But what ratio have received the $43M from an fallen African state?
It never ceses to amaze me what sort of people fall for that gag or one of its variants. I recently saw a news show on CBS about the victims of these scams. The list included and Engineer a Doctor and a Schoolteacher. You would think people with that level of education would know better? I suppose it puts some weigh behind the old adage: "...educated beyond their intelligence".
Actually you have to uncheck the 'PDF maker' component, check the 'Do not show this notice again' and then click 'Continue' which (IIRC) is contrary to what the instructions say, which is to click 'Cancel' to opt out of the repair. Now curses and pestilence upon you for irritaning me into re-installing Adobe Acrobat just to try this out.
It's just plants copying RAID or PAR files. This is nothing new - we've had those for years now.
Copying? If it bothers you so much you can always sue them for patent infringement. Of course the plants might lawyer up and come back at you claiming prior art....
Nice as the Print to PDF feature in OS.X is there are a few things it can't do that Adobe can. Another problem that I have heard people gripe about who use Adobe Acrobat alot is that the OS.X PDF functionality lags a little behind the Acrobat suite in terms of features. That means you sometimes have trouble with files you get sent from people running the latest Acrobat suite. I dont use PDF's often enough to be irritated by this but I know some people who use Adobe products because of it.
If you have any trouble with this bar the thing to do (Worked for me on Adobe Acrob at 6.0 for Mac) is:
or where ever else you installe Office there are three subfolderst there.
$ ls Excel PowerPoint Word
each directory contains a file name
PDFMaker.[xla|ppa|dot]
Delete those files and you are rid of the damn toolbar. The only problem is that the next time you start Adobe Acrobat you get a nag screen stating that Acrobat needs to make repairs. No matter how I try to opt out of the damn repair Acrobat still re-creates those files. Just for kicks I tried to refuse Acrobat write permission to those three directories but it just refused to start which I thought was rather funny. After that I deleted the damn thing (aka Adobe Acrobat Professional) and have yet to regret it.
Of course, as the article points out, none of this is actually illegal, even if it does make the victim look a bit less like a white knight
I once recieved an abusive letter (Pinned under the windsheild wiper of my car) from another tenant in the same building where had just moved in. They were complaining that I was parkign in a spot that they had rights to and were paying for and which happened to be the best spot available. I returned a very polite letter that I made sure was ice cold and factual outlining that the parking spaces were numbered as where the apartments and that according to my rental agreement this parking spot Nr. X belongded to my aparment Nr. X and that I was in fact paying for it. There were no insults, no abuse and no gloating in the letter, I just explained that they were in fact squattin on my parking spot, not the other way around. I never heard from them again. The the moral of the story is that the biggest mistake you can make is to get carried away in an Oh, goody, I'm in the right... Now lets REALLY chew them out! type frenzy. Alot of people end up making the mistake of hurting their own case by getting abusive or even insulting and thus ruin their position.
Apple already has a blue screen of death and just to show they are more innovative than Microsoft there is also the: 'Black screen of death', the 'frozen desktop from hell' and my personal favorite the 'Spinning beachball of death'. And before anybody flames me for Mac-Bashing please note that I am speaking from my experience as a Mac user.
The directive will now be passed to European Parliament, which can reject or amend the proposal, for a second reading.
It seems to me, judging from the above quote from TFA, that Democracy still has a chance to deal with this matter. Furthermore it seems to me that rejecting the European constitution out of hand simply because of software patents is a bit short sighted. The way the matter of Software patents has been handled in the EU may leave something to be desired but it is still no worse than the horsetrading and sculduggery that goes on in the national parilaments of various EU member states every day. I'm not the biggest fan of the EU but it is still better than the old fragmented Europe of feuding nation states.
The BBC is one of the more widely used public services in the UK.
Try the world! The BBC's TV and Radio programs are widely watched and listened to around the world by alot more people than use the service in the UK. I don't think people in the UK are quite aware of just how big an international PR medium the BBC is. Other countries can only dream of having a state controlled TV network that is watched by this kind of an international audience. Furthermore, at least in so far as news reporting is concerned, the BBC commands alot more respect internationally than the big US networks do (Althoug to be fair there is a number of notable exceptions to this rule among the latter but it is depressingly small) recent reporting scandals not withstanding.
Heh.. That's a funny thought isn't it? Somewhere on planet X in solarsystem Y intrepid scientific pioneers sit at their radio eqipment searching for signs of life, messages from other planets. After years of searching they finally get the message they have been waiting for. They spend months decodign it and finally manage to make sense of it. The gather around a display device full of expectation. Is it the encyclopedia galactica? The cure for all their diseases? The secret of universal peace? Somebody pushes a button to display the message for the first time on a visualdevice and that damn 'goatse' picture flashes accross the screen.
That thing reminds me of Dilbert's mission statement generator. The scary thing is that the material from Dilbert's babble engine actually sounds like alot of the stuff you are likely to find on actual corporate websites.
....the "The Gulag Archipelago", vols. I through III, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to prepare your self for what awaits you after Russian security servcices snatch you off the street and cart you off to recieve your just punishment in a secret Gulag they run in Siberia in cooperation with RIAA. The standard sentence is three years, locked in a rubber room listening to bagpipe music 24/7.
Information cannot be stopped. Knowledge about how to build a nuclear bomb eventually will spread to even terrorists. Well funded terrorists with friends in oil-rich states in the Middle East also have money to acquire all the parts to build a weapon.
What is the defense against the use of a nuclear weapon by a terrorist? The answer is not a missile shield. Even if the shield is 80% effective, one successful nuclear bomb would be devastating.
True, what never ceases to amaze me that certain people in the US still seem to think that nuclear missiles being launched at the USA by rogue states is the main threat. To me it seems like an excuse to throw money at defense contractors. If I wanted to detonate a nuclear device inside the USA it would be ever so much more simple to slip it through in one of the millions upon millions of cargo containers that move through US harbors every year. Another way is simply to land it off a small vessel somewhere in an sparsely inhabited place. There are stretches of coastline in the US, hundreds of kilometers long, that are patrolled by a handfull of coasguard cutters and a dozen or so state troopers, but still offer direct access to the road infrastructure. The really difficult part about building a terrorist nuclear bomb is staying off the radar screens of Russian/Chinese/US/European intelligence services as you buy the materials and build the thing since preventing Terrorists from getting their hands on an A-Bomb is probably one of the few things those guys would all be willing to cooperate on. Once it is built and on the loose a terrorist A-Bomb would be about as easy to find as Osama Bin Laden seem to be. That is if you stay away from idiot schemes like launching on the tip of some rickety badly designed ICBM on the USA.
... does have a tendency to make lousy remakes of great originals. I wonder if they will manage to make a hash of 'The Hitchikers Guide'? That being said mucking this up should be impossible. That book is just so damn funny even an idiot should be able to make a at least a mildly funny film from it.
how IBM is determined to move to an open desktop based on Linux and OpenOffice within about a year.
It's about time IBM took another whack at you know who.....
Now let's hope this gets upgraded from the lowly status of a mere rumor to the lofty status of a fact and results in a flood of out-of-the-box fully Linux capable of Laptops.:-D
If you want to attract people who play computer games to use your operating system, that's great. But do not assume that these people are normal Joes. Do not assume that they make up anything other than the tiniest niche market.
True, games are a niche market, although an important one. The best ways for the likes of Suse, RedHat, Mandrake &Co. to get regular users to use Linux is firstly by developing it's desktop capability to the point that one can convince corporations to use it on workstations. That basically means (this will horrify pruists) idiot proof Linux distros that offer all the same software and functionality as the normal Windows workstation plus the same kind of easy intuitive integration into Windows networks as you have got with OS.X. Secondly it would be important to ensure it has a sigificant representation in the student workstation pools of educational institutions from primary school upward. Which is why Microsoft donates computers and software to schools all over the place, they get to look like philanthropists while securing their market share. The 'normal user' will use at home what he/she learned to use at school or uses regularly at work.
I always stress the importance of getting a good power supply when I give advice for building PCs....
Personally I'm happy if I can teach users to remember to switch the powersupply from 110 to 220 volts when recieving computers from bought in the USA before plugging them into a 220v power outlet. I still have trouble not laughing out loud every time one of those ebay jockeys shows up with a PC/MAC that has a burned out powersupply. It must be really frustrating to buy a PC/MAC for a shitload of money and then damage or completely ruin it because you forgot to flip one little red switch.
Roland Dorgeles was an eccentric Frenchman and arch nemesis of the Cubists. To poke fun at them he tied a paint-brush to a donkey's tail, placed a canvas with pots of paint behind it. The donkey faithfully conjured up an abstract painting. The work was then exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants. The funny bit is that both the the public and the critics who commented on the painting did not seem to value it any less than the work of Van Dongen, Matisse and Roualt, who all exhibited at the same Salon. The matter caused a small scandal when it was leaked to the press. I once had a similar experience myself when I went to an art exhibition where an artist had bolted several multicolored urinals to a wall, no frills just standard issue urinals fromt he hardware store bolted to a wall, that's it. No paint no sculpting just urinals on a wall. The thing had a six figure price tag and a 'SOLD" sign on it. I drew the conclusion that art is what people say it is and if people think splashes from a donkeys tail and porcelain urinals bolted to a wall is art then well it is art.
... his reputation allows him to speak with a louder voice than we mortals do. After all, how many people can claim their hobby project morphed into something that makes the übercorpies fear for their market share? I would have expected him of all people to have spoken out sooner though?!?
You are new to denigrating Microsoft aren't you. That should be:... more unfortunate enslaved souls would escape the dungeons of the dark land of Mordor.
Who knows indeed, I once saw a documentary about Apple. The guy who narated the show told a story of how he worked one summer for them when Jobs and Co. were still operating out of a garage. When he came for his pay at the end of the summer Jobs offered to pay him with shares in Apple but he held out for the money. I can only imagine how that guy is still kicking him self. The lesson is that sometimes Fortuna favors the bold.
Cue all the "I really need [obscure function XYZZY] in {Word, Excel}" bots from Microsoft!
Not everybody who uses M$ Office is doing trivial work, some of the secretaries where I work use it's advanced features to save immense amounts of time. You can moan about people that need functions that OpenOffice doesn't have but it still won't make OpenOffice better than M$ Office. Tossing about pharses like: "Well then don't use that function" is not an option for a poweruser, he/she will bin OpenOffice and write it off. The day that OpenOffice supports all the advanced features in M$ Office that I use and does so without falling apart I'll switch. Until then M$ Office is a superior product, be it on Windows, Linux or my prefferred OS.X. So let's keep things in perspective. I'm hoping OpenOffice will be able to compete with M$ Office sooner rather than later but hyping OpenOffice up will only hurt it.
I've never understood the significant advantages of branded *nixes over BSD and linux.... My school runs Solaris, and I find it to be a solid *nix, but why would anyone pay (a large sum of) money for it?
Traditionally the branded *nixes have been more stable than Linux, performed better especially on large multipro systems, been guaranteed to work practically 100% of the time on certified hardware, been better tested and not on the OS using public like Linux still is to a large extent. Furthermore, with the big brands, if you have a mysterious bug or kernel panic you get a number to call and somebody works on it 16 hours a day till the bug is fixed. I can vouch for that last part, I used to do it for a living with a major Branded *nix. I will freely admit, however, that Linux is catching up with the branded *nixes. It has practically killed them off on most stand alone workstations and it is eating into the small to medium server market which is probably also why Sun is doing this.
Slashdot Mirror
But what ratio have received the $43M from an fallen African state?
It never ceses to amaze me what sort of people fall for that gag or one of its variants. I recently saw a news show on CBS about the victims of these scams. The list included and Engineer a Doctor and a Schoolteacher. You would think people with that level of education would know better? I suppose it puts some weigh behind the old adage: "...educated beyond their intelligence".
Actually you have to uncheck the 'PDF maker' component, check the 'Do not show this notice again' and then click 'Continue' which (IIRC) is contrary to what the instructions say, which is to click 'Cancel' to opt out of the repair. Now curses and pestilence upon you for irritaning me into re-installing Adobe Acrobat just to try this out.
It's just plants copying RAID or PAR files. This is nothing new - we've had those for years now.
Copying? If it bothers you so much you can always sue them for patent infringement. Of course the plants might lawyer up and come back at you claiming prior art....
If you have any trouble with this bar the thing to do (Worked for me on Adobe Acrob at 6.0 for Mac) is:or where ever else you installe Office there are three subfolderst there.each directory contains a file name Delete those files and you are rid of the damn toolbar. The only problem is that the next time you start Adobe Acrobat you get a nag screen stating that Acrobat needs to make repairs. No matter how I try to opt out of the damn repair Acrobat still re-creates those files. Just for kicks I tried to refuse Acrobat write permission to those three directories but it just refused to start which I thought was rather funny. After that I deleted the damn thing (aka Adobe Acrobat Professional) and have yet to regret it.
...lots of closed source contains rather dodgy comments that you might not want to be public.
Hehe.. very true. My favorite one:
"Sane people do things like this?"
Of course, as the article points out, none of this is actually illegal, even if it does make the victim look a bit less like a white knight
I once recieved an abusive letter (Pinned under the windsheild wiper of my car) from another tenant in the same building where had just moved in. They were complaining that I was parkign in a spot that they had rights to and were paying for and which happened to be the best spot available. I returned a very polite letter that I made sure was ice cold and factual outlining that the parking spaces were numbered as where the apartments and that according to my rental agreement this parking spot Nr. X belongded to my aparment Nr. X and that I was in fact paying for it. There were no insults, no abuse and no gloating in the letter, I just explained that they were in fact squattin on my parking spot, not the other way around. I never heard from them again. The the moral of the story is that the biggest mistake you can make is to get carried away in an Oh, goody, I'm in the right... Now lets REALLY chew them out! type frenzy. Alot of people end up making the mistake of hurting their own case by getting abusive or even insulting and thus ruin their position.
Apple already has a blue screen of death and just to show they are more innovative than Microsoft there is also the: 'Black screen of death', the 'frozen desktop from hell' and my personal favorite the 'Spinning beachball of death'. And before anybody flames me for Mac-Bashing please note that I am speaking from my experience as a Mac user.
Let's all hope that a plump Elbonian is taking a walk when CmdrTaco lands there after being tossed out of the plane.
The directive will now be passed to European Parliament, which can reject or amend the proposal, for a second reading.
It seems to me, judging from the above quote from TFA, that Democracy still has a chance to deal with this matter. Furthermore it seems to me that rejecting the European constitution out of hand simply because of software patents is a bit short sighted. The way the matter of Software patents has been handled in the EU may leave something to be desired but it is still no worse than the horsetrading and sculduggery that goes on in the national parilaments of various EU member states every day. I'm not the biggest fan of the EU but it is still better than the old fragmented Europe of feuding nation states.
The BBC is one of the more widely used public services in the UK.
Try the world! The BBC's TV and Radio programs are widely watched and listened to around the world by alot more people than use the service in the UK. I don't think people in the UK are quite aware of just how big an international PR medium the BBC is. Other countries can only dream of having a state controlled TV network that is watched by this kind of an international audience. Furthermore, at least in so far as news reporting is concerned, the BBC commands alot more respect internationally than the big US networks do (Althoug to be fair there is a number of notable exceptions to this rule among the latter but it is depressingly small) recent reporting scandals not withstanding.
Heh.. That's a funny thought isn't it? Somewhere on planet X in solarsystem Y intrepid scientific pioneers sit at their radio eqipment searching for signs of life, messages from other planets. After years of searching they finally get the message they have been waiting for. They spend months decodign it and finally manage to make sense of it. The gather around a display device full of expectation. Is it the encyclopedia galactica? The cure for all their diseases? The secret of universal peace? Somebody pushes a button to display the message for the first time on a visualdevice and that damn 'goatse' picture flashes accross the screen.
That thing reminds me of Dilbert's mission statement generator. The scary thing is that the material from Dilbert's babble engine actually sounds like alot of the stuff you are likely to find on actual corporate websites.
....the "The Gulag Archipelago", vols. I through III, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to prepare your self for what awaits you after Russian security servcices snatch you off the street and cart you off to recieve your just punishment in a secret Gulag they run in Siberia in cooperation with RIAA. The standard sentence is three years, locked in a rubber room listening to bagpipe music 24/7.
Information cannot be stopped. Knowledge about how to build a nuclear bomb eventually will spread to even terrorists. Well funded terrorists with friends in oil-rich states in the Middle East also have money to acquire all the parts to build a weapon.
What is the defense against the use of a nuclear weapon by a terrorist? The answer is not a missile shield. Even if the shield is 80% effective, one successful nuclear bomb would be devastating.
True, what never ceases to amaze me that certain people in the US still seem to think that nuclear missiles being launched at the USA by rogue states is the main threat. To me it seems like an excuse to throw money at defense contractors. If I wanted to detonate a nuclear device inside the USA it would be ever so much more simple to slip it through in one of the millions upon millions of cargo containers that move through US harbors every year. Another way is simply to land it off a small vessel somewhere in an sparsely inhabited place. There are stretches of coastline in the US, hundreds of kilometers long, that are patrolled by a handfull of coasguard cutters and a dozen or so state troopers, but still offer direct access to the road infrastructure. The really difficult part about building a terrorist nuclear bomb is staying off the radar screens of Russian/Chinese/US/European intelligence services as you buy the materials and build the thing since preventing Terrorists from getting their hands on an A-Bomb is probably one of the few things those guys would all be willing to cooperate on. Once it is built and on the loose a terrorist A-Bomb would be about as easy to find as Osama Bin Laden seem to be. That is if you stay away from idiot schemes like launching on the tip of some rickety badly designed ICBM on the USA.
... does have a tendency to make lousy remakes of great originals. I wonder if they will manage to make a hash of 'The Hitchikers Guide'? That being said mucking this up should be impossible. That book is just so damn funny even an idiot should be able to make a at least a mildly funny film from it.
how IBM is determined to move to an open desktop based on Linux and OpenOffice within about a year.
.....
:-D
It's about time IBM took another whack at you know who
Now let's hope this gets upgraded from the lowly status of a mere rumor to the lofty status of a fact and results in a flood of out-of-the-box fully Linux capable of Laptops.
If you want to attract people who play computer games to use your operating system, that's great. But do not assume that these people are normal Joes. Do not assume that they make up anything other than the tiniest niche market.
True, games are a niche market, although an important one. The best ways for the likes of Suse, RedHat, Mandrake &Co. to get regular users to use Linux is firstly by developing it's desktop capability to the point that one can convince corporations to use it on workstations. That basically means (this will horrify pruists) idiot proof Linux distros that offer all the same software and functionality as the normal Windows workstation plus the same kind of easy intuitive integration into Windows networks as you have got with OS.X. Secondly it would be important to ensure it has a sigificant representation in the student workstation pools of educational institutions from primary school upward. Which is why Microsoft donates computers and software to schools all over the place, they get to look like philanthropists while securing their market share. The 'normal user' will use at home what he/she learned to use at school or uses regularly at work.
They are attempting to reopen their body donation program which has been on hold since spring 2004 due to disappearing parts...
Somebody please clue me in here. What sort of a sick excuse for a human being would steal parts of a cadaver???
I always stress the importance of getting a good power supply when I give advice for building PCs....
Personally I'm happy if I can teach users to remember to switch the powersupply from 110 to 220 volts when recieving computers from bought in the USA before plugging them into a 220v power outlet. I still have trouble not laughing out loud every time one of those ebay jockeys shows up with a PC/MAC that has a burned out powersupply. It must be really frustrating to buy a PC/MAC for a shitload of money and then damage or completely ruin it because you forgot to flip one little red switch.
Roland Dorgeles was an eccentric Frenchman and arch nemesis of the Cubists. To poke fun at them he tied a paint-brush to a donkey's tail, placed a canvas with pots of paint behind it. The donkey faithfully conjured up an abstract painting. The work was then exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants. The funny bit is that both the the public and the critics who commented on the painting did not seem to value it any less than the work of Van Dongen, Matisse and Roualt, who all exhibited at the same Salon. The matter caused a small scandal when it was leaked to the press.
I once had a similar experience myself when I went to an art exhibition where an artist had bolted several multicolored urinals to a wall, no frills just standard issue urinals fromt he hardware store bolted to a wall, that's it. No paint no sculpting just urinals on a wall. The thing had a six figure price tag and a 'SOLD" sign on it. I drew the conclusion that art is what people say it is and if people think splashes from a donkeys tail and porcelain urinals bolted to a wall is art then well it is art.
... his reputation allows him to speak with a louder voice than we mortals do. After all, how many people can claim their hobby project morphed into something that makes the übercorpies fear for their market share? I would have expected him of all people to have spoken out sooner though?!?
...converts from the Darkness of Microsoft.
... more unfortunate enslaved souls would escape the dungeons of the dark land of Mordor.
You are new to denigrating Microsoft aren't you. That should be:
Who knows?
Who knows indeed, I once saw a documentary about Apple. The guy who narated the show told a story of how he worked one summer for them when Jobs and Co. were still operating out of a garage. When he came for his pay at the end of the summer Jobs offered to pay him with shares in Apple but he held out for the money. I can only imagine how that guy is still kicking him self. The lesson is that sometimes Fortuna favors the bold.
Cue all the "I really need [obscure function XYZZY] in {Word, Excel}" bots from Microsoft!
Not everybody who uses M$ Office is doing trivial work, some of the secretaries where I work use it's advanced features to save immense amounts of time. You can moan about people that need functions that OpenOffice doesn't have but it still won't make OpenOffice better than M$ Office. Tossing about pharses like: "Well then don't use that function" is not an option for a poweruser, he/she will bin OpenOffice and write it off. The day that OpenOffice supports all the advanced features in M$ Office that I use and does so without falling apart I'll switch. Until then M$ Office is a superior product, be it on Windows, Linux or my prefferred OS.X. So let's keep things in perspective. I'm hoping OpenOffice will be able to compete with M$ Office sooner rather than later but hyping OpenOffice up will only hurt it.
I've never understood the significant advantages of branded *nixes over BSD and linux.... My school runs Solaris, and I find it to be a solid *nix, but why would anyone pay (a large sum of) money for it?
Traditionally the branded *nixes have been more stable than Linux, performed better especially on large multipro systems, been guaranteed to work practically 100% of the time on certified hardware, been better tested and not on the OS using public like Linux still is to a large extent. Furthermore, with the big brands, if you have a mysterious bug or kernel panic you get a number to call and somebody works on it 16 hours a day till the bug is fixed. I can vouch for that last part, I used to do it for a living with a major Branded *nix. I will freely admit, however, that Linux is catching up with the branded *nixes. It has practically killed them off on most stand alone workstations and it is eating into the small to medium server market which is probably also why Sun is doing this.