Pretty good history, but you left out a
rather critical phrase to conveying the
greatness of DAZ to our fellow SlashDotters;
namely, the phrase:
"and 99% of its users do nothing but make
3d rendered porn with it".
Not that I mean that as a complaint,
not at all... But really, let's convey the
true greatness of DAZ here, rather than
glossing it over with the pseudo-professionalism
of "DAZ made human figures with superior morph
capability and texture detail".
and as such are upset that TiVo has restricted
the capabilities of the receivers they bought and
subscribed to use
Surprised? Upset? Gimme a break! Companies
do that, because we let them get away with it.
Best solution here? A mass returning of TiVos
for lying to their customers (arguably a violation
of their end of the contract for not acting
in good faith? Don't know how well that would
hold up in court, though, IANAL). Then set
up your own Myth box.
However, for those who don't want the hassle of
trying to explain DRM to a service desk clerk
who couldn't care less, just patch your TiVo
software to not encrypt the content, install
Samba on it, and mount the drive from any other
machine in your house. Poof, the idea of
automatically deleting content after a certain
time becomes moot.
Permission to use hardware I own, and monthly
payments to keep it working? Hah! Once you
have the hardware in-hand, their ability to
stop you from using it however you want vanishes.
C'mon, people, you DO NOT NEED an SUV. You need a
4-door sedan or, if you have trouble with the basic
idea of "don't breed until you run out of room",
a forced tubal ligation.
99% of the time, who do you see in an SUV? One person.
On a cell phone. Usually dressed too nicely to have
any sort of construction projects planned for the near
future. And how do these fine upstanding safety-conscious
folks drive? Cautiously and courteously? HA! Assuming they
can see you with that nice 80 degree blind spot on both
sides, they drive like the most aggressive, inconsiderate,
self-centered assholes on the road.
"Oh, but not me, I need my SUV, and drive like
a saint". Uh-huh... Whatever it takes to help you sleep
at night...
There is an anti-Christian and anti-South
portrayal in nearly all popular media and all
news stories.
Perhaps if the SANE Southern Christians
(presumeably the real whack-jobs count as a
small but unfortunately vocal minority) could
keep their boards of education from providing
the media with such a comedic goldmine, you'd
hear less about their ign'ance.
As we have it today, though, most Americans,
and virtually all non-Americans, read
the news coming out of our Bible Belt, and
feel torn between having a nice laugh or crying
for our sad state of scientific thinking...
"Jeezus, those buggers have nukes,
lots of 'em, and don't understand the comparative
accuracy of Pastafarianism".
But then, we live in a country where even in the
more enlightened coastal areas (minus the SouthEast),
we still prefer knowing how many firkins to the
puncheon and how many rods to the league, rather
than "add a zero at the end and call it a new unit".
And thank the FSM that my car gets eight to nine
furlongs per gill, what with fuel so expensive
and all...;-)
No, it's because that's actually a far
more sensible way to do it.
I SO hope you meant that as humor,
because I have absolutely no clue as to which
point you meant to respond to with each
section of your response. Great example of
why bottom posting makes ever so much
more sense.
Of course, we also have the classic:
"because it reads more logically."
"Why should I top post?"
Does this mean that using an significantly
large explosive device is almost a feasible
scenario for specific types of comets.
No, it means, "Why bother?".
On hitting the atmosphere, a solid object
experiences what amounts to a major case of
wind-burn. Bad enough that they heat up
sufficiently that the vast majority of such
objects vaporize.
A not-so-solid object would just completely
disintigrate, as the outer edges get ripped
off (revealiing a new outer edge, repeat until
you have a cloud of gravel rather than a
distinctly solid object).
Not to say that I'd want to live anywhere near
the eventual impact site, but the effect would
most resemble a really nasty sandblasting than
an event such as the Permian, Triassic, or
Cretaceous end-of-the-world scenarios.
5) When operating in freedom-hostile countries,
maintain a STRICT log rotation policy with a
very short retention period. Or, for those
countries that have minimum mandatory retention
periods, store the logs on servers in a more
sane country - China might have no problem
quietly crushing a dissident, but would they
even dare to ask when it would require
formally requesting "extradition" of the relevant
data?
And if the country in question has laws that
would prevent even that... Well, #1
looks like a pretty good option. At some
point, a company bears responsibility for its
complicity in dealing with oppressive regimes.
Now, in this particular situation, I would say
we don't have enough enformation to judge Yahoo's
choice to cooperate. If they fail to correct
whatever circumstances led to this cooperation
in an atrocity on their part, then we can
all shake our fingers and go "shame, shame, shame!".
But for now, no.
Wow. And we managed to actually get a few there
to do their mission?
I wonder if, like myself, NASA needed to rewrite
their commandline build scripts from scratch as
well... Talk about a waste of money! "Uh, it
doesn't work, not even close - admit it, you
guys never even tested this under ideal,
nevermind real-world, conditions", "Well, send
us a fix, and we'll consider making it part of
the next release", "Wait, which of us has
the service contract with the other???"
I'm a web developer, doing fine, but I'm
not really conformable divulging what I make
on Slashdot.
I don't mean this as a personal slam, but
that exact attitude keeps salaries low. Why
NOT talk about your salary? If you
don't talk about it, you can't know how you
compare. And although you might not care how
you compare in a rat-race sense, you damned well
should care that your employer treats
you "fairly"...
Me, I make just a hair over $40k. Sound low,
for someone with 10 years experience? In my
area, I can afford a mortgage on that. And
together with my SO, as a DINK couple, we do
pretty damned well combined.
TALK about your salary! Don't brag about it,
that just sounds obnoxious, but chat. Make
sure that neither you nor your friends have
gotten royally screwed.
I will never understand people who have this
phobia of discussing how much they make. If
you make something truly obscene (either minimum
wage or seven figures), okay, you might have a
reason to shy away from the topic - But within
an order of magnitude of "average", help create
a basis of comparison! It only hurts us,
the workers, to remain tight-lipped about it.
Now, I read Slashdot regularly - At least two or
three times per day. And quite seriously,
I have not noticed images inline in a
FP ever before. And not just randomly
linked images, either - real, Slashdot-hosted
images included in an article.
Not a good sign of things to come, when
Slashvertisements start resembling any other
"independant" bought-and-paid-for gaming
(or other niche-industry) site.
What is an example of a situation in which
you would ever need more the one instance of
the same application running?
Copy-and-pasting (more than once - Half a dozen
randomly scattered lines, for example) between
two files via notepad (or any editor that doesn't
support multiple open files simultaneously).
Logging into two different Yahoo Messenger
accounts at the same time (you can do
that, BTW, you just need to use "run as" to
open one of them under a different local user's
account). I only really use Yahoo, but I
expect this would apply to most non-open-source
IM clients.
Opening two instances of a media player (for
example, one with Pink Floyd's Dark Side
of the Moon, and the other with Wizard
of Oz).
For one that you can't do, how about
opening more than one instance of the Windows
defrag tool? I realize I won't gain any speed
on the same physical drive, but why not for
two different actual drives?
I could keep going, but hopefully you get the
idea... And sometimes, "use a better program"
doesn't exist as an option.
Although a lot of programs may lay it on a tad
thick, computer users NEED to learn a bit of
jargon if they hope to have any shot of dealing
with modern technology.
You can't use a car without understanding what
the brake and accellerator (and sometimes a
clutch) do. When you take it in for repairs,
even if you don't know how to fix it yourself,
you want to know if you need a spark plug or
a timing belt (not just "it broke, please pay
$xxxx for the next 20,000 miles...").
The same goes with computers. Your example, of
an "instance", I consider not that bad... How do
you phrase that better? "GAIM is already
running"? Since such errors usually happen when
you have a ghost process, I suspect most users
would find that even more frustrating
(I know how my grandfather would react - "God
damn it, if I already had it running I wouldn't
have tried to start it, you worthless pile of
(stream of obscenties ommitted)").
Cutesy tooltips.
I agree 100%... You can actually turn
those off, at least the ones that come from
Windows itself, but XP has a rather obnoxious
bug wherein you will eventually get them back,
and can't turn them off again (because
you already have them off).
Oh, and your peeve about the task bar - Drives
me absolutely batty. To re-quote the grandfather,
"God damn it, if I wanted to switch to that
window, I'd click on it, you worthless pile of
(stream of obscenties ommitted)!".:)
I see one major problem with this, if it
actually works...
How do you make it work on a more-or-less
continuous basis, rather than "blow one up,
extract energy, reset system"?
I suppose some sort of gravity-feed would
work to control the overall rate, if the
exact position of the capsule doesn't matter
too much, but even then this will still
make "little bangs" rather than a
continuous stream of energy. Internal
combustion engines we grasp, but internal
fusion engines? This strikes me as similar
to the problem of a space elevator - great
idea, if only we had something that
could bear that much stress...
In this case, the office FAR exceeds the man
in importance. The corpse matters not one
whit, particularly in a week when we will
start hearing about massive fatalities from
gross incompetance on the part of FEMA et
al in that "other" ongoing
sick-of-hearing-about-it major US news event.
Now, Rehnquist, while conservative, honestly
cared about the constitution over his pet
issues. But we need to let Bush know, from
day 1, that we'll have him fired by years end
if he tries to stick us with another abomination
like Scalia.
And if you consider this post in poor
taste, try rolling the phrase "Chief Justice
Alberto 'Torquemada' Gonzales" off your tongue
a few times. <shudders in horror>.
The guy says he makes flash games *for a living*.
Why should we assume that maybe this particular flash
game is so special that he would never want to make a
profit from it?
Well, for one thing, as a remake of a classic arcade
game he arguable doesn't have any rights to it in the
first place - The courts look at "fan tributes" and
"commercial ripoff" as totally different worlds of
infringement.
Also - I work in IT for a living. When someone asks
a tech-related question (online, in casual conversation,
whatever), if I can help, I'll try to answer it, totally
for free. Perhaps I could offer to answer for a fee,
but I just don't (though, I can't deny that
giving free advice has made me a few bucks on the
side when people realized they needed help beyond
their understanding and that I evidently knew the
solution). Same goes for coding in general - At my
previous job, I wrote firmware for a living. Does that
mean I shouldn't contribute to open source driver
projects?
I mean, this guy puts this BURGER-RELATED game on
his website (presumably for others to play) then gets
annoyed when a BURGER company likes it and wants its
BURGER-EATING customers to play it
And he redirected to a BURGER-RELATED site, so I
don't see the problem.
Y'know, this whole discussion has amused me. We have
people vehemently arguing that one side or the other
should bugger off and die due to the massive evil
of their actions.
Fudruckers could have asked permission. They chose
not to. He could have made a few bucks off this.
He chose not to. End of story - We can all either point
and laugh, either at his stupidity or cleverness, doesn't
matter which - But it pretty much ends there.
A person I don't know did something to a company I've
never heard of. Woo woo. Next story, please.
People hate worrying that when their kids go to
a site something nasty will popup instead. They hate
all sorts of other things about it too.
...Thus the massive rush to cancel their accounts
with ISPs; the huge number of brand new computers
in the landfills a few days after Christmas as people
realize their true awfulness; the ease of connecting
to a dial-up account with huge modem banks and no
callers; The high connection speeds at thousands of
(un)popular sites without a soul trying to download
the new content-of-the-day...
Here is a fellow, in a moment of juveline
petulance, destroyed a potential business
opportunity
Not everyone thinks in terms of "business
opportunities". In fact, I doubt most
people do. And I thank the deity for that
every day - The more people who think in
those terms, the worse our world becomes.
The guy already has a job he enjoys. He didn't
want or need another one. A company decided to
profit at his expense - If they had good
intentions about it, they would have given him
credit, maybe even (gasp!) asked permission
to use his game. They did not. Instead, they
chose to pop it up in a new empty window,
the only attribution of credit coming from
what the game itself contained.
Had he written them a polite "don't do that"
letter, I expect the FP would read more like
"Small-time flash developer sued for telling
major company about a security flaw on their
website" (hey, it does count as a security
flaw - A semi-trusted corporate site redirects
without warning to a totally untrusted 3rd party
site? This guy could have gone on a phishing
trip and made a fortune, if he thought in terms
of "business opportunities"). Comapnies don't
apologize, they litigate.
No such thing. This planet has never seen
one, and never will.
There will come a point when things get
so bad that people will just stop caring
Agreed, and I think we've already gotten right
to the threshold of that in the US. Personally,
I try to do the "right" thing, but could care
less about what "the law" says I should do
(largely because I've learned that "law" and
"right" only rarely overlap, and then only
for purely accidental reasons).
And looking at the next generation - I seriously
believe that what socity has called the "gimme"
or "entitlement" mentality reflects exactly
your assertion - They don't have a sense of
"entitlement" so much as a total disconnect
with the idea of intellectual property. We
tolerate the limited monopoly on
ideas and "content" for the purpose of
enriching the public domain a few years
down the road. Not for the purpose of making
Sony more money - No one cares if
Sony makes money, not even its own execs
(they just care about their bonuses, which get
fatter the more Sony makes).
Consider the current state of Music copyrights
from the perspective of a 10YO:
"Why shouldn't I just download it?"
"Well, because some day, that song will pass
into the public domain, and belong to
everybody. By letting the artist have
a copyright now, more artists will have
motivation to contribute to that eventual
shared culture."
"Okay, that makes sense... So will that happen
next year, when most sales have already
happened?"
"Well, it takes a little longer than that..."
"So when I turn 20?"
"Erm, no, longer still..."
"30?"
"Not quite..."
"So when? Not by 30? By then I'll turn
into a geezer listening to Perry Como!"
"Well, actually, it won't happen in your lifetime.
Probably not even your kids' lifetimes. IF
congress doesn't extend copyrights any further,
your grandkids might get to enjoy it for free
shortly after they retire..."
"Uhhh.. Yeah. Riiiiiigggghhht. Just keep
telling yourself that; Now if you'll excuse
me, I'll go download it from the real
public domain, Kazaa."
PDF itself actually seems like a nice idea, and
one which no real competition has yet come along
to challenge (even the biggest alternative,
PostScript, never really took off as anything
but a printer language).
People just need to use the default choice of
fonts, and avoid any features not in 4.0. 5.0
doesn't suck too badly, but moving to 6? Pain!
I have better uses of my time than to wait over
a full minute (on a reasonably new machine) just
to read something comparable in content to a
webpage (yeah yeah, talk about printing and
typesetting and page layout all you want, but
99% of us only tolerate Acrobat because some
moron thought a PDF would look more professional
than a webpage - For exactly two documents per
year do I care about its page layout
capabilities - My federal and state tax
forms).
Now, to nominate my own format(s) - TIFF, PCX,
even BMP (as a data format - as a container
format, it works as well as anything else).
We have PNG and lossless JPEG now, why would
anyone still use uncompressed raw data?
And of course, GIF - PNG gets better compression
(without downsampling the color information),
and no one "owns" it in the IP sense (yeah,
the UNISYS patent has expired, but it still
exists...)
I think it's important to point out from the
transcript that the mother blames Kazaa for this
happening.
While I agree that seems a tad cheesy, I think
we can all understand the sentiment...
Not a cop-out of "the evil company made me
do it!", but rather, "I have no freakin'
clue why you have me in court, possibly to lose
hundreds of thousands of dollars, for a crime
about which I have absolutely no knowledge".
Now, as for the "liable for her kids' actions"
argument - Do minors have the legal right to
accept Kazaa's terms of service? IANAL, so
perhaps that point would go nowhere in court;
But it seems to me that since minors can't
enter into contracts without a parent's
permission and cosignature, they similarly
shouldn't have the power to sign up to use
a service that could land their parents in
such deep debt without the parent even
knowing.
Would I rather have too much security in IT or too little
A Good question - But DRM/Palladium/TCPA/BacklashControlNameOfTheWeek
doesn't even touch the subject.
This will not make your machine more secure for you - It
will make it more secure for Microsoft. For Hollywood.
For the RIAA.
Not you. Not me. Not your clients (unless your clients include
members of the above list). We can go pound sand for all
they care. Oh, you can't open that critical briefing you wrote
last year? Too bad, Microsoft doesn't trust it so you'll just
have to deal. You can write a new one, though - Only a thousand
pages or so, right?
Wait, when did you start arguing my
side of this discussion?
Okay... I'll accept everything you wrote there.
But does it make more sense to experience a
"devastating" hardship once per generation,
or twice per year?
Look, I don't mean to sound completely
cold to these people's plight - They honestly
do have my sympathy, right at the moment. But
I KNOW that 99.9% will, rather than
packing their few remaining material posessions
and moving to, say, Nebraska, try to rebuild
their lives in the exact same place, just like
they did last time, and the time before, and
the generation before, and the century before.
There comes a time for any sane person where you
have to say "enough!", and pay attention to
the great big neon sign Mother Nature keeps
flashing, saying "no vacancy!".
You see, 2/3s of the planet Earth are covered
by water in the first place.
Hah hah. 90% of the land. Hey, ya got
me. 10 for technical accuracy but a 1 for
style.
Name the place, and I'll tell you what kind of
natural disaster is likely to strike there.
Okay - Northeastern US, not right on the coast,
and not at a local low point.
We get two hurricanes a century that manage to blow
down a few power lines and damage older roofs. We
get a weak tornado once or so per year. We get
"flash floods", but here that means your car
gets stuck in the mud, not washed out to sea.
As the only real "disaster" condition we get,
sometimes it snows too much... But only every decade
or two do we get anything bad enough
to call a disaster, and even then it just
counts as something of an annoyance, not a "real"
disaster - Oh no, I might need to read for a week
rather than watch the flickering opiate, while
waiting for the plows (which we already have
around and pay for ourselves, for just such
events) to make the roads passable for the electric
company repair crews.
In any case, don't conflate "possibility" with
"likelyhood"... Yes, most places will eventually
suffer some form of natural disaster - New
England actually had two hurricanes last century
that caused significant damage (but only right
on the coast). Compare that to getting two per
year! The first you call a freak storm, the
second you call a stupid place to build a castle.
Slashdot Mirror
DAZ started life...
Pretty good history, but you left out a rather critical phrase to conveying the greatness of DAZ to our fellow SlashDotters; namely, the phrase:
"and 99% of its users do nothing but make 3d rendered porn with it".
Not that I mean that as a complaint, not at all... But really, let's convey the true greatness of DAZ here, rather than glossing it over with the pseudo-professionalism of "DAZ made human figures with superior morph capability and texture detail".
and as such are upset that TiVo has restricted the capabilities of the receivers they bought and subscribed to use
Surprised? Upset? Gimme a break! Companies do that, because we let them get away with it.
Best solution here? A mass returning of TiVos for lying to their customers (arguably a violation of their end of the contract for not acting in good faith? Don't know how well that would hold up in court, though, IANAL). Then set up your own Myth box.
However, for those who don't want the hassle of trying to explain DRM to a service desk clerk who couldn't care less, just patch your TiVo software to not encrypt the content, install Samba on it, and mount the drive from any other machine in your house. Poof, the idea of automatically deleting content after a certain time becomes moot.
Permission to use hardware I own, and monthly payments to keep it working? Hah! Once you have the hardware in-hand, their ability to stop you from using it however you want vanishes.
If you are fixated on going hybrid with an SUV
...Then you deserve your pitiful 9mpg!
C'mon, people, you DO NOT NEED an SUV. You need a 4-door sedan or, if you have trouble with the basic idea of "don't breed until you run out of room", a forced tubal ligation.
99% of the time, who do you see in an SUV? One person. On a cell phone. Usually dressed too nicely to have any sort of construction projects planned for the near future. And how do these fine upstanding safety-conscious folks drive? Cautiously and courteously? HA! Assuming they can see you with that nice 80 degree blind spot on both sides, they drive like the most aggressive, inconsiderate, self-centered assholes on the road.
"Oh, but not me, I need my SUV, and drive like a saint". Uh-huh... Whatever it takes to help you sleep at night...
There is an anti-Christian and anti-South portrayal in nearly all popular media and all news stories.
;-)
Perhaps if the SANE Southern Christians (presumeably the real whack-jobs count as a small but unfortunately vocal minority) could keep their boards of education from providing the media with such a comedic goldmine, you'd hear less about their ign'ance.
As we have it today, though, most Americans, and virtually all non-Americans, read the news coming out of our Bible Belt, and feel torn between having a nice laugh or crying for our sad state of scientific thinking... "Jeezus, those buggers have nukes, lots of 'em, and don't understand the comparative accuracy of Pastafarianism".
But then, we live in a country where even in the more enlightened coastal areas (minus the SouthEast), we still prefer knowing how many firkins to the puncheon and how many rods to the league, rather than "add a zero at the end and call it a new unit". And thank the FSM that my car gets eight to nine furlongs per gill, what with fuel so expensive and all...
Yet another feeble attempt
Describing reality usually doesn't take much effort...
to make it seem like top posting is the same as writing bottom-to-top.
Nope. Not bottom to top, just backward in time. Not to say that makes any more sense...
No, it's because that's actually a far more sensible way to do it.
I SO hope you meant that as humor, because I have absolutely no clue as to which point you meant to respond to with each section of your response. Great example of why bottom posting makes ever so much more sense.
Of course, we also have the classic:
"because it reads more logically."
"Why should I top post?"
Does this mean that using an significantly large explosive device is almost a feasible scenario for specific types of comets.
No, it means, "Why bother?".
On hitting the atmosphere, a solid object experiences what amounts to a major case of wind-burn. Bad enough that they heat up sufficiently that the vast majority of such objects vaporize.
A not-so-solid object would just completely disintigrate, as the outer edges get ripped off (revealiing a new outer edge, repeat until you have a cloud of gravel rather than a distinctly solid object).
Not to say that I'd want to live anywhere near the eventual impact site, but the effect would most resemble a really nasty sandblasting than an event such as the Permian, Triassic, or Cretaceous end-of-the-world scenarios.
The options for Yahoo are
You forgot:
5) When operating in freedom-hostile countries, maintain a STRICT log rotation policy with a very short retention period. Or, for those countries that have minimum mandatory retention periods, store the logs on servers in a more sane country - China might have no problem quietly crushing a dissident, but would they even dare to ask when it would require formally requesting "extradition" of the relevant data?
And if the country in question has laws that would prevent even that... Well, #1 looks like a pretty good option. At some point, a company bears responsibility for its complicity in dealing with oppressive regimes.
Now, in this particular situation, I would say we don't have enough enformation to judge Yahoo's choice to cooperate. If they fail to correct whatever circumstances led to this cooperation in an atrocity on their part, then we can all shake our fingers and go "shame, shame, shame!". But for now, no.
Mars rovers use WindRiver VxWorks
ACK! No! Please tell me you jest?
Wow. And we managed to actually get a few there to do their mission?
I wonder if, like myself, NASA needed to rewrite their commandline build scripts from scratch as well... Talk about a waste of money! "Uh, it doesn't work, not even close - admit it, you guys never even tested this under ideal, nevermind real-world, conditions", "Well, send us a fix, and we'll consider making it part of the next release", "Wait, which of us has the service contract with the other???"
I'm a web developer, doing fine, but I'm not really conformable divulging what I make on Slashdot.
I don't mean this as a personal slam, but that exact attitude keeps salaries low. Why NOT talk about your salary? If you don't talk about it, you can't know how you compare. And although you might not care how you compare in a rat-race sense, you damned well should care that your employer treats you "fairly"...
Me, I make just a hair over $40k. Sound low, for someone with 10 years experience? In my area, I can afford a mortgage on that. And together with my SO, as a DINK couple, we do pretty damned well combined.
TALK about your salary! Don't brag about it, that just sounds obnoxious, but chat. Make sure that neither you nor your friends have gotten royally screwed.
I will never understand people who have this phobia of discussing how much they make. If you make something truly obscene (either minimum wage or seven figures), okay, you might have a reason to shy away from the topic - But within an order of magnitude of "average", help create a basis of comparison! It only hurts us, the workers, to remain tight-lipped about it.
...Of slashvertisements.
Now, I read Slashdot regularly - At least two or three times per day. And quite seriously, I have not noticed images inline in a FP ever before. And not just randomly linked images, either - real, Slashdot-hosted images included in an article.
Not a good sign of things to come, when Slashvertisements start resembling any other "independant" bought-and-paid-for gaming (or other niche-industry) site.
What is an example of a situation in which you would ever need more the one instance of the same application running?
Copy-and-pasting (more than once - Half a dozen randomly scattered lines, for example) between two files via notepad (or any editor that doesn't support multiple open files simultaneously).
Logging into two different Yahoo Messenger accounts at the same time (you can do that, BTW, you just need to use "run as" to open one of them under a different local user's account). I only really use Yahoo, but I expect this would apply to most non-open-source IM clients.
Opening two instances of a media player (for example, one with Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, and the other with Wizard of Oz).
For one that you can't do, how about opening more than one instance of the Windows defrag tool? I realize I won't gain any speed on the same physical drive, but why not for two different actual drives?
I could keep going, but hopefully you get the idea... And sometimes, "use a better program" doesn't exist as an option.
Meaningless jargon in messages.
:)
Although a lot of programs may lay it on a tad thick, computer users NEED to learn a bit of jargon if they hope to have any shot of dealing with modern technology.
You can't use a car without understanding what the brake and accellerator (and sometimes a clutch) do. When you take it in for repairs, even if you don't know how to fix it yourself, you want to know if you need a spark plug or a timing belt (not just "it broke, please pay $xxxx for the next 20,000 miles...").
The same goes with computers. Your example, of an "instance", I consider not that bad... How do you phrase that better? "GAIM is already running"? Since such errors usually happen when you have a ghost process, I suspect most users would find that even more frustrating (I know how my grandfather would react - "God damn it, if I already had it running I wouldn't have tried to start it, you worthless pile of (stream of obscenties ommitted)").
Cutesy tooltips.
I agree 100%... You can actually turn those off, at least the ones that come from Windows itself, but XP has a rather obnoxious bug wherein you will eventually get them back, and can't turn them off again (because you already have them off).
Oh, and your peeve about the task bar - Drives me absolutely batty. To re-quote the grandfather, "God damn it, if I wanted to switch to that window, I'd click on it, you worthless pile of (stream of obscenties ommitted)!".
I see one major problem with this, if it actually works...
How do you make it work on a more-or-less continuous basis, rather than "blow one up, extract energy, reset system"?
I suppose some sort of gravity-feed would work to control the overall rate, if the exact position of the capsule doesn't matter too much, but even then this will still make "little bangs" rather than a continuous stream of energy. Internal combustion engines we grasp, but internal fusion engines? This strikes me as similar to the problem of a space elevator - great idea, if only we had something that could bear that much stress...
fuck all the politics , lets remember the man..
In this case, the office FAR exceeds the man in importance. The corpse matters not one whit, particularly in a week when we will start hearing about massive fatalities from gross incompetance on the part of FEMA et al in that "other" ongoing sick-of-hearing-about-it major US news event.
Now, Rehnquist, while conservative, honestly cared about the constitution over his pet issues. But we need to let Bush know, from day 1, that we'll have him fired by years end if he tries to stick us with another abomination like Scalia.
And if you consider this post in poor taste, try rolling the phrase "Chief Justice Alberto 'Torquemada' Gonzales" off your tongue a few times. <shudders in horror>.
The guy says he makes flash games *for a living*. Why should we assume that maybe this particular flash game is so special that he would never want to make a profit from it?
Well, for one thing, as a remake of a classic arcade game he arguable doesn't have any rights to it in the first place - The courts look at "fan tributes" and "commercial ripoff" as totally different worlds of infringement.
Also - I work in IT for a living. When someone asks a tech-related question (online, in casual conversation, whatever), if I can help, I'll try to answer it, totally for free. Perhaps I could offer to answer for a fee, but I just don't (though, I can't deny that giving free advice has made me a few bucks on the side when people realized they needed help beyond their understanding and that I evidently knew the solution). Same goes for coding in general - At my previous job, I wrote firmware for a living. Does that mean I shouldn't contribute to open source driver projects?
I mean, this guy puts this BURGER-RELATED game on his website (presumably for others to play) then gets annoyed when a BURGER company likes it and wants its BURGER-EATING customers to play it
And he redirected to a BURGER-RELATED site, so I don't see the problem.
Y'know, this whole discussion has amused me. We have people vehemently arguing that one side or the other should bugger off and die due to the massive evil of their actions.
Fudruckers could have asked permission. They chose not to. He could have made a few bucks off this. He chose not to. End of story - We can all either point and laugh, either at his stupidity or cleverness, doesn't matter which - But it pretty much ends there.
A person I don't know did something to a company I've never heard of. Woo woo. Next story, please.
People hate worrying that when their kids go to a site something nasty will popup instead. They hate all sorts of other things about it too.
...Thus the massive rush to cancel their accounts
with ISPs; the huge number of brand new computers
in the landfills a few days after Christmas as people
realize their true awfulness; the ease of connecting
to a dial-up account with huge modem banks and no
callers; The high connection speeds at thousands of
(un)popular sites without a soul trying to download
the new content-of-the-day...
Here is a fellow, in a moment of juveline petulance, destroyed a potential business opportunity
Not everyone thinks in terms of "business opportunities". In fact, I doubt most people do. And I thank the deity for that every day - The more people who think in those terms, the worse our world becomes.
The guy already has a job he enjoys. He didn't want or need another one. A company decided to profit at his expense - If they had good intentions about it, they would have given him credit, maybe even (gasp!) asked permission to use his game. They did not. Instead, they chose to pop it up in a new empty window, the only attribution of credit coming from what the game itself contained.
Had he written them a polite "don't do that" letter, I expect the FP would read more like "Small-time flash developer sued for telling major company about a security flaw on their website" (hey, it does count as a security flaw - A semi-trusted corporate site redirects without warning to a totally untrusted 3rd party site? This guy could have gone on a phishing trip and made a fortune, if he thought in terms of "business opportunities"). Comapnies don't apologize, they litigate.
In a free society
No such thing. This planet has never seen one, and never will.
There will come a point when things get so bad that people will just stop caring
Agreed, and I think we've already gotten right to the threshold of that in the US. Personally, I try to do the "right" thing, but could care less about what "the law" says I should do (largely because I've learned that "law" and "right" only rarely overlap, and then only for purely accidental reasons).
And looking at the next generation - I seriously believe that what socity has called the "gimme" or "entitlement" mentality reflects exactly your assertion - They don't have a sense of "entitlement" so much as a total disconnect with the idea of intellectual property. We tolerate the limited monopoly on ideas and "content" for the purpose of enriching the public domain a few years down the road. Not for the purpose of making Sony more money - No one cares if Sony makes money, not even its own execs (they just care about their bonuses, which get fatter the more Sony makes).
Consider the current state of Music copyrights from the perspective of a 10YO:
"Why shouldn't I just download it?"
"Well, because some day, that song will pass into the public domain, and belong to everybody. By letting the artist have a copyright now, more artists will have motivation to contribute to that eventual shared culture."
"Okay, that makes sense... So will that happen next year, when most sales have already happened?"
"Well, it takes a little longer than that..."
"So when I turn 20?"
"Erm, no, longer still..."
"30?"
"Not quite..."
"So when? Not by 30? By then I'll turn into a geezer listening to Perry Como!"
"Well, actually, it won't happen in your lifetime. Probably not even your kids' lifetimes. IF congress doesn't extend copyrights any further, your grandkids might get to enjoy it for free shortly after they retire..."
"Uhhh.. Yeah. Riiiiiigggghhht. Just keep telling yourself that; Now if you'll excuse me, I'll go download it from the real public domain, Kazaa."
Pee.... Dee.... Eff....
PDF itself actually seems like a nice idea, and one which no real competition has yet come along to challenge (even the biggest alternative, PostScript, never really took off as anything but a printer language).
People just need to use the default choice of fonts, and avoid any features not in 4.0. 5.0 doesn't suck too badly, but moving to 6? Pain! I have better uses of my time than to wait over a full minute (on a reasonably new machine) just to read something comparable in content to a webpage (yeah yeah, talk about printing and typesetting and page layout all you want, but 99% of us only tolerate Acrobat because some moron thought a PDF would look more professional than a webpage - For exactly two documents per year do I care about its page layout capabilities - My federal and state tax forms).
Now, to nominate my own format(s) - TIFF, PCX, even BMP (as a data format - as a container format, it works as well as anything else). We have PNG and lossless JPEG now, why would anyone still use uncompressed raw data? And of course, GIF - PNG gets better compression (without downsampling the color information), and no one "owns" it in the IP sense (yeah, the UNISYS patent has expired, but it still exists...)
I think it's important to point out from the transcript that the mother blames Kazaa for this happening.
While I agree that seems a tad cheesy, I think we can all understand the sentiment... Not a cop-out of "the evil company made me do it!", but rather, "I have no freakin' clue why you have me in court, possibly to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars, for a crime about which I have absolutely no knowledge".
Now, as for the "liable for her kids' actions" argument - Do minors have the legal right to accept Kazaa's terms of service? IANAL, so perhaps that point would go nowhere in court; But it seems to me that since minors can't enter into contracts without a parent's permission and cosignature, they similarly shouldn't have the power to sign up to use a service that could land their parents in such deep debt without the parent even knowing.
Would I rather have too much security in IT or too little
A Good question - But DRM/Palladium/TCPA/BacklashControlNameOfTheWeek doesn't even touch the subject.
This will not make your machine more secure for you - It will make it more secure for Microsoft. For Hollywood. For the RIAA.
Not you. Not me. Not your clients (unless your clients include members of the above list). We can go pound sand for all they care. Oh, you can't open that critical briefing you wrote last year? Too bad, Microsoft doesn't trust it so you'll just have to deal. You can write a new one, though - Only a thousand pages or so, right?
but a week straight can be devastating,
Wait, when did you start arguing my side of this discussion?
Okay... I'll accept everything you wrote there. But does it make more sense to experience a "devastating" hardship once per generation, or twice per year?
Look, I don't mean to sound completely cold to these people's plight - They honestly do have my sympathy, right at the moment. But I KNOW that 99.9% will, rather than packing their few remaining material posessions and moving to, say, Nebraska, try to rebuild their lives in the exact same place, just like they did last time, and the time before, and the generation before, and the century before.
There comes a time for any sane person where you have to say "enough!", and pay attention to the great big neon sign Mother Nature keeps flashing, saying "no vacancy!".
You see, 2/3s of the planet Earth are covered by water in the first place.
Hah hah. 90% of the land. Hey, ya got me. 10 for technical accuracy but a 1 for style.
Name the place, and I'll tell you what kind of natural disaster is likely to strike there.
Okay - Northeastern US, not right on the coast, and not at a local low point.
We get two hurricanes a century that manage to blow down a few power lines and damage older roofs. We get a weak tornado once or so per year. We get "flash floods", but here that means your car gets stuck in the mud, not washed out to sea.
As the only real "disaster" condition we get, sometimes it snows too much... But only every decade or two do we get anything bad enough to call a disaster, and even then it just counts as something of an annoyance, not a "real" disaster - Oh no, I might need to read for a week rather than watch the flickering opiate, while waiting for the plows (which we already have around and pay for ourselves, for just such events) to make the roads passable for the electric company repair crews.
In any case, don't conflate "possibility" with "likelyhood"... Yes, most places will eventually suffer some form of natural disaster - New England actually had two hurricanes last century that caused significant damage (but only right on the coast). Compare that to getting two per year! The first you call a freak storm, the second you call a stupid place to build a castle.