The clock needs to have an AM or PM, or use 24 hour format.
I wondered why your homepage was taking so long to load. 3 minutes later IE pops up with a question about installing Flash 6 and I could view your site.
Do you *really* need the clock and the pulsing computer? Can't go back a version or two of flash so that people don't have to get flash 6?
If i'd hit your site via a search engine, I'd be heading on back in 10 seconds if I don't see anything interesting. As your menu's don't show until the flash loads, and it takes 3 minutes to get the plugin (for me, anyway. Damn modem), I'll be clicking that 'back' button quick.
But, it'd have to have some way of balancing out eg. with social security, you don't need it now, but 20 years down the track you may need it.
Oh, you never directed your taxes to it?
The government should be able to say "Well, lessee here, our records show you didn't contribute to social security for 10 years, so we don't have to contribute to you for the same amount of time. Get the hell out of my office."
I know that if you just type in "Foo" into your average windows web browser (IE 5+), it will iterate through the usual TLD's trying to find a match, and if not,will then go to your default search engine.
Probably what you're seeing here. What you need to do is convince people not to just type a word into the address bar, and get them to use Google instead.
How many more over-sensitive Australians are going to get their panties in a bunch because I didn't give the exact population of their cuntry? "5" is a little bit off the mark, you know.
As an Australian I'll reciprocate - let me have a guess for the UK population... erm...(picks random figure) 50 million? Ish? Personally I wonder how the hell you manage to fit everybody into the place - no wonder you all smell (ducks for cover).
And as for X-Boxes? They were retailing for $629 in local outlets in.au. My last PC box for work (1.1GHz celeron / 256MB / 20G) cost me $739.
To turn that into another universal indicator, $629 will buy you 600 cans of beer in Australia. Most Australians are just not that keen on yet another game console. I think they'll have trouble at half the price - and with games being $80 - $100 a pop (er, 76 - 98 cans of beer) they'd have better luck getting blood out of a stone.
(And , beer jokes aside, is it really worth it? Graphics are nice , but the gameplay? I dunno.)
I remember seeing a long time ago on the TV a system similar fitted to an exhaust on a pokey 4 cylinder Audi. The car was practically silent, and people had a lot of trouble stalling the car when pulling away from a standstill, because you had no real feedback on engine RPM.
Best bit was that after the car was 'silent', they simply put some nice beefy speakers in the car, linked it to engine RPM and load, and added a bit of computer wizardy. Suddenly the Audi sounded a whole lot more like a Ferrari, or at the flick of a switch , a F1 car (with 12,000 rpm 'wired' to about 4500 real engine rpm), they even had (heh) a jet turbine, but it was a bit crappy, cause turbines don't quite spool up like 4 cylinder cars do:-)
The presenter was having a ball, caning this little car around town - from the camera's position in the car it was pretty realistic.
Pretty much the 'killer app' for noise-cancelling tech in my opinion.
Most cd-drives have firmware that is upgradeable, similar to the BIOS in your PC. Mainly to fix or work around the bugs that they didn't see at the factory.
For example, I upgraded the firmware on my DVD drive because it didn't do DMA properly when it came out, but a firmware upgrade fixed it.
It's pretty unlikely that it would cause firmware corruption though. It is possible however to "crash" your firmware , so that it ends up in an unknown state (it's unknown, because the damn drive just sits there, and there aint no monitor or keyboard directly attached to your CD drive to see what went wrong).
Most likely, with a corrupted CD, all you get is a drive that spends 10 minutes trying to find a table of contents that makes sense. This (esp in windows machines) means 10 minutes of waiting for your cursor to respond, or rebooting.
There are only about 20 million people in australia. I can get CD's (if I wanted to - *snort*) for around AU$25. Dividing into $70M gives approximately 2.8 million CD's a year.
Does that mean that a tenth of the population (that's *2,000,000* people) copied a CD or two last year?
Or a hundredth of the population copied 15 CD's last year? That's still 200,000 people. That's a lot of people with access to a burner and the inclination to copy a CD that they already have in their possession somehow. I'm unsure if the music industry these days has enough interesting content left for 200,000 people to do this.
So,
It would appear from this that it's not really the "normal" people, it's something (or somebody) else - the people with 75 CD burners in the garage going wholesale, the tonnes of pirated CD's being imported etc, hell, they still might be mad about the $1M slap they got from the ACCC about the threats and standover tactics they used on music shops legally importing CD's. The problem I have with soundbites like that is whilst the guy with the garage full of burners is illegally copying for sure, the Industry is (in this case) implying the total, present $70M-a-year loss comes from the everyday person, and also implies that this will go up from all those criminals who come across a vendo-CD-Burner and decide to copy a CD.
Yes, the piracy figure will probably go up. But when you're throwing $70,000,000 figures around, it's very easy to for the general public to go, "Wow! seventy million! That's a lot! And there's going to be more piracy? So it's going to be what, a hundred million when these things become widespread?", when in all likelyhood, it'll be something like $75M or so. (Five million dollars is 200,000 CD's, remember)
Sure hope his monitor misread his pulse. 240 beats per minute is *4 beats per second.* Have you tried tapping your finger on the table 4 times a second?
Unless maybe you're a bird , or other small animal, 240BPM is *bad* for a heart that normally runs at 100BPM. Your heart does not have enough energy in reserve to do 240BPM for long.
Send your data on over here to.au - we'll carry on for you.
That is , until we get our own version of this crap law. Hope the Australian Consumer Competition Commission finds a way to show that DRM is restricting consumer choice.
For something slightly on-topic , I particularly liked this bit recently about record companies in Australia getting slapped with a $1M fine for being anticompetitive about imported CD's.
Best quote from that article?
Professor Fels highlighted a comment from Justice Hill, in his findings, that: 'The dire predictions of reduced promotion through to reduced production and ultimate market failure have simply not happened. If anything, the evidence shows a continued increase in titles, promotion and production and at the same time at lower prices'.
You *do* realise that mail servers can be configured to only accept relays from certain domains? eg from "outlying-branch-isp.com"?
And your new ISP is "cracking down" by letting it go half the day only? Hmmm.. I take it you get charged by the MB by your new ISP?
I know, it's fun to goof off, but you're doing the rest of the internet a disservice.For chrissakes, get somebody to post your system specs here on slashdot and get somebody will post the steps required to walk you through setting it up.... even *I'll* have a go, if it stops the spam just a little bit.
If someone at your outlying branch isp subnet(s) discovers your mail relay after that, well it should be a simple matter for you to get them booted.
Oh, don't post any identifying details about your company, unless you want them to experience THE AWESOME POWER OF THE SLASHDOT EFFECT *evil grin*
Heh , I like the sound of that...
"NOBODY EXPECTS THE SLASHDOT EFFECT!"
Kind of python-esque.
Perhaps you could tell us where you have been blacklisted and what IPs are listed so we can see for ourselves the veracity of your statement?
Post some ip's? On slashdot? Are you mad?
evil blacklist admin #1: The fool! Even after our comprehensive "re-education" program, he still complains!
evil blacklist admin #2: I know! We'll use the awesome POWER OF SLASHDOT against him! I'll log in and issue a politely-typed request for his IP.. He'll rue the day he spoke out against....
*pause for dramatic effect*
Actually, IIS hasn't had a hole since last August and IIS 5.1 hasn't had one, period. XP has only had the UPnP hole (new technology, consider it a version 1.00 bug).
There are FAR fewer holes in W2K than people would like to admit. IE may have some problems but not the base OS. Even IIS has been tighted up a great deal.
That is , holes that you can see.
Let's get the source out and have a look hey? Oh, sorry , can't do that. And as pointed out before, A code audit in Microsoft just results in a "patch / update / service pack x" , but a code audit in the real world results in postings to BugTraq.
I'd prefer it to drop a few frames here and there than drop whole scenes.
I noticed this scene-dropping one day on a re-run of "the simpsons"... some scenes had been removed - it was quite noticeable (and irritating).
But still, yet another ad can be squeezed in. I can't wait.
A few more years, and broadcast TV everywhere will be all shot to hell. The only channels left worth watching in Australia are the ABC (which doesn't have ads, being gov't funded),and SBS (who at least lumps their ads together at the end of each show). The other 3 networks are crap, with over-sensationalised news (how many more "shocking","horrific" news stories can there be?) and it seems more ads than content.
Who's up for making the next slashdot on the internet2 with video comments instead? Count me in:-)
uh, australia? what the fook does that have to do with the United States?
Speaking as an Australian, I hold some hope your painfully US-centric attitude can be rectified.
Last time I checked , we were using something loosely defined as the World-Wide-Web , not the United-States-Web, so I think it is entirely relevant, as one day a reference to this particular decision could help you.
Your comment portrays a bad image of the U.S. to the rest of the world. Wake up. The sun does not shine out of the US's collective posterior.
Don't make me have to come over there and kick your ass to prove it:-)
Slashdot Mirror
You Bastard!
Constructive criticism follows:
The clock needs to have an AM or PM, or use 24 hour format.
I wondered why your homepage was taking so long to load. 3 minutes later IE pops up with a question about installing Flash 6 and I could view your site.
Do you *really* need the clock and the pulsing computer? Can't go back a version or two of flash so that people don't have to get flash 6?
If i'd hit your site via a search engine, I'd be heading on back in 10 seconds if I don't see anything interesting. As your menu's don't show until the flash loads, and it takes 3 minutes to get the plugin (for me, anyway. Damn modem), I'll be clicking that 'back' button quick.
But, it'd have to have some way of balancing out eg. with social security, you don't need it now, but 20 years down the track you may need it.
Oh, you never directed your taxes to it?
The government should be able to say "Well, lessee here, our records show you didn't contribute to social security for 10 years, so we don't have to contribute to you for the same amount of time. Get the hell out of my office."
I know that if you just type in "Foo" into your average windows web browser (IE 5+), it will iterate through the usual TLD's trying to find a match, and if not ,will then go to your default search engine.
Probably what you're seeing here. What you need to do is convince people not to just type a word into the address bar, and get them to use Google instead.
How many more over-sensitive Australians are going to get their panties in a bunch because I didn't give the exact population of their cuntry?
... erm...(picks random figure) 50 million? Ish? Personally I wonder how the hell you manage to fit everybody into the place - no wonder you all smell (ducks for cover).
.au. My last PC box for work (1.1GHz celeron / 256MB / 20G) cost me $739.
"5" is a little bit off the mark, you know.
As an Australian I'll reciprocate - let me have a guess for the UK population
And as for X-Boxes? They were retailing for $629 in local outlets in
To turn that into another universal indicator, $629 will buy you 600 cans of beer in Australia. Most Australians are just not that keen on yet another game console. I think they'll have trouble at half the price - and with games being $80 - $100 a pop (er, 76 - 98 cans of beer) they'd have better luck getting blood out of a stone.
(And , beer jokes aside, is it really worth it? Graphics are nice , but the gameplay? I dunno.)
I remember seeing a long time ago on the TV a system similar fitted to an exhaust on a pokey 4 cylinder Audi. The car was practically silent, and people had a lot of trouble stalling the car when pulling away from a standstill, because you had no real feedback on engine RPM.
:-)
Best bit was that after the car was 'silent', they simply put some nice beefy speakers in the car, linked it to engine RPM and load, and added a bit of computer wizardy. Suddenly the Audi sounded a whole lot more like a Ferrari, or at the flick of a switch , a F1 car (with 12,000 rpm 'wired' to about 4500 real engine rpm), they even had (heh) a jet turbine, but it was a bit crappy, cause turbines don't quite spool up like 4 cylinder cars do
The presenter was having a ball, caning this little car around town - from the camera's position in the car it was pretty realistic.
Pretty much the 'killer app' for noise-cancelling tech in my opinion.
Firmware isn't as 'firm' as you think.
Most cd-drives have firmware that is upgradeable, similar to the BIOS in your PC. Mainly to fix or work around the bugs that they didn't see at the factory.
For example, I upgraded the firmware on my DVD drive because it didn't do DMA properly when it came out, but a firmware upgrade fixed it.
It's pretty unlikely that it would cause firmware corruption though. It is possible however to "crash" your firmware , so that it ends up in an unknown state (it's unknown, because the damn drive just sits there, and there aint no monitor or keyboard directly attached to your CD drive to see what went wrong).
Most likely, with a corrupted CD, all you get is a drive that spends 10 minutes trying to find a table of contents that makes sense. This (esp in windows machines) means 10 minutes of waiting for your cursor to respond, or rebooting.
A little on the anti-social side for Sony though.
Hmm.. lets look at some facts.
There are only about 20 million people in australia. I can get CD's (if I wanted to - *snort*) for around AU$25. Dividing into $70M gives approximately 2.8 million CD's a year.
Does that mean that a tenth of the population (that's *2,000,000* people) copied a CD or two last year?
Or a hundredth of the population copied 15 CD's last year? That's still 200,000 people. That's a lot of people with access to a burner and the inclination to copy a CD that they already have in their possession somehow. I'm unsure if the music industry these days has enough interesting content left for 200,000 people to do this.
So,
It would appear from this that it's not really the "normal" people, it's something (or somebody) else - the people with 75 CD burners in the garage going wholesale, the tonnes of pirated CD's being imported etc, hell, they still might be mad about the
$1M slap they got from the ACCC about the threats and standover tactics they used on music shops legally importing CD's. The problem I have with soundbites like that is whilst the guy with the garage full of burners is illegally copying for sure, the Industry is (in this case) implying the total, present $70M-a-year loss comes from the everyday person, and also implies that this will go up from all those criminals who come across a vendo-CD-Burner and decide to copy a CD.
Yes, the piracy figure will probably go up. But when you're throwing $70,000,000 figures around, it's very easy to for the general public to go, "Wow! seventy million! That's a lot! And there's going to be more piracy? So it's going to be what, a hundred million when these things become widespread?", when in all likelyhood, it'll be something like $75M or so. (Five million dollars is 200,000 CD's, remember)
It's just the usual FUD - plain and simple.
well, you didn't get *laid* exactly - but in the end you did get *screwed*
Sure hope his monitor misread his pulse.
240 beats per minute is *4 beats per second.*
Have you tried tapping your finger on the table 4 times a second?
Unless maybe you're a bird , or other small animal, 240BPM is *bad* for a heart that normally runs at 100BPM. Your heart does not have enough energy in reserve to do 240BPM for long.
That is , until we get our own version of this crap law. Hope the Australian Consumer Competition Commission finds a way to show that DRM is restricting consumer choice.
For something slightly on-topic , I particularly liked this bit recently about record companies in Australia getting slapped with a $1M fine for being anticompetitive about imported CD's.
Best quote from that article?
So where is the USA equivalent of the the ACCC ?
Hmmm... perhaps I am wrong, but, /sbin?
/lib and /bin as well.
Isn't init in
Could be a bit hard to run mandrake's init scripts, if init is in a partition that isn't mounted until after init runs and kicks in all the rest.
Probably the same sort of conclusion could be drawn with
I guess that pixie dust IBM uses isn't so magical after all.
It's still good stuff - it's just that IBM's QA and Engineering Departments were snorting it when they designed and spec'd those drives.
Heh,
I have a 2.5" 9mm IBM 4GB drive , circa 1998.
It has a sticker on it that says, and I quote , "Rattle noise is normal"
When you pick it up, it sounds like there is a screw floating around in there somewhere - not a reassuring sound for a hard disk.
Maybe all you need is a little sticker like that on your drive and things will be ok again.
Or anywhere with a season called summer - car temps can easily reach 70 degrees C after a few hours in the sun.
"I can see my house from here!"
Well, somebody had to say it.
Ok.......
.. I take it you get charged by the MB by your new ISP?
.... even *I'll* have a go, if it stops the spam just a little bit.
...
You *do* realise that mail servers can be configured to only accept relays from certain domains? eg from "outlying-branch-isp.com"?
And your new ISP is "cracking down" by letting it go half the day only? Hmmm
I know, it's fun to goof off, but you're doing the rest of the internet a disservice.For chrissakes, get somebody to post your system specs here on slashdot and get somebody will post the steps required to walk you through setting it up
If someone at your outlying branch isp subnet(s) discovers your mail relay after that, well it should be a simple matter for you to get them booted.
Oh, don't post any identifying details about your company, unless you want them to experience THE AWESOME POWER OF THE SLASHDOT EFFECT *evil grin*
Heh , I like the sound of that
"NOBODY EXPECTS THE SLASHDOT EFFECT!"
Kind of python-esque.
Perhaps you could tell us where you have been blacklisted and what IPs are listed so we can see for ourselves the veracity of your statement?
....
Post some ip's? On slashdot? Are you mad?
evil blacklist admin #1: The fool! Even after our comprehensive "re-education" program, he still complains!
evil blacklist admin #2: I know! We'll use the awesome POWER OF SLASHDOT against him! I'll log in and issue a politely-typed request for his IP.. He'll rue the day he spoke out against
*pause for dramatic effect*
the BLACKLIST!
*evil laughter*
Hmm.
Is that net or (dot)NET?
Bold prediction : same (dot)NET slashdot story , 2 years from now.
Er,
Couldn't you get around this by :
1. Getting a friend to purchase and install product.
2. Sit next to friend and watch them use product.
3. Write scathing review.
Anyone?
Why did they have to screw a reasonably decent codec by calling it "divx ;-)"?
...
;-)"
;-) loses again.
I can see the proposals now
Engineer's email : "Well, we could use intel's I.263 codec or we could go with Divx
PHB Thought Process: "Divx-wink? That must be some sort of in-joke... hmmm , better go for I.263..... that sounds technical."
And Divx
Why? WHY?
Actually, IIS hasn't had a hole since last August and IIS 5.1 hasn't had one, period. XP has only had the UPnP hole (new technology, consider it a version 1.00 bug).
There are FAR fewer holes in W2K than people would like to admit. IE may have some problems but not the base OS. Even IIS has been tighted up a great deal.
That is , holes that you can see.
Let's get the source out and have a look hey? Oh, sorry , can't do that. And as pointed out before, A code audit in Microsoft just results in a "patch / update / service pack x" , but a code audit in the real world results in postings to BugTraq.
"Kelp is an amazingly nutritious food that could be grown quite cheaply."
I guess one day in the future I'll have to keep reminding myself of that....
"Honey, what's for dinner?"
"Kelp synth-o-steaks."
"Ah, crap."
(grits teeth,mutters to self) "kelp-is-an-amazingly-nutritious-food. kelp-is-an-amazingly-nutritious-food."
I'd prefer it to drop a few frames here and there than drop whole scenes.
... some scenes had been removed - it was quite noticeable (and irritating).
:-)
I noticed this scene-dropping one day on a re-run of "the simpsons"
But still, yet another ad can be squeezed in. I can't wait.
A few more years, and broadcast TV everywhere will be all shot to hell. The only channels left worth watching in Australia are the ABC (which doesn't have ads, being gov't funded),and SBS (who at least lumps their ads together at the end of each show). The other 3 networks are crap, with over-sensationalised news (how many more "shocking","horrific" news stories can there be?) and it seems more ads than content.
Who's up for making the next slashdot on the internet2 with video comments instead? Count me in
uh, australia? what the fook does that have to do with the United States?
:-)
Speaking as an Australian, I hold some hope your painfully US-centric attitude can be rectified.
Last time I checked , we were using something loosely defined as the World-Wide-Web , not the United-States-Web, so I think it is entirely relevant, as one day a reference to this particular decision could help you.
Your comment portrays a bad image of the U.S. to the rest of the world. Wake up. The sun does not shine out of the US's collective posterior.
Don't make me have to come over there and kick your ass to prove it