Can we get some of this "common-sense" in New Zealand please?
"Anti-piracy" 3-strikes was railroaded into our copyright law (section s92a) after select committee hearings and due process. Then the Minister had the gall to complain that all the moaners should have got involved in the process.
Someone needs to emphasize this in such a way that the right people see it: people who pirate software enjoy cracking it. The game itself is orders of magnitude less amusing. And their distributed ingenuity will smash your firm, secure edifice into beach absolutely every Goddamn time. There are no exceptions to this rule.
I don't care about the hype around the silly "series of tubes" comment. The corrupt bastard got what he deserved. Kickbacks are far too common in politics, and ultimately lead to the "lobbyist" driven politics like the DMCA.
I can't find the link now, but I remember reading that NASA had so much information on old tape that they couldn't read it out of the tapes fast enough to completely copy all the tapes before the tapes reached the end of their usable lives, or fell fould of mold/rot.
All of the replies claiming that this law is reasonable, I think have overlooked a few key things:
The Ministry of Economic Development has previously stated that it's not the Government's place to protect TPMs (aka DRM). This position has changed. Why? My guesses: free trade, WIPO, Apple.
The one good change (format-shifting allowed for fair use) has an automatic 2 year sunset clause unless it is specifically extended. WTF!? Do the backers of this bill know something that we don't about a new format being available in 2 yrs that they want to prevent shifting to?
Format shifting can be denied by a EULA. Expect to see little sealed stickers on CDs and DVDs saying "opening this case binds you to our contract which disallows format shifting"
You're only allowed to crack DRM for fair if you first ask the supplier to remove it for you, and wait for a resonable time for them to respond (1 month? 1 year? what's reasonable? Could Apple just say "yeah it's coming in release n.1"?).
There's no point comparing any media player that Microsoft may or may not produce with the iPod. Regardless of what Microsoft is trying to 'kill', they will have no problem in killing the product themselves.
They will create a hardware platform that is fantastic, open, and fast; with full wifi connectivity, bluetooth wireless headphones, VOIP capability, huge storage, and a killer interface.
Then they will load it with DRM, Passport(tm) authentication, proprietary codecs, no podcasting or RSS capability, and a shitty user interface, and attempt to sell it for $2. It will die a silent, lonely death.
And I am not a troll. I rely on developing.NET applications to feed my family. I do not hate Microsoft. I just know that a leopard cannot change its spots without the intervention of a benevolent geneticist.
We use LiPo batteries for radio control planes, and many of us have experienced swelling, and eventually combustion, because of the abuse that we put the batteries through. We demand massive current output to drive high-wattage brushless motors, and then get frustrated and charge the batteries at higher-than recommended currents so we can get out flying again.
Then there's the whole cottage industry of R/C flyers buying 'bare cells' and soldering together frankenstein combinations of cells in series and parallel to get the perfect size/voltage/weight battery for the plane we are building.
So in other words it comes as no surprise to me that LiPos in consumer products are swelling (and exploding) as the capacities and loads are increased, and as manufacturing perhaps gets shoddier as supply demand increases.
As I mention here, the more power you need, the more energy you need to store in a battery, and the higher the likelihood of some sort of catastrophic failure.
The monitor has built in loudspeakers, which would explain the phat borders:
The monitor is fully equipped. In addition to DVI and VGA connectors, there are two loudspeakers, and for once their quality is above average as the speakers in LCD monitors are usually a disaster. But they still aren't quite what you could call satisfactory. Other models do much better in this department.
Apparently elevator designers in New Zealand don't need Gurus. Although I expect our elevators are manufactured in Australia or somewhere in Southeast Asia. There are a couple of buildings in Auckland that have this system, including the amazing innovation of designating elevators with letters.
Agreed, but you've gotta say there's a happy medium surely? You don't want a visible loading dialog very often (as it appears to be the case with Google reader), but I totally agree that the treeview thing.
My first impressions? It's excrucuatingly slow, counter intuitive, and just generally sucks the big one. I mean if the future of "Web 2.0 is an animated Loading... dialog, then I'll just stick with 1.0 thankyou very much.
Seriously, it troubles me that in the rush to AJAXify everything, we seem to be going back to dialup days just when everything was starting to run smoothly on broadband. Sure I can load a 1000 element javascript array and do sorting and searching on the client side, but with today's connections and server hardware, what's the big deal with a page refresh?
Google reader vs Bloglines illustrates this brilliantly.
I feel it is my solemn duty to inform you that my sister has had dinner with PJ, making you, the humble Slashdot comment reader, merely four degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon. To illustrate:
You read my comment
My sister had dinner with Peter Jackson
PJ directed LotR, starring Sean Astin
Sean Astin starred in White Water Summer with Kevin Bacon
As a beta tester, I'm also happy to hack around at anything you're particularly interested in and post more shots.
As a long-time Oddpost user, I'm ecstatic that I finally have an option that is not IE-dependant. However I have some personal complaints about YMail, mainly being that they've taken the modifiers off the hotkeys (no ctrl-m for mail check etc.), and the icons and colors are a little cartoony for my tastes.
Apart from that, I love the interface more than Google's. I just like the drag-n-drop and context menus (e.g. right-click, delete mail). More intuitive for me than hotkeys I don't know, or tick-mail-then-perform-operation.
Wow. Nice April fools joke on my hosting provider - the site lasted all of about 60 seconds after the article went public. I never expected this pretty lame joke to actually get posted.
Here's a nicely formatted version of the article text (compared to that pretty poor effort above... thanks for the effort, but if you're going to repost the article text, perhaps at least remove the piles of whitespace mmkay?)
A couple of months ago, my wife and I were approached with an interesting offer by an affluent couple from California. After thinking carefully, we've decided to take them up on their offer. My fetish for gadgets is well puplicised through this blog, and I think this offer will help me finally get those gadgets I've been coveting for so long.
That's right, we're selling our son for $30k. There's nothing sinister about this, he's not going into child slavery or anything, Randy and Linda just really liked his demeanor, and they're keen on a Kiwi kid because they're usually so healthy. I hear $30 grand is a really good number these days.
So help me out: what would be a good swag of gadgets to get hold of for US$30,000? Here's my initial wish-list:
A nice G4 Powerbook. I've always been a Windows guy, but only due to cost. I'm super-keen to try out a nice fast Mac.
A Mac mini for home. Our house is pretty small, and a mini would make an ideal home media server thing.
An Alienware PC gaming rig, or maybe a hand-built gaming machine.
A PSP and/or Nintendo DS.
One of those portable media players like the Mrobe or something.
I'd argue that mom and pop email users would be a little confused by the conversation thread collapse thingy in Gmail. If you haven't seen oddpost, it's very very similar to outlook/express/thunderbird, with a tree for folder navigation etc., but all done in jscript & css.
Sure, I think Google's tools are cool, but I think Yahoo has the better ingredients for something totally integrated (if that's what people want...)
Think of an outlook-style web interface (oddpost), with folders for search (Y!), images (flickr), news, rss, blog, etc...
I think this makes a lot of sense. First Oddpost (for desktop-like webmail), then Flickr (for desktop-like photo management). If they can pull this together, I can see it being pretty cool.
I've been curious about Google's attempts to do email (introduce a new paradigm and confuse users), and photo management (buy a desktop product - wtf does Picass have to do with web?), but I can see some sense of coherence with Yahoo's (both web-based with slick/easy UIs).
Thanks for all the suggestions - as I expected there's a lot of good stuff here mixed with the flames and trolls.
For more info, the main issue really is more with lack of space rather than the little guy. He's pretty good at playing with his own toys rather than the adult stuff (helps that he has is own (dead) phone and computer mouse!). The main issue is that he keeps switching off the powerpoint that powers the ADSL router in the cupboard (we have switches on all wall sockets here in NZ).
So yeah, space is the issue. We don't really even have room for a computer desk - hence the laptop, setup and remove when finished. I think that may end up being the answer. I could spend thousands on smart clients etc... I'm probably better off forking out for an Alienware gaming laptop or something.
Slashdot Mirror
Can we get some of this "common-sense" in New Zealand please?
"Anti-piracy" 3-strikes was railroaded into our copyright law (section s92a) after select committee hearings and due process. Then the Minister had the gall to complain that all the moaners should have got involved in the process.
I think a quote from a famous internet wordsmith is in order here:
I don't care about the hype around the silly "series of tubes" comment. The corrupt bastard got what he deserved.
Kickbacks are far too common in politics, and ultimately lead to the "lobbyist" driven politics like the DMCA.
Unfortunately tape is NOT that reliable.
I can't find the link now, but I remember reading that NASA had so much information on old tape that they couldn't read it out of the tapes fast enough to completely copy all the tapes before the tapes reached the end of their usable lives, or fell fould of mold/rot.
There's no point comparing any media player that Microsoft may or may not produce with the iPod. Regardless of what Microsoft is trying to 'kill', they will have no problem in killing the product themselves.
.NET applications to feed my family. I do not hate Microsoft. I just know that a leopard cannot change its spots without the intervention of a benevolent geneticist.
They will create a hardware platform that is fantastic, open, and fast; with full wifi connectivity, bluetooth wireless headphones, VOIP capability, huge storage, and a killer interface.
Then they will load it with DRM, Passport(tm) authentication, proprietary codecs, no podcasting or RSS capability, and a shitty user interface, and attempt to sell it for $2. It will die a silent, lonely death.
And I am not a troll. I rely on developing
We use LiPo batteries for radio control planes, and many of us have experienced swelling, and eventually combustion, because of the abuse that we put the batteries through. We demand massive current output to drive high-wattage brushless motors, and then get frustrated and charge the batteries at higher-than recommended currents so we can get out flying again.
Then there's the whole cottage industry of R/C flyers buying 'bare cells' and soldering together frankenstein combinations of cells in series and parallel to get the perfect size/voltage/weight battery for the plane we are building.
So in other words it comes as no surprise to me that LiPos in consumer products are swelling (and exploding) as the capacities and loads are increased, and as manufacturing perhaps gets shoddier as supply demand increases.
As I mention here, the more power you need, the more energy you need to store in a battery, and the higher the likelihood of some sort of catastrophic failure.
Apparently elevator designers in New Zealand don't need Gurus. Although I expect our elevators are manufactured in Australia or somewhere in Southeast Asia. There are a couple of buildings in Auckland that have this system, including the amazing innovation of designating elevators with letters.
Seems to work alright.
I am also disappointed with the bitching here on slashdot regarding the article
I guess you're new here?
Hey fuck you skippy. I think you meant to say "New Zealand has Australia". They're the ones evolved (sorry, designed) from criminals. :)
I'm really not sure why everyone is complaining about this story. Perhaps they are not aware that I am, in fact, left handed?
Agreed, but you've gotta say there's a happy medium surely?
You don't want a visible loading dialog very often (as it appears to be the case with Google reader), but I totally agree that the treeview thing.
My first impressions? It's excrucuatingly slow, counter intuitive, and just generally sucks the big one. I mean if the future of "Web 2.0 is an animated Loading... dialog, then I'll just stick with 1.0 thankyou very much.
Seriously, it troubles me that in the rush to AJAXify everything, we seem to be going back to dialup days just when everything was starting to run smoothly on broadband. Sure I can load a 1000 element javascript array and do sorting and searching on the client side, but with today's connections and server hardware, what's the big deal with a page refresh?
Google reader vs Bloglines illustrates this brilliantly.
I've got a few screenshots up here.
As a beta tester, I'm also happy to hack around at anything you're particularly interested in and post more shots.
As a long-time Oddpost user, I'm ecstatic that I finally have an option that is not IE-dependant. However I have some personal complaints about YMail, mainly being that they've taken the modifiers off the hotkeys (no ctrl-m for mail check etc.), and the icons and colors are a little cartoony for my tastes.
Apart from that, I love the interface more than Google's. I just like the drag-n-drop and context menus (e.g. right-click, delete mail). More intuitive for me than hotkeys I don't know, or tick-mail-then-perform-operation.
Phew, a static page for that one article appears to have saved the day. Huzzah!
Wow. Nice April fools joke on my hosting provider - the site lasted all of about 60 seconds after the article went public. I never expected this pretty lame joke to actually get posted.
Here's a nicely formatted version of the article text (compared to that pretty poor effort above... thanks for the effort, but if you're going to repost the article text, perhaps at least remove the piles of whitespace mmkay?)
Hey thanks for that. Looks like it's already toast.
:)
Mean time to failure: about 180 seconds. I blame ipowerweb.com
I'd argue that mom and pop email users would be a little confused by the conversation thread collapse thingy in Gmail. If you haven't seen oddpost, it's very very similar to outlook/express/thunderbird, with a tree for folder navigation etc., but all done in jscript & css.
Sure, I think Google's tools are cool, but I think Yahoo has the better ingredients for something totally integrated (if that's what people want...)
Think of an outlook-style web interface (oddpost), with folders for search (Y!), images (flickr), news, rss, blog, etc...
I think this makes a lot of sense. First Oddpost (for desktop-like webmail), then Flickr (for desktop-like photo management). If they can pull this together, I can see it being pretty cool.
I've been curious about Google's attempts to do email (introduce a new paradigm and confuse users), and photo management (buy a desktop product - wtf does Picass have to do with web?), but I can see some sense of coherence with Yahoo's (both web-based with slick/easy UIs).
Interesting times.
Yeah absolutely, that is definitely the plan. I'm kinda looking forward to having my very own junior l33t h4x0r.
Having said that, the issue really has more to do with lack of space, than stopping him from messing with stuff.
Thanks for all the suggestions - as I expected there's a lot of good stuff here mixed with the flames and trolls.
For more info, the main issue really is more with lack of space rather than the little guy. He's pretty good at playing with his own toys rather than the adult stuff (helps that he has is own (dead) phone and computer mouse!). The main issue is that he keeps switching off the powerpoint that powers the ADSL router in the cupboard (we have switches on all wall sockets here in NZ).
So yeah, space is the issue. We don't really even have room for a computer desk - hence the laptop, setup and remove when finished. I think that may end up being the answer. I could spend thousands on smart clients etc... I'm probably better off forking out for an Alienware gaming laptop or something.
Thanks again guys and girl(s?)!
I don't care if the spammers' servers are DDoSed. They can take their fucked-up business model and shove it, as far as I am concerned.
Good on Lycos for finally having the balls to stand up to these guys. The spammers have been stealing bandwidth off all of us for far too long now.