I agree that for people who are always booked with something or other a PDA can be a godsend.
But frankly, I think that most people would get along well without one, or with the happy medium of a paper planner and a cellphone. I'm a student and I keep all my to-do stuff, duedates, appointments, scheduling, etc on the paper. No power, syncing required. Good handwriting recognition (most of the time.) The phone numbers are stored where I really need them (on the phone) as long as a couple of games if I am waiting for a ride or something.
If I got a PDA, it would get very light use and go obsolete and valueless before I got the price's worth out of it.
One good thing, though, about a PDA is that it's great for experimental lab work. You just type the results into the unit, save to an rtf file and you can avoid problems with re-typing all results, group members yelling at you because you haven't sent them the results or because you send them 3mb of scanned pages, etc.
But other than that, I really wouldn't get full use out of a PDA so I don't buy one.
""`Theft' is a harsh word, but that it is, pure and simple," the letter stated. "... It is no different from walking into the campus bookstore and in a clandestine manner walking out with a textbook without paying for it.""
Aside from the clear lack of logic in this statement, it is interesting to note that the RIAA has enough sense to not call it 'piracy' when they are talking to the Navy.
In reality, it's 'infringement of copyright' , not theft or piracy.
"Sigh, command lines... so fun, so minimalist. I don't like my start menu:\"
I suggest you check out the freeware win32 program (available with source) called MCL. It's a very useful 'command line' that can be added into windows. It has obsoleted the start menu on my machine. It's great because you can write your own plugins to control other applications, scripts to automate tasks and so on. There are tons of other options and I encourage any of those who are sick of the start menu to check it out.
"Lord knows THAT ain't true. I've known PLENTY of programmers 'didn't know SQUAT about computers!"
I have known people like this.
I helped out this one coder (with 10+ years of experience) with his sound card. This guy knew plenty about programming but not about hardware because that was not his job.
It turned out that the speakers were plugged into the wrong jack.
"The implementation is awful, but the intent is acceptable. Why can't you go to a library and checkout/read Penthouse? Because Penthouse does not fit in with the mission of a library."
I agree with what you say here. I better solution might be for force all future domain registration for mature websites to have a separate tld, perhaps.mat so pr0n seekers would go to www.autopr0n.mat. This allows easy filtering and reduces mis-filters. Of course such a thing would not be instantaneous because existing pr0n sites could take a few years to move over, i.e. waiting until their current registrations expire.
"Net Nanny is reputed to be one of the most brain-dead filters. My favorite example was its blocking "marsexplorer.org." You'll have to study that a little to figure out why. They had to set up a mirror."
The Lumberjack's Exchange: www.lumberjacksexchange.com
"This days i trust the printed (legal) cd's better than the copies. They are usually better material quality and they play everywhere.
But with all this crap they are pushing into the printed cd's, it is going to be a good policy to just avoid them and trust the copies.
If you come across a copy of a music cd, you know that the person who copied it made the effort to remove the restrictions placed on it.
Therefore in the future, there will be less trouble with copies than with original discs!"
That is abolsutely right. My mom just bought a Univeral disc and lo and behold it was copy-protected. (All universal discs have been like this for some time.) The first track had a bunch of static at the start. I knew she would bring one home sooner or later.
What do I do? I put the CD into the stereo, play the thing, and pipe the output into my machine and record a clean copy.
Now how often do you think we listen to the original?
"Even if they DO create a format that, magically, won't allow itself to be digitally reproduced - what's to stop audiophiles from recording and encoding the output stream?"
There have been some reports of DRM speakers that decode the sound inside the speaker. But I can't find them right now.
But seriously, I understand what you mean. No matter how hard they try, we can just put a microphone up to the speaker and record it with a slight degradadion in quality and then digitize it and it's good forever.
"I wonder just how long the record labels are going to survive before they figure out that they, not just their technology, are obsolete."
Ultimately, I believe that that is the real point here. They will last as long as joe consumer doesn't realise that old music distribution methods are obsolete.
"We can state with absolute certainty that no computer in the world can
access the data on this disc," said spokesman Brett Campbell. "We are also
confident that no-one is going to be able to produce pirate copies in this
format"
Besides, I already copied a bunch of my parents' old LPs to CD by running the connection from the amp output into my machine. The pops and scratches were cleaned out by a simple low-pass FFT filter in audacity and everything was good to go for CD burning.
(Note: I do recognise that the parent post is a joke.)
"Speaking of floppies.. are they actually still being made, or are those sold new in fact old warehouse fodder? Reason I ask, I've noticed that *ALL* 3" floppy media started going back pretty much together as of a couple years ago."
Floppies are still being made. I have seen 100 packs at costco. BUT the ones being made now are crappy. They only have glue on the corners to hold the two plastic halves together. Dust can get in the sides. The older floppies from times past are glued all the way around for longer life. Try to find OLD floppies!
Also you might want to check out one of those USB memory key devices.
"It seems CapitalOne's website works with Mozilla, as of this November, 2002. This is good news because many people have CapitalOne credit cards, and previously the site required Microsoft's Intarweb Explorer. This just shows how simply speaking up by e-mailing large companies can evoke change."
Excellent. Now keep speaking up and make sure they know that you are pleased to be able to continue giving them your business because they respect your personal choices.
My bank in canada always had a Mozilla friendly site and I made sure I sent them a nice e-mail thanking them,describing exactly why I prefer to use their services as opposed to my previous bank.
Positive feedback is just as important as negative feedback!
"My school added an "amazing new webmail feature" this year, but I really wasn't that impressed with it. The sad thing is that they probably paid some company for the webmail app, even though you can download several different ones at freshmeat.net for free."
It will still save them money because they will get significantly fewer calls from people who don't know how to set up pop3 and smtp in their Outbreak Express. My univ. also introduced one of these and it is pretty convenient. Click a quick shortcut in mozilla and enter uid/pass as opposed to starting telnet session, connect to mail server, start pine, go to inbox...
"(I've never seen one live up to the '1000 writes' standard they claim -- more like 3-7)"
Use good media and use good burners. I'm using Verbatim 4x-10X CD-Rw high speed discs with a top-of-the-line Plextor 40x12x40 drive and the most commonly written one is up to about 20 writes with no loss of data integrity.
And when the backup really matters, burn at the minimum speed. This will also reduce the chance of loss of data integrity.
"...and periodically PERFORM A RESTORE to verify readability and the fact that you are actually capturing what you think you are."
Absolutely right - one time, a client's business got broken into and all computers stolen. Fortunately, a cyclic zip disk backup was already implemented and all data was saved on those discs...
...except for this one admin assist whose very important accounting records were not on those discs. She saved them to separate floppies. But her box of floppies was bad.
Turns out that nobody ever tested the integrity of the backed up data on those floppies! (And really, floppies are terrible for backup in the first place. They are too easily damaged.) It was pretty obivous to me that something was going wrong because the floppy drive made strange groaning noises when disks from that box were put into it, but with non-technical people such blindling obvious things simply don't occur to them.
"RTF and Text are not good at all... Especially when you want send an email saying "The meeting is at 10:30am. See you there", we need Office XP doc file, with a couple of signature attachments -- better yet, copy a PPT slide from standard company template and highlight the 10:30 with big, bright colors."
When I was working at a large corporation several months ago, I saw this all the time. This was my first time working at a large company (I'm a student) and I was shocked that such madness actually happens. I blame admin-assists with too much time on their hands...
It was a 100% MSFT shop where everything was forced windows, outlook, IE, you know the deal.
But seriously, I wonder how much time was wasted creating a colourful e-mail with a cute clipart picture and all that for a 2-sentence annoucement.
"If you want to run windowsupdate (to remove security risks;) you _have_ to agree to trust them."
Agreed. I just removed the certificates and now all other security patches refuse to install, you can't upgrade your MSIE to a newer patch or encrpytion level, you can't run windowsupdate, etc. Nasty.
"This must be the most utterly humiliating admission I have ever read. The fact that it comes in the context of a security problem beggars belief."
I agree. I can't wait for the next worm or ILoveYou mass e-mail infection that spreads this. Hopefully whoever writes it will wipe "\My Documents" or perhaps the whole machine so that people will finally get the idea that responsible decisions must be made when computing, both with software choices, software administration, and useage in general. There are too many people out there who STILL haven't realised that irresponsibility when using computer has reprocussions in the real world.
"Why are these things posted here? Is it because of the many/. users that use windows:-), or is it because we're always trying to make windows look bad?"
Hello, today when browsing the site, I found an error (probably typographical) on the site. I would appreciate it if you could correct this: The story "Another Critical Microsoft Hole" should be reposted under the "It's Funny. Laugh." category. Thank you for your time.
"Yeah, but with Starband, your upstream bandwith is about 64Kilobits/sec over the satellite, so it's not much better than dialup."
Keep in mind that the people who are such a remote area that they can't get DSL/cable (like me) are on super-long phone loops so we can get 28.8 on a good day if we're lucky. 64K upstream is a big deal.
Slashdot Mirror
But frankly, I think that most people would get along well without one, or with the happy medium of a paper planner and a cellphone. I'm a student and I keep all my to-do stuff, duedates, appointments, scheduling, etc on the paper. No power, syncing required. Good handwriting recognition (most of the time.) The phone numbers are stored where I really need them (on the phone) as long as a couple of games if I am waiting for a ride or something.
If I got a PDA, it would get very light use and go obsolete and valueless before I got the price's worth out of it.
One good thing, though, about a PDA is that it's great for experimental lab work. You just type the results into the unit, save to an rtf file and you can avoid problems with re-typing all results, group members yelling at you because you haven't sent them the results or because you send them 3mb of scanned pages, etc.
But other than that, I really wouldn't get full use out of a PDA so I don't buy one.
Aside from the clear lack of logic in this statement, it is interesting to note that the RIAA has enough sense to not call it 'piracy' when they are talking to the Navy.
In reality, it's 'infringement of copyright' , not theft or piracy.
I suggest you check out the freeware win32 program (available with source) called MCL. It's a very useful 'command line' that can be added into windows. It has obsoleted the start menu on my machine. It's great because you can write your own plugins to control other applications, scripts to automate tasks and so on. There are tons of other options and I encourage any of those who are sick of the start menu to check it out.
You mean sharpie markers ;-)
I have known people like this.
I helped out this one coder (with 10+ years of experience) with his sound card. This guy knew plenty about programming but not about hardware because that was not his job.
It turned out that the speakers were plugged into the wrong jack.
I agree with what you say here. I better solution might be for force all future domain registration for mature websites to have a separate tld, perhaps .mat so pr0n seekers would go to www.autopr0n.mat. This allows easy filtering and reduces mis-filters. Of course such a thing would not be instantaneous because existing pr0n sites could take a few years to move over, i.e. waiting until their current registrations expire.
The Lumberjack's Exchange: www.lumberjacksexchange.com
Note: This site is not up any more.
That is abolsutely right. My mom just bought a Univeral disc and lo and behold it was copy-protected. (All universal discs have been like this for some time.) The first track had a bunch of static at the start. I knew she would bring one home sooner or later.
What do I do? I put the CD into the stereo, play the thing, and pipe the output into my machine and record a clean copy.
Now how often do you think we listen to the original?
I will laugh on the day when you can easily tell your drive's firmware to read the sessions on a CD in order from lowest to highest.
(If you don't know what this means, I suggest you read up on how "Enhanced CDs" also known as "CD-Extra" work.)
There have been some reports of DRM speakers that decode the sound inside the speaker. But I can't find them right now.
But seriously, I understand what you mean. No matter how hard they try, we can just put a microphone up to the speaker and record it with a slight degradadion in quality and then digitize it and it's good forever.
"I wonder just how long the record labels are going to survive before they figure out that they, not just their technology, are obsolete."
Ultimately, I believe that that is the real point here. They will last as long as joe consumer doesn't realise that old music distribution methods are obsolete.
Once again, the industry didn't realise that computers can already read LPs.
Besides, I already copied a bunch of my parents' old LPs to CD by running the connection from the amp output into my machine. The pops and scratches were cleaned out by a simple low-pass FFT filter in audacity and everything was good to go for CD burning.
(Note: I do recognise that the parent post is a joke.)
Floppies are still being made. I have seen 100 packs at costco. BUT the ones being made now are crappy. They only have glue on the corners to hold the two plastic halves together. Dust can get in the sides. The older floppies from times past are glued all the way around for longer life. Try to find OLD floppies!
Also you might want to check out one of those USB memory key devices.
Captain: Make it slow.
Excellent. Now keep speaking up and make sure they know that you are pleased to be able to continue giving them your business because they respect your personal choices.
My bank in canada always had a Mozilla friendly site and I made sure I sent them a nice e-mail thanking them ,describing exactly why I prefer to use their services as opposed to my previous bank.
Positive feedback is just as important as negative feedback!
It will still save them money because they will get significantly fewer calls from people who don't know how to set up pop3 and smtp in their Outbreak Express. My univ. also introduced one of these and it is pretty convenient. Click a quick shortcut in mozilla and enter uid/pass as opposed to starting telnet session, connect to mail server, start pine, go to inbox...
Use good media and use good burners. I'm using Verbatim 4x-10X CD-Rw high speed discs with a top-of-the-line Plextor 40x12x40 drive and the most commonly written one is up to about 20 writes with no loss of data integrity.
And when the backup really matters, burn at the minimum speed. This will also reduce the chance of loss of data integrity.
Absolutely right - one time, a client's business got broken into and all computers stolen. Fortunately, a cyclic zip disk backup was already implemented and all data was saved on those discs...
...except for this one admin assist whose very important accounting records were not on those discs. She saved them to separate floppies. But her box of floppies was bad.
Turns out that nobody ever tested the integrity of the backed up data on those floppies! (And really, floppies are terrible for backup in the first place. They are too easily damaged.) It was pretty obivous to me that something was going wrong because the floppy drive made strange groaning noises when disks from that box were put into it, but with non-technical people such blindling obvious things simply don't occur to them.
TEST YOUR DATA-BACKUP INTEGRITY!
When I was working at a large corporation several months ago, I saw this all the time. This was my first time working at a large company (I'm a student) and I was shocked that such madness actually happens. I blame admin-assists with too much time on their hands...
It was a 100% MSFT shop where everything was forced windows, outlook, IE, you know the deal.
But seriously, I wonder how much time was wasted creating a colourful e-mail with a cute clipart picture and all that for a 2-sentence annoucement.
Agreed. I just removed the certificates and now all other security patches refuse to install, you can't upgrade your MSIE to a newer patch or encrpytion level, you can't run windowsupdate, etc. Nasty.
Of course with Palladium this would be built into the hardware. I doubt they would tell us to rip a circuit or two out of the motherboard.
I agree. I can't wait for the next worm or ILoveYou mass e-mail infection that spreads this. Hopefully whoever writes it will wipe "\My Documents" or perhaps the whole machine so that people will finally get the idea that responsible decisions must be made when computing, both with software choices, software administration, and useage in general. There are too many people out there who STILL haven't realised that irresponsibility when using computer has reprocussions in the real world.
It's because a lot of slashdot users (47%) still use windows.
Hello, today when browsing the site, I found an error (probably typographical) on the site. I would appreciate it if you could correct this: The story "Another Critical Microsoft Hole" should be reposted under the "It's Funny. Laugh." category. Thank you for your time.
Keep in mind that the people who are such a remote area that they can't get DSL/cable (like me) are on super-long phone loops so we can get 28.8 on a good day if we're lucky. 64K upstream is a big deal.
Reading slashdot on the job already? You're brave, yes!