"And if you're really worried about them finding bad stuff on the internet, why don't you take the slightly longer and harder route of actually educating your kids so they know why it is you would rather they didn't browse certain types of site, and let them browse them to get out the initial curiosity, and then you'll find that they won't bother because they're only interested in 'evil sites' because they're forbidden and they don't know enough about them. Forbidden + mysterious = surefire failure at what you're trying to do."
Exactly right. I'm in university now but I've had a computer in my own room since I was maybe 12 or 13, although we didn't have internet access back then. My parents did a good job of impressing the right values onto me so I would be able to tell good from bad and right from wrong. Once you've got that taken care of, then you're basically coasting and it's hard for you or your kids to build up momentum in the wrong direction.
I damn well did look at pr0n out of curiosity but once the overall rush/thrill of it all gets past you, it's nothing special. Having a real girl/boyfriend is (probably*) a lot better than pr0n. I barely ever fire up the browser and get pr0n anymore because I don't have a reason to do it. And whether I like it or not I did end up having similar morals to my parents and I never, ever, did anything that was truly 'bad' related to the internet. I was never strictly supervised or watched over - it was simply good traditional parenting that set me on the right path.
Giving the kids the morals to make their own decisions is important because they have to learn how to make their own judgements and opinions. If you make all the decisions for them and control them at every turn, you'll just push them into more underground ways of doing what every teen does and probably contort their viewpoints.
So what am I trying to say? Here it is: You can and should teach them how to navigate as best you can. But only by letting them truly do it themselves will they develop conscience and maturity.
My yougest sibling has been on the internet since she was 6 or so but I know she will not get into any trouble. Our parents and I put the smarts and values into her so she doesn't act stupidly without micromanagement from others. A guiding, watchful person is necessary. Not a person who acts as a surrogate conscience and brain.
(he steps down from the pulpit)
*As a regular slashdot reader, I was obligated to add 'probably' to that sentence.
"What about Matrox [matrox.com], who've been dominating the multiple monitor graphics card market for years?"
True. IMO Matrox is best for non-gaming applications. One thing a lot of people forget is that Matrox is a significant player in the digital video products that deal with video capture and real time editing. Their RT.X series of DV editing products are among the best in the price range.
"getting data out of DVDs? the data is supposed to stay in them! You are in violation of the DMCA. please turn off and step away from the computer and wait calmly for Ashcroft to arrive in a fleet of black helicopters"
I'm just talking about normal playback here - Reading the raw encrypted sectors. Playing DVDs for the purpose of watching the movie is a real time process and if the drive has to make too many adjustments to read a poorly manufactured disc, then playback will suffer. This is why poorly pressed discs are undesirable. That's what I'm concerned about.
As to ripping DVDs to unencrypted VOBs, I could do that but since it's not a time sensetive process I don't mind if the ripping process is not totally linear with respect to decrpyted data / time issues.
And as to Big Brother Ashcroft, I don't live in the USA or an oil rich nation without a well developed refinery industry so I'm not worried.
Microfiche is great, but it's hard to read them digitally.;-) That's why I prefer CD-R. Here are some tips from someone who archives a lot of (say a spindle per month for personal data, and no it's not pr0n) on CD-R:
Firstly you should obviously be using high quality discs. Those cheapies will die quickly. Get ye some Taiyo Yuden, Memorex Black, TDK or similar.
Note that there are only something like twelve companies in the world that manufacture CD-R discs and then the brand name of many other companies are printed on them. For example if you find FujiFilm CD-R spindles that say "Made in Japan" then they're probably TY. This is what I use religiously. (Note: Some Fuji is made in Taiwan by Ricoh as well. You're safe to ignore these ones.)
Use a good physical storage method. This means that both the front and back of the discs are protected. Honestly I find that the Microsoft's Technet binders offer the best security and disc density in this field. The little sleeves are modular and the binders have rings so you can open the binder, hand the disc WITH THE SLEEVE to the next person and avoid getting fingerprints or dirt the disc. A lot of other binder sleeves leave half the disc exposed so they're rubbing against each other and so on. This is bad. You want the front and back of the disc to be protected completely.
I also put a little silica gel pack in my CD-R binders although honestly I have no systematic evidence that this helps control the humidity and makes a difference in the discs' longevity. But I'm better safe than sorry. (I basically collect the packets when I open the boxes from new computer products. At one job I had I opened a lot of new products so I collected a lot of the packets.)
I use a water based marker to label all my discs. No glue-on labels or alcohol based markers to eat through the discs. Now admittedly there are lots and lots of cases where people use sanford sharpies (which are alcohol based) and have NO bad side effects. Many of my older discs are labelled with sharpies and only ONE out of hundreds has failed, and there's no evidence that the sharpie was directly related. Still, you can't go wrong with a pack of 4 memorex water based CD-markers for $3. The only downside is that sharpies give you a daker, finer ink stroke.
And if your data is really that important, I hope you're not burning only one disc. Burn 3 and keep them in different physical locations so if one disc is lost to theft or file or decay, your data is not instantly lost.
"Is there a way to detect when a CD is about to fail?"
Check out the freeware win32 tool Nero CDSpeed which has many excellent functions for measuring the quality of optical discs (CD, CD-R, CD-Rw, DVD, etc) and tools for verifying the integrity of stored data. Its scandisc function test the drive's ability to read each file at the filesystem level and read each sector at the physical level, telling you which sectors are good, which are failing and which are dead.
An interesting side effect of using this tool is that I've noticed that the manufacture of pressed DVDs is highly variable! Some discs are excellent, some are crap. And it seems to be pretty consistent with the company that distributed them too. Some discs read very smoothly while others require all kinds of speed adjustments by the drive to get data out of them.
Disc One: The Film - Extended Version, Part I Part I - 107 mins (approx 236 mins total - includes 20 min fan club credit roll on Disc Two), PG-13, letterboxed widescreen (2.35:1), 16x9 enhanced, single-sided, RSDL dual-layered (layer switch at 50:42, at the start of chapter 15), custom slipcase with fold-out Digipack packaging (featuring production sketches and artwork), all commentaries feature on-screen text to identify speaker, audio commentary (with director Peter Jackson and writers Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens), audio commentary (with design team members Richard Taylor, Tania Rodger, Grant Major, Alan Lee, John Howe, Dan Hennah and Chris Hennah), audio commentary (with production and post-production team members Barrie Osborne, Mark Ordesky, Andrew Lesnie, Mike Horton, Jabez Olssen, Rick Porras, Howard Shore, Jim Rygiel, Joe Letteri, Ethan Van der Ryn, Mike Hopkins, Randy Cook, Christian Rivers, Brian Van't Hull and Alex Funke), audio commentary (with cast members Elijah Wood, Sean Astin, John Rhys-Davies, Billy Boyd, Dominic Monaghan, Orlando Bloom, Christopher Lee, Sean Bean, Bernard Hill, Miranda Otto, David Wenham, Brad Dourif, Karl Urban, John Noble, Craig Parker and Andy Serkis), 8-page booklet with foldout appendices map, Easter egg, animated film-themed menus with sound and music, scene access (31 chapters), languages: English (DD 5.1 EX, DTS 6.1 ES & DD 2.0 Surround), subtitles: English, Closed Captioned
Disc Two: The Film - Extended Version, Part II Part II - 129 mins (approx 236 mins total - includes 20 min fan club credit roll on Disc Two), PG-13, letterboxed widescreen (2.35:1), 16x9 enhanced, single-sided, RSDL dual-layered (layer switch at at 59:56, in chapter 18), all commentaries feature on-screen text to identify speaker, audio commentary (with director Peter Jackson and writers Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens), audio commentary (with design team members Richard Taylor, Tania Rodger, Grant Major, Alan Lee, John Howe, Dan Hennah and Chris Hennah), audio commentary (with production and post-production team members Barrie Osborne, Mark Ordesky, Andrew Lesnie, Mike Horton, Jabez Olssen, Rick Porras, Howard Shore, Jim Rygiel, Joe Letteri, Ethan Van der Ryn, Mike Hopkins, Randy Cook, Christian Rivers, Brian Van't Hull and Alex Funke), audio commentary (with cast members Elijah Wood, Sean Astin, John Rhys-Davies, Billy Boyd, Dominic Monaghan, Orlando Bloom, Christopher Lee, Sean Bean, Bernard Hill, Miranda Otto, David Wenham, Brad Dourif, Karl Urban, John Noble, Craig Parker and Andy Serkis), animated film-themed menus with sound and music, scene access (39 chapters), languages: English (DD 5.1 EX, DTS 6.1 ES & DD 2.0 Surround), subtitles: English, Closed Captioned
Discs Three & Four (See Page Two)
"It is an army bred for a single purpose... to destroy the world of men."
And so we come to the crossroads. The Two Towers is the second installment in Peter Jackson's epic film adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkein's The Lord of the Rings - the installment poised to make or break the trilogy. Could Jackson and company follow up on the blockbuster success of 2001's The Fellowship of the Ring? Would the film continue with the same level of quality? Would the momentum of the story build upon the climax of the first film, and prepare audiences for the ultimate confrontation between good and evil in the soon to be released final chapter, The Return of the King? The answer to all of these questions, of course, is a resounding yes.
As the film opens, we find ourselves plunged into the dark mines of Moria, to relive a few moments of Gandalf's confrontation with the fiery Balrog. But instead of playing out as we remember it in Fellowship of the Ring, this time, when Gandalf falls into the abyss, we fall with him to watch as his fight continues. The conseq
" Flash.. Ahhhh~ Savior of the universe.
Seriously tho. Who designed this page? I mean, I love anime, and Im fairly confident that this is going to be a wonderful (and profitable) movie, but fullscreening to a black "loading" page right away?
How about some basic design principals?!"
For some reason, practically every homepage for an anime movie or series in recent memory uses flash egregiously. It's damn hard to view them at home on my 28.8 connection (and frustrating because nothing faster is available.)
" I don't completely believe that Microsoft is evil. Microsoft helps my parents get online, have email, print pictures, and surf the web. There's no other easy software package out there expect that produced by microsoft that allows them to do it.
While I appreciate their products, it's hard to argue that they are not borg-like in their actions."
This is so blatantly untrue that the only conclusion I can come to is that you're either a microsoft troll or a hideously uninformed person.
*cue the pro-apple troll-feeding rebuttals to the parent post*
"f-prot antivirus does not work on ntfs filesystems. Oh well."
Unlikely, since I scanned my own NTFS partitions just today using the windows version. It'll scan whatever the OS can mount, so therefore the DOS version won't scan NTFS. But really, who regularly boots into DOS just to run an anti-virus as part of everyday operating procedure?
(I hope this post goes through. I've gotten that damn 500 internal server error something like 30 times on this one post.)
For sure. News stations that feature only news all the time are a godsend when commuting, and important in emergencies as well.
Remember The Blackout? I was at work patching the office for the Blaster worm when the lights went out. If it wasn't for radio and other wireless communication, we would have had no idea wtf was going on. Thankfully radio stations with reserve power managed to transmit so everyone could get into the car or use battery powered tranceivers to get the news updates.
I used to drive to and from Toronto all the time across a strech of the 401 and if it wasn't for 680 news I would have gotten into a lot of traffic jams.
Thus radio is still needed because it is an important way of disseminating information quickly, especially when only battery or small generator power is available.
This would be the c2.lop spyware from C2Media. It took my a while but I finally removed the bugger from my mom's laptop. The thing sets itself up such that certain parts of it just can't be deleted as they're always resident and running, so even if you remove the rest of the spyware, it keeps re-adding itself. You have to get down to safe mode or whatnot and clean it manually.
"This is equivalent of the facility you have in a physical bookstore to open a book and browse a few pages before purchasing."
The difference being that you can't write a computer program to go to the bookstore and systematically find the contents of certain books for you while you sleep. You can't root a bunch of windows boxes and have those zombies doing the whole thing to a physical store's collection.
I'm not saying that amazon's book text search feature is bad. I'm just saying it is different from and has different implications than the ability to walk into a bookstore and browse through a book.
Check out this thing called Sugarplum which creates pages with lots of real-looking but truly fake e-mail addresses. The point of using something like this is to poison the spammer databases and reduce the good:bad ratio of addresses. This way hopefully they will have to throw out the database or at least the content they gathered from your web site.
Other ANTI-SPAM techniques: Basically the best method is to never let your e-mail address appear in a machine-parseable format except in places where other data is supposed to go. For example, the 'from' address in all my e-mails is just a forwarder address and not my real address. The point of this is that when some luser that I sent mail to gets infected with the latest mass mailing worm, my real e-mail address will NOT appear in their address book and be spread across half the net. I can just change the forwarder whenever I want. Of course in the 'name' field if the e-mail it shows [My Name (myname-at-mydomain-org)] so the real address can be found that way by anyone with a clue.
Branding Mozilla: Towards Mozilla 2.0
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Branding Mozilla: Towards Mozilla 2.0
Recommendations for the branding and visual identity of the Mozilla Foundations product and project line - by Steven Garrity
Summary
This document is intended to offer suggestions to the Mozilla Foundation for the future of the Mozilla brand and visual identity. It is not intended to replace or redo the good work that has already been done in this area. Any suggestions made here that contradict, conflict, or replace guidelines, recommendation, or other work that has already been done reflects more my ignorance as the author than my opinion of what has been done.
As the Mozilla project moves towards an end-user focus from a developer and platform focus, the branding and visual identity of the organization and its software will need to be revisited. With the recent separation from Netscape and AOL, the need for the Mozilla project to have a brand of its own is all the more necessary.
Keep What Works
First, the Mozilla project has a lot going for it. It has a long heritage, reaching back to the early Netscape web browsers. The Mozilla name was an apt choice as a nod to the roots of the project. It is also unique (free of trademark issues), memorable, and relatively easy to spell and pronounce. Mozilla is a good name.
Lose What Doesnt Work
The Mozilla project is lacking a strong visual identity. The Mozilla lizard is widely recognized by developers and early-adopters on the web, but does not reach far beyond these groups. It is also used inconsistently across projects and products.
Any good visual identity builds on what is already established, while improving on the weaknesses of past. So too should the visual identity of the Mozilla project and products. A unified, consistent, but flexible brand and visual identity would be a great compliment to the technology developed under the Mozilla project.
Products, Projects, and the Foundation
The broad scope of the Mozilla project has lead to confusion among end users. The term Mozilla is used to describe a web browser, a suite of applications, a platform, and an entire collection of software projects.
The recently formed Mozilla Foundation has already started the work of clarifying the terminology. The name of the Mozilla Foundation itself is a good and clear name that obviously defines the official organization that manages the Mozilla project.
They have also clarified the eventual naming of key Mozilla products; the current Mozilla Firebird project is the temporary development name for what will eventually be called Mozilla Browser; the current Mozilla Thunderbird project is the temporary development name for what will eventually be called Mozilla Mail. This is clear, simple, and smart.
Seemingly simple and obvious declarations like this are important for the success of the Mozilla project. People cant use software that they dont know how to ask for. People cant tell others about software that they dont know what to call.
The Mozilla Browser and Mozilla Mail names are clear, simple, and strong names for what will become the flagship products of the Mozilla project.
Version Numbers
The Mozilla application suite is approaching version 2.0 (version 1.5 at the time of this writing) and the independent applications are approaching 1.0 (Mozilla Firebird is at 0.71 and Mozilla Thunderbird is at a humble 0.3 at the time of this writing). Many have speculated that the official replacement of the application suite with the independent applications would be appropriate time to declare them version 2.0.
The change in focus and new independent applications certain does warrant a new version
"Is it really that hard to sign up for a credit card? I have the credit card companies absolutely throwing themselves at my *feet* trying to get me to sign up for more credit cards. And my credit rating is *bad*."
In the USA it's really easy. There are so many banks and other companies competing to give you a credit card that they're willing to reach far down the credit rating food chain in order to get applicants.
I have worked in the credit card industry in Canada and it's certainly different here. There are only five big banks and much less competition for cardholders. A lot of the people who get all the pre-approved crap in the mail in the USA would never get approved in Canada for a credit card. That's why it's much easier to get a CC in the USA compared to Canada and probably a lot of other countries as well.
"Paypal issues a DEBIT CARD and they are _STILL_ not considered a BANK?!?!?! WTF?!?!?!?!?!?"
RTFA. You're just using paypal send someone a bunch of money. And then that person uses THEIR credit card to send you an iTMS gift certificate. Paypal is just acting as a conduit for the moving of funds.
" But I don't want to throttle my bandwidth! If they want me to download something, there should be a way where I don't have to share MY bandwidth. I want 110kb/sec, and I don't want to share."
Didn't you ever see that movie "A Beautiful Mind" starring Russel Crowe? Anti-hollywood/MPAA/aussie FUD aside, it shows nicely with a dating analogy why, for the best results, each entity should do what's best for their own interests AND the group's interests. Bittorrent is the very embodiment of this for the internet.
"Now, two big things conspire to keep bookstores from buying back your texts. Number one, it is often very difficult to get professors to order books on time. If a bookstore doesn't have a request from the prof, they can't buy the book back from you. Second, publishers are changing editions on average once every 2 years (average!!)"
And thirdly, the prices used bookstores pay students for used books are peanuts compared to what you get for selling the book outright to the next student. The one time I couldn't sell a $70 textbook, I took it to the campus bookstore's book buyback thing and they gave me $12 for it and then it was on the shelf for $52.50 again.
If I buy a new book, I can sell it to the next person for 70-75% of the retail price. If I buy it used to begin with, then I usually sell it for $5 less than what I paid, or if I barely put any wear on it, then I sell it for the price I got it for. So it works out to about $5/semester/book for me.
As to the issue of publishers changing the edition to avoid used book selling, professors at my university are smartening up too. They generally give out assignments/reading pages etc. for both the new and the old edition. I've heard a rant or two about how numerical methods (at a 2nd year university level) only changes once per 100 years and new editions are only for the reasons you mentioned.
The market for selling textbooks to students has IMO turned pure evil and I try to short circuit it in any way I can short of outright theft. (And I won't photocopy books either.) I just don't buy their new product unless I *know* I can't get a used one anywhere or I will want to keep the book for myself in the long run instead of selling it.
"iTunes uses IE as its browser no matter what browser you choose."
I'm not sure sure about that. On my win32 install, IE does not get access outside the firewall except to windows update. Yet iTMS still loads nicely in iTunes for Windows.
"That's for sure, when I upgraded from Acrobat 5 to 6 (full version), the time to create a PDF increased 10-fold (literally, no exageration here), and it takes nearly 2 full minutes for the damned program to load, even to view a bloody PDF!"
I've gotta agree that Acrobat 6 is terrible compared to earlier versions. Now I've only used the reader, but it's like Adobe deliberately tried to suck the life out of the product and make it miserable to use.
Their search function is broken beyond repair. Sometimes it finds nothing when the search term is obviously in the document. They instroduced this ultra-lame search sidebar instead of a dialogue box. And for some reason, when you're scrolling around a document from page to page trying to find some text after doing a search, it randomly changes zoom levels. No kidding. And they added some little text area in the top right that's constantly flashing text advertisements for reasons you should upgrade to the Paid Version.
I have no idea why, but it seems like Adobe is TRYING to drive people away from their products!
"Why should it store metadata in it's own db? You move the song file, you lose the metadata! That's dumb! Embedded metadata is good! Blame the FLAC developers for not supporting IDv* tags."
That's the purpose of having iTunes manage the library for you. There is no reason to move the file. And even if you don't subscribe to that style of file management, all you have to do is keep a checksum of the file in the DB and then it can be re-matched if/when you re-add the file later.
"OGG and FLAC support: what, are there like 50 people on the planet using those formats? While it might be nice for apple to suppor this, they're not in widespread use and there's no real reason to support it in the first release."
Considering that iRiver is releasing their own OGG/mp3 player I expect that a lot more than 50 people use the format. If iTunes supported OGG I could live with that as you can put FLAC in an ogg container. What I really would have preferred is some sort of SDK for iTunes so people could add their own features to it so apple wouldn't be bothered to add support for every little format because other developers could do it themselves.
" There is too unicode support. I have a lot of Japanese MP3s, and I can go back and forth between Windows and Mac iTunes and update files and they look the same on both ends... I don't get garbage characters."
But are you running it on a Japanese copy of windows? I am using English Windows 2000 and I have even installed the Japanese internationalisation fonts and input methods. I still get the garbage titles. While in contrast, my English version of OS X showns japanese titles nicely.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly right. I'm in university now but I've had a computer in my own room since I was maybe 12 or 13, although we didn't have internet access back then. My parents did a good job of impressing the right values onto me so I would be able to tell good from bad and right from wrong. Once you've got that taken care of, then you're basically coasting and it's hard for you or your kids to build up momentum in the wrong direction.
I damn well did look at pr0n out of curiosity but once the overall rush/thrill of it all gets past you, it's nothing special. Having a real girl/boyfriend is (probably*) a lot better than pr0n. I barely ever fire up the browser and get pr0n anymore because I don't have a reason to do it. And whether I like it or not I did end up having similar morals to my parents and I never, ever, did anything that was truly 'bad' related to the internet. I was never strictly supervised or watched over - it was simply good traditional parenting that set me on the right path.
Giving the kids the morals to make their own decisions is important because they have to learn how to make their own judgements and opinions. If you make all the decisions for them and control them at every turn, you'll just push them into more underground ways of doing what every teen does and probably contort their viewpoints.
So what am I trying to say? Here it is: You can and should teach them how to navigate as best you can. But only by letting them truly do it themselves will they develop conscience and maturity.
My yougest sibling has been on the internet since she was 6 or so but I know she will not get into any trouble. Our parents and I put the smarts and values into her so she doesn't act stupidly without micromanagement from others. A guiding, watchful person is necessary. Not a person who acts as a surrogate conscience and brain.
(he steps down from the pulpit)
*As a regular slashdot reader, I was obligated to add 'probably' to that sentence.
True. IMO Matrox is best for non-gaming applications. One thing a lot of people forget is that Matrox is a significant player in the digital video products that deal with video capture and real time editing. Their RT.X series of DV editing products are among the best in the price range.
I'm just talking about normal playback here - Reading the raw encrypted sectors. Playing DVDs for the purpose of watching the movie is a real time process and if the drive has to make too many adjustments to read a poorly manufactured disc, then playback will suffer. This is why poorly pressed discs are undesirable. That's what I'm concerned about.
As to ripping DVDs to unencrypted VOBs, I could do that but since it's not a time sensetive process I don't mind if the ripping process is not totally linear with respect to decrpyted data / time issues.
And as to Big Brother Ashcroft, I don't live in the USA or an oil rich nation without a well developed refinery industry so I'm not worried.
Firstly you should obviously be using high quality discs. Those cheapies will die quickly. Get ye some Taiyo Yuden, Memorex Black, TDK or similar.
Note that there are only something like twelve companies in the world that manufacture CD-R discs and then the brand name of many other companies are printed on them. For example if you find FujiFilm CD-R spindles that say "Made in Japan" then they're probably TY. This is what I use religiously. (Note: Some Fuji is made in Taiwan by Ricoh as well. You're safe to ignore these ones.)
Use a good physical storage method. This means that both the front and back of the discs are protected. Honestly I find that the Microsoft's Technet binders offer the best security and disc density in this field. The little sleeves are modular and the binders have rings so you can open the binder, hand the disc WITH THE SLEEVE to the next person and avoid getting fingerprints or dirt the disc. A lot of other binder sleeves leave half the disc exposed so they're rubbing against each other and so on. This is bad. You want the front and back of the disc to be protected completely.
I also put a little silica gel pack in my CD-R binders although honestly I have no systematic evidence that this helps control the humidity and makes a difference in the discs' longevity. But I'm better safe than sorry. (I basically collect the packets when I open the boxes from new computer products. At one job I had I opened a lot of new products so I collected a lot of the packets.)
I use a water based marker to label all my discs. No glue-on labels or alcohol based markers to eat through the discs. Now admittedly there are lots and lots of cases where people use sanford sharpies (which are alcohol based) and have NO bad side effects. Many of my older discs are labelled with sharpies and only ONE out of hundreds has failed, and there's no evidence that the sharpie was directly related. Still, you can't go wrong with a pack of 4 memorex water based CD-markers for $3. The only downside is that sharpies give you a daker, finer ink stroke.
And if your data is really that important, I hope you're not burning only one disc. Burn 3 and keep them in different physical locations so if one disc is lost to theft or file or decay, your data is not instantly lost.
Check out the freeware win32 tool Nero CDSpeed which has many excellent functions for measuring the quality of optical discs (CD, CD-R, CD-Rw, DVD, etc) and tools for verifying the integrity of stored data. Its scandisc function test the drive's ability to read each file at the filesystem level and read each sector at the physical level, telling you which sectors are good, which are failing and which are dead.
An interesting side effect of using this tool is that I've noticed that the manufacture of pressed DVDs is highly variable! Some discs are excellent, some are crap. And it seems to be pretty consistent with the company that distributed them too. Some discs read very smoothly while others require all kinds of speed adjustments by the drive to get data out of them.
TEXT OF THE ARTICLE
review by Bill Hunt, editor of The Digital Bits
Film Rating: A
Disc Ratings (Video/Extras): A/A+
Audio Ratings (DD/DTS): A-/A
Specs and Features
Disc One: The Film - Extended Version, Part I
Part I - 107 mins (approx 236 mins total - includes 20 min fan club credit roll on Disc Two), PG-13, letterboxed widescreen (2.35:1), 16x9 enhanced, single-sided, RSDL dual-layered (layer switch at 50:42, at the start of chapter 15), custom slipcase with fold-out Digipack packaging (featuring production sketches and artwork), all commentaries feature on-screen text to identify speaker, audio commentary (with director Peter Jackson and writers Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens), audio commentary (with design team members Richard Taylor, Tania Rodger, Grant Major, Alan Lee, John Howe, Dan Hennah and Chris Hennah), audio commentary (with production and post-production team members Barrie Osborne, Mark Ordesky, Andrew Lesnie, Mike Horton, Jabez Olssen, Rick Porras, Howard Shore, Jim Rygiel, Joe Letteri, Ethan Van der Ryn, Mike Hopkins, Randy Cook, Christian Rivers, Brian Van't Hull and Alex Funke), audio commentary (with cast members Elijah Wood, Sean Astin, John Rhys-Davies, Billy Boyd, Dominic Monaghan, Orlando Bloom, Christopher Lee, Sean Bean, Bernard Hill, Miranda Otto, David Wenham, Brad Dourif, Karl Urban, John Noble, Craig Parker and Andy Serkis), 8-page booklet with foldout appendices map, Easter egg, animated film-themed menus with sound and music, scene access (31 chapters), languages: English (DD 5.1 EX, DTS 6.1 ES & DD 2.0 Surround), subtitles: English, Closed Captioned
Disc Two: The Film - Extended Version, Part II
Part II - 129 mins (approx 236 mins total - includes 20 min fan club credit roll on Disc Two), PG-13, letterboxed widescreen (2.35:1), 16x9 enhanced, single-sided, RSDL dual-layered (layer switch at at 59:56, in chapter 18), all commentaries feature on-screen text to identify speaker, audio commentary (with director Peter Jackson and writers Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens), audio commentary (with design team members Richard Taylor, Tania Rodger, Grant Major, Alan Lee, John Howe, Dan Hennah and Chris Hennah), audio commentary (with production and post-production team members Barrie Osborne, Mark Ordesky, Andrew Lesnie, Mike Horton, Jabez Olssen, Rick Porras, Howard Shore, Jim Rygiel, Joe Letteri, Ethan Van der Ryn, Mike Hopkins, Randy Cook, Christian Rivers, Brian Van't Hull and Alex Funke), audio commentary (with cast members Elijah Wood, Sean Astin, John Rhys-Davies, Billy Boyd, Dominic Monaghan, Orlando Bloom, Christopher Lee, Sean Bean, Bernard Hill, Miranda Otto, David Wenham, Brad Dourif, Karl Urban, John Noble, Craig Parker and Andy Serkis), animated film-themed menus with sound and music, scene access (39 chapters), languages: English (DD 5.1 EX, DTS 6.1 ES & DD 2.0 Surround), subtitles: English, Closed Captioned
Discs Three & Four (See Page Two)
"It is an army bred for a single purpose... to destroy the world of men."
And so we come to the crossroads. The Two Towers is the second installment in Peter Jackson's epic film adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkein's The Lord of the Rings - the installment poised to make or break the trilogy. Could Jackson and company follow up on the blockbuster success of 2001's The Fellowship of the Ring? Would the film continue with the same level of quality? Would the momentum of the story build upon the climax of the first film, and prepare audiences for the ultimate confrontation between good and evil in the soon to be released final chapter, The Return of the King? The answer to all of these questions, of course, is a resounding yes.
As the film opens, we find ourselves plunged into the dark mines of Moria, to relive a few moments of Gandalf's confrontation with the fiery Balrog. But instead of playing out as we remember it in Fellowship of the Ring, this time, when Gandalf falls into the abyss, we fall with him to watch as his fight continues. The conseq
For some reason, practically every homepage for an anime movie or series in recent memory uses flash egregiously. It's damn hard to view them at home on my 28.8 connection (and frustrating because nothing faster is available.)
This is so blatantly untrue that the only conclusion I can come to is that you're either a microsoft troll or a hideously uninformed person.
*cue the pro-apple troll-feeding rebuttals to the parent post*
Unlikely, since I scanned my own NTFS partitions just today using the windows version. It'll scan whatever the OS can mount, so therefore the DOS version won't scan NTFS. But really, who regularly boots into DOS just to run an anti-virus as part of everyday operating procedure?
For anti-virus I swear by F-Prot which IMO is a model of correctness. They also have versions for various *nix as well.
So is anyone gonna open a betting pool saying that real quantum computing will be available before fusion power?
As we all know, fusion power is only 40 years away.
(Note: This is a joke. Please only mod down if you *understand* the joke and find it un-funny.)
For sure. News stations that feature only news all the time are a godsend when commuting, and important in emergencies as well.
Remember The Blackout? I was at work patching the office for the Blaster worm when the lights went out. If it wasn't for radio and other wireless communication, we would have had no idea wtf was going on. Thankfully radio stations with reserve power managed to transmit so everyone could get into the car or use battery powered tranceivers to get the news updates.
I used to drive to and from Toronto all the time across a strech of the 401 and if it wasn't for 680 news I would have gotten into a lot of traffic jams.
Thus radio is still needed because it is an important way of disseminating information quickly, especially when only battery or small generator power is available.
This would be the c2.lop spyware from C2Media. It took my a while but I finally removed the bugger from my mom's laptop. The thing sets itself up such that certain parts of it just can't be deleted as they're always resident and running, so even if you remove the rest of the spyware, it keeps re-adding itself. You have to get down to safe mode or whatnot and clean it manually.
The difference being that you can't write a computer program to go to the bookstore and systematically find the contents of certain books for you while you sleep. You can't root a bunch of windows boxes and have those zombies doing the whole thing to a physical store's collection.
I'm not saying that amazon's book text search feature is bad. I'm just saying it is different from and has different implications than the ability to walk into a bookstore and browse through a book.
Other ANTI-SPAM techniques: Basically the best method is to never let your e-mail address appear in a machine-parseable format except in places where other data is supposed to go. For example, the 'from' address in all my e-mails is just a forwarder address and not my real address. The point of this is that when some luser that I sent mail to gets infected with the latest mass mailing worm, my real e-mail address will NOT appear in their address book and be spread across half the net. I can just change the forwarder whenever I want. Of course in the 'name' field if the e-mail it shows [My Name (myname-at-mydomain-org)] so the real address can be found that way by anyone with a clue.
Branding Mozilla: Towards Mozilla 2.0 Recommendations for the branding and visual identity of the Mozilla Foundations product and project line - by Steven Garrity
Summary
This document is intended to offer suggestions to the Mozilla Foundation for the future of the Mozilla brand and visual identity. It is not intended to replace or redo the good work that has already been done in this area. Any suggestions made here that contradict, conflict, or replace guidelines, recommendation, or other work that has already been done reflects more my ignorance as the author than my opinion of what has been done.
As the Mozilla project moves towards an end-user focus from a developer and platform focus, the branding and visual identity of the organization and its software will need to be revisited. With the recent separation from Netscape and AOL, the need for the Mozilla project to have a brand of its own is all the more necessary.
Keep What Works
First, the Mozilla project has a lot going for it. It has a long heritage, reaching back to the early Netscape web browsers. The Mozilla name was an apt choice as a nod to the roots of the project. It is also unique (free of trademark issues), memorable, and relatively easy to spell and pronounce. Mozilla is a good name.
Lose What Doesnt Work
The Mozilla project is lacking a strong visual identity. The Mozilla lizard is widely recognized by developers and early-adopters on the web, but does not reach far beyond these groups. It is also used inconsistently across projects and products.
Any good visual identity builds on what is already established, while improving on the weaknesses of past. So too should the visual identity of the Mozilla project and products. A unified, consistent, but flexible brand and visual identity would be a great compliment to the technology developed under the Mozilla project.
Products, Projects, and the Foundation
The broad scope of the Mozilla project has lead to confusion among end users. The term Mozilla is used to describe a web browser, a suite of applications, a platform, and an entire collection of software projects.
The recently formed Mozilla Foundation has already started the work of clarifying the terminology. The name of the Mozilla Foundation itself is a good and clear name that obviously defines the official organization that manages the Mozilla project.
They have also clarified the eventual naming of key Mozilla products; the current Mozilla Firebird project is the temporary development name for what will eventually be called Mozilla Browser; the current Mozilla Thunderbird project is the temporary development name for what will eventually be called Mozilla Mail. This is clear, simple, and smart.
Seemingly simple and obvious declarations like this are important for the success of the Mozilla project. People cant use software that they dont know how to ask for. People cant tell others about software that they dont know what to call.
The Mozilla Browser and Mozilla Mail names are clear, simple, and strong names for what will become the flagship products of the Mozilla project.
Version Numbers
The Mozilla application suite is approaching version 2.0 (version 1.5 at the time of this writing) and the independent applications are approaching 1.0 (Mozilla Firebird is at 0.71 and Mozilla Thunderbird is at a humble 0.3 at the time of this writing). Many have speculated that the official replacement of the application suite with the independent applications would be appropriate time to declare them version 2.0.
The change in focus and new independent applications certain does warrant a new version
In the USA it's really easy. There are so many banks and other companies competing to give you a credit card that they're willing to reach far down the credit rating food chain in order to get applicants.
I have worked in the credit card industry in Canada and it's certainly different here. There are only five big banks and much less competition for cardholders. A lot of the people who get all the pre-approved crap in the mail in the USA would never get approved in Canada for a credit card. That's why it's much easier to get a CC in the USA compared to Canada and probably a lot of other countries as well.
RTFA. You're just using paypal send someone a bunch of money. And then that person uses THEIR credit card to send you an iTMS gift certificate. Paypal is just acting as a conduit for the moving of funds.
Didn't you ever see that movie "A Beautiful Mind" starring Russel Crowe? Anti-hollywood/MPAA/aussie FUD aside, it shows nicely with a dating analogy why, for the best results, each entity should do what's best for their own interests AND the group's interests. Bittorrent is the very embodiment of this for the internet.
And thirdly, the prices used bookstores pay students for used books are peanuts compared to what you get for selling the book outright to the next student. The one time I couldn't sell a $70 textbook, I took it to the campus bookstore's book buyback thing and they gave me $12 for it and then it was on the shelf for $52.50 again.
If I buy a new book, I can sell it to the next person for 70-75% of the retail price. If I buy it used to begin with, then I usually sell it for $5 less than what I paid, or if I barely put any wear on it, then I sell it for the price I got it for. So it works out to about $5/semester/book for me.
As to the issue of publishers changing the edition to avoid used book selling, professors at my university are smartening up too. They generally give out assignments/reading pages etc. for both the new and the old edition. I've heard a rant or two about how numerical methods (at a 2nd year university level) only changes once per 100 years and new editions are only for the reasons you mentioned.
The market for selling textbooks to students has IMO turned pure evil and I try to short circuit it in any way I can short of outright theft. (And I won't photocopy books either.) I just don't buy their new product unless I *know* I can't get a used one anywhere or I will want to keep the book for myself in the long run instead of selling it.
I'm not sure sure about that. On my win32 install, IE does not get access outside the firewall except to windows update. Yet iTMS still loads nicely in iTunes for Windows.
Here's that list of ominous napster partners that some people can't view:
Gateway, Microsoft, Roxio, Samsung, Yahoo
Honestly I don't see what the problem is with samsung or yahoo.
I've gotta agree that Acrobat 6 is terrible compared to earlier versions. Now I've only used the reader, but it's like Adobe deliberately tried to suck the life out of the product and make it miserable to use.
Their search function is broken beyond repair. Sometimes it finds nothing when the search term is obviously in the document. They instroduced this ultra-lame search sidebar instead of a dialogue box. And for some reason, when you're scrolling around a document from page to page trying to find some text after doing a search, it randomly changes zoom levels. No kidding. And they added some little text area in the top right that's constantly flashing text advertisements for reasons you should upgrade to the Paid Version.
I have no idea why, but it seems like Adobe is TRYING to drive people away from their products!
That's the purpose of having iTunes manage the library for you. There is no reason to move the file. And even if you don't subscribe to that style of file management, all you have to do is keep a checksum of the file in the DB and then it can be re-matched if/when you re-add the file later.
"OGG and FLAC support: what, are there like 50 people on the planet using those formats? While it might be nice for apple to suppor this, they're not in widespread use and there's no real reason to support it in the first release."
Considering that iRiver is releasing their own OGG/mp3 player I expect that a lot more than 50 people use the format. If iTunes supported OGG I could live with that as you can put FLAC in an ogg container. What I really would have preferred is some sort of SDK for iTunes so people could add their own features to it so apple wouldn't be bothered to add support for every little format because other developers could do it themselves.
But are you running it on a Japanese copy of windows? I am using English Windows 2000 and I have even installed the Japanese internationalisation fonts and input methods. I still get the garbage titles. While in contrast, my English version of OS X showns japanese titles nicely.