Now, I'm not pointing out these things to attack the Amish,
Yeah you are. But it's okay, the Amish are deranged religious zealots. But the point of the OP was not that the Amish are so perfect, but that most other "Christians" are raving hypocrites. They preach love and forgiveness, but absolutely refuse to practice it in their daily lives. They support the military, police, prisons, etc. Most of them even watch and practice violence (eveything from action movies, to football, to cockfighting) as entertainment.
Because I was over 25 and single, the local taliban
Are you seriously comparing the US justice system to the Afghani Taliban, one of the most pointlessly cruel regimes in modern history? The Taliban are primitive, savage, idiots who don't even really understand the basics of sha'ria, and you're comparing them to a sophisticated modern legal system like that of the USA? (and I consider myself a Taliban SUPPORTER!)
Or are you talking about some US vigilante group, or nutcase right-wing church, or some other nonsense? If you're talking about the Afghani Taliban, you got off easy. Nowadays they burn people alive.
I have gigantic hads and I prefer the controller "s", the small XBOX controller, because it has round buttons in a reasonable layout (diamond), the white and back buttons are better placed, and it's but better triggers. If there was a ginormous controller with a decent layout I would probably use that, but I haven't found a 3rd-party controller that meets my needs. I also have yet to find a decent XBOX wireless controller (the Logitech one is OK, but mine broke after 60 days). Oddly enough, I've founf a number of good wireless PS2 controllers.
By "proprietary" hen means that the wii will come with a "dual format" drive capable of playing Gamecube discs, standard DVDs, and presumably mini-DVDs as well into a SLOT-LOADING drive. This (to my knowledge) has not been implemented before and common sense should tell you why. I'm assuming that you won't be required to use some sort of ring attachment to use the Gamecube discs in the wii.
No, they don't. Let's see some videotape of insurgents in Iraq, Hezbollah, or Hamas fighters fighting the Israelis or Americans with children arrayed in front of them. It doesn't exist. This is just a bullshit excuse the Israelis and Americans use to bomb civilian areas where they suspect (or maybe even actually KNOW) militants are operating. Of course, Israel or the Unitend States would NEVER locate a military facility or troops near civilians, right? Have you looked around the US a little?
The reason for the bombing is protecting troops, period. Bombing the shit out of civilian areas is much safer for the Israeli and American forces because the insurgents/militants have little in the way of air defense. Dropping a 1000 lbs. bomb on a crowded marketplace to kill a handful of insurgets is ultimately much safer for Israeli and American troops than sending in a unit on fooor in armoured vehicles (which are also used somewhat indiscriminitely, for the same reasons). Massacring civilians is justified as "collateral damage" or other such nonsense.
If you want to make WWII-style "total war" arguments, be my guest. But in doing so you are basically denying that there is such a thing as "civilians" so don't whine if the "terrorists" murder schoolchildren because they're all "fighters" according to such twisted logic.
But he doesn't care about that shit, he wants 'copy *'. Virtually every MP3 player ever released since the first Rios support this feature. The iPod doesn't. In fact, it mangles the hell out of filenames DELIBERATELY to make this impossible to implement and to force you to use iTunes. And I personally have found showstopping bugs in all the iTunes replacements I've used in conjunction with iPods (On Windows anyway. Maybe on OSX there are replacements that work). I used to have an iPod mini. I loved it. But iTunes was like stabbing myself in the eye so I sold it and bought a Rio Karma because I wanted to drag n' drop files and crossfade is fscking awesome.
Since then I've learned about Rockboxhttp://www.rockbox.org/, which is an opensource firmware you can flash your iPod with that will make it not suck. You're probably still better off getting an iRiver player because it has better support for Rockbox.
And Europe is getting a bit tired of Microsoft's attitude.
This isn't about the EU vigorously defending the rights of European citizens. It's about European software companies (and goverments) being pissed off that lots of euros are flowing into Microsoft's coffers, an AMERICAN company. But they can't just stick on tarrifs like they normally do. Why? Because the tarrifs are designed to encourage local competitors. It's very difficult for local competitors to get traction against MS due to very significant compatibility issues.
Eventually I suspect that the EU will find some excuse to allow the release/theft of huge chunks of Windows source code to European software companies which will lead to a new round of the "DOS wars" wherin MS will us secret code to break interoperability with "foreign" versions of Windows.
Back when I was working for an internet music company (around 2000), this was one of the "big issues" that I spend a lot of time discussing with my peers:
1. We want to sell music on the internet, particularly Top 40 music.
2. Currently, you need a credit card to buy stuff on the internet.
3. Most people who listen to Top 40 (13-19 year olds), do not have credit cards.
P: So how to you sell Top 40 over the internet profitably?
It's a problem we never solved, or even came close to solving. We did come up with solutions in retail involving kiosks in Korea and the UK that would take cash, but since Americans hate kiosks I suspect that wouldn't take off here. The notion of pre-paid cards was also considered but rejected because we would have to pay retailers to carry the things, and we would have to pay a LOT because the retailers we would want the most (record stores) considered us "the enemy".
The solution to the problem that seems most promising is combined cellphones/MP3 players that allow teens to purchase songs with prepaid phone credits. In 2000, teen cellphone usage wasn't anywhere hear what it is now and it wasn't yet common to make purchases (ringtones, games, etc.) through cellphones. Currently such combined decives suck ass, but eventually one of the cellphone manufactures will push out decent products (probably Sony, they seem to be the leader) and online music will become somewhat more popular.
Frankly though, a huge percentage of teenagers have more time than money, and it that situation they would much rather spend time hunting around on the internet for free music rather than pay anything at all. I consider this a GOOD thing because (hopefully) it will lead to the collapse of of the record industry in general. Most artists don't make a dime on album sales, in many cases they have to pay the labels to sell their music. ALL of the money comes from touring and swag. So it's not like the collapse of the industry would hurt artists.
The clear dishonesty in releasing a beta that is called a release candidate is at issue.
And no software company has EVER come out with ANYTHING called a "Release Candidate", right? The very NEXT story on/. was about the Firefox 2 Release Candidate for God's sake! Here's a relavent articlehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_version.
The absurd anti-MS bias on/. is beginning to get to me. The fact is that the vast majority of readers and posters to/. are using Windows. And even if you're a rabid anti-MS zealot, virtually all computer professionals, etc. will be forced to use Windows at some point, and knowing something about the changes coming down the pike MIGHT prove useful.
If you want to complain about Vista, you should complain about the product based on actual experience. And you should try to do so constructively.
I can't say much because none of the betas I've tried (haven't tried RC1 or RC2 yet) would install in my 2 test rigs because the installer didn't like different bits of hardware (a RAID card and a video capture card) and I wasn't willing to yank cards just to test Vista. BTW, This is all hardware for which Vista drivers are not yet available. But I blame Vista for the installer just puking rather than igonring the non-essential hardware.
A few decades can be next to forever when you're in a war. If they managed to research and adapt Borg technology in that time, I could easily believe a Federation ship could take on the Borg from 20 years ago.
This would assume technology progression in Star Trek makes any sense. It doesn't. Why does Earth come to quickly dominate TECHNOLOGICALLY many races that have been spacefaring for literally centuries (Vulcans, Romulans, Klingons, Dominion, etc.) The series make clear that most significant technological innovation in the Alpha Quadrant comes from Earth. In Star Trek it is clear that humans are somehow fundamentally smarter and more "evolved" than other races, and that that they will eventually absorb or restrain any adversary. If you think about it, all the various enimies of humanity (Romulans, Klingons, Dominion, etc.) seem much more benign in this light.
Send all Internet connections thru proxies. Hire a couple of admins who have the job -- and nothing else -- of reviewing logs and applying content filters. Just flat out block porn, auction sites, non-official e-mail/webmail, stock/investment, gambling and sports sites. Start working down from there.
Yes, it's totally worth it to spend (at the bare minimum) $200,000 per year on admins and probably $10,000,000 per year on filtering software that won't work. Content filtering on the WWW is virtually impossible, and anyone who says otherwise is selling snake oil.
Post a policy, make everyone attend an "awareness" class, make them sign off on it. Make sure they all understand they are being watched and this sort of thing won't be tolerated.\
Another $50,000 on "training" pissed away.
Have the policy contain some teeth. Warn people on the first instance, reprimand on the following, suspend on #3 and FIRE THEM on #4. Make the termination public -- tell the rest of the staff why that person is no longer with you
And let's say (to use an IT example) this guy happened to be 50% of the way through a critical infrastructure project. Do you just let that project collapse? This is why many people who sexually harass others can get away with it. Because they're actually GOOD at their jobs.
Hospitals and health care institutions are a different animal. Nothing is more entertaining than watching some poor net admin try and tell a Doctor (aka GOD) that he can't do that. Heh. Subtler means are necessary.
This line is proof that you've worked mostly in hospitals. As a lowly IT peon you're not going to have a lot of success telling corporate officers or tenured professors what to do either.
I'm hoping that I read that wrong, and that you don't actually equate soldiers with "wife-beaters and axe murderers"
I forgot to add "police officers and prison guards".
Violence is violence is violence. As pointed out by another poster, soldiers inevitably become psychologically damaged and more prone to aberrant behavior simply by the nature of their jobs, which is being professional killers. This is the point of all that tough discipline outfits like the Marines are famous for: keeping the soldiers from going apeshit in the field. When this breaks down we have incidents like Haditha. The problem the US military is currently facing is an unwillingness to "hurt morale" by properly punishing the soldiers and officers involved (execution). The same rules apply to police and prison guards. Police officers who "accidently" shoot children and little old ladies should be executed, not completely unpunished as they are today.
I'm not "blaming" the people who choose these professions. ALL people with unrestricted physical power over others go apeshit, as has been proved by the Stanford Prison Experiment and elsewhere. There must be very tight restrictions on thier behavior. And in order for those restrictions to be effective, punishments for violations must be swift, extremely severe, and somewhat arbitrary. For example, I believe that trial is probably inappropriate and soldiers/police should be subject to direct punishment by superiors. Minor violations (for example, inappropriately touching a female prisoner) should warrant severe punishments (for example, flogging). The soldier's commander must recieve the same punishment. This is the ONLY way to maintain discipline among the troops. This is not just my opinion. Look up General Marius, Sun Tzu, Patton, etc.
I have told all of my clients *not* to accept the license agreement for the WGA Notification Tool.
Last time I checked you needed to install the WGA Notification tool to access the Windows Update web site, so this might not be very good advice. You can still download and install Critical updates automatically, but you need the Notification tool to access "Reccomended" updates and device drivers.
Of course, you'll never read about this in the news, since it sells a lot more commercials to talk about how the goverment is spending billions to kill people while millions of children are starving in the streets.
This is because Medicare, Social Security, etc. are generally efficient programs and a responsible use of the taxpayer's money. Defense spending, OTOH, is mostly a sucking bottomless hole of waste and corruption. Look at "Joint Strike", the most expensive military program in history, costing more than WWII in adjusted dollars, is going to end up generating a handful of aircraft which will be supplanted by the vastly more expensive and capable F-22. WTF? Don't even get me started on "Star Wars" or "ballistic missile defense", arguably the greatest boondoggles EVER. Nobody know how to piss away money like the United States Air Force. I'm sure this the fact that many generals, congressmen, etc. are bribed enormous sums by the defense industry has nothing to do with this.
If there was a "winner" in desktop Linux distributions that "winner" would definitely be Red Hat Enterprise Linux simply because that is the distribution which has the deepest penetration on the CORPORATE desktop, which is what really matters.
Personally I use Gentoo Linux almost exclusively, but I use Linux mostly on a lot of weird hardware and embedded systems.
As the parent point it is simply NOT POSSIBLE to create a rating system that can please the majority of users because of the extremely wide variations between individuals. Amish people are offended by ALL modern media. Most conservative Muslims are offended by ANY depiction or description of sexuality. Many pacifists are offended by ANY depiction of violence as entertainment. etc.
This is not about "protecting the children", the notion that media has a major impact on child morality is ridiculous. Children retain moral lessons primairly from their parents (99%), followed by other family members, religious/moral teachers, and finally peer groups. Media has virtually no impact. If your kid doesn't known how to deal with porn, that's YOUR problem, not the government's. Maybe you should have talked to him about it.
BTW, God forbid that your kids might see pornography! I mean, one day they might grow up and (horrors) HAVE SEX! Which would mean they they would produce children and perpetuate the human race for another generation. What a nightmare that would be! How can we bring about the Apocalypse that way? Much better that we expose children to relentless violence such that they grow up to be nice healthy soldiers, wife-beaters, and axe murderers.
In practice, virtually all of the noise and objections comes from Christian religious nuts. And these nuts have plenty of their own specialty media. They've got their own sattelite networks, radio, video games, even ISPs that will censor your connection for you. There are even services the provide specially censored versions of "mainstream" media, like DVD movies.
If these people want to be luddites, I won't stop them. But neither should they expect the public at large to cater to their paranoid fantasies.
The path to success in dethroning the iPod is not to try to do the same thing Apple does, only better, because that's not possible. It's like starting up a new car company and saying your goal is to outsell the Toyota Camry. You'll never do it.
Which is why the Honda Accord outsells the Camry, right?
Apple's success is the result of a combination of a good product, having the first online music store that worked with a damn, and an incredibly slick marketing campaign. Technically, there are MANY players clearly superior to the iPod and the PlayForSure/Janus stores offer all that iTunes does and then some. Most experts and audiophiles ("early adopters") have moved on. Apple still packages everything together much more smoothly for the non-expert, which is why they dominate the market. For the first time someone else is producing a similar package. We'll see if MS can fuck this up.
The major problem I've experienced and heard from others regarding iPods wasn't the iPod itself, but the annoying iTunes software. At least on Windows (and it's my understanding that 80%+ of iPod owners have Windows). The interface clashes with Windows and uses this annoying check-in/check-out interface that makes it near impossible to actually MOVE music around. And while techincally there is USB Mass Storage support iTunes sees fit to mangle the directory structure and filenames of anything you put on there, presumably to make it as useless as possible, and of course the files aren't playable until you "check them in" on iTunes which mangles them. The whole thing feels like proprietary bullshit on Windows and certainly isn't easy to use relative to 99% of other players which have USB Mass Storage support. IOW, "installing" the player simply adds a drive letter in Explorer and you drag and drop music files. This is even how DRM music works if you have WMP10 installed. No drivers, no installers, nothing.
First off, THIS IS NOT SPAM. This is technically a "mail bomb" or "email harassment". All this guy did is set up an automailer and send millions of emails to his former employer, which possibly messed up their email service for a week. If they had proper spam filtering on the mail server, it would have done absolutely nothing.
Secondly, this is his former employer we're talking about. Presumably they fucked him over somehow, which is why he mail bombed them. Where's his compensation? None. Instead, as is typical for teenagers, he gets screwed.
Finally, this is what you get for hiring a minor. I have no problem with saying that companies that exploit child labour might have to deal with a bit of extra crap, like getting mail bombs from rowdy kids. Don't wat to deal with these problems? Don't be so damn cheap.
Sorry, my sympathy for large soulless corporations that exploit children is limited.
Um, no. I was quoting TFA. And I consider it pretty offensive to compare the "failure" of the N64 and Gamecube to the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It's like saying the Atari collapse was just like the Holocaust because they ended up destroying millions of cartridges.
Having lost two straight console generations (think: N64 as Hiroshima, GameCube as Nagasaki), the company branched off into a new direction, looking to lose its previous isolationist mentality.
The Wii, since it will almost certainly have the worst graphics and a controller with limited buttons, will probably be the least desirable of the 3 platforms for multiconsole games. The best games on the Wii are likely to be those that take good advantage of the controller, and multiconsole games are unlikely to do that. I also think that the Wii will be big for classic games, much bigger that XBOX Arcade, because it's going to have a much bigger library.
And yeah, "crappy kiddie games" is accurate. Almost all movie, cartoon, and tv show games suck HARD and this has been determied by wide consensous. Check out gamerankings.com if you don't believe me. The only truly good movie/cartoon/etc. game to come out in recent years was Chronicles of Riddick, and everyone who reviewed that game commented on what a fluke it was (it was considerably better than the movie, also unheard of considerign how badly video game movies suck). It is 100% reasonable to assume that these games will be terrible because if they ARE any good it will be an amazing fluke.
I'll reserve judgement on Raving Rabids, I don't know much about it. I'm not a fan of Rayman or platformers in general.
Yeah it's 27 titles (supposedly) but have you LOOKED at these titles?
Avatar: The Last Airbender Call of Duty 3 Cars Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 2 Madden NFL 07 Marvel: Ultimate Alliance Need for Speed: Carbon Open Season Rayman Raving Rabbids SpongeBob SquarePants: Creature from the Krusty Krab
Multiplatform. Avatar, Cars, Open Season, and SpongeBob are crappy kiddie games. Most observers are of the opinion that multiplatform games will do better on the PS3 and 360 because those platforms have better graphics, and multiplatform games won't be likely to take advantage of the unique Wii controller.
Blazing Angels: Squadrons of WWII Blitz: The League Far Cry Metal Slug Anthology Monster 4x4 World Circuit
Old, already out on other platforms. Monster 4x4 is a disaster.
Dragon Quest Swords: The Masked Queen and the Tower of Mirrors Elebits Excite Truck Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers GT Pro Series The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess Metroid Prime 3: Corruption Red Steel Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam Trauma Center: Second Opinion Wii Sports
So we're REALLY left with 12 unique launch titles. And Wii Sports and Excite Truck seem to be little more than controller demonstrations. Bigger news is the relatively robust 3rd-party support. Nintendo won't have to support the launch on it's own with significant titles from both Square Enix and Ubisoft (Crystal Bearers and Red Steel). Time will tell if this will last.
Another thing to remember is that some of these titles were likely GameCube titles that were switched during development. I'm told the relatively similar architectures made this possible. IOW, expect many of the launch titles to look like GameCube titles.
I suspect the system will fare well in Japan, with the titles seeming to slightly cater to Japanese audiences (not a lot of sports games I notice), do fairly well in Europe, and struggle in the USA. Much like the Gamecube. In terms of commercial success, Nintendo is still likely to be Microsoft due to the 360's poor showing in Japan.
"Remember Microsoft being convicted of abusing their monopoly powers because of the fact that crucial parts of their platforms are closed? Ever tried to use NTFS on any other platform? Windows is as open as Aqua, and that is to say: NOT AT ALL."
I believe that he was talking about an open HARDWARE platform, which is certainly true in the case of Windows (and Linux). Windows will run on just about any x86-compatible system, unlike Apple which uses elaborate security for prevent users from installing the software anything other than Apple hardware.
"Microsoft could have been much more proactive from drivers from the start, including vendor certification and testing, and making their kernel hell to support devices."
Which is EXACTLY what Apple did, and vendors complained mightily about it. This is part of WHY Windows went on to dominate the desktop computer market. Apple's (slow) certification took 6 months to YEARS, and you had to pay big bucks, which completely killed time to market. Not to mention adding significatly to the cost of the product. Ever wonder why Mac-specific products are more expensive than Windows products, even for the EXACT same item? This is why. The most dramatic example strikes me as ATI video cards, which were often TWICE the price for Mac versions as Windows versions.
and I had to comment on this: "Furthermore, other companies write drivers for Apple's operating system, and it honestly couldn't be much easier, as the Operating System is extremely friendly to driver writers (and there's extensive documentation on it)."
This certainly wasn't true in the OS9 days, when it was an incredible nightmare to get development support from Apple. Lots and lots and lots of system calls were undocumented, even in the expensive documentation we paid thousands of dollars for. And the thousands we were paying annually for developer support got un literally nothing. Nobody would EVER talk to me on the phone. And I live in Cupertino. I got Apple staff at HQ (and in the labs) to tell me in person to fuck off when I complained about the inadaquate documentation and lousy support. Most of the people I talked to at Apple in 1990-2000 thought MacOS was dead and were going to work for Pixar or somebody else. This is literally what the head of developer support told me, which was his excuse for not helping. I guess these guys weren't "in the loop" about OSX. They didn't seem to know shit about it then, and they certainly didn't tell developers anything. I know guys working at Abobe on products like Photoshop that knew absolutely nothing about OSX before it launched.
Lest you complain about relavency, it is this failure during the late '90s that really hurt Apple. Apple is probably bigger now than is was then (in terms of marketshare) but Apple also proved that they don't give a crap about the "long term" or backwards compatibility. This was the kiss of death for corporate IT managers. Would you put an Mac in a mission-critical position KNOWING you won't get any support in 5 years and that since it's not open-source, you can't do it yourself?
You might argue that Microsft is in the same position, but you're wrong. Even if MS stopped providing support, there are LOTS of third-party companies that can step in. And many of those companies have source code and CAN make changes. Now maybe going open source is the best way in the long term, but that isn't an argument for Apple.
"Hypocrite much? Microsoft pushes Trusted Computing on you, is threatening to lock users out of hardware space altogether, and you're going to talk to us about Open Standards and Proprietary Slavery?"
Considering the only wide consumer-level application of TPM has been by APPLE to prevent people from running Windows or Linux on Intel-based Macs, I would consider this a bit of hypocracy too.
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Now, I'm not pointing out these things to attack the Amish,
Yeah you are. But it's okay, the Amish are deranged religious zealots. But the point of the OP was not that the Amish are so perfect, but that most other "Christians" are raving hypocrites. They preach love and forgiveness, but absolutely refuse to practice it in their daily lives. They support the military, police, prisons, etc. Most of them even watch and practice violence (eveything from action movies, to football, to cockfighting) as entertainment.
Because I was over 25 and single, the local taliban
Are you seriously comparing the US justice system to the Afghani Taliban, one of the most pointlessly cruel regimes in modern history? The Taliban are primitive, savage, idiots who don't even really understand the basics of sha'ria, and you're comparing them to a sophisticated modern legal system like that of the USA? (and I consider myself a Taliban SUPPORTER!)
Or are you talking about some US vigilante group, or nutcase right-wing church, or some other nonsense? If you're talking about the Afghani Taliban, you got off easy. Nowadays they burn people alive.
I have gigantic hads and I prefer the controller "s", the small XBOX controller, because it has round buttons in a reasonable layout (diamond), the white and back buttons are better placed, and it's but better triggers. If there was a ginormous controller with a decent layout I would probably use that, but I haven't found a 3rd-party controller that meets my needs. I also have yet to find a decent XBOX wireless controller (the Logitech one is OK, but mine broke after 60 days). Oddly enough, I've founf a number of good wireless PS2 controllers.
By "proprietary" hen means that the wii will come with a "dual format" drive capable of playing Gamecube discs, standard DVDs, and presumably mini-DVDs as well into a SLOT-LOADING drive. This (to my knowledge) has not been implemented before and common sense should tell you why. I'm assuming that you won't be required to use some sort of ring attachment to use the Gamecube discs in the wii.
Terrorists use civilians as human shields,
No, they don't. Let's see some videotape of insurgents in Iraq, Hezbollah, or Hamas fighters fighting the Israelis or Americans with children arrayed in front of them. It doesn't exist. This is just a bullshit excuse the Israelis and Americans use to bomb civilian areas where they suspect (or maybe even actually KNOW) militants are operating. Of course, Israel or the Unitend States would NEVER locate a military facility or troops near civilians, right? Have you looked around the US a little?
The reason for the bombing is protecting troops, period. Bombing the shit out of civilian areas is much safer for the Israeli and American forces because the insurgents/militants have little in the way of air defense. Dropping a 1000 lbs. bomb on a crowded marketplace to kill a handful of insurgets is ultimately much safer for Israeli and American troops than sending in a unit on fooor in armoured vehicles (which are also used somewhat indiscriminitely, for the same reasons). Massacring civilians is justified as "collateral damage" or other such nonsense.
If you want to make WWII-style "total war" arguments, be my guest. But in doing so you are basically denying that there is such a thing as "civilians" so don't whine if the "terrorists" murder schoolchildren because they're all "fighters" according to such twisted logic.
But he doesn't care about that shit, he wants 'copy *'. Virtually every MP3 player ever released since the first Rios support this feature. The iPod doesn't. In fact, it mangles the hell out of filenames DELIBERATELY to make this impossible to implement and to force you to use iTunes. And I personally have found showstopping bugs in all the iTunes replacements I've used in conjunction with iPods (On Windows anyway. Maybe on OSX there are replacements that work). I used to have an iPod mini. I loved it. But iTunes was like stabbing myself in the eye so I sold it and bought a Rio Karma because I wanted to drag n' drop files and crossfade is fscking awesome.
Since then I've learned about Rockboxhttp://www.rockbox.org/, which is an opensource firmware you can flash your iPod with that will make it not suck. You're probably still better off getting an iRiver player because it has better support for Rockbox.
And Europe is getting a bit tired of Microsoft's attitude.
This isn't about the EU vigorously defending the rights of European citizens. It's about European software companies (and goverments) being pissed off that lots of euros are flowing into Microsoft's coffers, an AMERICAN company. But they can't just stick on tarrifs like they normally do. Why? Because the tarrifs are designed to encourage local competitors. It's very difficult for local competitors to get traction against MS due to very significant compatibility issues.
Eventually I suspect that the EU will find some excuse to allow the release/theft of huge chunks of Windows source code to European software companies which will lead to a new round of the "DOS wars" wherin MS will us secret code to break interoperability with "foreign" versions of Windows.
Back when I was working for an internet music company (around 2000), this was one of the "big issues" that I spend a lot of time discussing with my peers:
1. We want to sell music on the internet, particularly Top 40 music.
2. Currently, you need a credit card to buy stuff on the internet.
3. Most people who listen to Top 40 (13-19 year olds), do not have credit cards.
P: So how to you sell Top 40 over the internet profitably?
It's a problem we never solved, or even came close to solving. We did come up with solutions in retail involving kiosks in Korea and the UK that would take cash, but since Americans hate kiosks I suspect that wouldn't take off here. The notion of pre-paid cards was also considered but rejected because we would have to pay retailers to carry the things, and we would have to pay a LOT because the retailers we would want the most (record stores) considered us "the enemy".
The solution to the problem that seems most promising is combined cellphones/MP3 players that allow teens to purchase songs with prepaid phone credits. In 2000, teen cellphone usage wasn't anywhere hear what it is now and it wasn't yet common to make purchases (ringtones, games, etc.) through cellphones. Currently such combined decives suck ass, but eventually one of the cellphone manufactures will push out decent products (probably Sony, they seem to be the leader) and online music will become somewhat more popular.
Frankly though, a huge percentage of teenagers have more time than money, and it that situation they would much rather spend time hunting around on the internet for free music rather than pay anything at all. I consider this a GOOD thing because (hopefully) it will lead to the collapse of of the record industry in general. Most artists don't make a dime on album sales, in many cases they have to pay the labels to sell their music. ALL of the money comes from touring and swag. So it's not like the collapse of the industry would hurt artists.
The clear dishonesty in releasing a beta that is called a release candidate is at issue.
/. was about the Firefox 2 Release Candidate for God's sake! Here's a relavent articlehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_version.
And no software company has EVER come out with ANYTHING called a "Release Candidate", right? The very NEXT story on
The absurd anti-MS bias on /. is beginning to get to me. The fact is that the vast majority of readers and posters to /. are using Windows. And even if you're a rabid anti-MS zealot, virtually all computer professionals, etc. will be forced to use Windows at some point, and knowing something about the changes coming down the pike MIGHT prove useful.
If you want to complain about Vista, you should complain about the product based on actual experience. And you should try to do so constructively.
I can't say much because none of the betas I've tried (haven't tried RC1 or RC2 yet) would install in my 2 test rigs because the installer didn't like different bits of hardware (a RAID card and a video capture card) and I wasn't willing to yank cards just to test Vista. BTW, This is all hardware for which Vista drivers are not yet available. But I blame Vista for the installer just puking rather than igonring the non-essential hardware.
A few decades can be next to forever when you're in a war. If they managed to research and adapt Borg technology in that time, I could easily believe a Federation ship could take on the Borg from 20 years ago.
This would assume technology progression in Star Trek makes any sense. It doesn't. Why does Earth come to quickly dominate TECHNOLOGICALLY many races that have been spacefaring for literally centuries (Vulcans, Romulans, Klingons, Dominion, etc.) The series make clear that most significant technological innovation in the Alpha Quadrant comes from Earth. In Star Trek it is clear that humans are somehow fundamentally smarter and more "evolved" than other races, and that that they will eventually absorb or restrain any adversary. If you think about it, all the various enimies of humanity (Romulans, Klingons, Dominion, etc.) seem much more benign in this light.
Send all Internet connections thru proxies. Hire a couple of admins who have the job -- and nothing else -- of reviewing logs and applying content filters. Just flat out block porn, auction sites, non-official e-mail/webmail, stock/investment, gambling and sports sites. Start working down from there.
Yes, it's totally worth it to spend (at the bare minimum) $200,000 per year on admins and probably $10,000,000 per year on filtering software that won't work. Content filtering on the WWW is virtually impossible, and anyone who says otherwise is selling snake oil.
Post a policy, make everyone attend an "awareness" class, make them sign off on it. Make sure they all understand they are being watched and this sort of thing won't be tolerated.\
Another $50,000 on "training" pissed away.
Have the policy contain some teeth. Warn people on the first instance, reprimand on the following, suspend on #3 and FIRE THEM on #4. Make the termination public -- tell the rest of the staff why that person is no longer with you
And let's say (to use an IT example) this guy happened to be 50% of the way through a critical infrastructure project. Do you just let that project collapse? This is why many people who sexually harass others can get away with it. Because they're actually GOOD at their jobs.
Hospitals and health care institutions are a different animal. Nothing is more entertaining than watching some poor net admin try and tell a Doctor (aka GOD) that he can't do that. Heh. Subtler means are necessary.
This line is proof that you've worked mostly in hospitals. As a lowly IT peon you're not going to have a lot of success telling corporate officers or tenured professors what to do either.
I'm hoping that I read that wrong, and that you don't actually equate soldiers with "wife-beaters and axe murderers"
I forgot to add "police officers and prison guards".
Violence is violence is violence. As pointed out by another poster, soldiers inevitably become psychologically damaged and more prone to aberrant behavior simply by the nature of their jobs, which is being professional killers. This is the point of all that tough discipline outfits like the Marines are famous for: keeping the soldiers from going apeshit in the field. When this breaks down we have incidents like Haditha. The problem the US military is currently facing is an unwillingness to "hurt morale" by properly punishing the soldiers and officers involved (execution). The same rules apply to police and prison guards. Police officers who "accidently" shoot children and little old ladies should be executed, not completely unpunished as they are today.
I'm not "blaming" the people who choose these professions. ALL people with unrestricted physical power over others go apeshit, as has been proved by the Stanford Prison Experiment and elsewhere. There must be very tight restrictions on thier behavior. And in order for those restrictions to be effective, punishments for violations must be swift, extremely severe, and somewhat arbitrary. For example, I believe that trial is probably inappropriate and soldiers/police should be subject to direct punishment by superiors. Minor violations (for example, inappropriately touching a female prisoner) should warrant severe punishments (for example, flogging). The soldier's commander must recieve the same punishment. This is the ONLY way to maintain discipline among the troops. This is not just my opinion. Look up General Marius, Sun Tzu, Patton, etc.
I have told all of my clients *not* to accept the license agreement for the WGA Notification Tool.
Last time I checked you needed to install the WGA Notification tool to access the Windows Update web site, so this might not be very good advice. You can still download and install Critical updates automatically, but you need the Notification tool to access "Reccomended" updates and device drivers.
I could be wrong about this though.
Of course, you'll never read about this in the news, since it sells a lot more commercials to talk about how the goverment is spending billions to kill people while millions of children are starving in the streets.
This is because Medicare, Social Security, etc. are generally efficient programs and a responsible use of the taxpayer's money. Defense spending, OTOH, is mostly a sucking bottomless hole of waste and corruption. Look at "Joint Strike", the most expensive military program in history, costing more than WWII in adjusted dollars, is going to end up generating a handful of aircraft which will be supplanted by the vastly more expensive and capable F-22. WTF? Don't even get me started on "Star Wars" or "ballistic missile defense", arguably the greatest boondoggles EVER. Nobody know how to piss away money like the United States Air Force. I'm sure this the fact that many generals, congressmen, etc. are bribed enormous sums by the defense industry has nothing to do with this.
If there was a "winner" in desktop Linux distributions that "winner" would definitely be Red Hat Enterprise Linux simply because that is the distribution which has the deepest penetration on the CORPORATE desktop, which is what really matters.
Personally I use Gentoo Linux almost exclusively, but I use Linux mostly on a lot of weird hardware and embedded systems.
For God's sake, PLEASE moderate the parent up!
As the parent point it is simply NOT POSSIBLE to create a rating system that can please the majority of users because of the extremely wide variations between individuals. Amish people are offended by ALL modern media. Most conservative Muslims are offended by ANY depiction or description of sexuality. Many pacifists are offended by ANY depiction of violence as entertainment. etc.
This is not about "protecting the children", the notion that media has a major impact on child morality is ridiculous. Children retain moral lessons primairly from their parents (99%), followed by other family members, religious/moral teachers, and finally peer groups. Media has virtually no impact. If your kid doesn't known how to deal with porn, that's YOUR problem, not the government's. Maybe you should have talked to him about it.
BTW, God forbid that your kids might see pornography! I mean, one day they might grow up and (horrors) HAVE SEX! Which would mean they they would produce children and perpetuate the human race for another generation. What a nightmare that would be! How can we bring about the Apocalypse that way? Much better that we expose children to relentless violence such that they grow up to be nice healthy soldiers, wife-beaters, and axe murderers.
In practice, virtually all of the noise and objections comes from Christian religious nuts. And these nuts have plenty of their own specialty media. They've got their own sattelite networks, radio, video games, even ISPs that will censor your connection for you. There are even services the provide specially censored versions of "mainstream" media, like DVD movies.
If these people want to be luddites, I won't stop them. But neither should they expect the public at large to cater to their paranoid fantasies.
The path to success in dethroning the iPod is not to try to do the same thing Apple does, only better, because that's not possible. It's like starting up a new car company and saying your goal is to outsell the Toyota Camry. You'll never do it.
Which is why the Honda Accord outsells the Camry, right?
Apple's success is the result of a combination of a good product, having the first online music store that worked with a damn, and an incredibly slick marketing campaign. Technically, there are MANY players clearly superior to the iPod and the PlayForSure/Janus stores offer all that iTunes does and then some. Most experts and audiophiles ("early adopters") have moved on. Apple still packages everything together much more smoothly for the non-expert, which is why they dominate the market. For the first time someone else is producing a similar package. We'll see if MS can fuck this up.
The major problem I've experienced and heard from others regarding iPods wasn't the iPod itself, but the annoying iTunes software. At least on Windows (and it's my understanding that 80%+ of iPod owners have Windows). The interface clashes with Windows and uses this annoying check-in/check-out interface that makes it near impossible to actually MOVE music around. And while techincally there is USB Mass Storage support iTunes sees fit to mangle the directory structure and filenames of anything you put on there, presumably to make it as useless as possible, and of course the files aren't playable until you "check them in" on iTunes which mangles them. The whole thing feels like proprietary bullshit on Windows and certainly isn't easy to use relative to 99% of other players which have USB Mass Storage support. IOW, "installing" the player simply adds a drive letter in Explorer and you drag and drop music files. This is even how DRM music works if you have WMP10 installed. No drivers, no installers, nothing.
First off, THIS IS NOT SPAM. This is technically a "mail bomb" or "email harassment". All this guy did is set up an automailer and send millions of emails to his former employer, which possibly messed up their email service for a week. If they had proper spam filtering on the mail server, it would have done absolutely nothing.
Secondly, this is his former employer we're talking about. Presumably they fucked him over somehow, which is why he mail bombed them. Where's his compensation? None. Instead, as is typical for teenagers, he gets screwed.
Finally, this is what you get for hiring a minor. I have no problem with saying that companies that exploit child labour might have to deal with a bit of extra crap, like getting mail bombs from rowdy kids. Don't wat to deal with these problems? Don't be so damn cheap.
Sorry, my sympathy for large soulless corporations that exploit children is limited.
Um, no. I was quoting TFA. And I consider it pretty offensive to compare the "failure" of the N64 and Gamecube to the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It's like saying the Atari collapse was just like the Holocaust because they ended up destroying millions of cartridges.
Not only is the article stupid, it's offensive.
Having lost two straight console generations (think: N64 as Hiroshima, GameCube as Nagasaki), the company branched off into a new direction, looking to lose its previous isolationist mentality.
Yeah, that's a TOTALLY valid analogy.
The Wii, since it will almost certainly have the worst graphics and a controller with limited buttons, will probably be the least desirable of the 3 platforms for multiconsole games. The best games on the Wii are likely to be those that take good advantage of the controller, and multiconsole games are unlikely to do that. I also think that the Wii will be big for classic games, much bigger that XBOX Arcade, because it's going to have a much bigger library.
And yeah, "crappy kiddie games" is accurate. Almost all movie, cartoon, and tv show games suck HARD and this has been determied by wide consensous. Check out gamerankings.com if you don't believe me. The only truly good movie/cartoon/etc. game to come out in recent years was Chronicles of Riddick, and everyone who reviewed that game commented on what a fluke it was (it was considerably better than the movie, also unheard of considerign how badly video game movies suck). It is 100% reasonable to assume that these games will be terrible because if they ARE any good it will be an amazing fluke.
I'll reserve judgement on Raving Rabids, I don't know much about it. I'm not a fan of Rayman or platformers in general.
Yeah it's 27 titles (supposedly) but have you LOOKED at these titles?
Avatar: The Last Airbender
Call of Duty 3
Cars
Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 2
Madden NFL 07
Marvel: Ultimate Alliance
Need for Speed: Carbon
Open Season
Rayman Raving Rabbids
SpongeBob SquarePants: Creature from the Krusty Krab
Multiplatform. Avatar, Cars, Open Season, and SpongeBob are crappy kiddie games. Most observers are of the opinion that multiplatform games will do better on the PS3 and 360 because those platforms have better graphics, and multiplatform games won't be likely to take advantage of the unique Wii controller.
Blazing Angels: Squadrons of WWII
Blitz: The League
Far Cry
Metal Slug Anthology
Monster 4x4 World Circuit
Old, already out on other platforms. Monster 4x4 is a disaster.
Dragon Quest Swords: The Masked Queen and the Tower of Mirrors
Elebits
Excite Truck
Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers
GT Pro Series
The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
Metroid Prime 3: Corruption
Red Steel
Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz
Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam
Trauma Center: Second Opinion
Wii Sports
So we're REALLY left with 12 unique launch titles. And Wii Sports and Excite Truck seem to be little more than controller demonstrations. Bigger news is the relatively robust 3rd-party support. Nintendo won't have to support the launch on it's own with significant titles from both Square Enix and Ubisoft (Crystal Bearers and Red Steel). Time will tell if this will last.
Another thing to remember is that some of these titles were likely GameCube titles that were switched during development. I'm told the relatively similar architectures made this possible. IOW, expect many of the launch titles to look like GameCube titles.
I suspect the system will fare well in Japan, with the titles seeming to slightly cater to Japanese audiences (not a lot of sports games I notice), do fairly well in Europe, and struggle in the USA. Much like the Gamecube. In terms of commercial success, Nintendo is still likely to be Microsoft due to the 360's poor showing in Japan.
In order:
"Remember Microsoft being convicted of abusing their monopoly powers because of the fact that crucial parts of their platforms are closed? Ever tried to use NTFS on any other platform? Windows is as open as Aqua, and that is to say: NOT AT ALL."
I believe that he was talking about an open HARDWARE platform, which is certainly true in the case of Windows (and Linux). Windows will run on just about any x86-compatible system, unlike Apple which uses elaborate security for prevent users from installing the software anything other than Apple hardware.
"Microsoft could have been much more proactive from drivers from the start, including vendor certification and testing, and making their kernel hell to support devices."
Which is EXACTLY what Apple did, and vendors complained mightily about it. This is part of WHY Windows went on to dominate the desktop computer market. Apple's (slow) certification took 6 months to YEARS, and you had to pay big bucks, which completely killed time to market. Not to mention adding significatly to the cost of the product. Ever wonder why Mac-specific products are more expensive than Windows products, even for the EXACT same item? This is why. The most dramatic example strikes me as ATI video cards, which were often TWICE the price for Mac versions as Windows versions.
and I had to comment on this:
"Furthermore, other companies write drivers for Apple's operating system, and it honestly couldn't be much easier, as the Operating System is extremely friendly to driver writers (and there's extensive documentation on it)."
This certainly wasn't true in the OS9 days, when it was an incredible nightmare to get development support from Apple. Lots and lots and lots of system calls were undocumented, even in the expensive documentation we paid thousands of dollars for. And the thousands we were paying annually for developer support got un literally nothing. Nobody would EVER talk to me on the phone. And I live in Cupertino. I got Apple staff at HQ (and in the labs) to tell me in person to fuck off when I complained about the inadaquate documentation and lousy support. Most of the people I talked to at Apple in 1990-2000 thought MacOS was dead and were going to work for Pixar or somebody else. This is literally what the head of developer support told me, which was his excuse for not helping. I guess these guys weren't "in the loop" about OSX. They didn't seem to know shit about it then, and they certainly didn't tell developers anything. I know guys working at Abobe on products like Photoshop that knew absolutely nothing about OSX before it launched.
Lest you complain about relavency, it is this failure during the late '90s that really hurt Apple. Apple is probably bigger now than is was then (in terms of marketshare) but Apple also proved that they don't give a crap about the "long term" or backwards compatibility. This was the kiss of death for corporate IT managers. Would you put an Mac in a mission-critical position KNOWING you won't get any support in 5 years and that since it's not open-source, you can't do it yourself?
You might argue that Microsft is in the same position, but you're wrong. Even if MS stopped providing support, there are LOTS of third-party companies that can step in. And many of those companies have source code and CAN make changes. Now maybe going open source is the best way in the long term, but that isn't an argument for Apple.
"Hypocrite much? Microsoft pushes Trusted Computing on you, is threatening to lock users out of hardware space altogether, and you're going to talk to us about Open Standards and Proprietary Slavery?"
Considering the only wide consumer-level application of TPM has been by APPLE to prevent people from running Windows or Linux on Intel-based Macs, I would consider this a bit of hypocracy too.