I have no clue as to why this program takes upwards of a minute to read a simple pdf file that is mostly text. It really boggles my mind as to what the computer could be doing with that time/cycles.. Where as foxit can load the same pdf in a blink of an eye.. but microsoft loves to revert the extentions to adobe, unless I march through a convoluted maze to revert it back. never let your well-meaning friend install adobe on your box, it's a nightmare to remove.
Foxit has already gone the way of Adobe Reader, updating, slow loading, and a nice little "advertising toolbar" for you.
The most common implication I've seen tossed about is the whole "WoW has dumbed down MMO's forever, and oh, how I long for the EQ/UO good old days." There is something to that; certainly WoW showed MMO publishers how to make a product that's friendly to the masses. In this case, it's "defer all the annoying repetitive grind until the endgame", rather than forcing you to do it during the leveling process.
Then you should try EVE Online. Least dumbed down MMO on the market as near as I can tell. Steep learning curve. Vastly more exciting because losses matter. In no other game I've ever seen does the term "PvP shakes" apply. I've been playing for two years and still get them.
My corpmates and I have ganked people and had them contact us and tell us it was the most exciting time they've ever had in a game and then ask to join us. This is after we just blew up their ship, mind you.
There's a new, free (as in your normal subscription costs cover it) expansion coming out this summer too. And as is always the case with MMOs, the first hit is free.
The UK and USA governments have both used cellphones to listen in on private conversations WHILE A CALL WAS NOT BEING MADE. Even CNN verifies this. Basically -- taking the battery out IS necessary if you want true privacy with NO chance of interference. And that's just one of many reasons why I would never get the piece of crap called the iPhone.
I would totally trust sensational news from a source that makes money by selling advertisements (requiring high viewership).
If you think this is true enough for it to affect your behavior, do some homework first. Otherwise, treat major media companies purely as entertainment. Hell, they should all be required to carry a warning label: "For entertainment purposes only." I mean, why else would they have the doings of celebrities on there? That stuff isn't news.
Honestly, who thinks this money will completely stop, or even sufficiently curb child porn?
The problem isn't child porn. The problem is that some twisted people like child porn. The porn itself is a symptom of the problem. Offensive, yes, but attacking the symptom of the problem never solves the problem.
The only way to locate people who like child porn - so you could treat the problem, not the symptom - would be to install brain monitors in every human being. Then the cure becomes worse than the disease.
Go back to the drawing boards folks, this isn't a solution at all. And it wastes a ton of taxpayer money that could be better spent on education.
If they're physically handicapped, then they're probably pretty easy to locate. You won't need a GPS unit and thus will probably be at school.
I'm not trying to be a jerk, but honestly....how many physically handicapped people have you known that were also truant?
I say if they want to grow up and be white (or whatever color) trash, that's their business. They can mow my lawn & flip burgers if they want. OR, they could get an education and sit at a cushy desk and get paid to use their brains.
There are roles in our society for people who refuse to apply themselves to anything, but they don't pay nearly so well.
And don't forget that both the sender *and* the recipient pay for a text message for every one sent.
Only in the US. In the UK (and the rest of Europe, AFAIK) the telcos don't charge you for receiving texts--and even the idea of them doing so is considered absurd.
Oh, believe me, we in the US consider it absurd too. But when every carrier available to you does it, it doesn't bleedin' matter what we think, does it?
Well, that's two games I won't be purchasing. Ever.
Funny thing is it will probably take a week for hackers to work around this. Then the illegal copied version will be not only cheaper, but a superior product.
I already detest DVDs for the same reasons:
The alternative to a DVD is to download a DVD rip DRM unencumbered, no FBI warning, no forced previews - hell, no previews. No user prohibited actions. I could store it easily on any media I choose - such as carry it to a friend's house on a thumb drive. I could fast forward and rewind more easily than a DVD. I could store it on a big fat network drive with thousands of others. I could stream it anywhere I have the bandwidth to watch it. It's easily transferred from media to media - as fast as you can copy files.
Tell me again why I should buy DRM encumbered games? They're decent products that are subsequently and deliberately made inferior in the eyes of many people.
It's not as scary as it seems. In the IT security world, if they have physical access, all bets are off. This goes for any machine/device and any OS. Even boot up BIOS passwords will probably not suffice.
None of these "lists" get at the heart of the problem: greedy, selfish, unscrupulous corporations (people).
These are all stop gap problems. Next, when we have brain-mail, they'll start spamming that. And we'll need a new "list" for the same problem in a different format. We need to stop treating the symptom of the problem.
What we ought to do is discorporate any company that behaves like this, confiscate 100% of their corporate assets - donate them to schools - and imprison their executive members. Fines are not sufficient, they're merely treated as a cost of doing business.
If we were to do this consistently to every corporation that misbehaved badly, we would soon have a nation of very well behaved corporations would we not?
Nature (think the universe, not a forest) has no compunctions about innocents dying. We're merely a tiny subset of nature, so for us to strive for this type of perfection when nature itself doesn't care is kind of silly. And will inevitably fail.
"Innocents" are killed every day. Drive down a highway sometime and look at the roadkill. It was the animals killed that failed to adapt to a hazard present in their lives. Perhaps by chance, but over time nature will get it right.
It's merely a process of natural selection, and thinking that conscious, deliberate, human action is somehow outside nature is misguided at best.
Over time, the animals that don't go near the road start taking over (by virtue of being alive to breed) and soon you don't have as much road kill, but you still have the animals.
If you manage to get put to death for something you didn't do, them somewhere along the line you failed to take a course of action that would lead you out of that. In short, there's something wrong with you. Nature is better at making people than people will ever be through their own volition. Getting up in arms about an extremely small number of individuals is a waste of time. You'll never be batting 1000 where fallible components (read: people) are involved. So stop wasting your time and that of others.
We are a part of nature. Nature has to adapt to us too.
Verizon is still a scummy company. I'm not just flaming.
Their cell phones come with the ugliest branding ever, and it's nearly impossible to remove. They lock the phones into their service (I realize most US providers do this) and they frequently cripple file transfer methods in a (largely successful) attempt to force users to buy ring tones and whatnot from them at outrageously inflated prices.
If their FIOS is better, too bad, I'm done giving them money.
Surely they should use example.com (Documented in RFCs to never be a real domain). It has no MX and points to a simple web page that just says it's an example for documentation and gives a link to the relevant RFC.
Actually, having just read 2001 and it's successors I can tell you that it's much harder to separate the book from the movie than it might seem. Especially with this little tidbit:
In 2001 the book Discovery slingshots around Jupiter to get to Saturn.
In 2001 the movie, they just went straight to Jupiter, Saturn was hardly mentioned. Clarke later applauded him for this, but it gets curiouser.
When Clarke wrote 2010, they had gone straight to Jupiter. He rewrote history in the 2nd book to follow the movie rather than the book.
So I'd have to question the statement that the book somehow predates the movie, they were done at the same time. Yet even Clarke decided to follow the movie, not his own book. SAnd apparently Clarke enjoyed it, but said it was an expensive way to write a book.
If you want to read more of his thoughts on the matter read the prologue or afterward after each of the 2001 series.
Well, look at it the other way, non-threaded programs are easier to write and are thus typically more robust and reliable.
Easier, certainly. But what evidence do you have that single threaded (non-threaded is a misnomer) applications are more reliable?
I would actually argue the opposite. A program that can spawn worker threads and keep running if one of them fails - even catastrophically - is by definition more robust and reliable.
I happen to be one of these "young people", so forgive me if I'm unable to remain objective here.
But going from "us[ing] your corporate network to run most any device, technology or social networking software they can get their hands on" does not automatically equate to "Pose[ing an] Increasing Risk to Networks". It's a loaded phrase to begin with and portrays young people as literally connecting any device they can find to the network for no reason whatsoever. Here we actually have more problems caused by older folks. Most of the kids know how to troubleshoot their own "most any device". And personally? I hate myspace and facebook. The only social network I care about at the moment is LinkedIn and it's very low maintenance.
The very story title belies a failure to understand security. The network itself is unimportant. It's what's connected to it that matters. But the headline made it obvious that the submitter is not even aware of this distinction.
I could (and have) just easily described older IT folks as pointlessly draconian for no reason.
Show me the research that conclusively equates networking sites or personal devices directly to security risk. Hell, show me that there's any benefit at all to expiring passwords or blanket bans on personal equipment. Most of the major security breeches I've read about were due to leaving a non-personal laptop full of information somewhere it could be stolen. Not personal devices [cue dramatic music] "connected to the network". I would guess 95% of all employees here have "personal devices" "connected to the network" up to and including the CEO. iPods are scary!
It's not the device connected to the network that matters, it's the person using it. If you don't trust the person to responsibly use personal devices at work, then why do you trust them to use company property? Both likely grant the same level of access to information that should be protected. What difference does it make if they connect an iPod?
I know two developers here that work on personal machines and both are older than me!
If you ask me this article is full of bias and fail - and admittedly, so does this post, but at least I don't try to hide it.
What we first need to do is change the FCC so that it's not headed by appointed officials, but rather by elected representatives.
The FCC's power has grown far beyond it's original intention (regulating airwaves frequencies in the U.S.). Apparently they only do things in response to complaints. Or at least that's how it once was. But the really fucked up thing is 99% of complaints come from one organization.
So essentially this one single organization is responsible for most of the - detrimental in my opinion - changes to what is allowed to be broadcast or not.
It's not the popular decision. People just think it is because this one fucked up organization has such broad powers and people just assume that it's the popular opinion. It is not.
To other countries: The US is not up tight! Most of us love a good nipple on TV. It's this one organization that has been acting via the screwed up joke that is our FCC that has watered down our TV, not popular opinion.
So, not only do you get screwed into double dipping on the hardware, they also screw you into double dipping on the software.
Double dipping?
Last I checked some movie studios were approximately decadipping at this point:
The original movie on VHS
The original movie on Laserdisc
The director's cut on VHS
The original movie on DVD
The director's cut on DVD
The digitally remastered version DVD
The super magic ultra awesome edition DVD (Aliens quadrilogy, I'm looking at you)
The blu-ray version
The director's super, mega, ultra freaking awesome blu-ray edition
The director's super, mega, ultra freaking awesome blu-ray edition with 2.0 features
And let's not forget some awesome features of DVDs and probably blu-ray as well. How about "user-prohibited actions"?
Yay, I'm forced to watch previews on a movie I paid for. Or I can't skip the FBI warning. Or I can't skip the stupid menu animations.
The alternative is to download a DVD rip DRM unencumbered, no FBI warning, no forced previews - hell, no previews. No user prohibited actions. I could store it easily on any media I choose - such as carry it to a friend's house on a thumb drive. I could fast forward and rewind more easily than a DVD. I could store it on a big fat network drive with thousands of others. I could stream it anywhere I have the bandwidth to watch it. It's easily transferred from media to media - as fast as you can copy files.
Tell me again why I should buy DVD or blu-ray discs? They couldn't compete even if they were free.
Slashdot Mirror
You forgot to tag it with IAAAC (I Am An Asbestos Consultant).
The cool kids are using Sumatra now.
It's a little sparse on features (like remembering page view settings), but it makes even Foxit look slow.
Then you should try EVE Online. Least dumbed down MMO on the market as near as I can tell. Steep learning curve. Vastly more exciting because losses matter. In no other game I've ever seen does the term "PvP shakes" apply. I've been playing for two years and still get them.
My corpmates and I have ganked people and had them contact us and tell us it was the most exciting time they've ever had in a game and then ask to join us. This is after we just blew up their ship, mind you.
There's a new, free (as in your normal subscription costs cover it) expansion coming out this summer too. And as is always the case with MMOs, the first hit is free.
If you think this is true enough for it to affect your behavior, do some homework first. Otherwise, treat major media companies purely as entertainment. Hell, they should all be required to carry a warning label: "For entertainment purposes only." I mean, why else would they have the doings of celebrities on there? That stuff isn't news.
Honestly, who thinks this money will completely stop, or even sufficiently curb child porn?
The problem isn't child porn. The problem is that some twisted people like child porn. The porn itself is a symptom of the problem. Offensive, yes, but attacking the symptom of the problem never solves the problem.
The only way to locate people who like child porn - so you could treat the problem, not the symptom - would be to install brain monitors in every human being. Then the cure becomes worse than the disease.
Go back to the drawing boards folks, this isn't a solution at all. And it wastes a ton of taxpayer money that could be better spent on education.
If they're physically handicapped, then they're probably pretty easy to locate. You won't need a GPS unit and thus will probably be at school.
I'm not trying to be a jerk, but honestly....how many physically handicapped people have you known that were also truant?
I say if they want to grow up and be white (or whatever color) trash, that's their business. They can mow my lawn & flip burgers if they want. OR, they could get an education and sit at a cushy desk and get paid to use their brains.
There are roles in our society for people who refuse to apply themselves to anything, but they don't pay nearly so well.
I have a better idea. Parenting.
Well, that's two games I won't be purchasing. Ever.
Funny thing is it will probably take a week for hackers to work around this. Then the illegal copied version will be not only cheaper, but a superior product.
I already detest DVDs for the same reasons:
The alternative to a DVD is to download a DVD rip DRM unencumbered, no FBI warning, no forced previews - hell, no previews. No user prohibited actions. I could store it easily on any media I choose - such as carry it to a friend's house on a thumb drive. I could fast forward and rewind more easily than a DVD. I could store it on a big fat network drive with thousands of others. I could stream it anywhere I have the bandwidth to watch it. It's easily transferred from media to media - as fast as you can copy files.
Tell me again why I should buy DRM encumbered games? They're decent products that are subsequently and deliberately made inferior in the eyes of many people.
They couldn't compete even if they were free.
That hasn't stopped the executives where I work from buying up macbook airs and iphones seconds after they come out.
It's not as scary as it seems. In the IT security world, if they have physical access, all bets are off. This goes for any machine/device and any OS. Even boot up BIOS passwords will probably not suffice.
This is stupid and pointless.
The problem isn't "unsafe browsers". Phishing is social engineering, not hacking. The problem is unsafe users.
Give a stupid user a safe browser and a semi-sophisticated phish and they'll cough up that login.
Give a smart user a IE 5.0 and they'll never get busted.
If paypal really wanted to increase user safety they'd do it with user education.
Tell users to very carefully navigate to the correct site, make a bookmark, and then never go to the site any other way again.
None of these "lists" get at the heart of the problem: greedy, selfish, unscrupulous corporations (people).
These are all stop gap problems. Next, when we have brain-mail, they'll start spamming that. And we'll need a new "list" for the same problem in a different format. We need to stop treating the symptom of the problem.
What we ought to do is discorporate any company that behaves like this, confiscate 100% of their corporate assets - donate them to schools - and imprison their executive members. Fines are not sufficient, they're merely treated as a cost of doing business.
If we were to do this consistently to every corporation that misbehaved badly, we would soon have a nation of very well behaved corporations would we not?
Wrong.
Nature (think the universe, not a forest) has no compunctions about innocents dying. We're merely a tiny subset of nature, so for us to strive for this type of perfection when nature itself doesn't care is kind of silly. And will inevitably fail.
"Innocents" are killed every day. Drive down a highway sometime and look at the roadkill. It was the animals killed that failed to adapt to a hazard present in their lives. Perhaps by chance, but over time nature will get it right.
It's merely a process of natural selection, and thinking that conscious, deliberate, human action is somehow outside nature is misguided at best.
Over time, the animals that don't go near the road start taking over (by virtue of being alive to breed) and soon you don't have as much road kill, but you still have the animals.
If you manage to get put to death for something you didn't do, them somewhere along the line you failed to take a course of action that would lead you out of that. In short, there's something wrong with you. Nature is better at making people than people will ever be through their own volition. Getting up in arms about an extremely small number of individuals is a waste of time. You'll never be batting 1000 where fallible components (read: people) are involved. So stop wasting your time and that of others.
We are a part of nature. Nature has to adapt to us too.
I actually RTFA, and I must say without reservation that it is completely and totally worth reading the entire thing.
Verizon is still a scummy company. I'm not just flaming.
Their cell phones come with the ugliest branding ever, and it's nearly impossible to remove. They lock the phones into their service (I realize most US providers do this) and they frequently cripple file transfer methods in a (largely successful) attempt to force users to buy ring tones and whatnot from them at outrageously inflated prices.
If their FIOS is better, too bad, I'm done giving them money.
It did until you got it slashdotted.
You mean like the fox guarding the hen house?
Actually, having just read 2001 and it's successors I can tell you that it's much harder to separate the book from the movie than it might seem. Especially with this little tidbit:
In 2001 the book Discovery slingshots around Jupiter to get to Saturn.
In 2001 the movie, they just went straight to Jupiter, Saturn was hardly mentioned. Clarke later applauded him for this, but it gets curiouser.
When Clarke wrote 2010, they had gone straight to Jupiter. He rewrote history in the 2nd book to follow the movie rather than the book.
So I'd have to question the statement that the book somehow predates the movie, they were done at the same time. Yet even Clarke decided to follow the movie, not his own book. SAnd apparently Clarke enjoyed it, but said it was an expensive way to write a book.
If you want to read more of his thoughts on the matter read the prologue or afterward after each of the 2001 series.
I would actually argue the opposite. A program that can spawn worker threads and keep running if one of them fails - even catastrophically - is by definition more robust and reliable.
But what about threading?
I'm tired of every browser tab and window I have open locking up so Flash can render in one of the windows.
Even IE doesn't do this!
I happen to be one of these "young people", so forgive me if I'm unable to remain objective here.
But going from "us[ing] your corporate network to run most any device, technology or social networking software they can get their hands on" does not automatically equate to "Pose[ing an] Increasing Risk to Networks". It's a loaded phrase to begin with and portrays young people as literally connecting any device they can find to the network for no reason whatsoever. Here we actually have more problems caused by older folks. Most of the kids know how to troubleshoot their own "most any device". And personally? I hate myspace and facebook. The only social network I care about at the moment is LinkedIn and it's very low maintenance.
The very story title belies a failure to understand security. The network itself is unimportant. It's what's connected to it that matters. But the headline made it obvious that the submitter is not even aware of this distinction.
I could (and have) just easily described older IT folks as pointlessly draconian for no reason.
Show me the research that conclusively equates networking sites or personal devices directly to security risk. Hell, show me that there's any benefit at all to expiring passwords or blanket bans on personal equipment. Most of the major security breeches I've read about were due to leaving a non-personal laptop full of information somewhere it could be stolen. Not personal devices [cue dramatic music] "connected to the network". I would guess 95% of all employees here have "personal devices" "connected to the network" up to and including the CEO. iPods are scary!
It's not the device connected to the network that matters, it's the person using it. If you don't trust the person to responsibly use personal devices at work, then why do you trust them to use company property? Both likely grant the same level of access to information that should be protected. What difference does it make if they connect an iPod?
I know two developers here that work on personal machines and both are older than me!
If you ask me this article is full of bias and fail - and admittedly, so does this post, but at least I don't try to hide it.
What we first need to do is change the FCC so that it's not headed by appointed officials, but rather by elected representatives.
The FCC's power has grown far beyond it's original intention (regulating airwaves frequencies in the U.S.). Apparently they only do things in response to complaints. Or at least that's how it once was. But the really fucked up thing is 99% of complaints come from one organization.
So essentially this one single organization is responsible for most of the - detrimental in my opinion - changes to what is allowed to be broadcast or not.
It's not the popular decision. People just think it is because this one fucked up organization has such broad powers and people just assume that it's the popular opinion. It is not.
The organization responsible for all this? The Parent's Television Council. The sick thing is they're proud to be the nation's most influential advocacy organization yet have barely a million members. That's right one million uptight fucks are responsible for 99.8-99.9% of all FCC regulation that affects 303 million people.
And the FCC allows it.
To other countries: The US is not up tight! Most of us love a good nipple on TV. It's this one organization that has been acting via the screwed up joke that is our FCC that has watered down our TV, not popular opinion.
Care to link to a place where I can download such software or buy such a player?
I currently use XBMC, but I think it's forced via hardware to ignore its owner when trying to skip things.
Last I checked some movie studios were approximately decadipping at this point:
- The original movie on VHS
- The original movie on Laserdisc
- The director's cut on VHS
- The original movie on DVD
- The director's cut on DVD
- The digitally remastered version DVD
- The super magic ultra awesome edition DVD (Aliens quadrilogy, I'm looking at you)
- The blu-ray version
- The director's super, mega, ultra freaking awesome blu-ray edition
- The director's super, mega, ultra freaking awesome blu-ray edition with 2.0 features
And let's not forget some awesome features of DVDs and probably blu-ray as well. How about "user-prohibited actions"?Yay, I'm forced to watch previews on a movie I paid for. Or I can't skip the FBI warning. Or I can't skip the stupid menu animations.
The alternative is to download a DVD rip DRM unencumbered, no FBI warning, no forced previews - hell, no previews. No user prohibited actions. I could store it easily on any media I choose - such as carry it to a friend's house on a thumb drive. I could fast forward and rewind more easily than a DVD. I could store it on a big fat network drive with thousands of others. I could stream it anywhere I have the bandwidth to watch it. It's easily transferred from media to media - as fast as you can copy files.
Tell me again why I should buy DVD or blu-ray discs? They couldn't compete even if they were free.