I've had Norton Anti-Virus delete my Thunderbird Inbox when it detected an incoming virus. This was the main thing that made me get rid of Norton on all my computers.
I mean that when I first tried to buy music from them (last year sometime) I was forced to use IE (Firefox was not supported at the time). There was no helpful error message or anything telling you to use IE. When you went to the checkout, you would simply get a message saying transaction failed. It's like they didn't even consider that other browsers existed. Only when I contacted their support was I told that IE was mandatory.
They've fixed the Firefox support problem (I just bought some mp3s), but they still do not support Mac (though they claim to be working on it).
There were indeed prohibition laws in Canada. They were legislated at the provincial level, not federal, but it was prohibition all the same. Today's provincial liquor monopolies like the Liquor Control Board of Ontario are relics of that time.
If they are going to come out with versions for each country, the Canadian version will probably be patterned after Bob and Doug McKenzie
Bob: G'day! I'm a Mac! Doug: And I'm a PC, eh? Bob: Today I'm gonna show you how I can run Microsoft Office applications, eh? Doug: No way, eh?! That's my job! Bob: Take off! Look at this chart that shows how much beer and back bacon I need to get me through the Stanley Cup Playoffs, eh? Doug: You hoser! That's not enough beer! Bob: Take off!
After that they can do commercials using Red Green and the Trailer Park Boys.
Secure ID tokens, and other token solutions, provide excellent second-factor security, but they have the downside of being
(1) Difficult to deploy to customers (2) Expensive (3) Somewhat fragile
The system described in the link also provides good second-factor security, is easy to deploy, cheap, and robust. The downside is that the "matrix" could be copied. Sounds like the matrix should be guarded kinda like you guard your ATM card (i.e., you don't just leave it lying around).
I'm working in Canada now. Despite the fact that their government forced metric units on them, do you realize that virtually everyone (well, immigrants from metric countries notwithstanding) continues to use Imperial units (in this case, they are Imperial units -- 4.4L/gallon, etc) in their daily life? It's 82 outside, not 28. I weigh 190, not 86. I had a fever of 101, not 39.
Are you surrounded by old people? I am Canadian, I haven't heard temperatures in deg F for a long long time.
The most common occurrences of Imperial in my life are
* My weight (still in pounds) * Construction (still 2x4s and so on) * Paper (8.5x11 anyone?)
The worst experience I had occurred when I cancelled my Rogers high speed internet. They provided a phone number to call to cancel, and I was on hold for 20 minutes listening to some awful country and western yodelling or something like that.
You know the music from Mars Attacks, which made the martians' heads explode. That stuff. I kid you not.
Boy did they get a piece of my mind when I got off hold.
This is really neat, but doesn't it strike anybody as odd that they decided to sail *towards* an active volcano? Were they trying to get a last minute entry into the 2006 Darwin Awards or something?
No, we call the generation after that the sex without condoms generation.
Actually, you might be stuck with iPod generation. I think the term was coined by a think-tank organization, and it is actually an acronym for "Insecure, Presssured, Overtaxed, and Debt-ridden."
Hear hear! When Aragorn went over the cliff, I was thinking WTF! The movie is already so long that parts of the story have beeen omitted. Why the hell is he adding new stuff?
If you would read my post again you will see that I am not slamming VB at all. In fact, I am complimenting it. My "VB hacks" point is that VB is so easy to program with it makes people who are no at all qualified to program believe they are software engineers. This doesn't happen so often with other languages because the learning curves are steeper. For example, most (unfortunately not all) C-hacks and Perl-hack don't get delusions of grandeur because they are too busy shooting themselves in the foot.
I used to work in a camera store. Although not directly related to losing computer data, the ways customers would destroy their cameras and their film were often quite amusing.
One guy dropped his camera into a lake at the cottage. He had read somewhere that once a camera has been immersed it should not be removed from the water. So he brought us his camera in a bucket full of lake water. I think there was even sand.
Another guy had his film (remember that stuff?) with vacation pictures break in the camera, so he couldn't rewind the roll. He did a very intelligent thing. He went into a pitch dark room, and by feel opened up the camera, took out the film and put it into a film container. Would have worked, except that didn't use one of those black Kodak film containers. Instead he used one of those clear film containers from Fuji. When he proudly brought his "saved" film in for processing, we regretfully had to inform him that despite his best efforts, the film was ruined.
Then there was the lady who didn't understand why her night photos of Niagara Falls (taken with a Kodax Disc camera) didn't turn out, because she distinctly remembered that the flash went off. We had to explain to her that if her flash could illuminate all of the Falls from that distance, it would probably kill everybody within 10 feet of her.
Can you imagine the support nightmare Microsoft would unleash upon themselves if they did what the article suggests?
Articles like this underline a huge problem in the software industry. Too many people think that software is easy, and that all any problem needs is a few software tweaks. Too many people are willing to offer up solutions without thinking the issue all the way through.
It is attitudes like this that lead to failed billion-dollar IT projects, most of what is offered on the Daily WTF, and VB hacks promoting themselves as software engineers.
Also, why would a winery doubt the authenticity of their own wine? Is this in case someone breaks in and steals their wine, but replaces it with an exact duplicate?
Wineries that are still using real corks might be able to tell if a wine has been tainted with trichloroanisole (cork taint) before shipping the wine. About 5% to 10% of wines with corks get cork taint, and wineries would rather that bad bottles not make it into the hands of the consumer.
Also, though wineries might not need to authenticate their own bottles, the counterfeit alcohol market is very large. Something to the tune of $400,000,000 per year. Being able to determine the authenticity of a bottle of Petrus, Opus One, or Canadian icewine without opening the bottle would come in very handy for any wine reseller.
"This was a screw up, and we're angry and upset about it. It was an innocent enough attempt to reach out to the academic community with new research tools, but it was obviously not appropriately vetted..."
This is sounding very much like Dilbert's boss's public apology made years ago:
"It was wrong for us to sell keyboards with no 'Q' We're sorry. We're morons. We're dumber than squirrels. We hear voices and do what they command. I have broccoli in my socks. "
"The thing about Flash is that many designers and artists use it to create pieces of art, animated or dynamic in form. For these people, Flash is used to a different end than what a typical commercial or information website might use it for, which in many cases amounts to abuse of Flash."
As an art form, I think Flash is great. But many of those sites that your link points to, although very beautiful to look at, are commercial site that do a horrible job at conveying information about the business. One more than one of those flash-enabled commercial sites, I had to sit through long animations just to get at a single sentence of information.
Look at it this way. If you were a business and were printing a dead-tree brochure, would you make the reader have to figure out a puzzle every time she wanted to turn the page? That's what browsing a flash-enabled site is like. Every link is a puzzle.
Slashdot Mirror
The result
I've had Norton Anti-Virus delete my Thunderbird Inbox when it detected an incoming virus. This was the main thing that made me get rid of Norton on all my computers.
I mean that when I first tried to buy music from them (last year sometime) I was forced to use IE (Firefox was not supported at the time). There was no helpful error message or anything telling you to use IE. When you went to the checkout, you would simply get a message saying transaction failed. It's like they didn't even consider that other browsers existed. Only when I contacted their support was I told that IE was mandatory.
They've fixed the Firefox support problem (I just bought some mp3s), but they still do not support Mac (though they claim to be working on it).
That's the USA version of the store. Try (if you can) going to the Canadian version of the same page.
There were indeed prohibition laws in Canada. They were legislated at the provincial level, not federal, but it was prohibition all the same. Today's provincial liquor monopolies like the Liquor Control Board of Ontario are relics of that time.
If they are going to come out with versions for each country, the Canadian version will probably be patterned after Bob and Doug McKenzie
Bob: G'day! I'm a Mac!
Doug: And I'm a PC, eh?
Bob: Today I'm gonna show you how I can run Microsoft Office applications, eh?
Doug: No way, eh?! That's my job!
Bob: Take off! Look at this chart that shows how much beer and back bacon I need to get me through the Stanley Cup Playoffs, eh?
Doug: You hoser! That's not enough beer!
Bob: Take off!
After that they can do commercials using Red Green and the Trailer Park Boys.
Thanks for the example. I made some personal modifications and sent it off to my MP.
Secure ID tokens, and other token solutions, provide excellent second-factor security, but they have the downside of being
(1) Difficult to deploy to customers
(2) Expensive
(3) Somewhat fragile
The system described in the link also provides good second-factor security, is easy to deploy, cheap, and robust. The downside is that the "matrix" could be copied. Sounds like the matrix should be guarded kinda like you guard your ATM card (i.e., you don't just leave it lying around).
I'm working in Canada now. Despite the fact that their government forced metric units on them, do you realize that virtually everyone (well, immigrants from metric countries notwithstanding) continues to use Imperial units (in this case, they are Imperial units -- 4.4L/gallon, etc) in their daily life? It's 82 outside, not 28. I weigh 190, not 86. I had a fever of 101, not 39.
Are you surrounded by old people? I am Canadian, I haven't heard temperatures in deg F for a long long time.
The most common occurrences of Imperial in my life are
* My weight (still in pounds)
* Construction (still 2x4s and so on)
* Paper (8.5x11 anyone?)
The worst experience I had occurred when I cancelled my Rogers high speed internet. They provided a phone number to call to cancel, and I was on hold for 20 minutes listening to some awful country and western yodelling or something like that.
You know the music from Mars Attacks, which made the martians' heads explode. That stuff. I kid you not.
Boy did they get a piece of my mind when I got off hold.
Only a true geek would describe lovebird calls as "pinging."
Well done! But you should have continued and called it the lovebird "handshake" protocol.
This is really neat, but doesn't it strike anybody as odd that they decided to sail
*towards* an active volcano? Were they trying to get a last minute entry into the 2006 Darwin Awards or something?
No, we call the generation after that the sex without condoms generation.
Actually, you might be stuck with iPod generation. I think the term was coined by a think-tank organization, and it is actually an acronym for "Insecure, Presssured, Overtaxed, and Debt-ridden."
Hear hear! When Aragorn went over the cliff, I was thinking WTF! The movie is already so long that parts of the story have beeen omitted. Why the hell is he adding new stuff?
If you would read my post again you will see that I am not slamming VB at all. In fact, I am complimenting it. My "VB hacks" point is that VB is so easy to program with it makes people who are no at all qualified to program believe they are software engineers. This doesn't happen so often with other languages because the learning curves are steeper. For example, most (unfortunately not all) C-hacks and Perl-hack don't get delusions of grandeur because they are too busy shooting themselves in the foot.
I used to work in a camera store. Although not directly related to losing computer data, the ways customers would destroy their cameras and their film were often quite amusing.
One guy dropped his camera into a lake at the cottage. He had read somewhere that once a camera has been immersed it should not be removed from the water. So he brought us his camera in a bucket full of lake water. I think there was even sand.
Another guy had his film (remember that stuff?) with vacation pictures break in the camera, so he couldn't rewind the roll. He did a very intelligent thing. He went into a pitch dark room, and by feel opened up the camera, took out the film and put it into a film container. Would have worked, except that didn't use one of those black Kodak film containers. Instead he used one of those clear film containers from Fuji. When he proudly brought his "saved" film in for processing, we regretfully had to inform him that despite his best efforts, the film was ruined.
Then there was the lady who didn't understand why her night photos of Niagara Falls (taken with a Kodax Disc camera) didn't turn out, because she distinctly remembered that the flash went off. We had to explain to her that if her flash could illuminate all of the Falls from that distance, it would probably kill everybody within 10 feet of her.
Can you imagine the support nightmare Microsoft would unleash upon themselves if they did what the article suggests?
Articles like this underline a huge problem in the software industry. Too many people think that software is easy, and that all any problem needs is a few software tweaks. Too many people are willing to offer up solutions without thinking the issue all the way through.
It is attitudes like this that lead to failed billion-dollar IT projects, most of what is offered on the Daily WTF, and VB hacks promoting themselves as software engineers.
Wineries that are still using real corks might be able to tell if a wine has been tainted with trichloroanisole (cork taint) before shipping the wine. About 5% to 10% of wines with corks get cork taint, and wineries would rather that bad bottles not make it into the hands of the consumer.
Also, though wineries might not need to authenticate their own bottles, the counterfeit alcohol market is very large. Something to the tune of $400,000,000 per year. Being able to determine the authenticity of a bottle of Petrus, Opus One, or Canadian icewine without opening the bottle would come in very handy for any wine reseller.
He should have chosen a Burgundy, which is a fine match for prosciutto, instead of a Chianti.
It's the only way to be sure.
But what if pirate == ninja?
Think about it: Teenage Mutant Ninja Pirates!
How can it be cheaper to buy a console when I already have a PC? I might not have the latest hot graphics card, but most games don't need them.
Also, I don't have a TV.
I am sure there are lots of advantages for owning a console, but process of elimination leads me to the PC.
From AOL's public apology
"This was a screw up, and we're angry and upset about it. It was an innocent enough attempt to reach out to the academic community with new research tools, but it was obviously not appropriately vetted..."
This is sounding very much like Dilbert's boss's public apology made years ago:
"It was wrong for us to sell keyboards with no 'Q' We're sorry. We're morons. We're dumber than squirrels. We hear voices and do what they command. I have broccoli in my socks. "
"The thing about Flash is that many designers and artists use it to create pieces of art, animated or dynamic in form. For these people, Flash is used to a different end than what a typical commercial or information website might use it for, which in many cases amounts to abuse of Flash."
As an art form, I think Flash is great. But many of those sites that your link points to, although very beautiful to look at, are commercial site that do a horrible job at conveying information about the business. One more than one of those flash-enabled commercial sites, I had to sit through long animations just to get at a single sentence of information.
Look at it this way. If you were a business and were printing a dead-tree brochure, would you make the reader have to figure out a puzzle every time she wanted to turn the page? That's what browsing a flash-enabled site is like. Every link is a puzzle.
>V for Vendetta--though a good book and great movie--was a TOTAL ripoff of 1984.
Yeah, and 1984 was a TOTAL rip-off of "We" by Yevgeny Zamyatin and, of course, "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley.
Influence does not mean rip-off.