...The reason is that the BIOS manufacturer Phoenix Technologies dislikes the trademark infrigment.
Phew!
I've lost track of the times I've restarted my machine, held down the delete key and tried to load up slashdot using the BIOS instead of the web browser by mistake. Now I can surf again without fear of making this foolish mistake!
Re:Yes, but now the webdesigners will have to foll
on
BBC says "Avoid Explorer"
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Considering the BBCs site doesn't or didn't display right in Netscape how can they recommend avoiding IE?
If you're using NS4 then personally I believe you should expect problems. I'm all for cross-browser compliance, but there really is no reason to be using a 5-6 year old browser with substandard (to put it mildly) CSS support.
I design for standards compliant browsers, NS4 is not, therefore visitors who insist upon using this take their chances. Even Redhat have removed it now, which is a good thing - if only Netscape would remove the download link...
I used to hang out on the #linux channel on undernet about a year or so ago - I'd leave IRC running and chime in if I could help out. However, I left as the channel became nothing more than a little club of idiots banning newbies and anyone even mentioning the "wrong" distro names. I just thought it pathetic, and totally at odds with the idea of open discussion.
I'm sure it's now 100% script kiddies and wannabies.
Why not just develop a bayesian filter for the MTAs, so most of this junk will quietly disappear at the source?
Failing that, isn't spamming just wire-fraud, and so subject to severe fines anyway? It's obvious the Bush administration is very "tolerant" of any "business" that rakes in cash by whatever means (let's face it, they're all potential donations!) but surely it doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to track these scumbags down - their ISP, the open relay, the headers all provide evidence. If there were a few arrests each week, and very very high fines, with lots of publicity, this problem would virtually disappear.
Hell, just publicity, and information to the layman about how to report the problem,and who to report it to would help - surely any potential "customer" of these scumbags would think twice about using their services if they saw them being nailed to the wall day in and day out...
Is it really that hard to stop this? Or at least drastically reduce the problem? I get twice as much spam as legitimate email now (easily 30 - 40 a day), it passed "ridiculous" long ago...
Wouldn't it be cheaper to just build one of those?
Looking at the specs, I'd say probably so. But that's not the most important part: I've not check up on Microsoft's "Media centre" edition of XP but I'm betting it includes that marvelous mechanism whereby a broadcaster can prevent you from recording a program (and maybe even force recording for sponsor's programs).
With a home-built solution you're free to use what you like... Makes you wonder who they're targeting this thing at really - since the tech-types will doubtless have the ability to build this from parts and the average J6P won't splash out $1700 to play DVDs and record programs. They seem to make a big deal of the 3D performance too, but I'd imagine playing Quake with a keyboard and mouse in the lounge is not the ideal gaming environment - and the picture will be crap on most TVs too...
Well, all I can really say is that I'm sure glad we didn't have any big wars during the 80's, because this is just funny. I'm off now, to download this incredible training simulation and turn myself into a lethal killing machine, able to blow up tanks with single shells.
Yeah, of course they should have kitted it out with a nice 30 inch monitor and nice 3D hardware pushing 4,000,000,000 textured polys a second, with dolby 5.1 sound and authentic hydraulic motion.
If you'd read the actual story (imagine that?!) you'd have noticed the trainer had extra controls, and was more of a simulation than a game. The "player" did not control the tank itself, only the gun turret which would probably not excite teenagers out to whup some vector-based ass...
This is a pathetic excuse - rarely do people jump in their car and JUST take a DVD back to the shop without doing anything else (shopping etc). Much of the time a person returning a DVD will hire another anyway, in which case they would have made the trip for that reason. This is all assuming they have to use a car in the first place.
Of course, you can try to argue that the sheer weight of the DVD will cause teh vehicle to use extra fuel I guess...
If this media catches on you may not have to return your DVD rentals in the future.
Yet another way to contribute to the environment. Let's just dump more trash rather than get off our lazy asses to take the DVD back to the shop... Jesus...
Last time I bothered checking my spam-bucket, every single item of spam was from some scummy US outfit - at least the ones that had a real snail-mail address, or phone number.
Pity there's not enough bribesH^H^H^H^H^H^funds from concerned organisations to the governments to bring about some effort on the part of the authorities to track and fine/imprison the scumbags responsible.
If the spammers were sending out email with MP3 attachments of Britney's latest "hit", you can bet they'd be caught, sentenced and jailed within a week...
Filtering anything is not the right thing for them to be doing.
While I personally prefer to implement my own firewall, and enjoy the freedom to do more or less what I want, I think it would be better all round if the standard "problem" ports (netbios,http,smtp,dns etc) were blocked by default for all new subscribers to a service, but could be unblocked if the subscriber so requested.
For the vast majority of people, it's in their best interests to block, they likely have no idea what a "port" is, and they'd never need to allow incoming connections anyway - but anyone with a clue, and other requirements could fend for themselves.
I'm all for freedom, but compromised machines, run by clueless idiots on DSL lines are a serious problem these days.
Well it's difficult to prove most people like Britney, especially when the main alternatives are Christina Aguilera and "Back stree boyz version 936r5". People tend to buy what they hear, so if someone comes up with a kick-ass track that never gets any airplay, does this mean it's crap.
Funnily enough the only real experimentation is happening in dance music, where direct feedback from the people on the dancefloor drives the success of a track. Obviously they still never get chart play, so a large proportion of the populace never hear them, but imagine having some banding trance track followed by [Insert boy band of week] - the DJ would be beaten to a pulp - or applauded for the irony I guess...
There should be a way for all these good free songs to be promoted by Radio station. Or else it is never going to affect the Music Industry.
Erm, who do you think controls most of the playlists on the radio stations already? If a commercial radio "DJ" suddenly decides to start playing anything not computer-picked according to reams of realtime stats and record company bribery he's out on the street within 10 seconds.
The problem is that the bad guys control the media (and the court system and politics for that matter), which is why all "popular music" is devolving into syruppy, cookie-cutter trash suitable for a strictly defined age-group, and proven in lab tests.
Oh man, I got totally hooked on SC5 on my Dreamcast - it's kind of disturbing just how addictive it is! The strange thing is, I'd never even consider playing a "dancing" game, being more of a mindless-violence genre fan, but the gameplay is just unreal (and often surreal;-)
If anyone has a DC, and hasn't played Space Channel 5, they're really missing out! Just don't tell your friends; they'll think you're different and strange...
...Christ, I thought I was bad with 6PCs and 2 laptops! Thanks for this - I can show these pictures to girlfriends and family members when they question my sanity from now on;-)
...there is absolutely NO chance of winning with the conspiracy crowd. They have everything to lose by conceding. (And I was pretending to be one of them. I'm not! Really!)
So you say... By the way, I know you all think I'm paranoid. I'm not you know... but you all THINK I AM, DON'T YOU?!!!
I too have an iMac 400mhz with 384MB ram and the old 8MB graphic card. I find OS-X unusable, literally. It's so slow and clunky I honestly can't bear to use it. I hated OS9 too, due to it crashing all the time, so there's not many options left.
Ok, I'm no Apple advocate (the iMac was bought solely to test web pages - and it's all I've ever used it for), but the browser performance, sluggish gui performance, long startup time etc have lead to it ending up in a corner gathering dust. I haven't used it in around half a year, and I doubt I'll ever use it again unless I really need to check some web app with its terrible IE5x browser.
Contrast that with Linux and XP (although I hate the beast from Redmond, I find XP nice to work with) which are really snappy and require much less RAM. I have 512-768MB on all of my PC based machines, and XP rarely uses more than 256MB even when I'm using Fireworks, Flash or any other graphic or audio app (of course, when I launch Sun 1 Studio the memory usage sky-rockets;-) I'd say XP is actually less memory hungry with similar apps than Linux (especially using the Gnome or KDE desktops).
Although many will doubtless claim this is insignificant to MS - the fact they're further delayed in getting their own hardware out there will do them serious damage in the mobile device arena. Nokia and other phone manufacturers have a growing army of 3rd party developers writing new software for their devices, which in turn makes them more desirable for anyone who wishes to expand their capabilities. Although the phone manufacturers are making some mistakes (mostly messing about with the J2ME standard classes, and offering little support) the number of apps is increasing very quickly.
Contrast this with MS, who have no platform, no 3rd party developers (as far as I know), and very little to offer over the established brands. The other mobile makers already have software to sync their devices with Windows/Linux/Mac OS', and they're pretty reliable.
MS is going to have a very very hard battle trying to convince anyone to buy their phones, even moreso than the XBox - which isn't doing well compared to the competition.
This is a good thing;-)
Database lunacy driven by clients!
on
SQL Fundamentals
·
· Score: 2
Having redundant, or seemingly ludicrous table structures can sometimes be the fault of client specs changing under a programmer/designer's feet.
I recently completed an app to handle load allocations for a haulage company. A weeks worth of deliveries are emailed over every Saturday, the app sucks it in and populates the db, then makes descisions based upon vehicle availability, capacity etc etc. This was all well and good UNTIL the supplier started reusing distribution point IDs as they changed! So one week we would have ID 65536 holding details for Fred Bloggs, the next, ID 65536 would be Joe Smith. This brilliant idea of reusing IDs was never mentioned, and only appeared after 2 months had passed and problems arose with deliveries appearing at the wrong addresses!
When asked why they did this, the reply was "we just do it that way"?! Needless to say, since the distributor IDs were the foreign key for orders, which were in turn linked to delivery items, and also to the vehicles used for delivery, this lead to some "creative" changes in the db (now delivery points have the id plus another "version" id which doesn't help efficiency all that much, and must look ridiculous to anyone else viewing the code).
Then there was the fact the haulage company wanted to be able to "squeeze" extra items into a vehicle after specifying its maximum capacity - and then asking me why the app wouldn't allow it - oh and also they often wanted to be able to route large vehicles to locations marked as "inaccesible" for that vehicle - which kind of screwed up the routing logic... In fact, just thinking about that project brings tears to my eyes;-)
Slashdot Mirror
...The reason is that the BIOS manufacturer Phoenix Technologies dislikes the trademark infrigment.
Phew!
I've lost track of the times I've restarted my machine, held down the delete key and tried to load up slashdot using the BIOS instead of the web browser by mistake. Now I can surf again without fear of making this foolish mistake!
Considering the BBCs site doesn't or didn't display right in Netscape how can they recommend avoiding IE?
If you're using NS4 then personally I believe you should expect problems. I'm all for cross-browser compliance, but there really is no reason to be using a 5-6 year old browser with substandard (to put it mildly) CSS support.
I design for standards compliant browsers, NS4 is not, therefore visitors who insist upon using this take their chances. Even Redhat have removed it now, which is a good thing - if only Netscape would remove the download link...
I used to hang out on the #linux channel on undernet about a year or so ago - I'd leave IRC running and chime in if I could help out. However, I left as the channel became nothing more than a little club of idiots banning newbies and anyone even mentioning the "wrong" distro names. I just thought it pathetic, and totally at odds with the idea of open discussion.
I'm sure it's now 100% script kiddies and wannabies.
Why not just develop a bayesian filter for the MTAs, so most of this junk will quietly disappear at the source?
,and who to report it to would help - surely any potential "customer" of these scumbags would think twice about using their services if they saw them being nailed to the wall day in and day out...
Failing that, isn't spamming just wire-fraud, and so subject to severe fines anyway? It's obvious the Bush administration is very "tolerant" of any "business" that rakes in cash by whatever means (let's face it, they're all potential donations!) but surely it doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to track these scumbags down - their ISP, the open relay, the headers all provide evidence. If there were a few arrests each week, and very very high fines, with lots of publicity, this problem would virtually disappear.
Hell, just publicity, and information to the layman about how to report the problem
Is it really that hard to stop this? Or at least drastically reduce the problem? I get twice as much spam as legitimate email now (easily 30 - 40 a day), it passed "ridiculous" long ago...
Wouldn't it be cheaper to just build one of those?
Looking at the specs, I'd say probably so. But that's not the most important part: I've not check up on Microsoft's "Media centre" edition of XP but I'm betting it includes that marvelous mechanism whereby a broadcaster can prevent you from recording a program (and maybe even force recording for sponsor's programs).
With a home-built solution you're free to use what you like... Makes you wonder who they're targeting this thing at really - since the tech-types will doubtless have the ability to build this from parts and the average J6P won't splash out $1700 to play DVDs and record programs. They seem to make a big deal of the 3D performance too, but I'd imagine playing Quake with a keyboard and mouse in the lounge is not the ideal gaming environment - and the picture will be crap on most TVs too...
I do like their laptops though...
Well, all I can really say is that I'm sure glad we didn't have any big wars during the 80's, because this is just funny. I'm off now, to download this incredible training simulation and turn myself into a lethal killing machine, able to blow up tanks with single shells.
Yeah, of course they should have kitted it out with a nice 30 inch monitor and nice 3D hardware pushing 4,000,000,000 textured polys a second, with dolby 5.1 sound and authentic hydraulic motion.
Oh wait, this was built about 20 years ago....
If you'd read the actual story (imagine that?!) you'd have noticed the trainer had extra controls, and was more of a simulation than a game. The "player" did not control the tank itself, only the gun turret which would probably not excite teenagers out to whup some vector-based ass...
... is the following snippet from the article:
"The chef's hat was suggested by my wife Lesley..."
After all this, they're still married?!
This is a pathetic excuse - rarely do people jump in their car and JUST take a DVD back to the shop without doing anything else (shopping etc). Much of the time a person returning a DVD will hire another anyway, in which case they would have made the trip for that reason. This is all assuming they have to use a car in the first place.
Of course, you can try to argue that the sheer weight of the DVD will cause teh vehicle to use extra fuel I guess...
we will buy expensive hard drives that are designed to fail after a short time...
Don't Fujitsu already sell these?
If this media catches on you may not have to return your DVD rentals in the future.
Yet another way to contribute to the environment. Let's just dump more trash rather than get off our lazy asses to take the DVD back to the shop... Jesus...
Last time I bothered checking my spam-bucket, every single item of spam was from some scummy US outfit - at least the ones that had a real snail-mail address, or phone number.
Pity there's not enough bribesH^H^H^H^H^H^funds from concerned organisations to the governments to bring about some effort on the part of the authorities to track and fine/imprison the scumbags responsible.
If the spammers were sending out email with MP3 attachments of Britney's latest "hit", you can bet they'd be caught, sentenced and jailed within a week...
Hmm, you know I've been wondering what to do with the "almost_certainly_spam" directory SA has been filling with mail on my server.
;-)
I think I'll whip up a quick perl script to forward them all on to some choice addresses every night via cron - it'll give me a warm inner glow
$50 to anyone who goes around to her spam-house and cuts her connection with a pair of pliers.
;-)
$10 bonus for taking a baseball bat to her PC...
Filtering anything is not the right thing for them to be doing.
While I personally prefer to implement my own firewall, and enjoy the freedom to do more or less what I want, I think it would be better all round if the standard "problem" ports (netbios,http,smtp,dns etc) were blocked by default for all new subscribers to a service, but could be unblocked if the subscriber so requested.
For the vast majority of people, it's in their best interests to block, they likely have no idea what a "port" is, and they'd never need to allow incoming connections anyway - but anyone with a clue, and other requirements could fend for themselves.
I'm all for freedom, but compromised machines, run by clueless idiots on DSL lines are a serious problem these days.
Well it's difficult to prove most people like Britney, especially when the main alternatives are Christina Aguilera and "Back stree boyz version 936r5". People tend to buy what they hear, so if someone comes up with a kick-ass track that never gets any airplay, does this mean it's crap.
Funnily enough the only real experimentation is happening in dance music, where direct feedback from the people on the dancefloor drives the success of a track. Obviously they still never get chart play, so a large proportion of the populace never hear them, but imagine having some banding trance track followed by [Insert boy band of week] - the DJ would be beaten to a pulp - or applauded for the irony I guess...
There should be a way for all these good free songs to be promoted by Radio station. Or else it is never going to affect the Music Industry.
Erm, who do you think controls most of the playlists on the radio stations already? If a commercial radio "DJ" suddenly decides to start playing anything not computer-picked according to reams of realtime stats and record company bribery he's out on the street within 10 seconds.
The problem is that the bad guys control the media (and the court system and politics for that matter), which is why all "popular music" is devolving into syruppy, cookie-cutter trash suitable for a strictly defined age-group, and proven in lab tests.
Or maybe I'm just cynical?
Oh man, I got totally hooked on SC5 on my Dreamcast - it's kind of disturbing just how addictive it is! The strange thing is, I'd never even consider playing a "dancing" game, being more of a mindless-violence genre fan, but the gameplay is just unreal (and often surreal ;-)
If anyone has a DC, and hasn't played Space Channel 5, they're really missing out! Just don't tell your friends; they'll think you're different and strange...
...Christ, I thought I was bad with 6PCs and 2 laptops! Thanks for this - I can show these pictures to girlfriends and family members when they question my sanity from now on ;-)
...there is absolutely NO chance of winning with the conspiracy crowd. They have everything to lose by conceding. (And I was pretending to be one of them. I'm not! Really!)
So you say... By the way, I know you all think I'm paranoid. I'm not you know... but you all THINK I AM, DON'T YOU?!!!
10,000?!! The entire MAME catalogue is only around 3,500 games from 1975-2000.
;-)
Do they count each background colour change for pong as a separate game or something?
EG, pong:(8 background colours) * (1 player * 4 difficulty levels + 2 player * 4 speeds) * (8 foreground colours) * (sound on or off (2))
= 8*8*8*2
= 1024 pong games
I too have an iMac 400mhz with 384MB ram and the old 8MB graphic card. I find OS-X unusable, literally. It's so slow and clunky I honestly can't bear to use it. I hated OS9 too, due to it crashing all the time, so there's not many options left.
;-) I'd say XP is actually less memory hungry with similar apps than Linux (especially using the Gnome or KDE desktops).
Ok, I'm no Apple advocate (the iMac was bought solely to test web pages - and it's all I've ever used it for), but the browser performance, sluggish gui performance, long startup time etc have lead to it ending up in a corner gathering dust. I haven't used it in around half a year, and I doubt I'll ever use it again unless I really need to check some web app with its terrible IE5x browser.
Contrast that with Linux and XP (although I hate the beast from Redmond, I find XP nice to work with) which are really snappy and require much less RAM. I have 512-768MB on all of my PC based machines, and XP rarely uses more than 256MB even when I'm using Fireworks, Flash or any other graphic or audio app (of course, when I launch Sun 1 Studio the memory usage sky-rockets
Although many will doubtless claim this is insignificant to MS - the fact they're further delayed in getting their own hardware out there will do them serious damage in the mobile device arena. Nokia and other phone manufacturers have a growing army of 3rd party developers writing new software for their devices, which in turn makes them more desirable for anyone who wishes to expand their capabilities. Although the phone manufacturers are making some mistakes (mostly messing about with the J2ME standard classes, and offering little support) the number of apps is increasing very quickly.
;-)
Contrast this with MS, who have no platform, no 3rd party developers (as far as I know), and very little to offer over the established brands. The other mobile makers already have software to sync their devices with Windows/Linux/Mac OS', and they're pretty reliable.
MS is going to have a very very hard battle trying to convince anyone to buy their phones, even moreso than the XBox - which isn't doing well compared to the competition.
This is a good thing
Having redundant, or seemingly ludicrous table structures can sometimes be the fault of client specs changing under a programmer/designer's feet.
;-)
I recently completed an app to handle load allocations for a haulage company. A weeks worth of deliveries are emailed over every Saturday, the app sucks it in and populates the db, then makes descisions based upon vehicle availability, capacity etc etc. This was all well and good UNTIL the supplier started reusing distribution point IDs as they changed! So one week we would have ID 65536 holding details for Fred Bloggs, the next, ID 65536 would be Joe Smith. This brilliant idea of reusing IDs was never mentioned, and only appeared after 2 months had passed and problems arose with deliveries appearing at the wrong addresses!
When asked why they did this, the reply was "we just do it that way"?! Needless to say, since the distributor IDs were the foreign key for orders, which were in turn linked to delivery items, and also to the vehicles used for delivery, this lead to some "creative" changes in the db (now delivery points have the id plus another "version" id which doesn't help efficiency all that much, and must look ridiculous to anyone else viewing the code).
Then there was the fact the haulage company wanted to be able to "squeeze" extra items into a vehicle after specifying its maximum capacity - and then asking me why the app wouldn't allow it - oh and also they often wanted to be able to route large vehicles to locations marked as "inaccesible" for that vehicle - which kind of screwed up the routing logic... In fact, just thinking about that project brings tears to my eyes
How big is the typeface? I mean, come on, it's not that big a language after all and you could easily fit the basics into 50 pages at most...