well, 31.. because I don't think "00000" would be a particularly useful "key press". But,point taken. But, I remember seeing a blind / deaf man using a braille typewriter when I was a kid. It was very similar to what you describe. The point there being.. with just a small amount of buttons (6 for braille, one for morse!), you can relay quite a bit of information.
Actually, 00000 is a useful keypress. The strum bar can be used to strobe in the value. Whammy for shifting, and a few keycodes for alternate character sets (e.g., "switch to numbers", "switch to symbols", "swich to special") and you can probably do it. Just typing a long string of Perl can probably get tiring having to continually switch character sets.
There was a 5-bit code that did this... if you wanted numbers, it sent a Number keycode, followed by one of the re-mapped keycodes.
My guess is that soldering may not be as big as a problem as one may think. Yes it looks like soldering may basically wipe your disk. But you could always re flash the chip after its been soldered into place.
Or flash it in-place. There are plenty of devices where the initial contents are loaded after the board is assembled. JTAG is the popular method - either via boundary scan, or debug mode, but more and more SoC's have a boot ROM that can be put in a special "download" mode. Short a few lines, hook up via serial or USB, download.
In-system programming means the assembly can be done in China with no worry about software theft - because manufacture doesn't require software. If necessary, a simple test utility can be burned into the flash. Once the hardware is manufactured, it's shipped back and ISP is used to put on the real software.
Having flash pre-programmed prior to delivery is extremely rare, at best, it's done during manufacture, where the source chip is copied to the destination prior to pick and place. But given the large density of flash and special programmers needed, ISP tends to be far more economical.
One of the strengths and unfortunate weaknesses of PCs is that components are interchangable. This is a plus, since it means anyone can replace a part, but the downside is, the replacement parts may not fit the "concept" quite wel.
In this case, it appears that while there's the central stand for wire routing, I'm not sure if it comes with the requisite power supply and cables trimmed to the right length. Too much cable is OK, you can hide the slack in the tower, but more often than not, cables are just a wee bit too short.
A design like the old G4 towers where one side flips down with the motherboard exposed and all the cables running along the edge is what I envision a good case to be, but even in OEM PC designs from Dell and the like, they incorporate such "flip open" design. Unfortunately, it fails as some cable is too short, meaning it flips open a little bit, you disconnect it, open it more, disconnect the next too-short cable, etc. A real mess that spoils the nice servicability.
My one concern is that - what happens if the power supply you bought doesn't have cables that reach? You have to invest in extensions? Or is that vertical stand contain a backplane, and all you do is plug the power/sata/IDE/etc cables into it, where they will go to the right component?
Other than Win-L, you can save yourself a hunt for the 'K' key and realize that "Lock Computer" is the first button in the "security dialog" that pops up. Ctrl-Alt-Del-Enter works far faster since Enter on the numpad works and is a convenient location to hit it whilst standing up.
Doesn't work for everyone (especially those where group policy disables lock) - but hitting enter to "Log Off" doesn't do anything disaterous until you hit it again (it pops up a dialog asking for confirmation).
This also brings a new friend for F5 hitting. To get to the bios menu you'll be smashing F12 as fast as you can during boot.
Or F2. Or DEL. Or INS. Or whatever other key you have to hit to enter the setup or boot menu.
It's kinda frustrating really - would it really hurt for manufacturers to either tell you in the manual what keys to hit, or to display that information sooner? The modern trend in BIOSes is to display the splash screen, do initializations, then at the very last moment, flash the keys you need to get into the BIOS or boot menu. If you aren't looking at the screen at the right time or right place, you'll miss it and have to boot it again.
Is it too much to ask to show it as part of the splash screen so I know what I can hit and prepare to hit it?
Aside from the retrieval of a page, rendering said (static) page will be instant in almost all cases, regardless the browser. If it doesn't, either the page is way way way too complicated or you are using an antiquated machine.
Welcome to the world wide web, TheRealMindChild. Out here pages are "way way way too complicated". You can close your eyes and go "lalalala" but that doesn't mean those pages aren't there.
But I'm sure the number of static non-javascript way-way-way-way-too-complicated pages is but a tiny fraction of the number of pages with poorly coded Javascript that can lock up a browser for minutes while the Javascript runs in order to generate the page. And with the number of people using AJAX, Javascript is playing an increasingly larger and larger role in ensuring that the Javascript engine is what holds up rendering.
The fact you can get "There is a script on this page that is taking a long time [Stop Script] [Continue]" type dialogs probably says it all.
Heck, I've downloaded cracks for games that I bought
Proving once again that DRM only hurts paying customers. It's pretty damned stupid of any company to reduce useability and value for your paying customers who would be better off just pirating it. It's backwards. Add value for paying customers that the pirates can't have, and then stop worrying about the damned pirates.
We are in this economic mess because today's businesspeople are greedy morons.
Unfortunately, these days, cracks are pretty iffy. Half of them are trojans that aren't really a crack at all, but just load your system up with malware and tons of crap. The majority of the other half are real cracks, but they're wrapped with malware, so your program will be patched, but it'll also load a bunch of malware onto your system. (People think their antivirus targets cracks specifically, but it's actually the vast majority of cracks available do contain malware.)
Yes, malware authors have caught on to the whole cracks business. I see listings of tons of cracks whose executables are the exact same size down to the byte (and probably compare the same, too), often easily 5000+ copies of the same trojan with varying filenames of applications and crack groups. Their boldness continues when they name popular movies and append various movie release groups to the end (and yes, people I guess are dumb enough that a 40K file purporting to be a 2 hour movie is reasonable...). This is probably a really good infection vector to be aware of the next time you're cleaning out a machine. It's not just websites, but people loving cracked software.
There's probably a secret place where one can grab clean official cracks, but the vast majority you find on Google and bittorrent will be infected crap.
If there is something that humans find inherently addictive about gaming, health companies should tap into that to provide something which humans both need and desire: fitness.
If you ask around, a lot of people *want* to be fit but they have lots of convenient excuses as to why they're not. People want to look good and a lot of people are even willing to put up with the inconvenience of exercise and physical exertion - they just don't have the time.
Being able to introduce a method of exercise that is genuinely fun for all and doesn't require extra time on top of our daily activities, as long as it's done sensibly and cleverly, could be a crucial step towards reducing obesity.
While the likes of Wii Fit (and the Wii) selling out and such show the demand is there, I believe the whole "exercise gaming" thing dates way back to the beginning of the millennium with games like Dance Dance Revolution. DDR is a great way to get some exercise (as long as you're playing with decent mats and not the controller), and while its popularity has faded the past few years, people were literally addicted to DDR (one of my friends was so good, he could play with this back to the screen, having not only memorized the notes, but also the the left/right/front/back inversion). Later versions of DDR also included an exercise program that had warmup, full exercise, and cool down songs...
And I believe there was a movement by some schools to supplement their PE classes with DDR machines. Or treadmill PCs. Or little half exercise bikes that fit under a desk.
The big problem is, many people deride such things (just see the/. comments about DDR in PE classes, or treadmills/other equipment hooked to computers and consoles so you have to exercise to continue surfing/playing), on the belief you really should "suffer" or set aside time to go to the gym and do a proper workout. Or that if you're playing a game, you're not really exercising. (Yes, they ignore the time-starved as well... the whole point of all these things is to raise the general activity level, not serve as a complete weight-loss/strength-training/etc routine...).
Forget about performance, what about power saving? For a couple of years now we have been promised the ability to shut down a graphics card and rely just on the on-board chip for desktop use, with the card kicking in when a game is launched. No-one seems to have actually implemented it yet though.
I know nVidia does, and I believe ATI has similar technology. There's a weak GPU onboard the chipset, but it can then switch to the faster offboard GPU when you want the grunt (at the expense of battery life).
Heck, even the dual-GPU Macbooks support it - there's an option to use the powerful offboard GPU or the chipset one, and it's been around since at least this current generation of Apple laptops. I believe the big criticism was that on Windows, you can enable/disable the extra GPU without a reboot, while on MacOS X, you have to reboot to go from single/weak to dual mode (you can't really "turn off" the chipset GPU, so you might as well use it). I'm not sure if this is still true for Snow Leopard.
I wouldn't go for it (and I don't work for Apple), but money is money I suppose. For many, job satisfaction outweighs wages, to a certain point. There's also the time already invested in the current position to consider; even if you're not completely satisfied with your current gig, the devil you know is better than the devil you don't.
An interesting thing is, Apple pays really well for retail - I believe the starting wage is $12/hr if you're just floor sales, and I believe the Geniuses get paid starting at $15+/hr. (Retail jobs normally pay a tiny bit above minimum wage). It's not high pay, but it's quite well off for retail stores.
Microsoft must be paying a pretty penny more to lure people away. Makes me wonder how many people Microsoft and Apple turn away because they're attracted to the pay. I don't know how much Costco pays (they're considered the best retail chain to work for - pay and benefit wise...).
At no point did I feel it was my fault or that Nintendo didn't like me. There was a minor concern over save games etc should the whole unit need replacing (their webpages of the time basically said "bad luck"). You can copy some savegames to SD card, but some prevent you which does make me angry. I only have 3 downloaded titles as I decided I wanted to own not rent them (ie I am only paying for stuff I can move to new systems at my choice.)
Odd. If the Wii dies, Nintendo wants you to return it to them, and when they repair/replace it, they'll move the DRM keys AND your content over to the new Wii automatically as part of the refurb plan. (I recall this happened to the Wii failures that happened close to launch.) I believe they ask you if you've purchased anything from the Shopping Channel - if you say yes, they will do the transfers and ensure the DRM keys are moved. (And I won't worry about Nintendo support - didn't they only stop supporting the NES only a few years ago?).
Are you kidding? Haven't you ever heard of PSP games that take 7 minutes to get to the gameplay?
And Sony wonders why people have hacked their PSPs - a hacked PSP running the game off memory stick is much more enjoyable (mostly because it removes those crappy seek times - hey look, SSD makes life better!). Or why they're releasing the Go.
Sony should do on the PSP what Microsoft did on the Xbox360 - let people copy games to the memory stick (with DRM by having the disc in the drive, but redirecting drive reads to the memory stick), which would remove the best legit reason to hack the firmware.
Instead of being used for real time control (face it - the latency will suck), it can be used to offload some display and controls elsewhere.
Think of it as a per-person "screen". Each player would have a compatible device connected via WiFi. Stuff that the player should know, but remain hidden from everyone else can be displayed on these little screens, and input taken from them.
This might work very well for an RTS type game.
If we allow consoles to use it, which have many split-screen games, racing games can use it to show your position on the track without telling everyone else, as well as stuff like powerups and cheats (a la Mario Kart).
BUt that's only for a small subset of multiplayer games that support split-screen and have the need to show player-private data without letting everyone else in. As a regular controller, it would suck, but as one with a per-person display, it may have potential.
So...is this an alternative to Apple's iPhone SDK, or does it work with it? (in other words, could developers not have to pay the Apple tax to write iPhone apps?)
Unless this thing compiles to native code, a runtime interpreter isn't allowed by Apple's SDK. So I suspect.net apps, just like free iPhone development, will require jailbroken phones. (Jailbroken phones don't require the $100/year membership).
Other than that, I don't see how in the world will Apple allow it.
Protip for your friends: Get broadband internet. The actual Ubuntu upgrade doesn't take very long. Trying to download the new release over 56k might not be fun. But then, they could have just gotten a cd an upgraded from that.
Or pick a different mirror. I've seen Ubuntu mirrors (usually the default round-robin selects the slow ones...) end up rate-limiting the download. Instead of getting broadband speeds, you get maybe twice-dialup download speeds. Other mirrors can saturate a good link and then some.
1) A third party can shut you down. This happens quite often with the IRC-based botnets - the admins simply/akill anyone attempting to join the channel, or someone else can take over the botnet. Ditto Google - they can disable the group, or have it return NOP commands or someone else can post a command to self-destruct the botnet. That's why people tend to use P2P for botnets.
2) A paper trail is left. Who was attacked and when, the commands issued, etc., are all logged and kept by the third party. Even using a proxy, it seems like a really bad idea when someone is logging everything. Heck, imagine what Google could do with logs of people who accessed that newsgroup.
Seems to me that if they want to sell me something, they'll adapt to my usage. And if eBay wants to continue to dominate the auction market, they'll make their site readable by buyers and sellers as well as customer service reps.
problem is, eBay has critical mass. If you're a seller, you want to sell on the site people are going to buy, and that's eBay. If you're a buyer, you want to visit a site with lots of items for sale, or where there's lots of sellers. Again, eBay. If you sell on a smaller site, you either won't sell the item, have to discount it to get any bids, or hope that single bid will attract others. If you buy, the smaller sites may or may not have the item you want, so either you wait forever for it, or have to settle for whatever you find with little choice.
eBay has been doing a ton of crap the past 10 years, and people swear to never use eBay again. Yet eBay keeps growing. Either the negative press is having no effect, or the sellers who leave reluctantly come back. Face it, look at what changes have happened - increased transaction and listing fees, use of Paypal, feedback changes, etc. But eBay gets away with it because they can - the alternatives may be better for everyone, but unable to attract the critical mass to be sustainable, they fade out. There are few auction sites online that everyone knows about, so if you're looking for something, it's eBay.
I will admit I liked their old design better - it loaded faster for me and was snappier and pages were easier to use. I find the new pages awful and the new site worse. Of course, people are only complaining now because eBay just changed ebay.com - these new page layouts have been present on all the international sites for months or even years now.
What I don't understand is why people go onto eBay and buy stuff you can buy online at Amazon or retail, often for the same price or less.
Maybe I am the only one, but I subscribe to the paper version of the NY Times and read the paper online. What I pay to them for the subscription covers the cost of my online access to their editorial writers. I read different things from the paper and the online version, it's a different experience.
There's actually a reason for this, and it's probably why the broadsheet isn't going to go away.
A broadsheet covers many articles on a page, while most news websites are one-article-per-page, with headlines (and maybe a blurb) on the front page.
When you read a broadsheet, you scan the headlines, and once you find an interesting one on that page, you read it. But as you read, your eye might be drawn to an interesting photo/art/drawing/words of another article, that you'll soon find yourself reading. You'll probably find yourself reading articles whose headlines don't interest you, but something else about the article did, and you read it anyways. Plus, you already scanned the headlines so you get a rough idea what's happening. A broadsheet simply has more time to "grab" a reader into reading an article.
When you read online, you click on the article (new tab/window/whatever), read the article, go back to the main page, find something else, etc. But you're hunting for more specific stuff - not interested in world news? skip the entire section and head onto the entertainment or what have you. People read online news for specific news. Because all headlines are shown the same way, unless you really read every one, you'll skim it like a block of text, and ignore the rest.
Media has different purposes. Broadsheets inform on a global level - what happened yesterday? You may not care about wars going on, but you'll probably have read the headline, and have some idea what's going on.
Online is great for late breaking news that you're interested in. Apple released new iPods? Microsoft released new Windows? Major bug in Mac OS X?
Twitter/social networks/etc, are great for very up to date coverage on events that might be important.
Take Wednesday's Apple keynote. Those keenly interested in Apple news would've either gone there, or read the live blogs. Those mildly interested in technology would read the online blogs about the new products announced, but this may be dribbled out over the course of a day. Those who don't care about technology would read about it in Thursday's broadsheet (they wouldn't get it from the online newspaper - as they're more likely to skip that headline, while a broadsheet can attract the reader who may catch words like Steve Jobs standing up, or see a photo of Jobs, or have a headline like "Jobs returns to Apple".
Someone like me, I don't really care what happens in the US, but it's good to skim the International News section of the broadsheet to find out if anything interesting happened (like Obama's speech to schoolchildren was interesting). I don't care for the details, but was curious enough to see what was so offensive it would cause people to take their kids out of school (this was prior to the speech, a little article about it). I don't bother with online because I don't care about it and would've missed it ("Meh, typical partisan politicking, next!"), and I sure don't care to read the twits (it's TWITter. Not TWEETer) about the speech live.
Different media is consumed in different ways. Media needs ot understand this.
I'm guessing the tarball gets around the "permissions are whiped-out" issue, and as the GP mentions, this is only for moving files from one *nix machine to another (not playing files off of the external drive). Seem pretty straight-forward to me. It just doesn't address the permissions problem when playing files directly off of the drive.
Actually, Linux had a form of tarballs-on-fat support. I think it was removed in the 2.4 kernel though. It stored files on fat as normal files, and the permissions/long filenames/etc. information was kept inside a special tarball in the same directory. It polluted the filesystem, but it transparently saved permissions and other stuff. As far as anyone was concerned, it was a normal Linux filesystem.
Here's something I found interesting, being a NoScript user.
I went to the Apple website, and not having apple.com in the whitelist, I didn't notice it was any different than normal (I had it whitelisted elsewhere). It was only until I got deeper into the navigation did things start to break. I then realized that apple.com was set to BLOCKED by default (NoScript is a whitelist, after all), yet Apple's site didn't immediately become unusuable. In fact, it degraded so gracefully that I never noticed the differences. There were a few, like how the product scroller (on the Mac page) had a rather un-Apple scrollbar (rendered by Firefox), but everything still clicked and acted normal (I thought it was just a Firefox thing). No, JavaScript was off - with it on, it's as I expect.
I think the ones that failed would've been the iTunes download pages, and the Apple ads (which only let you download the "web" tiny versions - the JavaScript version lets you go all the way to 720p). Maybe even the Apple movie trailers (I can't remember).
It's not often you come across a modern website whose no-Javascript mode is so similar to the Javascript mode, and with very, very few rendering flaws that would normally clue you in.
Either Apple designs their website without Javascript support (or minimal support) or their web maintainers are skillful at the art of graceful degradation.
Why not have everyone roll the dice, whoever rolls highest wins the came. There's an equal amount of strategy and luck in that "variant". (And fwiw, I usually win because I'm more stubborn and people get bored and make stupid trades just to move things along -- what a great game mechanic).
I've found that the cheapest 3 sets of properties gives a huge advantage to the owner. The most expensive properties, not so much. The theory goes that because they're the cheap ones, you can get hotels up and early and start dinging them from the get-go. Plus, owning that side of the board means everyone will hit it sooner or later. Putting up that one hotel on Boardwalk or whatever the last two streets are, gives a greater payout, but fewer people will actually roll to hit it. But own the first 9 streets, yowza. Guaranteed everyone will hit something there soon enough. And it probably cost less, too.
Slow and steady nickle and diming vs. the lucky lotto. (Eventually the guy who owns the most expensive properties will win, but owning the cheapest with hotels weakens everyone else to the point that that endgame isn't usually reached - they're too broke to build!)
Suppose I put a Word document on a computer where OO.o is installed instead of Office. The document says "open me in MS Word". The OS says, "Word isn't installed". What happens? What originally should have happened: The OS looks at the document, says "Word document, open this with OO.o", and everything works great. The extra information was a stupid extra step. "Word document" is all the OS needs in order to figure out how to open it.
What if you didn't have OO.o OR Office installed?
Type/creator codes were meant to replace "ugly" extensions, but in the Internet age, the only way to pass file metadata around is in the filename - MIME types get preserved, if you're lucky, but more often than not, the MIME type is just based on the filename (i.e., the extension).
This was probably due to limited namespace - what is a ".doc" file? These days, it's 95% certainty it's a MS Word document. But it can also be a plain text file since many older programs from the 80s/90s used ".doc" to represent a generic document, like a manual. You'd have README, README.TXT, README.DOC, etc.
So Mac came up with a way to use 2 32-bit identifiers - a creator code, and a type code. Creators are used to identify a creator, so double-clicking would open the same app that opened it (back in the days when compatibility was horrible, the general thinking is you want to open something in the app that created it). The type ID was a fallback in case you can't find the creator, you can try a type lookup, in case it was something another program could handle. If not, you could consult a small database of creator codes to application name mapping, and display an error like "The file 'my file.doc' could not be opened because 'Microsoft Word' was not found, nor any other program that could open it.", thus providing the user with a reason why the file can't be displayed/viewed/etc., and what the user could get to open it. (Would be nice for whoever did the "WINMAIL.DAT" crap...)
These days, it seems that creator codes aren't useful anymore since any number of documents can be created in any number of programs, and binding a document to who created it is less useful these days. Type codes are still useful, though, though the expressiveness of modern extensions makes even type codes obsolete.
French is largely stagnant - oddly enough, because the French actively try to keep "un-French" words OUT of their language. There was the idiocy a few years back when the French government actually outlawed the word "e-mail" in official gov't correspondence in favor of the longer "courier electronique" phrase, trying their damndest to keep that "eeevil" english wording out of their parlance. It didn't work well.
Are you sure it was France? I believe it was more like Quebec, and yes, they'll literally force anyone to say that. (Legally, too - there's the Language Police for a reason in Quebec).
And the red octogonal road signs say "Arret" (with the accent on the e) in Quebec, while in France, they say "Stop". And to many surprised people, the France-French will say "stop" to tell someone to stop. And Quebec ATC will introduce itself in French first, before going to ICAO-mandated English (especially if you're a Canadian plane) as a fall-back. I believe in France they will address you in English first.
Don't confuse the Quebec French from France French. Quebeckers have a tendency to want to get rid of all "anglo" words ASAP. I think they're overdue for their next set of words they wish to expunge from their language and replaced with French equivalents.
Microsoft points are annoying, but all you have to do is divide the points value by 80 to get the dollars so it's not too difficult
US dollars, to be precise. (Alternatively, add 25% to the points value and divide by 100, which is easier to do mentally - thus 800 points, plus 25% = 1000, divide by 100, gives you $10)
An interesting aspect of the points system is it buries the whole notion of exchange rates. I remember when the Xbox360 was released, you paid $20 Canadian for 1250 points (~$15.63 US in points, or about a 78 cent dollar). Now it's gone up to 1400 points ($17.50 US, or an 87.5 cent dollar). It allows Microsoft to actually "move" with the exchange rate (by offering more or less points per dollar) somewhat, without having to re-price the entire store continuously. The opposite of this would be say, the iTunes store, or the Playstation Network Store - prices are fixed. When currency weakens, it's a benefit (things cost the same), but when it strengthens, people complain ("costs more" - and it happened when the Canadian dollar reached parity - lots of talk about how we were being gouged because books were 50% more expensive and thus cheaper in the US, etc. Hell, some stores ran "We use US pricing" campaigns!).
However, it's changing - Microsoft has starting allowing use of points *or* direct credit card transactions. So you could pay 800 points, or $10, your choice.
Me personally, I'd go for points - they go on sale very often (they're considered "video game accessories" and getting them 10% off is easy, but 20+% sales aren't uncommon). That 800 point game will always cost 800 points (unless it goes on special), and Microsoft will always bill $10 for it (again, unless it goes on sale). With a points card I got 20% off, I get the same thing for $8. I do however use points for other stuff in the Arcade, so my balance tends to stick pretty low.
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Actually, 00000 is a useful keypress. The strum bar can be used to strobe in the value. Whammy for shifting, and a few keycodes for alternate character sets (e.g., "switch to numbers", "switch to symbols", "swich to special") and you can probably do it. Just typing a long string of Perl can probably get tiring having to continually switch character sets.
There was a 5-bit code that did this... if you wanted numbers, it sent a Number keycode, followed by one of the re-mapped keycodes.
Or flash it in-place. There are plenty of devices where the initial contents are loaded after the board is assembled. JTAG is the popular method - either via boundary scan, or debug mode, but more and more SoC's have a boot ROM that can be put in a special "download" mode. Short a few lines, hook up via serial or USB, download.
In-system programming means the assembly can be done in China with no worry about software theft - because manufacture doesn't require software. If necessary, a simple test utility can be burned into the flash. Once the hardware is manufactured, it's shipped back and ISP is used to put on the real software.
Having flash pre-programmed prior to delivery is extremely rare, at best, it's done during manufacture, where the source chip is copied to the destination prior to pick and place. But given the large density of flash and special programmers needed, ISP tends to be far more economical.
One of the strengths and unfortunate weaknesses of PCs is that components are interchangable. This is a plus, since it means anyone can replace a part, but the downside is, the replacement parts may not fit the "concept" quite wel.
In this case, it appears that while there's the central stand for wire routing, I'm not sure if it comes with the requisite power supply and cables trimmed to the right length. Too much cable is OK, you can hide the slack in the tower, but more often than not, cables are just a wee bit too short.
A design like the old G4 towers where one side flips down with the motherboard exposed and all the cables running along the edge is what I envision a good case to be, but even in OEM PC designs from Dell and the like, they incorporate such "flip open" design. Unfortunately, it fails as some cable is too short, meaning it flips open a little bit, you disconnect it, open it more, disconnect the next too-short cable, etc. A real mess that spoils the nice servicability.
My one concern is that - what happens if the power supply you bought doesn't have cables that reach? You have to invest in extensions? Or is that vertical stand contain a backplane, and all you do is plug the power/sata/IDE/etc cables into it, where they will go to the right component?
Other than Win-L, you can save yourself a hunt for the 'K' key and realize that "Lock Computer" is the first button in the "security dialog" that pops up. Ctrl-Alt-Del-Enter works far faster since Enter on the numpad works and is a convenient location to hit it whilst standing up.
Doesn't work for everyone (especially those where group policy disables lock) - but hitting enter to "Log Off" doesn't do anything disaterous until you hit it again (it pops up a dialog asking for confirmation).
Or F2. Or DEL. Or INS. Or whatever other key you have to hit to enter the setup or boot menu.
It's kinda frustrating really - would it really hurt for manufacturers to either tell you in the manual what keys to hit, or to display that information sooner? The modern trend in BIOSes is to display the splash screen, do initializations, then at the very last moment, flash the keys you need to get into the BIOS or boot menu. If you aren't looking at the screen at the right time or right place, you'll miss it and have to boot it again.
Is it too much to ask to show it as part of the splash screen so I know what I can hit and prepare to hit it?
But I'm sure the number of static non-javascript way-way-way-way-too-complicated pages is but a tiny fraction of the number of pages with poorly coded Javascript that can lock up a browser for minutes while the Javascript runs in order to generate the page. And with the number of people using AJAX, Javascript is playing an increasingly larger and larger role in ensuring that the Javascript engine is what holds up rendering.
The fact you can get "There is a script on this page that is taking a long time [Stop Script] [Continue]" type dialogs probably says it all.
Unfortunately, these days, cracks are pretty iffy. Half of them are trojans that aren't really a crack at all, but just load your system up with malware and tons of crap. The majority of the other half are real cracks, but they're wrapped with malware, so your program will be patched, but it'll also load a bunch of malware onto your system. (People think their antivirus targets cracks specifically, but it's actually the vast majority of cracks available do contain malware.)
Yes, malware authors have caught on to the whole cracks business. I see listings of tons of cracks whose executables are the exact same size down to the byte (and probably compare the same, too), often easily 5000+ copies of the same trojan with varying filenames of applications and crack groups. Their boldness continues when they name popular movies and append various movie release groups to the end (and yes, people I guess are dumb enough that a 40K file purporting to be a 2 hour movie is reasonable...). This is probably a really good infection vector to be aware of the next time you're cleaning out a machine. It's not just websites, but people loving cracked software.
There's probably a secret place where one can grab clean official cracks, but the vast majority you find on Google and bittorrent will be infected crap.
While the likes of Wii Fit (and the Wii) selling out and such show the demand is there, I believe the whole "exercise gaming" thing dates way back to the beginning of the millennium with games like Dance Dance Revolution. DDR is a great way to get some exercise (as long as you're playing with decent mats and not the controller), and while its popularity has faded the past few years, people were literally addicted to DDR (one of my friends was so good, he could play with this back to the screen, having not only memorized the notes, but also the the left/right/front/back inversion). Later versions of DDR also included an exercise program that had warmup, full exercise, and cool down songs...
And I believe there was a movement by some schools to supplement their PE classes with DDR machines. Or treadmill PCs. Or little half exercise bikes that fit under a desk.
The big problem is, many people deride such things (just see the /. comments about DDR in PE classes, or treadmills/other equipment hooked to computers and consoles so you have to exercise to continue surfing/playing), on the belief you really should "suffer" or set aside time to go to the gym and do a proper workout. Or that if you're playing a game, you're not really exercising. (Yes, they ignore the time-starved as well... the whole point of all these things is to raise the general activity level, not serve as a complete weight-loss/strength-training/etc routine...).
I know nVidia does, and I believe ATI has similar technology. There's a weak GPU onboard the chipset, but it can then switch to the faster offboard GPU when you want the grunt (at the expense of battery life).
Heck, even the dual-GPU Macbooks support it - there's an option to use the powerful offboard GPU or the chipset one, and it's been around since at least this current generation of Apple laptops. I believe the big criticism was that on Windows, you can enable/disable the extra GPU without a reboot, while on MacOS X, you have to reboot to go from single/weak to dual mode (you can't really "turn off" the chipset GPU, so you might as well use it). I'm not sure if this is still true for Snow Leopard.
An interesting thing is, Apple pays really well for retail - I believe the starting wage is $12/hr if you're just floor sales, and I believe the Geniuses get paid starting at $15+/hr. (Retail jobs normally pay a tiny bit above minimum wage). It's not high pay, but it's quite well off for retail stores.
Microsoft must be paying a pretty penny more to lure people away. Makes me wonder how many people Microsoft and Apple turn away because they're attracted to the pay. I don't know how much Costco pays (they're considered the best retail chain to work for - pay and benefit wise...).
Odd. If the Wii dies, Nintendo wants you to return it to them, and when they repair/replace it, they'll move the DRM keys AND your content over to the new Wii automatically as part of the refurb plan. (I recall this happened to the Wii failures that happened close to launch.) I believe they ask you if you've purchased anything from the Shopping Channel - if you say yes, they will do the transfers and ensure the DRM keys are moved. (And I won't worry about Nintendo support - didn't they only stop supporting the NES only a few years ago?).
And Sony wonders why people have hacked their PSPs - a hacked PSP running the game off memory stick is much more enjoyable (mostly because it removes those crappy seek times - hey look, SSD makes life better!). Or why they're releasing the Go.
Sony should do on the PSP what Microsoft did on the Xbox360 - let people copy games to the memory stick (with DRM by having the disc in the drive, but redirecting drive reads to the memory stick), which would remove the best legit reason to hack the firmware.
If there were many split-screen PC games.
Instead of being used for real time control (face it - the latency will suck), it can be used to offload some display and controls elsewhere.
Think of it as a per-person "screen". Each player would have a compatible device connected via WiFi. Stuff that the player should know, but remain hidden from everyone else can be displayed on these little screens, and input taken from them.
This might work very well for an RTS type game.
If we allow consoles to use it, which have many split-screen games, racing games can use it to show your position on the track without telling everyone else, as well as stuff like powerups and cheats (a la Mario Kart).
BUt that's only for a small subset of multiplayer games that support split-screen and have the need to show player-private data without letting everyone else in. As a regular controller, it would suck, but as one with a per-person display, it may have potential.
Unless this thing compiles to native code, a runtime interpreter isn't allowed by Apple's SDK. So I suspect .net apps, just like free iPhone development, will require jailbroken phones. (Jailbroken phones don't require the $100/year membership).
Other than that, I don't see how in the world will Apple allow it.
Or pick a different mirror. I've seen Ubuntu mirrors (usually the default round-robin selects the slow ones...) end up rate-limiting the download. Instead of getting broadband speeds, you get maybe twice-dialup download speeds. Other mirrors can saturate a good link and then some.
Except, there are two issues...
1) A third party can shut you down. This happens quite often with the IRC-based botnets - the admins simply /akill anyone attempting to join the channel, or someone else can take over the botnet. Ditto Google - they can disable the group, or have it return NOP commands or someone else can post a command to self-destruct the botnet. That's why people tend to use P2P for botnets.
2) A paper trail is left. Who was attacked and when, the commands issued, etc., are all logged and kept by the third party. Even using a proxy, it seems like a really bad idea when someone is logging everything. Heck, imagine what Google could do with logs of people who accessed that newsgroup.
problem is, eBay has critical mass. If you're a seller, you want to sell on the site people are going to buy, and that's eBay. If you're a buyer, you want to visit a site with lots of items for sale, or where there's lots of sellers. Again, eBay. If you sell on a smaller site, you either won't sell the item, have to discount it to get any bids, or hope that single bid will attract others. If you buy, the smaller sites may or may not have the item you want, so either you wait forever for it, or have to settle for whatever you find with little choice.
eBay has been doing a ton of crap the past 10 years, and people swear to never use eBay again. Yet eBay keeps growing. Either the negative press is having no effect, or the sellers who leave reluctantly come back. Face it, look at what changes have happened - increased transaction and listing fees, use of Paypal, feedback changes, etc. But eBay gets away with it because they can - the alternatives may be better for everyone, but unable to attract the critical mass to be sustainable, they fade out. There are few auction sites online that everyone knows about, so if you're looking for something, it's eBay.
I will admit I liked their old design better - it loaded faster for me and was snappier and pages were easier to use. I find the new pages awful and the new site worse. Of course, people are only complaining now because eBay just changed ebay.com - these new page layouts have been present on all the international sites for months or even years now.
What I don't understand is why people go onto eBay and buy stuff you can buy online at Amazon or retail, often for the same price or less.
There's actually a reason for this, and it's probably why the broadsheet isn't going to go away.
A broadsheet covers many articles on a page, while most news websites are one-article-per-page, with headlines (and maybe a blurb) on the front page.
When you read a broadsheet, you scan the headlines, and once you find an interesting one on that page, you read it. But as you read, your eye might be drawn to an interesting photo/art/drawing/words of another article, that you'll soon find yourself reading. You'll probably find yourself reading articles whose headlines don't interest you, but something else about the article did, and you read it anyways. Plus, you already scanned the headlines so you get a rough idea what's happening. A broadsheet simply has more time to "grab" a reader into reading an article.
When you read online, you click on the article (new tab/window/whatever), read the article, go back to the main page, find something else, etc. But you're hunting for more specific stuff - not interested in world news? skip the entire section and head onto the entertainment or what have you. People read online news for specific news. Because all headlines are shown the same way, unless you really read every one, you'll skim it like a block of text, and ignore the rest.
Media has different purposes. Broadsheets inform on a global level - what happened yesterday? You may not care about wars going on, but you'll probably have read the headline, and have some idea what's going on.
Online is great for late breaking news that you're interested in. Apple released new iPods? Microsoft released new Windows? Major bug in Mac OS X?
Twitter/social networks/etc, are great for very up to date coverage on events that might be important.
Take Wednesday's Apple keynote. Those keenly interested in Apple news would've either gone there, or read the live blogs. Those mildly interested in technology would read the online blogs about the new products announced, but this may be dribbled out over the course of a day. Those who don't care about technology would read about it in Thursday's broadsheet (they wouldn't get it from the online newspaper - as they're more likely to skip that headline, while a broadsheet can attract the reader who may catch words like Steve Jobs standing up, or see a photo of Jobs, or have a headline like "Jobs returns to Apple".
Someone like me, I don't really care what happens in the US, but it's good to skim the International News section of the broadsheet to find out if anything interesting happened (like Obama's speech to schoolchildren was interesting). I don't care for the details, but was curious enough to see what was so offensive it would cause people to take their kids out of school (this was prior to the speech, a little article about it). I don't bother with online because I don't care about it and would've missed it ("Meh, typical partisan politicking, next!"), and I sure don't care to read the twits (it's TWITter. Not TWEETer) about the speech live.
Different media is consumed in different ways. Media needs ot understand this.
Actually, Linux had a form of tarballs-on-fat support. I think it was removed in the 2.4 kernel though. It stored files on fat as normal files, and the permissions/long filenames/etc. information was kept inside a special tarball in the same directory. It polluted the filesystem, but it transparently saved permissions and other stuff. As far as anyone was concerned, it was a normal Linux filesystem.
It was UMSDOS.
Here's something I found interesting, being a NoScript user.
I went to the Apple website, and not having apple.com in the whitelist, I didn't notice it was any different than normal (I had it whitelisted elsewhere). It was only until I got deeper into the navigation did things start to break. I then realized that apple.com was set to BLOCKED by default (NoScript is a whitelist, after all), yet Apple's site didn't immediately become unusuable. In fact, it degraded so gracefully that I never noticed the differences. There were a few, like how the product scroller (on the Mac page) had a rather un-Apple scrollbar (rendered by Firefox), but everything still clicked and acted normal (I thought it was just a Firefox thing). No, JavaScript was off - with it on, it's as I expect.
I think the ones that failed would've been the iTunes download pages, and the Apple ads (which only let you download the "web" tiny versions - the JavaScript version lets you go all the way to 720p). Maybe even the Apple movie trailers (I can't remember).
It's not often you come across a modern website whose no-Javascript mode is so similar to the Javascript mode, and with very, very few rendering flaws that would normally clue you in.
Either Apple designs their website without Javascript support (or minimal support) or their web maintainers are skillful at the art of graceful degradation.
I've found that the cheapest 3 sets of properties gives a huge advantage to the owner. The most expensive properties, not so much. The theory goes that because they're the cheap ones, you can get hotels up and early and start dinging them from the get-go. Plus, owning that side of the board means everyone will hit it sooner or later. Putting up that one hotel on Boardwalk or whatever the last two streets are, gives a greater payout, but fewer people will actually roll to hit it. But own the first 9 streets, yowza. Guaranteed everyone will hit something there soon enough. And it probably cost less, too.
Slow and steady nickle and diming vs. the lucky lotto. (Eventually the guy who owns the most expensive properties will win, but owning the cheapest with hotels weakens everyone else to the point that that endgame isn't usually reached - they're too broke to build!)
What if you didn't have OO.o OR Office installed?
Type/creator codes were meant to replace "ugly" extensions, but in the Internet age, the only way to pass file metadata around is in the filename - MIME types get preserved, if you're lucky, but more often than not, the MIME type is just based on the filename (i.e., the extension).
This was probably due to limited namespace - what is a ".doc" file? These days, it's 95% certainty it's a MS Word document. But it can also be a plain text file since many older programs from the 80s/90s used ".doc" to represent a generic document, like a manual. You'd have README, README.TXT, README.DOC, etc.
So Mac came up with a way to use 2 32-bit identifiers - a creator code, and a type code. Creators are used to identify a creator, so double-clicking would open the same app that opened it (back in the days when compatibility was horrible, the general thinking is you want to open something in the app that created it). The type ID was a fallback in case you can't find the creator, you can try a type lookup, in case it was something another program could handle. If not, you could consult a small database of creator codes to application name mapping, and display an error like "The file 'my file.doc' could not be opened because 'Microsoft Word' was not found, nor any other program that could open it.", thus providing the user with a reason why the file can't be displayed/viewed/etc., and what the user could get to open it. (Would be nice for whoever did the "WINMAIL.DAT" crap...)
These days, it seems that creator codes aren't useful anymore since any number of documents can be created in any number of programs, and binding a document to who created it is less useful these days. Type codes are still useful, though, though the expressiveness of modern extensions makes even type codes obsolete.
Are you sure it was France? I believe it was more like Quebec, and yes, they'll literally force anyone to say that. (Legally, too - there's the Language Police for a reason in Quebec).
And the red octogonal road signs say "Arret" (with the accent on the e) in Quebec, while in France, they say "Stop". And to many surprised people, the France-French will say "stop" to tell someone to stop. And Quebec ATC will introduce itself in French first, before going to ICAO-mandated English (especially if you're a Canadian plane) as a fall-back. I believe in France they will address you in English first.
Don't confuse the Quebec French from France French. Quebeckers have a tendency to want to get rid of all "anglo" words ASAP. I think they're overdue for their next set of words they wish to expunge from their language and replaced with French equivalents.
US dollars, to be precise. (Alternatively, add 25% to the points value and divide by 100, which is easier to do mentally - thus 800 points, plus 25% = 1000, divide by 100, gives you $10)
An interesting aspect of the points system is it buries the whole notion of exchange rates. I remember when the Xbox360 was released, you paid $20 Canadian for 1250 points (~$15.63 US in points, or about a 78 cent dollar). Now it's gone up to 1400 points ($17.50 US, or an 87.5 cent dollar). It allows Microsoft to actually "move" with the exchange rate (by offering more or less points per dollar) somewhat, without having to re-price the entire store continuously. The opposite of this would be say, the iTunes store, or the Playstation Network Store - prices are fixed. When currency weakens, it's a benefit (things cost the same), but when it strengthens, people complain ("costs more" - and it happened when the Canadian dollar reached parity - lots of talk about how we were being gouged because books were 50% more expensive and thus cheaper in the US, etc. Hell, some stores ran "We use US pricing" campaigns!).
However, it's changing - Microsoft has starting allowing use of points *or* direct credit card transactions. So you could pay 800 points, or $10, your choice.
Me personally, I'd go for points - they go on sale very often (they're considered "video game accessories" and getting them 10% off is easy, but 20+% sales aren't uncommon). That 800 point game will always cost 800 points (unless it goes on special), and Microsoft will always bill $10 for it (again, unless it goes on sale). With a points card I got 20% off, I get the same thing for $8. I do however use points for other stuff in the Arcade, so my balance tends to stick pretty low.
Lesser known deal - Microsoft owns Halo, and they licensed Marvel to do the comics side of it. Isn't DIsney partially owned/controlled by Steve Jobs?
Of course, the Mickey MOuse Master Chief series .... *shudder*.