISO standard and natively streamable, MPEG 4 has been plagued by the codec mess (mostly Microsoft's fault) four years ago. There is no single "MPEG 4" codec; instead, there's Microsoft's MPEG 4, DivX, XviD, QuickTime, blah, blah, blah. Users are turned away due to the sheer number of codecs they have to download just to view one video. The newest "universal" MPEG format is still MPEG 2, and it doesn't get the compression that many people need to make video sizes or bandwidths palatable to the customers.
And so now, in the next version of Windows, we'll all have RealONE bundled in, but hopefully with less access violations and bluescreens than the program delivers now. And, hopefully, with a more consumer-friendly and less surreptitious frontend. I'd rather watch Microsoft choke Real to death with WMP; despite the DRM and Microsoft-coded bizarreness, Real's software is worse.
But the last straw came a year ago when the pop-ups began plugging such household names as J.C. Penney Co. and Capital One Financial Corp., companies McMann expected to know better.
So this person expects Capital One, a company known for making the corniest commercials on TV, and a participant in the national scheme pushing limitless interest rates and exorbitant fees, to not engage in adware? I'd expect Capital One to be one of the FIRST and BIGGEST users of adware, popups, and direct marketing.
They put David Spade on our television screens two years longer than necessary; that alone is evil enough!
Note: 3.1_r0 CD image problem A bug has been discovered in the 3.1_r0 CD/DVD images: new installs from these images will have a commented-out entry in/etc/apt/sources.list for "http://security.debian.org/ testing/updates" rather than an active entry for "http://security.debian.org/ stable/updates", and thus will not get security updates by default. This was due to incorrect Release files on the images.
If you have already installed a system using a 3.1r0 CD/DVD image, you do not need to reinstall. Instead, simply edit/etc/apt/sources.list, look for any lines mentioning security.debian.org, change "testing" to "stable", and remove "# " from the start of the line.
If you installed other than from a CD or DVD (for example, netboot, or booting from floppy and installing the base system from the network), you are not affected by this bug.
These new 3.1_r0a images correct this flaw. We apologise for the inconvenience.
On another note, I wanted to start downloading the 3.1 ISO set for Sparc, but none of the US mirrors have 3.1 ISO sets, and the root server is giving out 404's. Perhaps they're all still busy updating? At this point, I don't think bit-torrent is propagated well enough to be faster than HTTP/FTP, and jigdo only puts the load on your workstation by opening 9,000 connections on your box to go download little bits of Debian.
I can name four games with heavy gunplay with realistic weapons that are all rated Teen by the ESRB: Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, Call of Duty, Battlefield 1942, Battlefield Vietnam. All of these games get a Teen rating because they lack blood. They all feature real-world weapons being used exclusively on humans with realistic sound effects and non-blood visual effects. They even feature explosions with humans getting injured by the blasts, and human suffering and aggression. But they escape through a loophole because they don't show blood spilling. Something is seriously wrong here.
Personally, I consider anything with real-life guns or very detailed suffering to be Mature, blood or no blood. Letting companies "enhance their marketing spectrum" because they leave out one mature item out of many is wrong. Anyone else notice that three of the four games I mentioned were published by Electronic Arts?
I haven't heard of a law regarding the freedom of media playback (has this issue ever come up before standardized digital media were invented?), but as it is now, the CDDA patent holders will forbid the label from placing the "Compact Disc Digital Audio" logo on the CD or case. This has happened before with Cactus Data Shield, Macrovision, etc., and it didn't stop consumers from buying the CDs without checking for the seal. After consumers discovered that their multi-speed drives couldn't play the "CDs" they were buying, they started complaining to the labels and started spreading the word, and the cat was out of the bag as far as the redbook-violating protection schemes were concerned.
I once read that dance music label Kontor was going to use copy protection on CD single releases, as well as albums. Many DJs use expensive CD players such as the Pioneer CDJ-1000 and Denon 5000 that are all multi-speed, have large buffers, and do real-time pitch adjustment, which REQUIRES multi-speed drives. These players only work with redbook CDs; the faux-error copy protection schemes that won't run in many car CD players will also make these >$600 CD players choke. Hopefully music labels have thought more of this when mastering CDs now.
agreed, CDE is fugly, but it's functional. Even after a bit of kicking around in Java Desktop a bit, I like CDE on my Ultra 2 because it loads a lot faster, and doesn't take up the huge amount of memory and CPU time that GNOME does. Desktop wallpapers got old on about the fourth time I logged in just to do a few console things, and speaking of console, gnome-terminal's antialiased fonts are worthless when using a 1152x900 display; I was opening rxvt more often because it wasn't a resource hog.
After a while, I saw that Java Desktop was a lot less appealing on a low-end machine like the Ultra 2. I mean, I can still run XMMS and The Gimp in CDE just fine, even though I can't use a custom wallpaper.
"Security is a question," Gillespie said. "How easy is it for someone to interact with a wireless communication and pick up a number?"
Hopefully not as easy as stopping payment on questionable charges to the account. The advantage of online progressively-updated statements becomes infinitely greater here; you'll have to check your statements every WEEK if it gets bad. Genuine cowhide is out, 100 mil thick aluminum is in!
Their proprietary formats are a de facto standard (except Massachusetts)
Last I checked, the de facto standard here is still MS Word. IMO the only reason why Massachusetts is still in the class action is because SOMEONE had to throw a wrench in the works (and a pack of lawyers want to get rich quick while us consumers just shred up the 6-page class-action form that will only yield vouchers for more Microsoft software; seriously, I got one of these, and it was a waste of time).
Some factors to the misconception that Massachusetts is the bastion of anti-M$ are the facts that Massachusetts plays host to MIT (birthplace of X, alma mater of many *nix users), the Free Software Foundation, etc. Come on, we have a supreme judicial court that passed a statute on gay marriage, and a governor who openly opposes gay marriage AND civil unions. Even WE don't know what we stand for!
Yeah, I had to devote an entire day to installing Gentoo, and the box didn't have an Internet connection. I had to boot the Gentoo CD with the "docache" option at the SILO prompt to allow the ejecting of the CDROM, and dump the entire package CD onto the hard drive. Even then I couldn't get a number of packages.
The box isn't running Gentoo normally, though; I basically wanted to go through a Gentoo install successfully so I could do it all again in less time when I have the box situated in a semi-permanent, usable place. It's running Solaris 10 now, which is pretty cool, but Java Desktop runs pretty slow. Still very usable in CDE though. This computer isn't used regularly; I just do my *nix experimentation on it now and then.
Some may ask "Why not use Debian instead if you have no Internet?" I already tried; Debian Woody doesn't interface with the hardware RTC chip or the power interface, so I couldn't reliably change the system clock, and I'd have to manually shut down the box. I have the same Debian running in a Sparcstation 5 though, and it doesn't have any those incompatibility problems.
That specsheet says "2 Model 844", which would imply only two Opterons. While that's not too shabby, this is a quad CPU server; why not smoke 'em if you got 'em (or just go buy the V20z)? I haven't read through the whole article, so I don't know what the $20K reviewing sample has in it, but it still sounds enticing.
That's pretty fast compared to what I've done: compiling 2.4.27 in Gentoo on a Sun Ultra 2 (2 x 300 MHz UltraSPARC). It took over 90 minutes, and that was without the USB and Bluetooth sections of the kernel, since there's no way the Ultra 2 can make any use of either.
have they ever said who it's for? I'm assuming at least motion pictures ("Movies. They're worth it.") and sporting events (at last they have a method of enforcing the "This telecast may not be copied..." spiel). But what's to stop the networks from flagging everything with the broadcast flag? About the only thing to stop that is the ATSC DVR market, which would be DOA if absolutely everything was flagged. Or at least it would take consumers a while to realize they wasted money on a boat anchor, and another business fiasco would be brewing, with the DVR manufacturers trying to hold down the lid on the pot.
Of course this does not affect HD satellite systems, since they can use their own system to flag programs as untimeshiftable. Keep in mind that DirecTV is owned by News Corporation, which also owns Fox. There's a whole other powderkeg to deal with.
And as far as DVHS, it's going the way of the dodo. Tape stretching and wear over time is bad for analog tapes, but even worse when a digital stream is on there. I see HD recording devices going to hard disk, since 10 GB per hour of HD isn't as insurmountable as it was three years ago.
agreed; Edwards' quote is going in my sig to replace my ancient and drawn-out adaptation of a Jurassic Park quote.
But seriously, I wasn't consciously thinking of Jurassic Park when I first wrote that quote in late 2000. I was thinking more of the dotcom bubble era mentality of software developers. Of course that ruffled a few feathers here and there, but it stuck for a while. Until now.
But Klaus Holse Andersen, the European vice-president of Microsoft Business Solutions, denied on Tuesday that the jobs at Navision were ever at risk. "No, that is not what he said in the meeting," Andersen told ZDNet UK. "There is no plan for us to close down the site."
Slashdot Mirror
Now I remember what program that was: Windows Task Manager. The contents of the menus changed depending on which Task Manager tab you had selected at the moment. Now most of these menu changes were context-sensitive (selecting columns that were only displayed in the Processes menu, for instance), but if I recall correctly, the "Shut Down..." option was available in the menu if ONE of the three tabs was selected, but not the other two.
What seems like an extension of Microsoft's "Do more with less" mantra appears to me to be dishonesty and inconsistency. If you've witnessed a relatively computer-unsavvy person trying to hunt around for a menu option that has "disappeared", then you know that consistency is the most important property of a UI. It should stay as it appeared before; not vanish suddenly, presenting you with less options, or suddenly moving options around behind your back.
In my opinion, Steve Ballmer needs to wrangle up his UI "developers, developers, developers, developers", and have a little talk about "consistency, consistency, consistency, consistency..."
I remember using some Microsoft program, and the contents of the File menu changed depending on which sub-window was highlighted at any particular moment. I don't quite remember which program it was; it might've been Microsoft Query Analyzer, but then again it might've been Microsoft Nightmare. ;-)
The sad part is that Microsoft has started discouraging the use of keyboard combinations since Windows XP, and Apple has encouraged the use of keyboard combinations since OS X. There are some XP programs and features that have no keyboard shortcuts, and won't allow the use of the system caret (the highlight over a button, text field, or other UI object that helps you use the keyboard to manipulate and use GUI objects), while in OS X 10.4, there's an option in "System Preferences -> Keyboard & Mouse" that lets you "press Tab to move the keyboard focus between:... All controls".
We have come full circle, ladies and gentlemen. Combine this with Quicksilver and other utilities, and the Mac is now more keyboard-friendly than the Windows PC, and can be used more efficiently than the Windows PC. What has this world come to?
Not just potential employees, but entire families. My family has lived in the greater Boston area for over 140 years, and exorbitant housing costs are going to force the youngest generation to either rent all our lives, or move farther west of Boston, perhaps even out of the state entirely. A family-sized house is worth $0.5 million when 20 miles away from Boston, and only goes up as you get closer. And guess where a lot of the tech jobs are? Within a 20 mile radius of Boston. Burlington has many office buildings with such residents as Adobe Systems, Sun Microsystems, and Oracle. Farther out west are companies like EMC, Hewlett-Packard, and Intel. It's like a miniature Silicon Valley.
But outsourcing, rising housing costs, rising taxes, rising healthcare, rising auto insurance (arguably the worst in the country; I'm a step 9 and pay over $900 per year for a Corolla) are driving people elsewhere. And since the average salary for any position is higher here than in places like the Midwest, Tobacco Road, and so on, companies won't want to move in or grow here. There are already companies that are moving out or considering moving out. And the rolling blackouts are a death knell for anyone who wants to run a datacenter: the mostly natural-gas-fired electrical power plants have exposed a weakness in the infrastructure here. The writing is on the wall.
One now-odious trend that was started around 1995 was the "Enhanced CD", which was a multisession music CD with a primary redbook music session, and a data session that would be recognized as a CD-ROM when inserted into multisession-capable CD-ROM drives. I'm not that versed in how Enhanced CD tells the computer to recognize the data session, but I do know that the CD-ROM drive must be multisession capable (every drive after about 1996 is capable). When you inserted the CD into a Windows 95 computer, the data session would be loaded, and whatever was scripted in AUTORUN.INF would run. I'm inclined to believe that Microsoft had a hand in this by creating autorun, as that would not only make installing software easier, but would create the impression of a hands-free multimedia experience for all the luddites. Some Enhanced CDs contained things like music videos, movie cast interviews, and so on, but much more of this was devoted to promotional advertising.
One other way to have music and data on the same disc was to have a "mixed-mode CD", which would have track 1 as the data and tracks 2-99 as music. Many PC games from 1996 onward did this, as having the CD play presented less CPU overhead than WAV/MP3/MOD music, and sounded better and more consistent from system to system than MIDI. Of course, these CDs ended up having track 1 used for data, which would sound like either silence or noise when played on a regular CD player, depending on whether the CD player would screen out the data track as noise.
When the copy protection rush started to develop, music companies used the multisession hole combined with AUTORUN.INF in Windows to present "media players" that would obscure the music track and force the user to agree to a EULA and load some proprietary player to play less-than-CD-quality tracks with a monitored player that would phone home. When combined with a non-redbook CD-audio track that had spurious errors injected, this provided the "ultimate unrippable CD". Well, throw in Linux and Mac users either getting around the autorun hole or having their systems crash due to the protection, along with consumer outrage at not being able to play the "spurious error" CDs in any multi-speed CD player, along with this new debacle, and you have a big conundrum.
Apple's OS X already has an option to show all sessions on a CD as different CD icons when a disc is loaded. Microsoft still hasn't done anything like this for Windows, nor have they considered ditching the security vulnerability that is Autorun.
If I remember correctly, Macromedia was responsible for the whole "Enhanced CD" craze.
1. PHB sees Microsoft adverspamming for Windows Computer Cluster 2003, and believes the drivel. ...
2. PHB makes case to execs, gets capital for an 80-node WCC2K3 cluster for eleventy billion dollars, thanks to Licensing 7.
3. Admins shake their heads in disdain, get the thing running, and walk away.
4. Developers waste time and resources reinventing the wheel.
5. Nodes start to get rooted because the admins didn't harden the system.
6. Organized crime groups use nodes to DDoS websites in the name of extortion.
7.
8. Profit! (for Microsoft, at least).
By my count, Microsoft, Sophos, Symantec, and the Department of Homeland Security have "violated the DMCA".
I've also personally worked with an HP bladecenter, and its AC power supply unit runs off of 3-phase. The bladecenter itself takes two 48VDC lines, and there's a DC power kit so you can run the bladecenter in a 48VDC-powered facility.
So here's the list of application crashes not fatal to general system stability, with OS version. And of course, the newer version had "No more ($errorname)s!", because they were no longer called $errorname.
- Windows 3.0: Uninterruptible Application Error
- Windows 3.1: General Protection Fault
- Windows 95/98/ME: Illegal Operation
- Windows NT/2K/XP: Access Violation
I wonder what the new, re-euphemised name for this in Windows Vista will be. Unapproved Boondoggle Cessation?
It's called "tamper-resistant" because the Titanic was unsinkable.
Driver annoyances are the main reason why I went for a 12" PowerBook. Wi-Fi worked out of the box (but I had to connect via ethernet initially so I could get past the intro screens, enter a terminal, and do a quick ifconfig to print en1's MAC address, since Apple only prints the ethernet MAC on the sticker instide the battery chamber). Video was rock solid, and already at the proper resolution (which is more than can be said for wrestling with X, especially if your video chipset has a restricted driver). Sound worked fine. Hard drives worked fine (I've seen firsthand the issues with using Fedora on some Dell Latitude laptops that use SATA hard drives). Browsers were relatively mature (I threw on Camino and Opera in addition to Safari; the browse-out continues). I have working Quake 3 and Quake 1. CD burning is fully functional without driver issues. Perl and ruby are already installed (now it's time to learn 'em!); the C compiler is on the utilities CD in case I need to use it. And, most importantly, the manufacturer will support the *nix OS that's installed if I have problems, so I'm not lost looking on forums if something stupid happens.
This is how a *nix laptop should be. Not wrestling with drivers all over the place. Unfortunately, too many of the manufacturers out there are too obstinate to support non-profit driver development.
Oh, GREAT. If there was one piece of software that I wanted to see starved off by Microsoft's monopoly, it was RealPlayer. I don't like how Windows Media Player 8/9/10 promotes DRM, installs a DRM service in every Windows XP computer (mspmspsv.exe), and may potentially install more DRMware at the driver or kernel level, but Real is no better. Their software is harder to install, and more bloated and cumbersome than Windows Media Player 9. Their software uses an even worse "web portal" interface than WMP, and performs worse in erratic stream playback than WMP. And their RealOne player is one of the most invasive pieces of software when installed. It's basically spyware and malware.
From what I've seen, support for streaming media is heading away from Real and toward Windows Media merely because all the computers with Windows XP preinstalled can play WM files already, as opposed to having to download and run the Real installer. The fact that many media sites already have to deal with enterprise MS software licensing may have something else to do with it. Despite being an ISO standard and natively streamable, MPEG 4 has been plagued by the codec mess (mostly Microsoft's fault) four years ago. There is no single "MPEG 4" codec; instead, there's Microsoft's MPEG 4, DivX, XviD, QuickTime, blah, blah, blah. Users are turned away due to the sheer number of codecs they have to download just to view one video. The newest "universal" MPEG format is still MPEG 2, and it doesn't get the compression that many people need to make video sizes or bandwidths palatable to the customers.
And so now, in the next version of Windows, we'll all have RealONE bundled in, but hopefully with less access violations and bluescreens than the program delivers now. And, hopefully, with a more consumer-friendly and less surreptitious frontend. I'd rather watch Microsoft choke Real to death with WMP; despite the DRM and Microsoft-coded bizarreness, Real's software is worse.
These two strips sound very familiar; are they in Casual Day Has Gone Too Far? If so, I need to find a photocopier and laminator.
So this person expects Capital One, a company known for making the corniest commercials on TV, and a participant in the national scheme pushing limitless interest rates and exorbitant fees, to not engage in adware? I'd expect Capital One to be one of the FIRST and BIGGEST users of adware, popups, and direct marketing.
They put David Spade on our television screens two years longer than necessary; that alone is evil enough!
The note at the top of every 3.1 download page:
/etc/apt/sources.list for "http://security.debian.org/ testing/updates" rather than an active entry for "http://security.debian.org/ stable/updates", and thus will not get security updates by default. This was due to incorrect Release files on the images.
/etc/apt/sources.list, look for any lines mentioning security.debian.org, change "testing" to "stable", and remove "# " from the start of the line.
Note: 3.1_r0 CD image problem
A bug has been discovered in the 3.1_r0 CD/DVD images: new installs from these images will have a commented-out entry in
If you have already installed a system using a 3.1r0 CD/DVD image, you do not need to reinstall. Instead, simply edit
If you installed other than from a CD or DVD (for example, netboot, or booting from floppy and installing the base system from the network), you are not affected by this bug.
These new 3.1_r0a images correct this flaw. We apologise for the inconvenience.
On another note, I wanted to start downloading the 3.1 ISO set for Sparc, but none of the US mirrors have 3.1 ISO sets, and the root server is giving out 404's. Perhaps they're all still busy updating? At this point, I don't think bit-torrent is propagated well enough to be faster than HTTP/FTP, and jigdo only puts the load on your workstation by opening 9,000 connections on your box to go download little bits of Debian.
I can name four games with heavy gunplay with realistic weapons that are all rated Teen by the ESRB: Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, Call of Duty, Battlefield 1942, Battlefield Vietnam. All of these games get a Teen rating because they lack blood. They all feature real-world weapons being used exclusively on humans with realistic sound effects and non-blood visual effects. They even feature explosions with humans getting injured by the blasts, and human suffering and aggression. But they escape through a loophole because they don't show blood spilling. Something is seriously wrong here.
Personally, I consider anything with real-life guns or very detailed suffering to be Mature, blood or no blood. Letting companies "enhance their marketing spectrum" because they leave out one mature item out of many is wrong. Anyone else notice that three of the four games I mentioned were published by Electronic Arts?
I haven't heard of a law regarding the freedom of media playback (has this issue ever come up before standardized digital media were invented?), but as it is now, the CDDA patent holders will forbid the label from placing the "Compact Disc Digital Audio" logo on the CD or case. This has happened before with Cactus Data Shield, Macrovision, etc., and it didn't stop consumers from buying the CDs without checking for the seal. After consumers discovered that their multi-speed drives couldn't play the "CDs" they were buying, they started complaining to the labels and started spreading the word, and the cat was out of the bag as far as the redbook-violating protection schemes were concerned.
I once read that dance music label Kontor was going to use copy protection on CD single releases, as well as albums. Many DJs use expensive CD players such as the Pioneer CDJ-1000 and Denon 5000 that are all multi-speed, have large buffers, and do real-time pitch adjustment, which REQUIRES multi-speed drives. These players only work with redbook CDs; the faux-error copy protection schemes that won't run in many car CD players will also make these >$600 CD players choke. Hopefully music labels have thought more of this when mastering CDs now.
agreed, CDE is fugly, but it's functional. Even after a bit of kicking around in Java Desktop a bit, I like CDE on my Ultra 2 because it loads a lot faster, and doesn't take up the huge amount of memory and CPU time that GNOME does. Desktop wallpapers got old on about the fourth time I logged in just to do a few console things, and speaking of console, gnome-terminal's antialiased fonts are worthless when using a 1152x900 display; I was opening rxvt more often because it wasn't a resource hog.
After a while, I saw that Java Desktop was a lot less appealing on a low-end machine like the Ultra 2. I mean, I can still run XMMS and The Gimp in CDE just fine, even though I can't use a custom wallpaper.
Hopefully not as easy as stopping payment on questionable charges to the account. The advantage of online progressively-updated statements becomes infinitely greater here; you'll have to check your statements every WEEK if it gets bad. Genuine cowhide is out, 100 mil thick aluminum is in!
Last I checked, the de facto standard here is still MS Word. IMO the only reason why Massachusetts is still in the class action is because SOMEONE had to throw a wrench in the works (and a pack of lawyers want to get rich quick while us consumers just shred up the 6-page class-action form that will only yield vouchers for more Microsoft software; seriously, I got one of these, and it was a waste of time).
Some factors to the misconception that Massachusetts is the bastion of anti-M$ are the facts that Massachusetts plays host to MIT (birthplace of X, alma mater of many *nix users), the Free Software Foundation, etc. Come on, we have a supreme judicial court that passed a statute on gay marriage, and a governor who openly opposes gay marriage AND civil unions. Even WE don't know what we stand for!
Yeah, I had to devote an entire day to installing Gentoo, and the box didn't have an Internet connection. I had to boot the Gentoo CD with the "docache" option at the SILO prompt to allow the ejecting of the CDROM, and dump the entire package CD onto the hard drive. Even then I couldn't get a number of packages.
The box isn't running Gentoo normally, though; I basically wanted to go through a Gentoo install successfully so I could do it all again in less time when I have the box situated in a semi-permanent, usable place. It's running Solaris 10 now, which is pretty cool, but Java Desktop runs pretty slow. Still very usable in CDE though. This computer isn't used regularly; I just do my *nix experimentation on it now and then.
Some may ask "Why not use Debian instead if you have no Internet?" I already tried; Debian Woody doesn't interface with the hardware RTC chip or the power interface, so I couldn't reliably change the system clock, and I'd have to manually shut down the box. I have the same Debian running in a Sparcstation 5 though, and it doesn't have any those incompatibility problems.
That specsheet says "2 Model 844", which would imply only two Opterons. While that's not too shabby, this is a quad CPU server; why not smoke 'em if you got 'em (or just go buy the V20z)? I haven't read through the whole article, so I don't know what the $20K reviewing sample has in it, but it still sounds enticing.
That's pretty fast compared to what I've done: compiling 2.4.27 in Gentoo on a Sun Ultra 2 (2 x 300 MHz UltraSPARC). It took over 90 minutes, and that was without the USB and Bluetooth sections of the kernel, since there's no way the Ultra 2 can make any use of either.
have they ever said who it's for? I'm assuming at least motion pictures ("Movies. They're worth it.") and sporting events (at last they have a method of enforcing the "This telecast may not be copied..." spiel). But what's to stop the networks from flagging everything with the broadcast flag? About the only thing to stop that is the ATSC DVR market, which would be DOA if absolutely everything was flagged. Or at least it would take consumers a while to realize they wasted money on a boat anchor, and another business fiasco would be brewing, with the DVR manufacturers trying to hold down the lid on the pot.
Of course this does not affect HD satellite systems, since they can use their own system to flag programs as untimeshiftable. Keep in mind that DirecTV is owned by News Corporation, which also owns Fox. There's a whole other powderkeg to deal with.
And as far as DVHS, it's going the way of the dodo. Tape stretching and wear over time is bad for analog tapes, but even worse when a digital stream is on there. I see HD recording devices going to hard disk, since 10 GB per hour of HD isn't as insurmountable as it was three years ago.
agreed; Edwards' quote is going in my sig to replace my ancient and drawn-out adaptation of a Jurassic Park quote.
But seriously, I wasn't consciously thinking of Jurassic Park when I first wrote that quote in late 2000. I was thinking more of the dotcom bubble era mentality of software developers. Of course that ruffled a few feathers here and there, but it stuck for a while. Until now.