I've tried saying 'NO, BAD FILE!' and 'BE AN MPEG!' but it doesn't seem to make them play.
Firefox on Windows seems pretty sketchy with it's media support, by default there seem to be some handlers for relevant mime types missing (works fine once they are added manually though).
I was mostly having problems with WMV files (though also with some MPEG's), hopefully this will make things better (my only Windows machine is for gaming, so I tend to be using it to look at game related info when I'm browsing - which is where a lot of the crappy WMV files come from).
The decision to use WMV is undoubtedly a stupid one borne of ignorance though. From experience, I know there are plenty of ways to do streaming video in a non proprietary way that work fine in WMP, QT and other native video players (without incurring the insane streaming server licensing costs charged by Real, Adobe and Microsoft).
Some idiot in our company bought some Windows Media Streaming services, because someone in senior management put their foot down (more fool them for not standing up to management though). People I work with think Adobe's streaming server is 'magically better' for some reason I've not yet fathomed either. I assume it's entirely because they imagine something that costs more must be better and so worth what the vendor is asking.
There are lots of other places where mixed behavior is nice and once you get used to it, it's hard to do without. I disagree completely, I don't think it's desirable behavior and I can really do without it. You always end up with sub-optimal applications as a result, and power users and the most casual users alike end up disliking the result.
When it comes to software development, knowing what NOT to do can be a pretty important and underrated skill - all to often people start off integrating things or trying to build some 'giant unified killer platform' just because they can, or at least think they can. Just because you can, doesn't mean it's a good idea or that other people will want it (and telling them they want it and if they don't agree suggesting that they don't understand the concept, doesn't work).
I have no objection to applications logically expanding their functionality, or working together seamlessly, but there is way too much temptation to add new features than fix difficult bugs or implement much more relevant functionality because it's harder and/or more time consuming. There is a fair amount of unrewarding and tedious work in most projects and it's hard to stick at it.
Safari is a pretty straight forward browser, it has excellent CSS and JavaScript support though. With the debug options enabled, it's my favorite browser to use and create websites in (before I do 'tweaking' in IE and Firefox to make up for issues with less sophisticated CSS and JavaScript support). Speed wise it's pretty much tied with Firefox - which is much faster at some things (some forms of compositing), but slower at others (other types of compositing, JavaScript execution speed).
I think it's a mistake to suggest Konqueror is a better browser than Safari because it has fairly irrelevant features like sftp integration - when it lacks CSS and JavaScript support in a way that is regularly noticeable not only when creating websites, but in just visiting sites on a day to day basis.
Where Mac OS X does clearly fall down is the file manager (which has been overtaken the most by Nautilus), which is a ironic given how good the Finder was in Mac OS Classic (for the time). I'm still surprised and annoyed Apple haven't addressed some of the basic issues in the current Finder, like poor icon spacing (and god forbid if a remote webdav share goes down unexpectedly...).
I notice that it's missing when I use an XP system and the silly thing insists on opening separate windows. It takes time, obscures what I'm looking at and is hard to drag and drop between. If you mean 'insists on opening separate windows for different file system views' or even 'separate windows for web browsing and for file browsing' that's simply not true (and hasn't been for 10 years). I wonder if you are talking about tab support in the file/web browser. I believe that's been a feature in XP for that least 6 months or so (if the system is up to date), but I've never used it so I don't know what it's limitations are.
However... we can blame the law for our collective lack of defense in situations like this. You could, but you'd be barking up the wrong tree.
If the majority of students carried guns, the killings in this incident and others like it may very well have been minimized if he had been taken out early on. I doubt it would have made much difference though to be honest - you'd still need the presence of mind and ability to take the guy out (which few would have) and the shooter has the advantage of already having drawn a weapon (and so can kill you before you've even gotten yours out).
Of course, there is a downside to this scenario that's being conveniently overlooked here. You'd surely see a lot more than the 30+ people in this incident killed every year in shootouts between students (and other young people), just because a bunch of hot-headed young adults had guns on them and got into an argument with each other over something trivial, but they had guns on them, so one guy draws his, they everybody else in the group draws theirs...
Hell, I've been mugged/had random morons start fights with me/people I'm with several times (in some places its remarkably easy to attract scum) and it would have been great to have been carrying a weapon on those occasions, at least for me. If everyone had been carrying, I would be amazed if I'd be alive now (there would have been at least a couple of deaths I'm sure, even if only the assholes had been killed, which seems wishful thinking).
The less hot headed young guys have access to guns, the better. US society is not able to handle the freedom and responsibility that comes with the relatively liberal gun legislation it already has (though some countries do manage the balance quite well it seems). Hopefully things will change some day, but right now, if you care about lives rather than rhetoric, more control - not less - is more likely to save lives (even if it's the lives of poor, typically black kids or 'white trash', in poor urban neighborhoods who tighter gun control would have the most impact on - the thousands of young guys who are killed by other young guys every year that go by without a blip on the news and who few people care about).
Right now, having greater civil liberties when it comes to gun control, won't make society more liberal or more civil, it will just mean more deaths. If you want to improve the quality of your civil society, the answer is the same as ever, focus on education and building an equitable society. You won't stop incidents like this, but you might save far more lives from being taken by angry young men with guns as a result.
I'm not usually one to find 'disruptive' pranks funny, but this doesn't seem too far off the kind of things do they on the show (which I've not seen). If companies will put out shows that do just these kind of stunts, and aimed at the teenage/early 20's demographic it's of course no surprise.
This seems largely harmless in the end, and ABC seem to be taking it in good faith (recognising the irony, I assume). I'm happy that it brings attention to how worth while it is to have a system where you make some attempt to verify the authenticity of a claim of ownership when a takedown is issued.
I know with the DMCA you are supposed to take down content when a complaint is made - and not dick around establishing ownership (and you should then put it back up if the origional party claims it's legitimate - and then it's up the two parties to fight it out in court), but are you at least allowed to verify the request was sent by the party that claims to have sent it? If not, it seems like a significant oversight in the process.
If the people who drafted this legislation had any idea about the technology they were dealing with, they could at least have mandated requests be digitally signed with the public key of the content holder (with a certificate that is backed by one of a number of trusted authorities).
They're not? Nope.
If they're not withholding anything, why are consumer connections in the US so much slower than those in korea, etc? It is more expensive for a connection of the same speed, again it's economics at play. There are VERY few places in the world where connectivity is as fast and as cheap as it is in the US, and those places have unique circumstances (typically they are much smaller nations - e.g. Sweden, where the entire population is not much larger than NY- or in places like South Korea, where you have fast cheap access in cities like Seoul, even though most of the people in the country are still earning half the national average of US citizens and are living well below what we'd consider to be the poverty line).
Virtually everything is cheaper in Korea, why would network connectivity be any different? Compare: In much of the US you can get connectivity far cheaper than in the UK. Do you imagine that UK companies are co-operating to stiff those of us in the UK as part of a national conspiracy, or again is more likely to be economics (the tax regiem, labour costs, cost of living issues, relative currency values) at play?
If they're not trying to sell it back to us as a value add, why are faster connections so much more expensive? I think that's exactly what they're doing. They have refused to invest in technologies that would vastly benefit the consumer because it wouldnt benefit them much. What technologies are they supposed to be withholding on? The industry is currently struggling to keep up with the huge demand those of us in Western countries (where the usage patterns for the average family are far more demanding than in most other countries). Large providers and carriers are already spending billions of dollars constantly upgrading and re-designing their neworks to cope with demand (constantly re-negotating new contracts with vendors like Cisco/Juniper/Extreme to build them). In many cases they are comminiting to long term capital investments far greater than the companies purchase price on the open market (that is to say, large amounts relative to their size).
Just a decade ago consumers were almost all on dialup, very little P2P, no sites like YouTube or Google Video. A short while later and uptake has skyrocketed, as usage, with it being used for much more bandwith intensive online gaming, users rountinely downloading 0.5-1.5 GB *demos* of software (not to mention all those patches, often several hundred megabytes) VoIP (X-Box Live, TeamSpeak, Ventrillo, Skype, etc.), heavy connection-clogging P2P traffic patterns, video downloads now common place, with HD and VoD services starting to take off (and set to also become common place in the next 18 months).
In markets where labour is not cheap, and cost of living is higher, it costs more. When you have a large landmass to cover, and hundres of millions of people who all want high speed connectivity it gets yet more expensive (because many more users, means a more sophisticated network is required). Still, the dollar remains realtively low, which is one reason the US is (particularly in urban areas) one of the cheapest places to get high speed consumer interent access in the world.
So generic internet access is not available to the general public. We need to make it available The thing is, there is no single "internet backbone" you are guaranteed access to. You have access to your providers network and by their grace other networks they also connect to (and / or what ever your contract might stipulate) that's all you get. You don't get acess to "all the networks on earth" magically, just because you pay a few bucks a month to some telco. You get what access people choose to allow you. If you want access to a specific network, set up a peering arrangement with them like anyone else (or get transit from someone who does, and a contract that says that provider will give you unfettered access to a specific host, at least as long as they happen to peer or have some sort of transit arrangement with your destination network...).
This is exactly what providers have to do. Just because your ISP peers with or gets transit from a carrier, doesn't mean THEY get access to "all sites they can". They only get what you pay for. That's one reason providers have multiple transit and peering points (different places charge different amounts for connectivity, and at some points you can only get access to a limited number of destinations).
What you are suggesting means forcing anyone to has a network where traffic passes through to allow everyone who connects to it to use it however they want, and to pump unlimited amounts of traffic of any time presumabily. Frankly, what other people do on their networks is their business, they pay to run that network, not you, you would do well to remember that you are being granted a privillage in being allowed to use it. If they are somehow forced to cover the cost of allowing your P2P traffic through on their network (along with other, less demanding, traffic they don't mind carrying - maybe because that sort of traffic is going to a less expensive destination - maybe even one that is profitable because it belongs to a transit customer of theirs), how are they going to stay in business if it's costing them money?
If they are doing traffic shaping that effects you, it's to save them money. If you try screw with them, they are just going to not accept traffic from you (e.g. they could refuse to accept traffic for netblocks that belong to consumer DSL/Cable/Dial ranges (detection for that sort of thing based on ARIN/RIPE/etc. data is fairly common already)). Then you will be even worse off, because the routing was already being as efficent as it could be meaning that if you can still get to the end hop, the route will be slower and/or less reliable, and you've just shot yourself in the foot.
No one is willing to provide it now, because tiered access is more profitable Consumers don't want to pay for anything but tiered access. High quality commercial connectivity (and the superior QoS and SLA's that come with it) is of course avalible, it's just really expensive (for a reason - you have to build in way more resiliency and capacity to ensure it works as it's supposed to). If it matters that much to you, you are free to obtain it, but I expect like most of you will settle for what's avalible at far cheaper price (as smaller companies do - and even, ultimately, larger ones and governments who all have to settle over price v. SLA's).
It's not as if providers are dicking with us and withholding better access just to make more money by selling it as a value add (if that were the case, and cellphone operators have been guilty of this, then it's worth thinking about doing something), it's just more expensive to build and maintain a better network. Mostly, they are currently thinking "How can we manage the increasing traffic volumes for all these customers who want VoD, P2P and other depanding network services without going bust or pricing ourselves out of the market?".
There's a difference between giving priority to different kinds of packets (QoS), and giving priority to packets from different sources, which is what Net Neutrality is all about There is? Cringuely, like most headline seeking authors, writes a lot of daft stuff, however this none of this is news to me and he's right that carriers and telco's have been doing this for years. The best part of 10 years ago I was working for a international carrier developing a system to charge / limit our customers (national telco's, smaller carriers private firms doing significant data transfer and large isp's) based on packet type (technically, by port).
Let's say a European company buys it's connectivity from a datacenter company buys and resells wholesale traffic from a carrier, and the carrier gets traffic from a pan-European carrier, who has an agreement with a US carrier, who peers an exchange, which your provider connects to (and you have traffic that goes through that chain to the origional company in Europe).
Now it's all but certain some traffic shaping is going on there, and it's increasingly likely (as the technology to support it becomes increasingly avalible, better and cheaper) that different QoS's will be applied based on a number of factors - like the immediately preceeding source and the next hop in the chain. There are going to be agreements between each of the two companies (or with a third party, like the exchange) but you don't controll all of them, none of the guys in the middle care about you or the guy you are talking to they only care about their customers.
Companies sign agreements to do this kind of stuff because it works out cheaper for them to do so. It's a bit silly, as it's expensive even just to measure and limit it (you need more sophisticated hardware and software just to treat it differently) but it has valid uses, like rate limiting P2P traffic (which nearly every provider does these days - because otherwise it would add a whack to their bill, and yours, and reduce the network speed to a crawl).
I find the idea of forbidding two companies from entering into private peering arrangements that suit them abhorrent. They are not necessarily obliged to let your traffic go over their network at all.
There have been some really famous examples of global jackasses that have upset people so much that carriers and telco's have stopped routing traffic to them altogether (a carrier I used to work at did this to services run by Alan Brown of ORBS infamy - a 'blacklist' provider who where always putting the wrong companies in their blacklist and making wild, incorrect and unfounded allegations because he hadn't done his homework), eventually driving them out of business.
IIRC, above.net went one step further and *advertised* traffic for his company's IP netblock, then null routed it (it's owners had a stake in a competing commercial service, MAPS, so they found it particularly amusing I assume).
it's not that silly. I contend it is not only silly, but sufficently bad to warrent legal action, because whoever built it must have known how badly it was designed to start with.
It appears that the system doesn't use a form of encyption unlocked by a key (entered by the user) to store the data - and that instead it simply requires use of a single instruction to the USB device indicate the data ought to be accessible or not. That just sounds ludicrous.
If it had been developed in good faith, and this were a bug (rather than part of the design) and/or the result of a sphosticated exploit that it would have been hard to predict, I would be sympathetic. As I would if they had clearly indicated it's limitations (which they could have, but if they've taken the website down now, I'm guessing not).
What's particularly telling for me is, while the company were quite happy to tout the supposed virtues of the product, they are clearly worried about it now they have been found out. That repesents a staggering failure by the designers of the software, their managers, the marketing and product design teams, the HR department who hired all these people of clearly very dubious virtue and the senior management involved.
Either they are crooks (because they were complicit in touting such a crummy product that didn't really do what it claimed to do in a reasonable way) or are they are all, really, really dumb (and none of them asked pertinent questions of the other parties at any stage of product development).
DVD maximum capacity is actually just shy of 18 GB, even 8 GB is enormous, most high definition games take up less than 4 GB (uncompressed). I can't see that there is any way Resistance needed anything like 20 GB on the disc, especially when there is hard disk right there in every PS3 (which you'd always want to extract content to if you could, to keep loading times as fast as possible).
Quite a few games, going back to the days of the Dreamcast, take up way more space on the disc that in used for anything meaningful (e.g. audio tracks uncompressed, art assets that aren't used in the game, data repeated in multiple places on the disk to allow for faster loading times, even data that was just junk to make it harder to illegally copy the game so it wouldn't fit on a regular CD), I expect that's what's going on with Resistance if the image does take up that much space.
I do see the argument that it's easier for content producers if they don't have to spend time optimising data just because the medium is limited - or at least I could, if it were not the case that the PS3 only has 256 MB RAM (half that of the X-Box 360), which is obviously a limiting factor on the resolution of textures that can be used (and, IIRC it's VRAM but also shared for main memory), so it's not like the texture quality (and hense file size) on games on the PS3 is even able to match that of a high end PC title (even though in practice it will look just fine when it's up on a TV a few feet away from you).
it's just a nice convenience that i am surprised everyone gets so upset about. I think that stems from it being the reason the console was delayed for over a year here, and why it's so expensive, and the consequent feeling that it's supposed to beneficial for gamers is just BS, it's really just benifical to Sony in getting Blu Ray established in the home (and fighting off HD DVD).
I disagree. If power was that important, the PS2 would have died one year into it's life when the Gamecube and X-box (both more powerful systems) were launched. Although, it's worth mentioning that from what I've seen your average Joe genuinely thought the PS2 was better than the GC or X-Box and were skeptical of both them (I assume becasue it was Microsoft's first console, and the previous Nintendo console had been the N64 - which proved no match for the origional PS).
I'm looking forward to Tiger Woods on the Wii (I saw it on a retailers shelf here in the UK, only to be told 'it wasn't for sale yet' at the counter) and that's entirely due to the control system. I don't think I'd ever buy it for the 360 though (playing golf on a regular controller just doesn't appeal to me). The poor graphics on the Wii do put me off though (and I'm already avoiding some Wii titles because of how blurry and indistinct they look on my HDTV).
You've got to love it when someone posts a non-sensical promotion for Gentoo that can't be backed up (because apparently they have no idea how other distributions work) and an attempt to call them on it gets modded flamebait, even when the previous poster is an obnoxious jerk in response to a polite inquiry.
And still, we have nothing to back up the bizzaro and rather vague initial assertion...
Given how much experience I've got with different Linux Distributions (and operating systems in general) I'd be amused to see you try and name two or three.
How are you suggesting Gentoo is somehow unique from other Linux distributions to be specifically worth mentioning?
From what you've said I gather it's something relating to 'decentralised control', but I can't think of any way in which it's unique in that regard (compared to say Debian, Slackware, Fedora, etc.), either in terms of kernel/module management or wider package management.
Umm, most video cards work just fine. I always check before buying one, but I've never, ever had a problem. Some of the cards that are coming out now do not support EFI, and fail back to BIOS compatibility, which may work with Windows, but not OS X (who never used BIOS). In general, however, any video card you buy will work fine. Sadly, that's not true. New high end cards just flat out don't work, and of course it flat out doesn't support SLI (which, if you have a decent sized monitor and plan on having games that actually run at the native resolution a decent level of quality, is something that's required).
I've been waiting for Apple to refresh and hopefully support SLI (at last...), so I can have a system in the office for development and just boot into Windows for games, but no luck. I would easily have bought one of these systems, in fact I was really looking forward to an announcement this week but have been very disappointed. A single Geforce 7300 is not something I'd use for gaming - hell the two graphics cards in my PC are 7800 GTX's from summer 2005, selling it as new now on a 'pro' system is laughable.
They don't lose out completely, as I'll probably just get a Mac Book Pro now (I've got a couple of Mac's but both G4's, and I'm thinking of giving PowerBook to a relative). I would rather have just paid far more for a nice new do-it-all desktop though.
I would say that Serenity is good, but you'd be forgiven for thinking it was mediocre without seeing Firefly first, which is what's really about (it was made because they couldn't get a second series). While I guess the film stands on it's own, I can't imagine it has 1/10th of the impact without having seen the series.
For the benfit of those who haven't seen both, the Serenity film ties up and explains what happens in the series.
I would say *definitely* by the series on DVD and *don't* watch Serenity first! I know the series is more expensive, but I'm sure most people on/. would really like it and very few would regret it.
After watching the series, then rent or buy the movie (or keep an eye out for it on satellite/cable and PVR it when it comes on). I'm sure you'll be chomping at the bit for more once you've seen the series.
Who gives a rat's who reads SFX? Gosh, I cant see how that would be relevent to the poll. You may want to RTFA.
And the grandparent's comment stands: "More people dressed up as Wookiees last Halloween than saw Serenity." People. Not SFX readers. People. Period." Star Wars is more popular, it doesn't mean those who like it feel more strongly about it or make them 'loyal fans'. It's pretty hard to be a 'loyal fan' when the quality of the material varies so greatly. If anything, have a wide popular fanbase it means the strength of feeling is likely to be much diluted - think Manchester United supporters, for example.
I know people who are loyal fans of a few different stories/franchises. While most people I know really like Star Wars and we'd trape along to the cinema if a new trilogy was coming out, I don't really know anyone that feels as strongly about it as people do about smaller, tighter (i.e. more consistantly good quality) franchises like Firefly.
I've bought a few SNES and N64 games on the Wii (N64 titles as I've run out of native titles and I skipped over the N64, SNES and NES titles because it's great to play some classics again).
While every other game I've downloaded runs just fine, and it's joy to play the likes of Super Mario again, (it's as if it hasn't aged at all, though sadly the same cannot be said of the N64 port to which time has not been kind), the TMNT port does NOT work correctly.
My memory might be a bit wonky, but while I do remember a couple of native games on the NES suffering from flickery sprites and iffy controls (some movie knock-off titles spring to mind), but TMNT was not one of them.
I can't believe anyone play tested this title before it was released - at least not anyone who knows what to look for. It's immediately noticeably sluggish, poor to respond and flickery, like it's running on an emulator that can't handle whatever routines the game is using properly. Ironically, I've downloaded the ROM and played it on a 3rd party emulator which runs the game far better.
I would understand one or two titles being a bit iffy if they'd released a huge back catalog, but games on the virtual console are only coming through at a trickle right now. This one is poor effort on Nintendo's part, and while it's playable, I would caution people against getting this one (maybe get an old Zelda title instead).
It's grossly ignorant to suggest it's not a series of chemical reactions, and that simply isn't a point worth debating any more than I'd get into a debate about the world not being flat, or the earth being more than 10,000 years old.
'Love' is also an abstract concept, but it only exists as such because the concept dates back to a time before we were even able to imagine being able to understand or explain animal behavior (including our own) through the study of biochemistry or neurology.
To quote Cole Porter, "Birds do, bees do it, even educated fleas do it" - the basic rules apply for humans, only have larger brains than most animals and so the whole affair is subsequently more complicated and less predictable in humans than it is in simpler life forms (not least because we are able to, and indeed make, a lot more value judgments).
Your correlation is flawed because, unlike numeracy (which is human construct), what we know as love existed long before Homo Sapiens came along. I'm sure it existed even before mammals were dominant on Earth (and that dinosaurs where into doing the kind of crazy stuff birds do today to attract mates, for example).
I find it disappointing how many people miss that love is a series of chemical reactions, or are uncomfortable discussing it as such.
Though I suspect it's also true majority of people (in most countries) believe in 'life after death', as if you don't lose neurons as you get older (which we know to be the case) but they really go off to some sort of alternate dimension, and the rest of your brain is re-united with them when you eventually pass on. Or maybe they you only take with you what you have when you die (and Heaven is filled with confused old people who don't know who or where they are).
It seems major religions are very much in denial about the physical aspect of the mind, particularly when it comes to things like love and death.
It is a common mistake by the exact market the Mac Mini is aimed at, I would expect the adaptor to be more hardy then that. It does seem like bad design on the part of the Mini (given a lot of people will be reaching round the back to plug it in without really looking where it is).
Unless your phone line has much higher then normal voltage on it or something, I'd suspect there was more to it then that, and I would suggest calling Apple about it. If plugging a phone line into the ethernet port is enough to make the port unusable I'd have to say Apple has a pretty serious issue on their hands. The port was working right before, but not right after. I seem to recall I was re-connecting it because I I'd just moved the mini across the room - and that it even cause the mini to reboot when I did it (which caused me to go "WTF?" and then actually turn it round to see what I'd done). It doesn't recognize anything as being plugged into the RJ45 port any more when it try (though the interface otherwise shows up just fine on the bus).
I'm not sure if UK phone line voltage is any higher than US phone line voltage (though I'd guess about the same). I think I was basically 'unlucky' in just happening to make contact with the elements on RJ11 interface in the RG45 socket. I'm sure people make that mistake all time without breakage though.
I'm almost tempted to get it looked at, but I'm not optimistic about getting any response other than being told I'd need to pay to get a new motherboard (i.e. a new Mini) - I'd bother if it was an Intel Mini, but it's a G4 one so I think the bottleneck on the network interface is liable to be the bus speed, CPU and the slow internal hard disk in any case, so using the FW interface instead of the GigE interface isn't a big problem (I'll need to get a small FW hub so I can keep my iSight plugged in though I guess).
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I've tried saying 'NO, BAD FILE!' and 'BE AN MPEG!' but it doesn't seem to make them play.
Firefox on Windows seems pretty sketchy with it's media support, by default there seem to be some handlers for relevant mime types missing (works fine once they are added manually though).
I was mostly having problems with WMV files (though also with some MPEG's), hopefully this will make things better (my only Windows machine is for gaming, so I tend to be using it to look at game related info when I'm browsing - which is where a lot of the crappy WMV files come from).
The decision to use WMV is undoubtedly a stupid one borne of ignorance though. From experience, I know there are plenty of ways to do streaming video in a non proprietary way that work fine in WMP, QT and other native video players (without incurring the insane streaming server licensing costs charged by Real, Adobe and Microsoft).
Some idiot in our company bought some Windows Media Streaming services, because someone in senior management put their foot down (more fool them for not standing up to management though). People I work with think Adobe's streaming server is 'magically better' for some reason I've not yet fathomed either. I assume it's entirely because they imagine something that costs more must be better and so worth what the vendor is asking.
When it comes to software development, knowing what NOT to do can be a pretty important and underrated skill - all to often people start off integrating things or trying to build some 'giant unified killer platform' just because they can, or at least think they can. Just because you can, doesn't mean it's a good idea or that other people will want it (and telling them they want it and if they don't agree suggesting that they don't understand the concept, doesn't work).
I have no objection to applications logically expanding their functionality, or working together seamlessly, but there is way too much temptation to add new features than fix difficult bugs or implement much more relevant functionality because it's harder and/or more time consuming. There is a fair amount of unrewarding and tedious work in most projects and it's hard to stick at it.
Safari is a pretty straight forward browser, it has excellent CSS and JavaScript support though. With the debug options enabled, it's my favorite browser to use and create websites in (before I do 'tweaking' in IE and Firefox to make up for issues with less sophisticated CSS and JavaScript support). Speed wise it's pretty much tied with Firefox - which is much faster at some things (some forms of compositing), but slower at others (other types of compositing, JavaScript execution speed).
I think it's a mistake to suggest Konqueror is a better browser than Safari because it has fairly irrelevant features like sftp integration - when it lacks CSS and JavaScript support in a way that is regularly noticeable not only when creating websites, but in just visiting sites on a day to day basis.
Where Mac OS X does clearly fall down is the file manager (which has been overtaken the most by Nautilus), which is a ironic given how good the Finder was in Mac OS Classic (for the time). I'm still surprised and annoyed Apple haven't addressed some of the basic issues in the current Finder, like poor icon spacing (and god forbid if a remote webdav share goes down unexpectedly...). I notice that it's missing when I use an XP system and the silly thing insists on opening separate windows. It takes time, obscures what I'm looking at and is hard to drag and drop between. If you mean 'insists on opening separate windows for different file system views' or even 'separate windows for web browsing and for file browsing' that's simply not true (and hasn't been for 10 years). I wonder if you are talking about tab support in the file/web browser. I believe that's been a feature in XP for that least 6 months or so (if the system is up to date), but I've never used it so I don't know what it's limitations are.
I'm still waiting for that add on.
Seems like a better to get the 360 or Wii version over the PS3 edition though, at least they'll come with a rumble pack.
"Now with rumble, for HIS pleasure..."
Of course, once they make a video game console you can have sex with, the human race is doomed to extinction.
If the majority of students carried guns, the killings in this incident and others like it may very well have been minimized if he had been taken out early on. I doubt it would have made much difference though to be honest - you'd still need the presence of mind and ability to take the guy out (which few would have) and the shooter has the advantage of already having drawn a weapon (and so can kill you before you've even gotten yours out).
Of course, there is a downside to this scenario that's being conveniently overlooked here. You'd surely see a lot more than the 30+ people in this incident killed every year in shootouts between students (and other young people), just because a bunch of hot-headed young adults had guns on them and got into an argument with each other over something trivial, but they had guns on them, so one guy draws his, they everybody else in the group draws theirs...
Hell, I've been mugged/had random morons start fights with me/people I'm with several times (in some places its remarkably easy to attract scum) and it would have been great to have been carrying a weapon on those occasions, at least for me. If everyone had been carrying, I would be amazed if I'd be alive now (there would have been at least a couple of deaths I'm sure, even if only the assholes had been killed, which seems wishful thinking).
The less hot headed young guys have access to guns, the better. US society is not able to handle the freedom and responsibility that comes with the relatively liberal gun legislation it already has (though some countries do manage the balance quite well it seems). Hopefully things will change some day, but right now, if you care about lives rather than rhetoric, more control - not less - is more likely to save lives (even if it's the lives of poor, typically black kids or 'white trash', in poor urban neighborhoods who tighter gun control would have the most impact on - the thousands of young guys who are killed by other young guys every year that go by without a blip on the news and who few people care about).
Right now, having greater civil liberties when it comes to gun control, won't make society more liberal or more civil, it will just mean more deaths. If you want to improve the quality of your civil society, the answer is the same as ever, focus on education and building an equitable society. You won't stop incidents like this, but you might save far more lives from being taken by angry young men with guns as a result.
Hey video podcasts - excellent thanks (I didn't notice that when I went to their site myself).
I'm not usually one to find 'disruptive' pranks funny, but this doesn't seem too far off the kind of things do they on the show (which I've not seen). If companies will put out shows that do just these kind of stunts, and aimed at the teenage/early 20's demographic it's of course no surprise.
This seems largely harmless in the end, and ABC seem to be taking it in good faith (recognising the irony, I assume). I'm happy that it brings attention to how worth while it is to have a system where you make some attempt to verify the authenticity of a claim of ownership when a takedown is issued.
I know with the DMCA you are supposed to take down content when a complaint is made - and not dick around establishing ownership (and you should then put it back up if the origional party claims it's legitimate - and then it's up the two parties to fight it out in court), but are you at least allowed to verify the request was sent by the party that claims to have sent it? If not, it seems like a significant oversight in the process.
If the people who drafted this legislation had any idea about the technology they were dealing with, they could at least have mandated requests be digitally signed with the public key of the content holder (with a certificate that is backed by one of a number of trusted authorities).
Virtually everything is cheaper in Korea, why would network connectivity be any different? Compare: In much of the US you can get connectivity far cheaper than in the UK. Do you imagine that UK companies are co-operating to stiff those of us in the UK as part of a national conspiracy, or again is more likely to be economics (the tax regiem, labour costs, cost of living issues, relative currency values) at play? If they're not trying to sell it back to us as a value add, why are faster connections so much more expensive? I think that's exactly what they're doing. They have refused to invest in technologies that would vastly benefit the consumer because it wouldnt benefit them much. What technologies are they supposed to be withholding on? The industry is currently struggling to keep up with the huge demand those of us in Western countries (where the usage patterns for the average family are far more demanding than in most other countries). Large providers and carriers are already spending billions of dollars constantly upgrading and re-designing their neworks to cope with demand (constantly re-negotating new contracts with vendors like Cisco/Juniper/Extreme to build them). In many cases they are comminiting to long term capital investments far greater than the companies purchase price on the open market (that is to say, large amounts relative to their size).
Just a decade ago consumers were almost all on dialup, very little P2P, no sites like YouTube or Google Video. A short while later and uptake has skyrocketed, as usage, with it being used for much more bandwith intensive online gaming, users rountinely downloading 0.5-1.5 GB *demos* of software (not to mention all those patches, often several hundred megabytes) VoIP (X-Box Live, TeamSpeak, Ventrillo, Skype, etc.), heavy connection-clogging P2P traffic patterns, video downloads now common place, with HD and VoD services starting to take off (and set to also become common place in the next 18 months).
In markets where labour is not cheap, and cost of living is higher, it costs more. When you have a large landmass to cover, and hundres of millions of people who all want high speed connectivity it gets yet more expensive (because many more users, means a more sophisticated network is required). Still, the dollar remains realtively low, which is one reason the US is (particularly in urban areas) one of the cheapest places to get high speed consumer interent access in the world.
depanding (adjective)
1) A contraction of "demanding" and "dependant"
2) A typo
This is exactly what providers have to do. Just because your ISP peers with or gets transit from a carrier, doesn't mean THEY get access to "all sites they can". They only get what you pay for. That's one reason providers have multiple transit and peering points (different places charge different amounts for connectivity, and at some points you can only get access to a limited number of destinations).
What you are suggesting means forcing anyone to has a network where traffic passes through to allow everyone who connects to it to use it however they want, and to pump unlimited amounts of traffic of any time presumabily. Frankly, what other people do on their networks is their business, they pay to run that network, not you, you would do well to remember that you are being granted a privillage in being allowed to use it. If they are somehow forced to cover the cost of allowing your P2P traffic through on their network (along with other, less demanding, traffic they don't mind carrying - maybe because that sort of traffic is going to a less expensive destination - maybe even one that is profitable because it belongs to a transit customer of theirs), how are they going to stay in business if it's costing them money?
If they are doing traffic shaping that effects you, it's to save them money. If you try screw with them, they are just going to not accept traffic from you (e.g. they could refuse to accept traffic for netblocks that belong to consumer DSL/Cable/Dial ranges (detection for that sort of thing based on ARIN/RIPE/etc. data is fairly common already)). Then you will be even worse off, because the routing was already being as efficent as it could be meaning that if you can still get to the end hop, the route will be slower and/or less reliable, and you've just shot yourself in the foot. No one is willing to provide it now, because tiered access is more profitable Consumers don't want to pay for anything but tiered access. High quality commercial connectivity (and the superior QoS and SLA's that come with it) is of course avalible, it's just really expensive (for a reason - you have to build in way more resiliency and capacity to ensure it works as it's supposed to). If it matters that much to you, you are free to obtain it, but I expect like most of you will settle for what's avalible at far cheaper price (as smaller companies do - and even, ultimately, larger ones and governments who all have to settle over price v. SLA's).
It's not as if providers are dicking with us and withholding better access just to make more money by selling it as a value add (if that were the case, and cellphone operators have been guilty of this, then it's worth thinking about doing something), it's just more expensive to build and maintain a better network. Mostly, they are currently thinking "How can we manage the increasing traffic volumes for all these customers who want VoD, P2P and other depanding network services without going bust or pricing ourselves out of the market?".
Let's say a European company buys it's connectivity from a datacenter company buys and resells wholesale traffic from a carrier, and the carrier gets traffic from a pan-European carrier, who has an agreement with a US carrier, who peers an exchange, which your provider connects to (and you have traffic that goes through that chain to the origional company in Europe).
Now it's all but certain some traffic shaping is going on there, and it's increasingly likely (as the technology to support it becomes increasingly avalible, better and cheaper) that different QoS's will be applied based on a number of factors - like the immediately preceeding source and the next hop in the chain. There are going to be agreements between each of the two companies (or with a third party, like the exchange) but you don't controll all of them, none of the guys in the middle care about you or the guy you are talking to they only care about their customers.
Companies sign agreements to do this kind of stuff because it works out cheaper for them to do so. It's a bit silly, as it's expensive even just to measure and limit it (you need more sophisticated hardware and software just to treat it differently) but it has valid uses, like rate limiting P2P traffic (which nearly every provider does these days - because otherwise it would add a whack to their bill, and yours, and reduce the network speed to a crawl).
I find the idea of forbidding two companies from entering into private peering arrangements that suit them abhorrent. They are not necessarily obliged to let your traffic go over their network at all.
There have been some really famous examples of global jackasses that have upset people so much that carriers and telco's have stopped routing traffic to them altogether (a carrier I used to work at did this to services run by Alan Brown of ORBS infamy - a 'blacklist' provider who where always putting the wrong companies in their blacklist and making wild, incorrect and unfounded allegations because he hadn't done his homework), eventually driving them out of business.
IIRC, above.net went one step further and *advertised* traffic for his company's IP netblock, then null routed it (it's owners had a stake in a competing commercial service, MAPS, so they found it particularly amusing I assume).
It appears that the system doesn't use a form of encyption unlocked by a key (entered by the user) to store the data - and that instead it simply requires use of a single instruction to the USB device indicate the data ought to be accessible or not. That just sounds ludicrous.
If it had been developed in good faith, and this were a bug (rather than part of the design) and/or the result of a sphosticated exploit that it would have been hard to predict, I would be sympathetic. As I would if they had clearly indicated it's limitations (which they could have, but if they've taken the website down now, I'm guessing not).
What's particularly telling for me is, while the company were quite happy to tout the supposed virtues of the product, they are clearly worried about it now they have been found out. That repesents a staggering failure by the designers of the software, their managers, the marketing and product design teams, the HR department who hired all these people of clearly very dubious virtue and the senior management involved.
Either they are crooks (because they were complicit in touting such a crummy product that didn't really do what it claimed to do in a reasonable way) or are they are all, really, really dumb (and none of them asked pertinent questions of the other parties at any stage of product development).
Quite a few games, going back to the days of the Dreamcast, take up way more space on the disc that in used for anything meaningful (e.g. audio tracks uncompressed, art assets that aren't used in the game, data repeated in multiple places on the disk to allow for faster loading times, even data that was just junk to make it harder to illegally copy the game so it wouldn't fit on a regular CD), I expect that's what's going on with Resistance if the image does take up that much space.
I do see the argument that it's easier for content producers if they don't have to spend time optimising data just because the medium is limited - or at least I could, if it were not the case that the PS3 only has 256 MB RAM (half that of the X-Box 360), which is obviously a limiting factor on the resolution of textures that can be used (and, IIRC it's VRAM but also shared for main memory), so it's not like the texture quality (and hense file size) on games on the PS3 is even able to match that of a high end PC title (even though in practice it will look just fine when it's up on a TV a few feet away from you). it's just a nice convenience that i am surprised everyone gets so upset about. I think that stems from it being the reason the console was delayed for over a year here, and why it's so expensive, and the consequent feeling that it's supposed to beneficial for gamers is just BS, it's really just benifical to Sony in getting Blu Ray established in the home (and fighting off HD DVD).
I'm looking forward to Tiger Woods on the Wii (I saw it on a retailers shelf here in the UK, only to be told 'it wasn't for sale yet' at the counter) and that's entirely due to the control system. I don't think I'd ever buy it for the 360 though (playing golf on a regular controller just doesn't appeal to me). The poor graphics on the Wii do put me off though (and I'm already avoiding some Wii titles because of how blurry and indistinct they look on my HDTV).
You've got to love it when someone posts a non-sensical promotion for Gentoo that can't be backed up (because apparently they have no idea how other distributions work) and an attempt to call them on it gets modded flamebait, even when the previous poster is an obnoxious jerk in response to a polite inquiry.
And still, we have nothing to back up the bizzaro and rather vague initial assertion...
Given how much experience I've got with different Linux Distributions (and operating systems in general) I'd be amused to see you try and name two or three.
How are you suggesting Gentoo is somehow unique from other Linux distributions to be specifically worth mentioning?
From what you've said I gather it's something relating to 'decentralised control', but I can't think of any way in which it's unique in that regard (compared to say Debian, Slackware, Fedora, etc.), either in terms of kernel/module management or wider package management.
I've been waiting for Apple to refresh and hopefully support SLI (at last...), so I can have a system in the office for development and just boot into Windows for games, but no luck. I would easily have bought one of these systems, in fact I was really looking forward to an announcement this week but have been very disappointed. A single Geforce 7300 is not something I'd use for gaming - hell the two graphics cards in my PC are 7800 GTX's from summer 2005, selling it as new now on a 'pro' system is laughable.
They don't lose out completely, as I'll probably just get a Mac Book Pro now (I've got a couple of Mac's but both G4's, and I'm thinking of giving PowerBook to a relative). I would rather have just paid far more for a nice new do-it-all desktop though.
I would say that Serenity is good, but you'd be forgiven for thinking it was mediocre without seeing Firefly first, which is what's really about (it was made because they couldn't get a second series). While I guess the film stands on it's own, I can't imagine it has 1/10th of the impact without having seen the series.
/. would really like it and very few would regret it.
For the benfit of those who haven't seen both, the Serenity film ties up and explains what happens in the series.
I would say *definitely* by the series on DVD and *don't* watch Serenity first! I know the series is more expensive, but I'm sure most people on
After watching the series, then rent or buy the movie (or keep an eye out for it on satellite/cable and PVR it when it comes on). I'm sure you'll be chomping at the bit for more once you've seen the series.
I know people who are loyal fans of a few different stories/franchises. While most people I know really like Star Wars and we'd trape along to the cinema if a new trilogy was coming out, I don't really know anyone that feels as strongly about it as people do about smaller, tighter (i.e. more consistantly good quality) franchises like Firefly.
I've bought a few SNES and N64 games on the Wii (N64 titles as I've run out of native titles and I skipped over the N64, SNES and NES titles because it's great to play some classics again).
While every other game I've downloaded runs just fine, and it's joy to play the likes of Super Mario again, (it's as if it hasn't aged at all, though sadly the same cannot be said of the N64 port to which time has not been kind), the TMNT port does NOT work correctly.
My memory might be a bit wonky, but while I do remember a couple of native games on the NES suffering from flickery sprites and iffy controls (some movie knock-off titles spring to mind), but TMNT was not one of them.
I can't believe anyone play tested this title before it was released - at least not anyone who knows what to look for. It's immediately noticeably sluggish, poor to respond and flickery, like it's running on an emulator that can't handle whatever routines the game is using properly. Ironically, I've downloaded the ROM and played it on a 3rd party emulator which runs the game far better.
I would understand one or two titles being a bit iffy if they'd released a huge back catalog, but games on the virtual console are only coming through at a trickle right now. This one is poor effort on Nintendo's part, and while it's playable, I would caution people against getting this one (maybe get an old Zelda title instead).
Nonsensical, pretentious, contradictory cods-wallop.
I don't know what compelled me to search, but I found this on Google.
It's grossly ignorant to suggest it's not a series of chemical reactions, and that simply isn't a point worth debating any more than I'd get into a debate about the world not being flat, or the earth being more than 10,000 years old.
'Love' is also an abstract concept, but it only exists as such because the concept dates back to a time before we were even able to imagine being able to understand or explain animal behavior (including our own) through the study of biochemistry or neurology.
To quote Cole Porter, "Birds do, bees do it, even educated fleas do it" - the basic rules apply for humans, only have larger brains than most animals and so the whole affair is subsequently more complicated and less predictable in humans than it is in simpler life forms (not least because we are able to, and indeed make, a lot more value judgments).
Your correlation is flawed because, unlike numeracy (which is human construct), what we know as love existed long before Homo Sapiens came along. I'm sure it existed even before mammals were dominant on Earth (and that dinosaurs where into doing the kind of crazy stuff birds do today to attract mates, for example).
I find it disappointing how many people miss that love is a series of chemical reactions, or are uncomfortable discussing it as such.
Though I suspect it's also true majority of people (in most countries) believe in 'life after death', as if you don't lose neurons as you get older (which we know to be the case) but they really go off to some sort of alternate dimension, and the rest of your brain is re-united with them when you eventually pass on. Or maybe they you only take with you what you have when you die (and Heaven is filled with confused old people who don't know who or where they are).
It seems major religions are very much in denial about the physical aspect of the mind, particularly when it comes to things like love and death.
I'm not sure if UK phone line voltage is any higher than US phone line voltage (though I'd guess about the same). I think I was basically 'unlucky' in just happening to make contact with the elements on RJ11 interface in the RG45 socket. I'm sure people make that mistake all time without breakage though.
I'm almost tempted to get it looked at, but I'm not optimistic about getting any response other than being told I'd need to pay to get a new motherboard (i.e. a new Mini) - I'd bother if it was an Intel Mini, but it's a G4 one so I think the bottleneck on the network interface is liable to be the bus speed, CPU and the slow internal hard disk in any case, so using the FW interface instead of the GigE interface isn't a big problem (I'll need to get a small FW hub so I can keep my iSight plugged in though I guess).