Re:A couple of other interesting points..
on
P2P Now and Then
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· Score: 1
Microsoft didn't make quicken. Microsoft DID make AVI.
Microsoft made the AVI format, but they didn't make DivX/MP3, one of the multitude of third-party codec combinations you can use when building an AVI, nor must that file have been constructed using a Microsoft tool.
Microsoft created the DLL format, but they didn't make Quicken, or any of the multitude of third-party modules created using the DLL format, nor must that file have been constructed using a Microsoft tool.
Compare and contrast.
(By the way, AVI, the RIFF format from which it descends, DLL, and many other file formats were developed jointly by Microsoft and IBM for Windows and OS/2, respectively.)
Re:A couple of other interesting points..
on
P2P Now and Then
·
· Score: 1
Well, AVI is a mircosoft file format.
Reporting an AVI as a Microsoft video is about like claiming that Quicken is a Microsoft product because it uses DLLs.
Making it close tabs would be counter-intuitive and inconsistent.
You mean, like Microsoft Word 2003 does it? How it can't decide if it's an SDI or MDI application? How it shows each document as a separate application icon and the document close and application close do the same thing, but insists on showing all open documents under its Window menu?
Yes, that is entirely counter-intuitive and inconsistent.
Last time I checked, it was illegal in the US for telemarketers to call cell phones.
This isn't correct, as has been pointed out in other places and a sub-thread. Only automated dialers cannot call cellular phones. Manual dialing is perfectly legal at the federal level.
Contrast this with TCP/IP which is an open standard and just works.
More importantly, if it doesn't work, you can look to the published standards to see who's not holding up their end of the standard. Microsoft would probably prefer the de facto standard be whatever their software emits or accepts.
I build all my desktop machines with crap parts and no extended warranties, but laptops need the 3 year full service warranty.
I agree completely, laptops start to drop parts on the surrounding countryside as they pass the two year mark, based on my experience.
On a related note, I managed to get a brand spankin' new laptop to replace the lemon I had that they couldn't fix properly. Never mind it was because they outsourced the repairs to a company that was terminally clueless and they had a fix-it-in-so-many-attempts-or-we-replace-it policy. ("Customer reports that batteries won't charge? Why should I actually test the charging assembly when a hard drive is so easy to replace?")
You need to stay on top of your school boards, especially those of you with tech savvy. Let them know (since they are elected) that they can't let the districts do stupid tech things.
This is not just public school boards, small charter schools with volunteer tech people have this kind of problem, too. The main tech volunteer last year wanted to purchase a 1U rack server without a supporting rack or UPS. He wanted to centralize virus scanning on the server, rather than investing in any virus scanner licenses for the dozen or two Windows XP boxes it would service. He also wanted to do DVD-based backups on a file server with a quarter-terabyte of storage.
Unfortunately, when this was pointed out, the result was total inaction that lost the school many thousand dollars in grant money and the school has no central server.
I remember times where people actually quoted relevant material from previous mails, trimmed down unnecessary garbage and answered questions *below* the question itself.
In business politics, someone can get added to the thread after the fact or get the mail forwarded to them, and the presence of a message history greatly aids in their understanding. This is really a work-around for poor tools and processes.
Why not live in a happy non-religious time, where everybody gets along? Why live in the constant fear and guilt that Christianity teaches?
AGENT SMITH: Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from.
Looking at the coldest temperatures here, it looks like Minnesota tied North Dakota's coldest temperature of -60*F in 1996 (1936 for ND). I was up at my in-laws place in NW Minnesota that time and their outside thermometer was pegged at -66*F.
Without block heaters or a heated garage, we were running the cars every so often to ensure they'd start when we needed.
At that temperature, you walk slowly or you make your own wind chill.
It would not be unreasonable to make it legally required to use such a system on some highways. You don't like it, take the side streets.
Some areas with major rivers only have freeway bridges that cross the rivers, or the regular street bridges are many dozens of miles up/downstream. You're suggesting that the manual drivers go hundreds of miles out of their way to cross a river?
Agreed. The same thing goes for most jobs, it's not the type of tools that are used to produce the job that counts, it's mainly the quality of work. (Quality including things like the time it takes, the thoroughness of their work, the durability of the finished product, etc.)
Moria and Angband have had hallucination status flags a decade before Nintendo submitted this patent. It wasn't a variable effect, but when something triggered hallucinations it caused you to see all sorts of things that weren't there and couldn't be acted on.
Of course, since those are free, open-source games, nobody saw the need to patent features like that.
I wonder if they ever patented playing while high. In Nintendo's Yoshi's Story, if you touched a Fuzzy, you'd get "dizzy". The playing area would distort around, changing gravity oddly and affecting your balance. Made it hard to jump over holes and stay on platforms when the world went spinning.
GF: Why does it complain everytime I unplug my iPod? Me: You have to eject it first. GF: Why? Me (thinks): Shall I explain write behind caching or just tell her id...
Can't USB/firewire/whatever have a pressure or motion sensor that triggers when you touch the plug? Then you could immediately dump write cache to the device, sound a buzzer, or something.
Or lock the plug in place. Detect when someone tries to pull it out, "eject" the device automatically, and release the hardware lock.
This is one area where making it more intuitive would make all our lives a little easier.
Slashdot Mirror
- Microsoft made the AVI format, but they didn't make DivX/MP3, one of the multitude of third-party codec combinations you can use when building an AVI, nor must that file have been constructed using a Microsoft tool.
- Microsoft created the DLL format, but they didn't make Quicken, or any of the multitude of third-party modules created using the DLL format, nor must that file have been constructed using a Microsoft tool.
Compare and contrast.(By the way, AVI, the RIFF format from which it descends, DLL, and many other file formats were developed jointly by Microsoft and IBM for Windows and OS/2, respectively.)
Well, AVI is a mircosoft file format.
Reporting an AVI as a Microsoft video is about like claiming that Quicken is a Microsoft product because it uses DLLs.
Some tabby tools (like Eclipse 3.1) show the tab-closing X on the current tab and hide it on non-current tabs until you mouse over them.
Making it close tabs would be counter-intuitive and inconsistent.
You mean, like Microsoft Word 2003 does it? How it can't decide if it's an SDI or MDI application? How it shows each document as a separate application icon and the document close and application close do the same thing, but insists on showing all open documents under its Window menu?
Yes, that is entirely counter-intuitive and inconsistent.
Last time I checked, it was illegal in the US for telemarketers to call cell phones.
This isn't correct, as has been pointed out in other places and a sub-thread. Only automated dialers cannot call cellular phones. Manual dialing is perfectly legal at the federal level.
See 47 USC 227(b)(1)(A)(iii)
Contrast this with TCP/IP which is an open standard and just works.
More importantly, if it doesn't work, you can look to the published standards to see who's not holding up their end of the standard. Microsoft would probably prefer the de facto standard be whatever their software emits or accepts.
I agree with the GP - don't vote for the lesser of two evils, vote against the two party system by choosing an outsider.
Vote for an outsider, a greater evil?
I build all my desktop machines with crap parts and no extended warranties, but laptops need the 3 year full service warranty.
I agree completely, laptops start to drop parts on the surrounding countryside as they pass the two year mark, based on my experience.
On a related note, I managed to get a brand spankin' new laptop to replace the lemon I had that they couldn't fix properly. Never mind it was because they outsourced the repairs to a company that was terminally clueless and they had a fix-it-in-so-many-attempts-or-we-replace-it policy. ("Customer reports that batteries won't charge? Why should I actually test the charging assembly when a hard drive is so easy to replace?")
Who uses MSN Messenger? I know no one, but my AIM buddy list has 150 people on it.
Ah, that settles it. Virtually no one uses MSN Messenger, then.
And here I thought it was a veiled reference to dark-ages contraception.
You need to stay on top of your school boards, especially those of you with tech savvy. Let them know (since they are elected) that they can't let the districts do stupid tech things.
This is not just public school boards, small charter schools with volunteer tech people have this kind of problem, too. The main tech volunteer last year wanted to purchase a 1U rack server without a supporting rack or UPS. He wanted to centralize virus scanning on the server, rather than investing in any virus scanner licenses for the dozen or two Windows XP boxes it would service. He also wanted to do DVD-based backups on a file server with a quarter-terabyte of storage.
Unfortunately, when this was pointed out, the result was total inaction that lost the school many thousand dollars in grant money and the school has no central server.
Next to the butterfly, or on the other side of the world?
I had a Genius Netscroll POS that flashed the scroll wheel light when it got email.
This is particularly pointless. Who looks at their mouse while using it?
I remember times where people actually quoted relevant material from previous mails, trimmed down unnecessary garbage and answered questions *below* the question itself.
In business politics, someone can get added to the thread after the fact or get the mail forwarded to them, and the presence of a message history greatly aids in their understanding. This is really a work-around for poor tools and processes.
As usual, the /. editors display their utter inability to distinguish between science and pseudoscience.
As Scott Adams said as the title of one of his Dilbert collections, "When did ignorance become a point of view?"
Why not live in a happy non-religious time, where everybody gets along? Why live in the constant fear and guilt that Christianity teaches?
AGENT SMITH: Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from.
The Enigma cryptosystem would have never been cracked had it been correctly copied from the ancient Klingon model.
Looking at the coldest temperatures here, it looks like Minnesota tied North Dakota's coldest temperature of -60*F in 1996 (1936 for ND). I was up at my in-laws place in NW Minnesota that time and their outside thermometer was pegged at -66*F.
Without block heaters or a heated garage, we were running the cars every so often to ensure they'd start when we needed.
At that temperature, you walk slowly or you make your own wind chill.
That will never happen in this day and age, given current security concerns. Two words: "car bomb."
Since car bombs parked on the street are so ineffective.
It would not be unreasonable to make it legally required to use such a system on some highways. You don't like it, take the side streets.
Some areas with major rivers only have freeway bridges that cross the rivers, or the regular street bridges are many dozens of miles up/downstream. You're suggesting that the manual drivers go hundreds of miles out of their way to cross a river?
Agreed. The same thing goes for most jobs, it's not the type of tools that are used to produce the job that counts, it's mainly the quality of work. (Quality including things like the time it takes, the thoroughness of their work, the durability of the finished product, etc.)
Moria and Angband have had hallucination status flags a decade before Nintendo submitted this patent. It wasn't a variable effect, but when something triggered hallucinations it caused you to see all sorts of things that weren't there and couldn't be acted on.
Of course, since those are free, open-source games, nobody saw the need to patent features like that.
I wonder if they ever patented playing while high. In Nintendo's Yoshi's Story, if you touched a Fuzzy, you'd get "dizzy". The playing area would distort around, changing gravity oddly and affecting your balance. Made it hard to jump over holes and stay on platforms when the world went spinning.
As a last line of attack, you can record the content as it's being output to the speakers. As the GP said, "If you can hear it, you can record it."
GF: Why does it complain everytime I unplug my iPod?
Me: You have to eject it first.
GF: Why?
Me (thinks): Shall I explain write behind caching or just tell her id...
Can't USB/firewire/whatever have a pressure or motion sensor that triggers when you touch the plug? Then you could immediately dump write cache to the device, sound a buzzer, or something.
Or lock the plug in place. Detect when someone tries to pull it out, "eject" the device automatically, and release the hardware lock.
This is one area where making it more intuitive would make all our lives a little easier.