Your comparison is both incomplete, and somewhat innacurate.
For instance, AIM is not the only IM that can send files (directly). Also, you mention encryption.. while I do not use either yahoo or msn, i can tell you that AIM has had the ability to use digital certificates to initiate RSA-2048 -> SSL encryption for years. (I use www.thawte.com's free e-mail certificate for both this and my e-mail.)
Anyhoo.. just a couple of corrections.
PS. GAIM has an encryption plugin... but it does not interpolate with AIM's encryption scheme. Why is this? Because of this, gaim encryption only works with other gaim users, instead of the entire aim community..
"You'd think, with all the smart people working for newspapers..."
Erm.. I don't know about your local newspaper, but the folks at my local newspaper seems to working on the same reading age as those that they write for (about 8th grade).
Then again.. maybe this person is refering to the New York Times... 'cause we all know they've never screwed up a story...
The Yellow Machine's RAID features can bring a greater degree of confidence in the safety of your data than you might find in an inexpensive consumer NAS device. In addition, the flexibility of its built-in switch and router bring extra capabilities to the table in a compact form-factor.
But the Yellow Machine misses the mark on a number of points, especially its primary value-proposition of being an all-in-one box for small-office users. If all you want is a basic NAT firewall, the Yellow Machine will probably suit you. But its use of a proxy that is limited only to email and web protection (and buggy at that) will give you fits if you want to limit what users can do on the Internet. Frankly, you'd be a lot better served buying a $40 router and just setting the Yellow Machine to Storage mode.
But even as a NAS, the Yellow Machine fails to match up to RAID competion like Buffalo's TeraStation and Infrant's ReadyNAS due to its missing print server, inability to connect to USB-based storage devices and missing support of user file access via FTP and HTTP.
The bottom line is that the Yellow Machine's relatively high cost, merely modest performance, and problematic proxy behaviors should cause prospective purchasers to think twice before buying.
For my money, looks like I'll be investigating other products, first.
Normally, I'm not in favor of suing. Seems that there are far too many frivolous lawsuits, these days. In Sony's case, however, I'll go so far as to say that they deserve to get their ass handed to them in court.
Not only did they put something like this in their cd's, but they were warned by a respected security/anti-virus firm about it... and they did nothing until the public caught on. An example needs to be made of companies that behave like this.
I say, write your state legislator as well as your congressmen and senators, and urge everyone to sue. Let those <sarcasm> lovely </sarcasm> DMCA laws work in our favor, for once.
Perhaps the question is not, "why do betas last so long, these days?" Perhaps the question should be, "why didn't betas always last this long?"
Seriously here, how much buggy software might have been avoided if manufacturers had been more concerned about the final product?
As a side-note: while the majority of software has experienced lengthening betas over the past few years, there is one market that has gone the polar-opposite: games. Ever notice how many patches come out for games, these days? Or how many really crappy games get rushed through just to get it out the door? Game companies could learn a lesson by following the rest of the industry, for once.
"NBC Universal has signed a deal with Wurld Media to make some of their movies available for download via a secure P2P network in 2006..."
NBC/Universal may not have known this, but most of these movies have already been available for download via a secure P2P network for the past 3 years or so; BitTorrent uses SHA-1 for hashing, and is thus secure against fraudulant data injections. Silly NBC.
"Sony BMG today detailed a program that should allow customers who bought one of the 52 titles known to be tained with the company's deeply flawed anti-piracy software to exchange them for CDs of the same title, sans rootkit of course."
What about damages incurred to those who unknowingly installed the rootkit? What about the cost of removal? IMHO, it would be in Sony's best interest to offer something beyond just replacing the defective rootkit'd product... As an added incentive to Sony, such an action might look good in their up-coming trials from the lawsuits resulting from their rootkit.
"...has created organisms that live six times their usual lifespan, raising hopes that it might be possible to slow ageing in humans."
Great... this is just what our world needs. Half of Africa is malnourished and in China a woman is only allowed 1 child in her lifetime... and we're considering increasing our lifespans to 6x.
Science is really neat, and all that... but sometimes, I swear, scientists don't think of the repurcussions of their actions. Do they take into consideration food consumption? Living space? Energy requirements? Don't get me wrong, I'm no hippy... but I can see some serious harm coming from this.
If this were some drug that were only given out to our brightest minds, I'd be all for it. But if something like this is actually applied to the population, en-mass, the end result will be catastrophic.
Just my $0.02... maybe the rest of you aren't so cynical.
"...the music credits list Elton John and Andrew Loyd Webber along side John Williams..."
Ok, I can see Andrew Lloyd Webber... he's a well known theatre guy with plenty of musicals under his belt. But... Elton John?
What, is he going to sing Rocket Man during space scenes or something?
I wish like mad that I had the links to back up what I'm about to say, but I guess you'll just have to take my word for it, or do the research yourself.
About 18 months ago, I'd heard a friend that smokes complaining about how much tax money the government made off of smokers... so I took it upon myself to do a little research. With the help of Google, I was able to locate the relevant U.S. federal government sites. As it turns out, with the insane amount of money that is spent on tobacco smoking related illnesses (both in treatment and prevention), in order for cigarette taxes to fully pay for it, you would have to spend near $15 per pack of cigarettes.
The simple fact is that contrary to popular belief (I was fairly shocked, myself), smokers are not paying anywhere near enough in taxes to simple even with the cost of their healthcare.
Somewhere, I actually saved the three government reports and analysis pages... but for the life of me, I'm not sure where they are, off hand. I know one site used was the FDA. The other two were both.gov's.. but I cannot remember what agencies they were.
If you ask nicely, I may be able to find those pages (and the url's) and send them to you. But by the time I get around to locating them again, this story will likely be days old.
"I wonder if this will have any impact on the no smoking bans we have seen in recent years?"
Absolutely not. It's not like you're allowed to smoke ultra-lights or whatever. 90% less pollution in my air is still pollution. Also, frankly, cigarette smoke is incredibly offensive to many people. It's not merely the health concern, it's plain rude to be forced to either breathe in smoke or leave an establishment. It's long past time for people to realise that forcing me to inhale your cigarette smoke is about as polite as me walking past your dinner table and shitting my pants, and forcing you to either breathe in my ass-gas or leave the establishment. It's that simple.
Smoke at home if you want. Or, outside, away from other people.
"...the Yahoo Mail team, which they think beat the Gmail team."
I've got news for Yahoo: You haven't won jack. Your interface is laden with annoying ads, as opposed to the gmail ads that you barely even notice. I find that with Yahoo!, even brand new accounts get a metric tonne of spam on a daily basis. This is to be expected... but why on earth can't you filter it out? Gmail does. Plus, Gmail has that lovely, innovative method for tracking multiple email correspondencies.
In short, Gmail is a superior service. For all your efforts and hard work, you ain't won jack.
At most, I'd be willing to pay half of what it costs to buy the DVD at Wal-Mart. This assumes that the download is of comparable quality and includes any extras that are usually reserved for DVD.
I see little reason to pay more than half, considering how much cheaper it is for the studios to put it out on the internet rather than produce, package and ship DVD's. In fact, even if the internet downloaded movie costs half as much as the store bought DVD, the studio will still make more money from the transaction.
Of course, this is all a pipe-dream. Looking at the track record of greed and abuse by the movie studios and their lackeys, you can be sure that internet downloaded movies will have artificially high prices. They'll intro the service at $8 for all movies, and then after a year or so they'll start demanding $15 for new releases. And, to top it off: you know there is no way in hell that these downloads will be legally transferable. If I buy a DVD, and decide it blows, I can at least take it down to the pawn shop or give it to someone else. Can the same thing be said with these DRM laden downloads? I seriously doubt it.
"Don't laugh, the White House cease and desisted The Onion!"
At first I opted to ignore people making comments about how "stupid" it was for the White House to give a C&D to The Onion, but it's really starting to get old... so, here's my rebuttal:
The Onion is a well known fictional news-site. Nigh everything you find there is a farse. The problem, and the beauty, of The Onion is that they present their "news stories" in a manner that many don't realise is a joke -- many people actually think that The Onion is a real news site. Anyone familiar with it can recount the many times that real journalists don't do enough research and reprint an Onion story, believing the farse to be truth.
This is all well and good... but sites like The Onion should not be using the Presidential / White House seal. Those are government seals that are used for official sources. The Onion using those seals is taking humour one step too far... instead of just making up a fake news story and letting people figure out for themselves whether it's true or not, The Onion was shoving a government seal on it -- which makes it look much more authentic.
I see no reason why they shouldn't have gotten a C&D. It's not like they were sued for $1,000,000.00 or shut-down. They were just told to stop using official government seals for completely fictional "news."
As to the "waste of government resources" arguement: it probably only costs the taxpayers of one of the wealthiest nations on earth a couple thousand bucks, at most. The distributed cost to you and me... yeah... like $0.00000005. Darn... I'm going to have to go on wellfare, now.
Just because the parent's comment wasn't exactly nice to WoTC does not invalidate it... Many, if not most, "serious" dnd players/dm's very much miss TSR -- a company that was full of innovative ideas and actually seemed to want to please its customers.
Gamers have several reasons to be less-than-satisfied with WoTC, compared to TSR, including:
Bringing out crappy products just to fill the monthly release cycle, instead of focusing on polishing products to a point where DM's don't have to read through a book to be able to sanction official content.
Releasing books that seem more focused on pretty artwork than solid material -- and, of course, the artwork costs more to print, so the cost for the book is increased. Go figure
Refocusing resources into creating entirely new realms (ie. Eberron) instead of updating much-loved and heavily-played pre-existing realms (ie. the Forgotten Realms). (note: I'm not saying Eberron sucks. I'm just saying that FR needs a lot of work before it is updated to d20, still.. and it's been 5 years since 3.0 debuted.)
"Updating" the ruleset (ie. version 3.5) to the point that half the "current" DnD books are using incompatible rules which require serious work by the DM in order for their material to work with the 3.5 rule-system.
I could go on... but I think I've proven my point: WoTC hasn't always shown consideration to its customers. The parent was perfectly justified for voicing dissatisfaction with WoTC. Mod him up.
Can anyone explain what is up with this? The board comes with 8 channel sound built in. What do you need a separate sound card for? Is the sound quality really that much better?"
I'll take a stab at answering that question:
Anyone serious about either audio or gaming adds a dedicated sound card. And a good one (ie. audigy2 or better). Your onboard 8-channel sound is a minimal solution, and offers very little hardware acceleration, making it subpar for gaming. (What gamer wants 5-10% of the cpu's attention to be stuck on doing audio, when a good sound blaster can drop that to 0-3%) Also of consideration is audio quality; as a basic rule-of-thumb, onboard audio is going to be built using lower quality DAC's and other components. The signal-to-noise ratio isn't going to be stellar, and is thus not suitable for serious audio enthusiasts.
In short, onboard sound may be fine for listening to mp3's on your computer speakers, and may even be good enough for those that only play occasional games... but no serious geek would consider onboard audio as a replacement for a decent soundcard.. especially when you can get a basic Audigy2 for under $50.
Not to be rude... but your lack of knowledge about computer hardware makes your suggestions moot. Not that the other components you mention are bad.. it's just that it's hard to take your recommendations seriously when you display a lack of basic knowledge about hardware. Please refrain from making recommendations until you are better versed in the subject.
Well, beyond the fact that there aren't many companies putting out E-books as-yet...
Price. The price for the few E-books that I come accross is too high for me to accept.
Exportability. Who wants to buy an E-book (that costs nearly as much as the paper version) when it's digitally signed/encrypted so that it can't be exported into other formats? It may not bother you now, but a few years down the line it'd really piss you off if that copy of Harry Potter in.lit format couldn't be converted to a format that is still in existence. Hell, some E-books won't even let you print your copy out on paper. WTF is up with that...
They don't to spend $100,000,000 to get me on board.... I've already disabled all my antivirus and antispyware, and my computer is still too fast for my software.
Leave it to MS to give me an excuse to upgrade... they've succeeded where countless other viruses and worms have not!
Lately there have been so many newly announced (and shortly there-after: denounced) rumours concerning Google, I'm proposing that Slashdot create a new category just for Google related rumours.
Seriously... are there people out there that have nothing better to do than speculate as to what new thing will come out of google's labs next?
Slashdot Mirror
For instance, AIM is not the only IM that can send files (directly). Also, you mention encryption.. while I do not use either yahoo or msn, i can tell you that AIM has had the ability to use digital certificates to initiate RSA-2048 -> SSL encryption for years. (I use www.thawte.com's free e-mail certificate for both this and my e-mail.)
Anyhoo.. just a couple of corrections.
PS. GAIM has an encryption plugin... but it does not interpolate with AIM's encryption scheme. Why is this? Because of this, gaim encryption only works with other gaim users, instead of the entire aim community..
Then again.. maybe this person is refering to the New York Times... 'cause we all know they've never screwed up a story...
Here is a quote of their conclusion: For my money, looks like I'll be investigating other products, first.
Normally, I'm not in favor of suing. Seems that there are far too many frivolous lawsuits, these days. In Sony's case, however, I'll go so far as to say that they deserve to get their ass handed to them in court.
Not only did they put something like this in their cd's, but they were warned by a respected security/anti-virus firm about it... and they did nothing until the public caught on. An example needs to be made of companies that behave like this.
I say, write your state legislator as well as your congressmen and senators, and urge everyone to sue. Let those <sarcasm> lovely </sarcasm> DMCA laws work in our favor, for once.
Perhaps the question is not, "why do betas last so long, these days?" Perhaps the question should be, "why didn't betas always last this long?"
Seriously here, how much buggy software might have been avoided if manufacturers had been more concerned about the final product?
As a side-note: while the majority of software has experienced lengthening betas over the past few years, there is one market that has gone the polar-opposite: games. Ever notice how many patches come out for games, these days? Or how many really crappy games get rushed through just to get it out the door? Game companies could learn a lesson by following the rest of the industry, for once.
I find that it conserves water if I just piss outdoors. Sure, the neighbors might not like it, but ... it's for the environment!
"Have Geeks Gone Mainstream?"
I can tell you from first-hand experience with females: NO, Geeks have not gone mainstream!!
Science is really neat, and all that... but sometimes, I swear, scientists don't think of the repurcussions of their actions. Do they take into consideration food consumption? Living space? Energy requirements? Don't get me wrong, I'm no hippy... but I can see some serious harm coming from this.
If this were some drug that were only given out to our brightest minds, I'd be all for it. But if something like this is actually applied to the population, en-mass, the end result will be catastrophic.
Just my $0.02... maybe the rest of you aren't so cynical.
Am I the only one that misread that, at first?
;)
I could have sworn it actually read, "Microsoft Complete Cluster F**k Server 2003"
And, if you think about it... my misinterpretation might actually be closer to the truth.
Do they show OO loading? Because that's a waste of a solid 60 seconds worth of video... ;)
Er.. uhm.. so I heard.
I wish like mad that I had the links to back up what I'm about to say, but I guess you'll just have to take my word for it, or do the research yourself.
.gov's.. but I cannot remember what agencies they were.
About 18 months ago, I'd heard a friend that smokes complaining about how much tax money the government made off of smokers... so I took it upon myself to do a little research. With the help of Google, I was able to locate the relevant U.S. federal government sites. As it turns out, with the insane amount of money that is spent on tobacco smoking related illnesses (both in treatment and prevention), in order for cigarette taxes to fully pay for it, you would have to spend near $15 per pack of cigarettes.
The simple fact is that contrary to popular belief (I was fairly shocked, myself), smokers are not paying anywhere near enough in taxes to simple even with the cost of their healthcare.
Somewhere, I actually saved the three government reports and analysis pages... but for the life of me, I'm not sure where they are, off hand. I know one site used was the FDA. The other two were both
If you ask nicely, I may be able to find those pages (and the url's) and send them to you. But by the time I get around to locating them again, this story will likely be days old.
Smoke at home if you want. Or, outside, away from other people.
In short, Gmail is a superior service. For all your efforts and hard work, you ain't won jack.
At most, I'd be willing to pay half of what it costs to buy the DVD at Wal-Mart. This assumes that the download is of comparable quality and includes any extras that are usually reserved for DVD.
I see little reason to pay more than half, considering how much cheaper it is for the studios to put it out on the internet rather than produce, package and ship DVD's. In fact, even if the internet downloaded movie costs half as much as the store bought DVD, the studio will still make more money from the transaction.
Of course, this is all a pipe-dream. Looking at the track record of greed and abuse by the movie studios and their lackeys, you can be sure that internet downloaded movies will have artificially high prices. They'll intro the service at $8 for all movies, and then after a year or so they'll start demanding $15 for new releases. And, to top it off: you know there is no way in hell that these downloads will be legally transferable. If I buy a DVD, and decide it blows, I can at least take it down to the pawn shop or give it to someone else. Can the same thing be said with these DRM laden downloads? I seriously doubt it.
The Onion is a well known fictional news-site. Nigh everything you find there is a farse. The problem, and the beauty, of The Onion is that they present their "news stories" in a manner that many don't realise is a joke -- many people actually think that The Onion is a real news site. Anyone familiar with it can recount the many times that real journalists don't do enough research and reprint an Onion story, believing the farse to be truth.
This is all well and good... but sites like The Onion should not be using the Presidential / White House seal. Those are government seals that are used for official sources. The Onion using those seals is taking humour one step too far... instead of just making up a fake news story and letting people figure out for themselves whether it's true or not, The Onion was shoving a government seal on it -- which makes it look much more authentic.
I see no reason why they shouldn't have gotten a C&D. It's not like they were sued for $1,000,000.00 or shut-down. They were just told to stop using official government seals for completely fictional "news."
As to the "waste of government resources" arguement: it probably only costs the taxpayers of one of the wealthiest nations on earth a couple thousand bucks, at most. The distributed cost to you and me... yeah... like $0.00000005. Darn... I'm going to have to go on wellfare, now.
Gamers have several reasons to be less-than-satisfied with WoTC, compared to TSR, including:
- "Updating" the ruleset (ie. version 3.5) to the point that half the "current" DnD books are using incompatible rules which require serious work by the DM in order for their material to work with the 3.5 rule-system.
I could go on... but I think I've proven my point: WoTC hasn't always shown consideration to its customers. The parent was perfectly justified for voicing dissatisfaction with WoTC. Mod him up.something tells me that something like this could usher in a new era of pr0n. 3d goggles and a vibrating chair, oh my!
I'll take a stab at answering that question:
Anyone serious about either audio or gaming adds a dedicated sound card. And a good one (ie. audigy2 or better). Your onboard 8-channel sound is a minimal solution, and offers very little hardware acceleration, making it subpar for gaming. (What gamer wants 5-10% of the cpu's attention to be stuck on doing audio, when a good sound blaster can drop that to 0-3%) Also of consideration is audio quality; as a basic rule-of-thumb, onboard audio is going to be built using lower quality DAC's and other components. The signal-to-noise ratio isn't going to be stellar, and is thus not suitable for serious audio enthusiasts.
In short, onboard sound may be fine for listening to mp3's on your computer speakers, and may even be good enough for those that only play occasional games... but no serious geek would consider onboard audio as a replacement for a decent soundcard.. especially when you can get a basic Audigy2 for under $50.
Not to be rude... but your lack of knowledge about computer hardware makes your suggestions moot. Not that the other components you mention are bad.. it's just that it's hard to take your recommendations seriously when you display a lack of basic knowledge about hardware. Please refrain from making recommendations until you are better versed in the subject.
Well, beyond the fact that there aren't many companies putting out E-books as-yet...
- Exportability. Who wants to buy an E-book (that costs nearly as much as the paper version) when it's digitally signed/encrypted so that it can't be exported into other formats? It may not bother you now, but a few years down the line it'd really piss you off if that copy of Harry Potter in
.lit format couldn't be converted to a format that is still in existence. Hell, some E-books won't even let you print your copy out on paper. WTF is up with that...
Just my 2 cents. YMMVThey don't to spend $100,000,000 to get me on board.... I've already disabled all my antivirus and antispyware, and my computer is still too fast for my software.
Leave it to MS to give me an excuse to upgrade... they've succeeded where countless other viruses and worms have not!
Lately there have been so many newly announced (and shortly there-after: denounced) rumours concerning Google, I'm proposing that Slashdot create a new category just for Google related rumours.
Seriously... are there people out there that have nothing better to do than speculate as to what new thing will come out of google's labs next?
And people say that I need to get a life...