Thanks for putting the numbers in:) The difference is visible if you see a US show on UK TV, but if you've been seeing it from this side of the atlantic for years, it is kinda nostalgic...
I recently moved out of a shared house where my flatmate owned the television. I've been in my own flat for about two months now, and I haven't missed it at all. I spend more time surfing, true, but I've really noticed that there's _absolutely nothing_ that I miss from TV.
I might be tempted to get one for watching DVDs - pulling up chairs round a desk to watch them on a monitor isn't quite the same (can't snuggle with the lady on a desk chair), and I might get one when Gran Turismo 4 comes out in December, but I wouldn't get one to watch television.
I guess what I'm saying is that TV, at least here in the UK, is sooooooooo not worth watching, you wouldn't believe it if you didn't stop.
...but hasn't hdtv gone the way of WAP already? It's been available for years, and people just aren't buying it.
I live in the UK, and our TV is higher definition than that in the US (I've tried googling for the specs, but you just get pages of marketing crap - if someone can find them, please reply) - we have more lines on the screen than you get on US TVs. The quality difference is obvious; you can easily spot shows that have been converted from US to UK standards. Hell, I quite like it sometimes - it has a Cheers-like feeling to it.
But the US still uses their standard, because it's _good enough_. I don't need to see every pimple on Joey's chin whilst watching Friends (might change my mind if that's Dawson's creek tho;). It's TV - I want entertainment, movement, action, not detail. Film, yes, I can see the point of getting it if you're a film buff, but honestly, how much attention do you really pay to TV?
If I want quality and immersion, I'll go to the cinema. TV's just not important enough to pay the extra cash for.
<Entirely offtopic>
As an aside, the BBC is planning to put lots of their footage online (another fruitless search for links). Apparently, they're going to filter requests by IP address to only allow connections from the UK. As a UK citizen and TV license payer (which is what pays for this), I know that most, if not all of you will be able to read a/. comment that tells you exactly how to get round that. I don't mind that at all, and I'm paying for it.
If you ask me, and I know you didn't, that's the way to protect content. Gently. It might add 5% or so to the cost, but hell, I'm proud of the BBC, and I don't mind sharing (and paying for) it:)
I thought it was worth pointing out the rationality of the replies to this post.
sirket "That said, you left a relay open for 3 days, and potentially tens of thousands of spam emails" kwerle Yeah, I know - pot kettle black. But I'm not supplying a service to thousands of users. fmaxwell No, but you may have been supplying spam to that many -- easily.
As a regular slashdot reader, this is the sort of non-biased, non-flaming discussion we need. If you ask me, too many people just leap on the burn-the-heretic bandwagon around here. I run my own smtp server, apache, etc. (because I *need* to - I'm freelance, I need a good site, and related email to work).
If those of you who know better don't educate those of us who don't, and point out where we're going wrong so we know how *not* to do things (for example, I know enough now not to let my smtp server accept requests outside my internal address range after reading/.), the net is going to carry on being filled with unpatched, unregulated services for the spammers and virus writers to play with.
Respect to the poster, and the replies. There will alway be those of us who *aren't* dedicated network admins who *need* to run services for which we can't afford professional help.
Thanks to the likes of you, I at least have an idea of what I should be looking out for, and I know enough to shut everything down when something odd turns up.
Flame me as you like, but at the moment, I can't afford to turn work down. I am thankful, however, that I read enough here (and in the appropriate links - yes, I did rtfa), to try my best not to add to the problems of the web.
Dammit, I think I just bigged up all of slashdot, trolls'n'all...
I've learnt a lot around here. Most of it has been from people like the above post, and the replies to it. Keep this up,./, and sooner or later, the only people who know how to run the web will be people who will run it nicely.
I went one better, and read the BBC review before I went to see it, so I was expecting it to be a piece of utter crap before it started.
I reckon it's a good couple of hours entertainment. No, it doesn't stand up to the first one, and no, I wouldn't pay to see it again, but I would say it's worth 2 beers, if only to see Morpheus come out of the closet, and Trinity in the bikini (just kidding;).
Like the parent says, if you forget about the first film and the hype, it's not too bad.
Any british solicitors out there? I know that in the UK, you automatically win any small claims (claiming < 1000GBP) case if the other side doesn't show up, but I don't know if you can take this kind of thing to small claims...
...cos I'm working (no, really) and testing as I go along, and I have to say, with no knee-jerk whatsoever, that IE is the poorest offering of the bunch.
My personal favourite is Opera cos I love the mouse gestures, but Mozilla's got good things going for it too, like being able to block those bloody annoying animated banner ads. Even Netscape's not bad these days;)
But Microsoft seem to think they reach perfection with the addition of the Go button on the address bar. It doesn't have tabbed browsing. It doesn't block popups. It doesn't have any useful features whatsoever, and IMO, it doesn't do anything it didn't do in IE4.
I hit a site in it earlier, and realised just how long it's been since I saw a popup/under ad, and how many sites still have them; I haven't seen one for ages. Until, that is, I accidentally went online with IE.
Security issues aside, IE gives the worst browsing experience of any modern browser I've seen. The only reason they have that market share is because IE comes bundled with every new PC. If Windows came with no browser, and users had to choose and download one, that share would disappear overnight.
his worst argument is that the relative difficulty a newbie has doing things in Linux makes it more secure
I don't think he's saying that linux is more secure because it's harder for a newbie to use; he's pointing out that you'd need to follow several non-trivial steps to allow a foreign executable to damage a linux system. It takes deliberate intent on the part of the user to run an attachment.
On a windows system, you could open your machine up to a virus just by looking at an email in outlook.
I can see the point this time; they've got to organise their trains to meet the demand for transport without running so many they lose money doing it. Anyone who uses the tube can tell you it's a nightmare cattle-truck ride at rush hour, and pretty much empty the rest of the day. Knowing how many people are going in which directions could help them optimise their timetable (and maybe stop them increasing the ticket price - hahaha).
I'll leave the Big Brother discussion to the rest of you, but bear in mind that in London, your credit card transactions and mobile already give your position away accurately enough for the authorities to know which cctv camera you're under...
Seriously people, I've mailed my mp about a few things, and had an smail reply each time. Keep it polite and sane, because you know they'll ignore an uninformed rant, and you don't want to waste your time, right?
I suggest simply dropping them a few lines to explain that Blunkett's been pushing several highly unpopular ideas and blatantly ignoring public opinion, and if he continues, well, I for one will be voting for the opposition purely to get rid of him.
From Wired (the cool furthermore snippets on the bottom right, so no url): "DNA testing on Otzi, the mummified "iceman" that caused a sensation when he was discovered by Austrian climbers in 1991, identified blood samples from at least four individuals. That, along with the presence of several arrow and knife wounds on Otzi himself, have led scientists to conclude that he was killed, probably after dispatching at least two of his assailants, in a battle that may have lasted two days. Blood from another combatant was found on the knife that Otzi was clutching in his right hand and an arrow tip found near the body contained the blood of two people, neither of them Otzi."
So it looks like he got some of them, but I guess we'll never really know...
imho, language should be purely about expressing thoughts. Whether you spell the word 'dreamed' or 'dreamt', I still understand what you're saying. Given that when I'm googling I'm not likely to enter just the one word, does it really matter? tbh, I think I'd be more likely to just search for 'dream', simply because it matches dream, dreamt, dreamed, dreaming etc.
Dammit, typed that too many times. I don't even know if I spelt it right any more.
Offtopic, as a Brit, I don't really think of it as 'British' spelling any more. Like you said, it's a case of US-en, and the rest-of-the-world-en... But as far as I'm concerned, they can spell words any way they like. It's their langauge too, and most geeks can't spell anyway;)
Do you think this means that traditional media is being diluted? Anyone and everyone has an opinion on current events. It used to be the case that you could trust the traditional media (newspapers, tv news etc) to bring you a responsible, independant portayal of current events, because they had pride in doing so, and being better at it than the other guy (ok, I might be being a little naive here).
The recent conflict in Iraq has highlighted, in my view, the fact that this isn't necessarily true any more. I saw A Lot of posts from Americans pointing out that the news coverage in the US missed out a lot of stuff that other news services (such as the bbc) put on the front page. I'm a Brit, and I tend to trust Auntie, but maybe I'm not getting the full story either. These days, if you want an accurate picture, you've got to check a few different sources, and judge them on their individual merits.
the comments on slashdot often provide far more interesting insight I'd agree with you on this one. I do, from time to time, rtfa, but I tend to pick up the wider view from the comments. The slashdot crowd seems to cover a wide variety of viewpoints, and there's always something in the +3s that picks up on a point that I hadn't thought of.
So I guess what I'm asking is this: I don't know you. I don't personally know anyone who posts on slashdot. How do I know that you know what you're talking about? How do I know that Joe Blogger isn't full of crap? How do I know that they know any more about the subject in question than I do?
If everyone has an opinion, and everyone expresses it without the traditional 'journalistic integrity', how do you tell which source is accurate?
Often with the primary goal to cause massive damage to civilians.
You were +1 insightful up to there. Both are good points.
But I very much doubt that anyone in the military actually *intends* to kill civilians. They're out there to kill the enemy as efficiently as possible with the least risk to themselves, and that means battering the sh1t out of military (ie anything that has a role in shooting back) targets.
The fact that the US military seems to hit the wrong thing on a regular basis - the Brits lost more personnel to 'friendly' fire than the Iraqis in the first invasion of Iraq - doesn't mean they're out there shooting at anything that moves. I'm more inclined to attribute it to incompetence, an overly gung-ho attitude or amphetamines. I don't believe it's malicious.
Like they say, never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.
Let's just say that your local media is more likely to tell you that another country is Bad(tm) then tell you about the stuff your own country is up to.
I'm not condoning any form of human rights abuse, I'd really like to live in a nice, happy, peaceful world, but let's face it; the west is not exactly utopia either. I saw a post around here the other day from a chinese/.r who pointed out that whilst China's gov is slowly getting better, ours is quite quickly getting worse.
Slashdot Mirror
The single speaker unit actually contains five individual speakers
The RIAA math was funny the first time round, but don't push it. Every joke gets old...
Thanks for putting the numbers in :) The difference is visible if you see a US show on UK TV, but if you've been seeing it from this side of the atlantic for years, it is kinda nostalgic...
Cry me a river. You can live without television.
I recently moved out of a shared house where my flatmate owned the television. I've been in my own flat for about two months now, and I haven't missed it at all. I spend more time surfing, true, but I've really noticed that there's _absolutely nothing_ that I miss from TV.
I might be tempted to get one for watching DVDs - pulling up chairs round a desk to watch them on a monitor isn't quite the same (can't snuggle with the lady on a desk chair), and I might get one when Gran Turismo 4 comes out in December, but I wouldn't get one to watch television.
I guess what I'm saying is that TV, at least here in the UK, is sooooooooo not worth watching, you wouldn't believe it if you didn't stop.
GT4 tho...
I live in the UK, and our TV is higher definition than that in the US (I've tried googling for the specs, but you just get pages of marketing crap - if someone can find them, please reply) - we have more lines on the screen than you get on US TVs. The quality difference is obvious; you can easily spot shows that have been converted from US to UK standards. Hell, I quite like it sometimes - it has a Cheers-like feeling to it.
But the US still uses their standard, because it's _good enough_. I don't need to see every pimple on Joey's chin whilst watching Friends (might change my mind if that's Dawson's creek tho
If I want quality and immersion, I'll go to the cinema. TV's just not important enough to pay the extra cash for.
<Entirely offtopic>
</Entirely offtopic>
I reckon there's got to be in the region of a million slashdotters here. We chuck in 20 USD each, and we've got us an orbiting camera.
Now, I can see this going one of two ways:
1) Hey, look, there's Ashcroft edging the yard! Who's your privacy daddy now, huh?
2) Hey, there's Natalie Portman in a bikini! Who's got the zoom?
I'm up for it. Who's with me?
As a regular slashdot reader, this is the sort of non-biased, non-flaming discussion we need. If you ask me, too many people just leap on the burn-the-heretic bandwagon around here. I run my own smtp server, apache, etc. (because I *need* to - I'm freelance, I need a good site, and related email to work).
If those of you who know better don't educate those of us who don't, and point out where we're going wrong so we know how *not* to do things (for example, I know enough now not to let my smtp server accept requests outside my internal address range after reading
Respect to the poster, and the replies. There will alway be those of us who *aren't* dedicated network admins who *need* to run services for which we can't afford professional help.
Thanks to the likes of you, I at least have an idea of what I should be looking out for, and I know enough to shut everything down when something odd turns up.
Flame me as you like, but at the moment, I can't afford to turn work down. I am thankful, however, that I read enough here (and in the appropriate links - yes, I did rtfa), to try my best not to add to the problems of the web.
Dammit, I think I just bigged up all of slashdot, trolls'n'all...
I've learnt a lot around here. Most of it has been from people like the above post, and the replies to it. Keep this up,
I went one better, and read the BBC review before I went to see it, so I was expecting it to be a piece of utter crap before it started.
;).
I reckon it's a good couple of hours entertainment. No, it doesn't stand up to the first one, and no, I wouldn't pay to see it again, but I would say it's worth 2 beers, if only to see Morpheus come out of the closet, and Trinity in the bikini (just kidding
Like the parent says, if you forget about the first film and the hype, it's not too bad.
Any british solicitors out there? I know that in the UK, you automatically win any small claims (claiming < 1000GBP) case if the other side doesn't show up, but I don't know if you can take this kind of thing to small claims...
And as far as convergence goes, I'd say it's not likely. I don't use my organiser too often, but I *never* use the oganiser on the phone.
I'd be more interested in an article that examined how many people use the organiser-like functions on their mobiles. I only got mine for the camera.
...cos I'm working (no, really) and testing as I go along, and I have to say, with no knee-jerk whatsoever, that IE is the poorest offering of the bunch.
;)
My personal favourite is Opera cos I love the mouse gestures, but Mozilla's got good things going for it too, like being able to block those bloody annoying animated banner ads. Even Netscape's not bad these days
But Microsoft seem to think they reach perfection with the addition of the Go button on the address bar. It doesn't have tabbed browsing. It doesn't block popups. It doesn't have any useful features whatsoever, and IMO, it doesn't do anything it didn't do in IE4.
I hit a site in it earlier, and realised just how long it's been since I saw a popup/under ad, and how many sites still have them; I haven't seen one for ages. Until, that is, I accidentally went online with IE.
Security issues aside, IE gives the worst browsing experience of any modern browser I've seen. The only reason they have that market share is because IE comes bundled with every new PC. If Windows came with no browser, and users had to choose and download one, that share would disappear overnight.
his worst argument is that the relative difficulty a newbie has doing things in Linux makes it more secure
I don't think he's saying that linux is more secure because it's harder for a newbie to use; he's pointing out that you'd need to follow several non-trivial steps to allow a foreign executable to damage a linux system. It takes deliberate intent on the part of the user to run an attachment.
On a windows system, you could open your machine up to a virus just by looking at an email in outlook.
I can see the point this time; they've got to organise their trains to meet the demand for transport without running so many they lose money doing it. Anyone who uses the tube can tell you it's a nightmare cattle-truck ride at rush hour, and pretty much empty the rest of the day. Knowing how many people are going in which directions could help them optimise their timetable (and maybe stop them increasing the ticket price - hahaha).
There's a BBC article on it here.
I'll leave the Big Brother discussion to the rest of you, but bear in mind that in London, your credit card transactions and mobile already give your position away accurately enough for the authorities to know which cctv camera you're under...
Full list of MPs and email addresses
Seriously people, I've mailed my mp about a few things, and had an smail reply each time. Keep it polite and sane, because you know they'll ignore an uninformed rant, and you don't want to waste your time, right?
I suggest simply dropping them a few lines to explain that Blunkett's been pushing several highly unpopular ideas and blatantly ignoring public opinion, and if he continues, well, I for one will be voting for the opposition purely to get rid of him.
Finally, a way to find the odd sock...maybe I could see where my karma goes...
...when I realised I've just asked a question of a dead guy.
/., please mod the parent into oblivion...
Apologies
...what the hell happened to your site? Want us to track 'em down and give 'em a good slashdotting?
You'll feel better about it. You know you will...
twocking great big error bars
Twocking. That's a fantastic new word, and well in keeping with slashdot graamar and speling guidleines.
Mind if I use it?
We have exactly 1.9 trillion unemployed IS/IT consultants in Portland alone
No you don't.
From Wired (the cool furthermore snippets on the bottom right, so no url):
"DNA testing on Otzi, the mummified "iceman" that caused a sensation when he was discovered by Austrian climbers in 1991, identified blood samples from at least four individuals. That, along with the presence of several arrow and knife wounds on Otzi himself, have led scientists to conclude that he was killed, probably after dispatching at least two of his assailants, in a battle that may have lasted two days. Blood from another combatant was found on the knife that Otzi was clutching in his right hand and an arrow tip found near the body contained the blood of two people, neither of them Otzi."
So it looks like he got some of them, but I guess we'll never really know...
You modded this funny?
You're going straight to hell, heretic.
these issues are non-trivial
;)
imho, language should be purely about expressing thoughts. Whether you spell the word 'dreamed' or 'dreamt', I still understand what you're saying. Given that when I'm googling I'm not likely to enter just the one word, does it really matter? tbh, I think I'd be more likely to just search for 'dream', simply because it matches dream, dreamt, dreamed, dreaming etc.
Dammit, typed that too many times. I don't even know if I spelt it right any more.
Offtopic, as a Brit, I don't really think of it as 'British' spelling any more. Like you said, it's a case of US-en, and the rest-of-the-world-en... But as far as I'm concerned, they can spell words any way they like. It's their langauge too, and most geeks can't spell anyway
Do you think this means that traditional media is being diluted? Anyone and everyone has an opinion on current events. It used to be the case that you could trust the traditional media (newspapers, tv news etc) to bring you a responsible, independant portayal of current events, because they had pride in doing so, and being better at it than the other guy (ok, I might be being a little naive here).
:)
The recent conflict in Iraq has highlighted, in my view, the fact that this isn't necessarily true any more. I saw A Lot of posts from Americans pointing out that the news coverage in the US missed out a lot of stuff that other news services (such as the bbc) put on the front page. I'm a Brit, and I tend to trust Auntie, but maybe I'm not getting the full story either. These days, if you want an accurate picture, you've got to check a few different sources, and judge them on their individual merits.
the comments on slashdot often provide far more interesting insight
I'd agree with you on this one. I do, from time to time, rtfa, but I tend to pick up the wider view from the comments. The slashdot crowd seems to cover a wide variety of viewpoints, and there's always something in the +3s that picks up on a point that I hadn't thought of.
So I guess what I'm asking is this: I don't know you. I don't personally know anyone who posts on slashdot. How do I know that you know what you're talking about? How do I know that Joe Blogger isn't full of crap? How do I know that they know any more about the subject in question than I do?
If everyone has an opinion, and everyone expresses it without the traditional 'journalistic integrity', how do you tell which source is accurate?
Discuss.
Often with the primary goal to cause massive damage to civilians.
You were +1 insightful up to there. Both are good points.
But I very much doubt that anyone in the military actually *intends* to kill civilians. They're out there to kill the enemy as efficiently as possible with the least risk to themselves, and that means battering the sh1t out of military (ie anything that has a role in shooting back) targets.
The fact that the US military seems to hit the wrong thing on a regular basis - the Brits lost more personnel to 'friendly' fire than the Iraqis in the first invasion of Iraq - doesn't mean they're out there shooting at anything that moves. I'm more inclined to attribute it to incompetence, an overly gung-ho attitude or amphetamines. I don't believe it's malicious.
Like they say, never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.
The space ship was launched at 47,000 feet and 105 knots, 10 nm east of Mojave
10 nanometres in around an hour? Man, I love progress...
... glass houses, stones, etc...
/.r who pointed out that whilst China's gov is slowly getting better, ours is quite quickly getting worse.
Let's just say that your local media is more likely to tell you that another country is Bad(tm) then tell you about the stuff your own country is up to.
I'm not condoning any form of human rights abuse, I'd really like to live in a nice, happy, peaceful world, but let's face it; the west is not exactly utopia either. I saw a post around here the other day from a chinese