Piracy is what keeps Microsoft from selling Windows for over $500 a copy to college students.
Nope, GNU/Linux is what keeps MS from trying to charge college students $500 for windows. They know that if they try to pull that off, their market share will evaporate in a few years since college students who can't spare $500 (read: 99%) will switch to open source.
You probably enabled soundcheck, and then imported a bunch of mp3s. On my pc this gets you 90+% CPU usage until its done, and then goes back to under 3%.
Soundcheck scans your mp3's volume level, so that the volume level doesn't jump up and down when playing mp3s from different sources.
I think that macrovision has a lot to gain by using FUD along with FADE (ok, lame pun): Once this can get to the mainstream media, or even most gaming mags, you can be sure that this story turns from "ingame copy protection alters gameplay" to "pirated games don't work right".
Remember a few back ago when the BSA was warning people about viruses in pirated programs[*]? I have a feeling we are going back there. Once joe average hears about anti-piracy software messing up his aim, he'll start blaming pirated games for everything from grafic glitches to lag to not being able to get past level 2 because he cant shoot straight in a FPS anyway. Joe buys the original game. Mission acomplished!
[*]Also, [RI/MP]AA recently trying to dub p2p Peer to Porn
I guess us poor windows users can settle with Winamp (if you are using a version before 2.90 I suggest you upgrade if only for the media library. Not as good as itunes but a cool feature none the less).
The included AVS (advanced visualisation studio) is pretty good, and you can easily make your own visualisations. Also, if you really want to send your productivity down the drain i suggest you run winamp, start AVS, enable overlay mode (double click for config, go to settings->dispay), and change the overlay color to black (or whatever you use as the default font color). "Set desktop to color" is optional. Minimize winamp and enjoy.
I don't know about the towel the parent mentioned, but i'd keep a couple of aspirins handy;-)
I'm not trying to start a flame war here, but my experience with winzip vs stuffit is the exact opposite: Stuffit takes ages to start, has a more obtrusive "buy me" notice (10 sec count down), and the interface is horrible:
The "extact selected" button has no label and looks almost exactly the same as the "add files" one
It supports dragging files from explorer to an archive, but not the opposite. This alone is a reason not to use stuffit.
The extract dialog is retarded: it wastes most of the screen space in showing me the files I've already selected, has a text field that's too small for most paths, and the browse dialog can't create new folders. The winzip dialog is much much better and has a lot of useful options. (although it could do with autocomplete cough *winrar* cough).
I might be using stuffit the wrong way, as I have been using winzip for years before i tried it, but i am completely underwhelmed. Also, afaik, stuffit doesn't do rar or ace, but then again neither does winzip.
Winrar has support for more file types than winzip, but winzip's interface just looks and feels nicer. It's not like winrar is ugly or anything but for some strange reason I can't get myself to use winrar over it.
Winace is very good too, but the interface feels a bit strange (draggin and archive to the window moves the archive to the current folder, whereas in winzip and winrar it opens the archive).
If the code comes through unscathed and viewable, then the compression wasn't effectively messed with
Messing up with the compression doesn't just mean that this particular frame doesn't look right. It could look ok, but use up too much space so there is less available for the rest of the film, where it's needed more (ie action scenes).
The anandtech article runs a measly 18 pages, while tom's runs 53. So it is clear that the THG article is 194% better than the anandtech one (see fig.1).
What's more, in our second test, "pretty pictures on the first page of the article" the beleaguered news site falls even further behind. While THG has 4 pictures on the first page, including one of the athlon XP (oh shiny!) anandtech has none. This could be due to a browser incompatibility or a hyper-active web-filter but we couldn't be bothered to check. (see fig.2)
As we can see, the THG article has !DIVISION_BY_ZERO! times the images of the anandech one, and so it must be much better.
[I am quite surprised that this post passes the lameness filter, considering the amount of ugly ASCII art. The fact that./ kills whitespace in ecode is annoying though ]
The fact that you have probably not played halo PC notwithstanding, I'd take my mouse and keyboard over a joystick any day. Add in internet play and possible mods, and I think that it's worth taking a look at if you don't have an xbox.
Of course, HL2 also being set for september 30 won't help halo-pc one bit.
links in blogs point to what bloggers are talking about, are interested in, and thus searching the web one gets what people who use the web are interested in.
The possible problem is: searching the web gets you what bloggers are interested in, and bloggers are not 100% representative of web users.
The issue here, as I see it, is that because of crosslinking, a lame blog entry about subject X could get a higher pagerank than a good forum thread about the same thing. Now, this is more of a problem with pagerank than a problem of blogging, but my point that more people getting into blogging could worsen google's results' quality still stands.
And just to be sure I'm clear on this: this is not the bloggers' problem, this is google's problem, and frankly link farming is a much worse "exploit" of this than the bloggers' artificially increased pagerank.
Good point. My worry is not about "amateurs" scoring better than the pros. It's about bloggers scoring better than everybody else, pros and other amateurs included.
Blogs could be bad for the quality of google's results: because of blogs linking to eachother, the get a bigger pagerank than thy should, and therefore more influence on google than they deserve. I'm afraid that getting more of the unwashed massed to blog would be a bad thing. Ofcourse google could change the way pagerank works so that blogs have a reduced pagerank or something to that extend.
Excerpt: You'd be hard-pressed to design a system that gave the blogging community a greater impact on Google's results. Because bloggers by definition link far more than your average Web page, and because they also tend to link to each other's sites (most blogs feature a now standard list of comrades in their margins), a page that attracts the attention of a few bloggers will quickly shoot up the Google rankings. Do a search on Larry Lessig's book "The Future of Ideas" -- a hit with the blogging community -- and a review from a blog called Sopsy Digest shows up 15 notches higher than an article from Business Week. (Or at least it did the last time I checked; Google rankings are hardly set in stone.)
We need to take care of our own FIRST. Don't worry about your neighbor's family until you feed your OWN.
If say Ethiopians started crawling into India en masse offering to program for 8 peanuts a day, Indians would toss their asses out in a second.They are hypocrits.
Right. Americans taking care of their own is OK. Indians doing the same thing [feeding their families before american or ethiopian ones] are hypocrits.
Are you suggesting that indian programmes should think "IBM is an american company, I'd rather let my family starve than work for them and make an american family starve." (Also, IBM is going to India, not vice-versa )
This is what you get when you cross some not-so-bright consumeroids [price price price// ads ads ads] with capitalism. It's the same thing with mom and pops stores vs walmart and made in USA vs made in china/taiwan.
Just wondering, when buying various products, do you make a consious effort to buy "made in the USA" even if they are more expensive or inferior to foreing ones?
I think you missunderstood me. I didnt'n mean that movie translations _could_ be hurried so they only take a week. I meant they _are_ hurried and they only take a week. The reason for the delay is distribution and marketing. (Think US to UK, no translation invlolved and the UK get most US movies around the same time as most of europe)
Also note I didn't say "you could do a goog translation in a week" I said you could do a crap one. And sadly, most are crap.
Before anyone asks "why don't you do a good one?", a lot of people can't tell a crap translation from a good one, or they are not upset about it, so there's no demand for good movie translations. Besides, around here the translation is handled by the distribution company whose "translation department" consists of some english literature students on minimum wage.
>The Harry Potter publishers were naive to think this wouldn't happen.
It's not the same thing. As far as I know, Harry Potter came out on the same day worldwide. It's just that the translated versions won't be out for a while, which is quite reasonable since translating 700+ pages is not something you can do over a weekend.
They could sit on the english version and wait until the translations were ready, but this creates another problem: waiting for _everyone_ to finish is going to take a ridiculously (sp?) long time (so everyone has to wait), and if you don't wait for everyone you're more or less back to square one: people in smaller markets have to wait for the translation and will not be happy about it. Also, where do you draw the line between popular and not-so-popular languages?
Also, for Harry Potter in particular there were going to be A LOT of people who would not be happy to learn that the (already late) book will take another 5 months to print while it's being translated. And, as another poster has observed, the odds of a story leak would skyrocket.
Traslating a book is not the same as a movie or localising a game. With a movie, there is a LOT less content to work on and the standrards are way lower so it only takes about a week, if that. Either waiting for a week to release the movie, or releasing it a week late in other countries is no big deal. Besides, since most movies have a lot of special effects, you could probably do the special effects and the translation at the same time. Theb problem lies mostly in distribution and marketing.
Video games are even easier since any game that's worth the effort of translating will go through weeks of betas and QA before it goes gold. Having said that, most companies are happy to spend 6 months making a PAL conversion even with no tranlating involved, so I must be missing something;-)
I'm really honestly not sure what PDF viewer you are using but... since when don't you have control over font size? I mean, I'm only familiar with Adobe Acrobat and xpdf but... come on buddy! It's called zoom!:)
Last time I checked, zooming does not rewrap lines, so you also need to scroll horizontaly.
(I don't believe that changing font sizes will ever be a feature of Acrobat's as the idea is that PDFs look and print the same everywhere)
So what, the same deal happened with XP and the FCKGW key.
Even if you didn't use a corporate key for XP, breaking the activation is trivial if you use FAT32 (as you can boot from a floppy and change the activation files, which is not as easy with NTFS. Or you could just disable windows file protection)
>An open source security program would be >exceptionally easy to bypass, I'd think, since >you'd have direct access to any encryption >mechanism used.
Everyone has access to the "encryption mechanism" of one time pad encryption, but it's been _proven_ (mathematicaly) to be uncrackable (unless you screw up the implementation).
When designing any kind of encrytpion, you should assume that your algorithm will be known to the attackers, even if your product will be closed source. For more info on "closed source security" aka security through obscurity, and why it is bad to depend on it, try google
Slashdot Mirror
>>No global IP addresses. Without a publicly addressable IP, any intention of sharing is crushed.
>You need to check out dynamic DNS, its been out for quite a while, and many places are free - for example, see dyndns.org
I can't see how that can help him. Dynamic DNS fixes the "my ISP gives me a dynamic IP", not the "my ISP puts me behind a stupid NAT" problem.
Piracy is what keeps Microsoft from selling Windows for over $500 a copy to college students.
Nope, GNU/Linux is what keeps MS from trying to charge college students $500 for windows. They know that if they try to pull that off, their market share will evaporate in a few years since college students who can't spare $500 (read: 99%) will switch to open source.
You probably enabled soundcheck, and then imported a bunch of mp3s. On my pc this gets you 90+% CPU usage until its done, and then goes back to under 3%.
Soundcheck scans your mp3's volume level, so that the volume level doesn't jump up and down when playing mp3s from different sources.
I think that macrovision has a lot to gain by using FUD along with FADE (ok, lame pun): Once this can get to the mainstream media, or even most gaming mags, you can be sure that this story turns from "ingame copy protection alters gameplay" to "pirated games don't work right".
Remember a few back ago when the BSA was warning people about viruses in pirated programs[*]? I have a feeling we are going back there. Once joe average hears about anti-piracy software messing up his aim, he'll start blaming pirated games for everything from grafic glitches to lag to not being able to get past level 2 because he cant shoot straight in a FPS anyway. Joe buys the original game. Mission acomplished!
[*]Also, [RI/MP]AA recently trying to dub p2p Peer to Porn
I guess us poor windows users can settle with Winamp (if you are using a version before 2.90 I suggest you upgrade if only for the media library. Not as good as itunes but a cool feature none the less).
;-)
The included AVS (advanced visualisation studio) is pretty good, and you can easily make your own visualisations. Also, if you really want to send your productivity down the drain i suggest you run winamp, start AVS, enable overlay mode (double click for config, go to settings->dispay), and change the overlay color to black (or whatever you use as the default font color). "Set desktop to color" is optional. Minimize winamp and enjoy.
I don't know about the towel the parent mentioned, but i'd keep a couple of aspirins handy
[Other cool vis plugins are milkdrop and R2 extreme]
I might be using stuffit the wrong way, as I have been using winzip for years before i tried it, but i am completely underwhelmed. Also, afaik, stuffit doesn't do rar or ace, but then again neither does winzip.
Winrar has support for more file types than winzip, but winzip's interface just looks and feels nicer. It's not like winrar is ugly or anything but for some strange reason I can't get myself to use winrar over it.
Winace is very good too, but the interface feels a bit strange (draggin and archive to the window moves the archive to the current folder, whereas in winzip and winrar it opens the archive).
If the code comes through unscathed and viewable, then the compression wasn't effectively messed with
Messing up with the compression doesn't just mean that this particular frame doesn't look right. It could look ok, but use up too much space so there is less available for the rest of the film, where it's needed more (ie action scenes).
and not resort to diverting my sexual urges into a game where i pretend to be a wizard.
You are completely wrong. I play a cleric.
skata
[greek for shit]
And to think that I actually googled for beleaguered to get the spelling right ;-)
Ha! good article my ass.
The anandtech article runs a measly 18 pages, while tom's runs 53. So it is clear that the THG article is 194% better than the anandtech one (see fig.1).What's more, in our second test, "pretty pictures on the first page of the article" the beleaguered news site falls even further behind. While THG has 4 pictures on the first page, including one of the athlon XP (oh shiny!) anandtech has none. This could be due to a browser incompatibility or a hyper-active web-filter but we couldn't be bothered to check. (see fig.2)As we can see, the THG article has !DIVISION_BY_ZERO! times the images of the anandech one, and so it must be much better.
[I am quite surprised that this post passes the lameness filter, considering the amount of ugly ASCII art. The fact that
The fact that you have probably not played halo PC notwithstanding, I'd take my mouse and keyboard over a joystick any day. Add in internet play and possible mods, and I think that it's worth taking a look at if you don't have an xbox.
Of course, HL2 also being set for september 30 won't help halo-pc one bit.
Well, naming the game UT 2003 was a dead giveaway that they planned to go the way of EA's TLA 200x line.
links in blogs point to what bloggers are talking about, are interested in, and thus searching the web one gets what people who use the web are interested in.
The possible problem is: searching the web gets you what bloggers are interested in, and bloggers are not 100% representative of web users.
The issue here, as I see it, is that because of crosslinking, a lame blog entry about subject X could get a higher pagerank than a good forum thread about the same thing. Now, this is more of a problem with pagerank than a problem of blogging, but my point that more people getting into blogging could worsen google's results' quality still stands.
And just to be sure I'm clear on this: this is not the bloggers' problem, this is google's problem, and frankly link farming is a much worse "exploit" of this than the bloggers' artificially increased pagerank.
Good point. My worry is not about "amateurs" scoring better than the pros. It's about bloggers scoring better than everybody else, pros and other amateurs included.
Blogs could be bad for the quality of google's results: because of blogs linking to eachother, the get a bigger pagerank than thy should, and therefore more influence on google than they deserve. I'm afraid that getting more of the unwashed massed to blog would be a bad thing. Ofcourse google could change the way pagerank works so that blogs have a reduced pagerank or something to that extend.
Salon article about blogs and their influence on google
Excerpt:
You'd be hard-pressed to design a system that gave the blogging community a greater impact on Google's results. Because bloggers by definition link far more than your average Web page, and because they also tend to link to each other's sites (most blogs feature a now standard list of comrades in their margins), a page that attracts the attention of a few bloggers will quickly shoot up the Google rankings. Do a search on Larry Lessig's book "The Future of Ideas" -- a hit with the blogging community -- and a review from a blog called Sopsy Digest shows up 15 notches higher than an article from Business Week. (Or at least it did the last time I checked; Google rankings are hardly set in stone.)
We need to take care of our own FIRST. Don't worry about your neighbor's family until you feed your OWN.
// ads ads ads] with capitalism. It's the same thing with mom and pops stores vs walmart and made in USA vs made in china/taiwan.
If say Ethiopians started crawling into India en masse offering to program for 8 peanuts a day, Indians would toss their asses out in a second.They are hypocrits.
Right. Americans taking care of their own is OK. Indians doing the same thing [feeding their families before american or ethiopian ones] are hypocrits.
Are you suggesting that indian programmes should think "IBM is an american company, I'd rather let my family starve than work for them and make an american family starve." (Also, IBM is going to India, not vice-versa )
This is what you get when you cross some not-so-bright consumeroids [price price price
Just wondering, when buying various products, do you make a consious effort to buy "made in the USA" even if they are more expensive or inferior to foreing ones?
I think you missunderstood me. I didnt'n mean that movie translations _could_ be hurried so they only take a week. I meant they _are_ hurried and they only take a week. The reason for the delay is distribution and marketing. (Think US to UK, no translation invlolved and the UK get most US movies around the same time as most of europe)
Also note I didn't say "you could do a goog translation in a week" I said you could do a crap one. And sadly, most are crap.
Before anyone asks "why don't you do a good one?", a lot of people can't tell a crap translation from a good one, or they are not upset about it, so there's no demand for good movie translations. Besides, around here the translation is handled by the distribution company whose "translation department" consists of some english literature students on minimum wage.
>The Harry Potter publishers were naive to think this wouldn't happen.
;-)
It's not the same thing. As far as I know, Harry Potter came out on the same day worldwide. It's just that the translated versions won't be out for a while, which is quite reasonable since translating 700+ pages is not something you can do over a weekend.
They could sit on the english version and wait until the translations were ready, but this creates another problem: waiting for _everyone_ to finish is going to take a ridiculously (sp?) long time (so everyone has to wait), and if you don't wait for everyone you're more or less back to square one: people in smaller markets have to wait for the translation and will not be happy about it. Also, where do you draw the line between popular and not-so-popular languages?
Also, for Harry Potter in particular there were going to be A LOT of people who would not be happy to learn that the (already late) book will take another 5 months to print while it's being translated. And, as another poster has observed, the odds of a story leak would skyrocket.
Traslating a book is not the same as a movie or localising a game. With a movie, there is a LOT less content to work on and the standrards are way lower so it only takes about a week, if that. Either waiting for a week to release the movie, or releasing it a week late in other countries is no big deal. Besides, since most movies have a lot of special effects, you could probably do the special effects and the translation at the same time. Theb problem lies mostly in distribution and marketing.
Video games are even easier since any game that's worth the effort of translating will go through weeks of betas and QA before it goes gold. Having said that, most companies are happy to spend 6 months making a PAL conversion even with no tranlating involved, so I must be missing something
I'm really honestly not sure what PDF viewer you are using but... since when don't you have control over font size? I mean, I'm only familiar with Adobe Acrobat and xpdf but... come on buddy! It's called zoom! :)
Last time I checked, zooming does not rewrap lines, so you also need to scroll horizontaly.
(I don't believe that changing font sizes will ever be a feature of Acrobat's as the idea is that PDFs look and print the same everywhere)
>What does a scroll wheel accomplish that holding
>down the third mouse button and dragging does not,
Changing weapons in FPS games. There's no way I'm playing one on a mouse that doesn't have a wheel.
So what, the same deal happened with XP and the FCKGW key.
Even if you didn't use a corporate key for XP, breaking the activation is trivial if you use FAT32 (as you can boot from a floppy and change the activation files, which is not as easy with NTFS. Or you could just disable windows file protection)
>An open source security program would be
>exceptionally easy to bypass, I'd think, since
>you'd have direct access to any encryption
>mechanism used.
Everyone has access to the "encryption mechanism" of one time pad encryption, but it's been _proven_ (mathematicaly) to be uncrackable (unless you screw up the implementation).
When designing any kind of encrytpion, you should assume that your algorithm will be known to the attackers, even if your product will be closed source. For more info on "closed source security" aka security through obscurity, and why it is bad to depend on it, try google
>Google cache of the Girl's Guide to Geek guys
Yeah, like a girl's guide to geek guys is going to get slashdotted.