Hear hear! I'm also ready to spend my strange foreign money on cheap US entertainment! Just give me a chance and I will!
Nothing new here, European users are fcked since the international profit cycle is built on selling us the old crap (and our local channels gladly buying it). I was initially very excited about this, but then realised it sounded too good to be true. And it was.
Oh well, back to downloading my stuff illegally and waiting for the Police to kick down the front door.
..."spend the needed time and money to make WAR great"
So what are they saying? The game sucks now and can't be released so let's put another 6 months and polish it. And what if it still sucks next april after putting in the extra polish? Will the EA hype marketing machine save you then?
I might be in minority, but I don't really care about polish. If you make a good game and the core mechanics work, the players will come and you can do the polish later (and get extra cred from your players because you're actually improving their experience by releasing upgrades for free). Of course if you notice your core machanics suck after 5 years of development, you're down the creek anyway.
The problem (IMHO) here might be that they're trying to go after WoW marketshare instead of just making a good game. The difference is, Blizzard has had 3 years to polish their game with input from couple of million live players and it's tough to beat. I'd much rather would see them create a great, gritty, bloody, PvP (or RvR) experience for that particular niche market (of say, 2-4 million players) and forget about the "every home has to have WAR box" mentality. If the game is good, the players will come. Forget WoW already!
I know it's poinless to try to tell things like this to/. "users", but if you would have clicked the story you would have seen a short section called "Related Stories" just before the comments.
In that little section you would have found two links to articles that are - surprise - related to this story.
Following those links would have taken you to the whole backstory story and you could have read that right here on Slashdot without having to do any Google searches.
Hey, in that case you can soon dump your Windows. CCP announced they'll be releasing EVE clients for Linux and Mac soon (though they're done with co-op with TransGaming, so probably Wine based instead of native, but getting a fully supported Linux client is always something).
People like claiming "I never got that e-mail" or "It must have gotten lost somewhere in the system" becase it's a easy way to get them off the hook. It's a bit like "I was writing a document yesterday and now it's gone!" (it's saved in their My Documents, they just never bothered to look). Or "My dog ate my homework".
They just probably managed to delete it without noticing or happened to filter it into some strange folder where they never check or something similarly idiotic. Problem between chair and the keyboard, in other words.
If you're finding your MTA's are losing 1% of your e-mail, it's either time to switch the servers or the admin managing them (or both).
I worked for a fairly large automotive company (you'd know the name).
We started XP deployment for the IT units around March -06 and it's probably just about finished now and moving on to the other parts of the corporation (and ends around next summer I'd guess, not working there anymore).
Will be a long long time before Vista hits their user desktops (probably around 2010, give or take few years), deploying tens of thousands of desktops throughout megacorps is not anything you want to do every year.
I think you're missing an important target group there.. While old farts (myself included) are often happy with the default ringtones, plenty teenagers around here (Sweden) have 20+ ringtones on their cells. They also switch them almost daily (or several times during a day), compare them with friends (often by playing them loudly in public places), swap them etc. etc. Also, background pics, funny MMS templates and screensavers are popular with this crowd. They also appreciate and use the features I often find completely useless (camera? wtf mate?).
It's "cool" to have a cool cellphone, I suppose the kids with last years (weeks?) old model cells with only default ringtones are ones not getting prom dates these days.
..didn't read TFA (of course), however the developer who actually writes the code is probably pressed by his Project Manager (or his local equivalent in case the particular function is outsourced overseas). The Project Leader is probably under a lot of pressure from his peers to push out the money sapping project to shipping so the company can start earning money and the company owners are probably sweating bullets because they know that this might cost their bonuses if the shareholders get pissed by the expenditure/delays.
So think: Ship, ship, ship. Get the shit out of the door and packaged, we can always Service Pack it later (and that way we get free testing by our customers).
Security problems and bugs are so commonplace in todays software that no company (save NASA, their bugs tend to cost lives in spectacular ways) takes huge PR-hits because they have to release ServicePack nr. 2 HotFix 53 for their flagship product.
1. Do you want the project to be finished in time? 2. Do you want it done in budget cost frame 3. Do you want good quality
Choose two alternatives. Anything else is just bullshitting yourself / your workers / your shareholders.
Next thing we need is a global service - I understand BBC limiting itself to UK to begin with, it is financed with UK tax money after all, however I really would like to see the day when broadcasters realize the power of global audience.. most companies are already global, and I would think the likes of Coca Cola, Nokia, Sony and Microsoft would see the possibilies of global marketing and the money they'd save/make by running their advers with something like that.
The superduper DRM schemes and limiting products to special markets only (through DVD regions for example) seems like a very odd and counter-productive thing to do from a global point of view.
Maybe what I'm asking for is utopia and maybe the current money flow is enough to keep us inprisoned to strange regional marketing schemes for years to come.. but maybe some day we consumers get the point through.. here's to hoping!
Well, it can happen to the best of us..
This is from Lasu's Linux Anecdotes
At one point, Linus had implemented device files in/dev, and wanted to dial up the university computer and debug his terminal emulation code again. So he starts his terminal emulator program and tells it to use/dev/hda. That should have been/dev/ttyS1. Oops. Now his master boot record started with "ATDT" and the university modem pool phone number. I think he implemented permission checking the following day.
Sarcasm filter on.. Well since they stole the Matrix (ok, ok, the legal case is not done yet) and the sequels (which they probably wrote) sucked major ass, I'm going to assume that you like them for spinning up multi-million dollar franchise from stolen ideas and beating a dead horse to death. Apart from the Matrix stuff their writing track record is not that great.
..or the companys mail/sys/netadmin, once The Boss gets irked enough of the "network delaying important work" all the time. After that.. well, you can kiss your job goodbye..
Right, forgot that IIS was a true bastion of security because it isn't as popular as Apache..
Also, you would apparently like to have a car with a stereo (or better yet, floor mat) that was impossible to remove and would completely wreck the car beyond salvage if removed by force?
There's probably a lot of Winamp users out there, but just because you use it doesn't make it more popular than MS Media player. Why not link to some numbers, usage stats?
Yes, this is Slashdot, we bash MS here.
Sarcasm aside..
The main thing here is that IE is so tightly integrated into Windows and many Microsoft applications so tightly integrated into IE, that it's impossible to remove. You can use Firefox for your surfing needs but you ain't going to get rid of IE from the system without completely breaking it in the progress.
Great news, thanks for posting. I've been following the BBC case for a while (I actually ranted about it in my blog a while back).
I'm not completely dead-against DRM in these cases (I personally do think it's utterly unnecessary BS, but I see why corporations would choose to use it), I just hope they'll choose somewhat portable format as I'm a Linux user. I'd hate have to keep on downloading the torrents just because the broadcasting company decided to chose a Windows only media.
If I'm not mistaken the BBC has lately been experimenting with.ogg so maybe not all is lost on that front.
Big kudos to BBC on being the front line pioneer in broadcasting (again!).
I'd be willing to pay for legal (non-DRM:ed) downloads of movies and tv-shows. Subscription or just per download, take you pick, I don't care.
I fail to see why Hollywood won't learn from RIAA's mistakes (and Apple's success) and start a service like this, the audience is global, there's tons of cash to make!
I live in a small nordic country (Sweden) where you have to wait 1-2 years for most "cool" shows (and even then they might get a timeslot around midnight) or get passed altogether (example, they just started running Angel Season 1, 01:00), so downloading series and buying them in DVD formats is more of a norm for me and many of my friends.
Now, a legal torrent.. that I'd pay for (and they'd even get my upload bandwidth for free).
Well the lockdown + whitelist part has been pretty trivial to do ever since Windows 2000 - just adjust the local policy (or distribute the GPO if in AD/Domain).
Not sure (never done it myself), but I'd imagine the "notify admin" button could be established with couple of lines of VBScript.
The article states that there's nothing in the phone that makes it particularly susceptible to viruses and that Nokia knows of no capabilities within any of its devices that a virus might exploit. Fair enough, I suppose, but what happens when one day they release a version which has a bug in it.
The AV software subscription seems to be an monthly based fee type thingy. (Hats off to F-Secure, looks like they're right there on the bleeding edge of squeezing money out of everything).
What I'd really like to see is Nokia (and other manufacturers) taking their responsibility and offering online (or SMS based) free updates to their OS.
I don't want to be forced to subscribing into some monthly fee based bloodsucking anti-virus scheme just to be able to use my phone without having to worry about viruses turning my phone into SMS spamming zombie.
Even Microsoft releases patches every now and then, why not Nokia (and other cell phone manufacturers)?
Ok, so there's two checkboxes for excluding Politics in the preferences, neither of them seems to work and as long a these stories get posted on the front page, there's no way to avoid them.
So a small plea to the editors; please keep politics in their own Section until someone fixes the Exclusion? Please?
Ok, I can imagine this post will be redundant in about 5 seconds, but why on earth would you consider a publicly editable web encyclopedia to be authorative in the first place? This is the Internet, not all you read is true.
However the cold reality of today is that many western countries are currently adopting very US-centric copyright laws that restrict fair-use and basically give big corps all the power to shut down any protocols/applications/companies they want.
It'll take a while, since laws are always playing catch-up with the technology, but we're slowly getting there.
Of course, after EU and Australia adopt these laws, there's still a plenty of free countries left in the world... but just to illustrate that Big Money will find a way, and some of the organizations and companies lobbying for this sort of stuff have very deep pockets indeed..
Slashdot Mirror
Hear hear! I'm also ready to spend my strange foreign money on cheap US entertainment! Just give me a chance and I will!
Nothing new here, European users are fcked since the international profit cycle is built on selling us the old crap (and our local channels gladly buying it).
I was initially very excited about this, but then realised it sounded too good to be true. And it was.
Oh well, back to downloading my stuff illegally and waiting for the Police to kick down the front door.
..."spend the needed time and money to make WAR great"
So what are they saying? The game sucks now and can't be released so let's put another 6 months and polish it.
And what if it still sucks next april after putting in the extra polish? Will the EA hype marketing machine save you then?
I might be in minority, but I don't really care about polish. If you make a good game and the core mechanics work, the players will come and you can do the polish later (and get extra cred from your players because you're actually improving their experience by releasing upgrades for free). Of course if you notice your core machanics suck after 5 years of development, you're down the creek anyway.
The problem (IMHO) here might be that they're trying to go after WoW marketshare instead of just making a good game. The difference is, Blizzard has had 3 years to polish their game with input from couple of million live players and it's tough to beat. I'd much rather would see them create a great, gritty, bloody, PvP (or RvR) experience for that particular niche market (of say, 2-4 million players) and forget about the "every home has to have WAR box" mentality. If the game is good, the players will come. Forget WoW already!
I know it's poinless to try to tell things like this to /. "users", but if you would have clicked the story you would have seen a short section called "Related Stories" just before the comments.
In that little section you would have found two links to articles that are - surprise - related to this story.
Following those links would have taken you to the whole backstory story and you could have read that right here on Slashdot without having to do any Google searches.
Isn't technology fantastic
?
It's probably reading mozilla/ff profiles to see if the Skype Firefox plugin is installed. Not very dangerous.
Hey, in that case you can soon dump your Windows.
CCP announced they'll be releasing EVE clients for Linux and Mac soon (though they're done with co-op with TransGaming, so probably Wine based instead of native, but getting a fully supported Linux client is always something).
Also..
"If you're finding your MTA's are losing 1% of your e-mail, it's either time to switch the servers or the admin managing them (or both)."
Quite right.
People like claiming "I never got that e-mail" or "It must have gotten lost somewhere in the system" becase it's a easy way to get them off the hook. It's a bit like "I was writing a document yesterday and now it's gone!" (it's saved in their My Documents, they just never bothered to look). Or "My dog ate my homework".
They just probably managed to delete it without noticing or happened to filter it into some strange folder where they never check or something similarly idiotic. Problem between chair and the keyboard, in other words.
If you're finding your MTA's are losing 1% of your e-mail, it's either time to switch the servers or the admin managing them (or both).
I worked for a fairly large automotive company (you'd know the name).
We started XP deployment for the IT units around March -06 and it's probably just about finished now and moving on to the other parts of the corporation (and ends around next summer I'd guess, not working there anymore).
Will be a long long time before Vista hits their user desktops (probably around 2010, give or take few years), deploying tens of thousands of desktops throughout megacorps is not anything you want to do every year.
Several options...
v iewers
As already pointed out, ImageMagick and some scripting will keep you going forever..however if you're not into that there are some graphical tools:
http://gthumb.sourceforge.net/
http://f-spot.org/Main_Page
Also, check out this page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_image_
Anyone using the word "Blogosphere" should be executed publicly.
I think you're missing an important target group there..
While old farts (myself included) are often happy with the default ringtones, plenty teenagers around here (Sweden) have 20+ ringtones on their cells. They also switch them almost daily (or several times during a day), compare them with friends (often by playing them loudly in public places), swap them etc. etc. Also, background pics, funny MMS templates and screensavers are popular with this crowd. They also appreciate and use the features I often find completely useless (camera? wtf mate?).
It's "cool" to have a cool cellphone, I suppose the kids with last years (weeks?) old model cells with only default ringtones are ones not getting prom dates these days.
The quantity is there...
..didn't read TFA (of course), however the developer who actually writes the code is probably pressed by his Project Manager (or his local equivalent in case the particular function is outsourced overseas). The Project Leader is probably under a lot of pressure from his peers to push out the money sapping project to shipping so the company can start earning money and the company owners are probably sweating bullets because they know that this might cost their bonuses if the shareholders get pissed by the expenditure/delays.
So think: Ship, ship, ship. Get the shit out of the door and packaged, we can always Service Pack it later (and that way we get free testing by our customers).
Security problems and bugs are so commonplace in todays software that no company (save NASA, their bugs tend to cost lives in spectacular ways) takes huge PR-hits because they have to release ServicePack nr. 2 HotFix 53 for their flagship product.
1. Do you want the project to be finished in time?
2. Do you want it done in budget cost frame
3. Do you want good quality
Choose two alternatives. Anything else is just bullshitting yourself / your workers / your shareholders.
If only other media companies would pick this up!
Next thing we need is a global service - I understand BBC limiting itself to UK to begin with, it is financed with UK tax money after all, however I really would like to see the day when broadcasters realize the power of global audience.. most companies are already global, and I would think the likes of Coca Cola, Nokia, Sony and Microsoft would see the possibilies of global marketing and the money they'd save/make by running their advers with something like that.
The superduper DRM schemes and limiting products to special markets only (through DVD regions for example) seems like a very odd and counter-productive thing to do from a global point of view.
Maybe what I'm asking for is utopia and maybe the current money flow is enough to keep us inprisoned to strange regional marketing schemes for years to come.. but maybe some day we consumers get the point through.. here's to hoping!
Sarcasm filter on..
Well since they stole the Matrix (ok, ok, the legal case is not done yet) and the sequels (which they probably wrote) sucked major ass, I'm going to assume that you like them for spinning up multi-million dollar franchise from stolen ideas and beating a dead horse to death.
Apart from the Matrix stuff their writing track record is not that great.
..or the companys mail/sys/netadmin, once The Boss gets irked enough of the "network delaying important work" all the time.
After that.. well, you can kiss your job goodbye..
No, they become authorized users as soon as you've accepted the EULA(s).
Right, forgot that IIS was a true bastion of security because it isn't as popular as Apache..
Also, you would apparently like to have a car with a stereo (or better yet, floor mat) that was impossible to remove and would completely wreck the car beyond salvage if removed by force?
There's probably a lot of Winamp users out there, but just because you use it doesn't make it more popular than MS Media player. Why not link to some numbers, usage stats?
Yes, this is Slashdot, we bash MS here.
Sarcasm aside..
The main thing here is that IE is so tightly integrated into Windows and many Microsoft applications so tightly integrated into IE, that it's impossible to remove. You can use Firefox for your surfing needs but you ain't going to get rid of IE from the system without completely breaking it in the progress.
That, I call insane.
I'm not completely dead-against DRM in these cases (I personally do think it's utterly unnecessary BS, but I see why corporations would choose to use it), I just hope they'll choose somewhat portable format as I'm a Linux user. I'd hate have to keep on downloading the torrents just because the broadcasting company decided to chose a Windows only media. If I'm not mistaken the BBC has lately been experimenting with .ogg so maybe not all is lost on that front.
Big kudos to BBC on being the front line pioneer in broadcasting (again!).
I'd be willing to pay for legal (non-DRM:ed) downloads of movies and tv-shows. Subscription or just per download, take you pick, I don't care.
I fail to see why Hollywood won't learn from RIAA's mistakes (and Apple's success) and start a service like this, the audience is global, there's tons of cash to make!
I live in a small nordic country (Sweden) where you have to wait 1-2 years for most "cool" shows (and even then they might get a timeslot around midnight) or get passed altogether (example, they just started running Angel Season 1, 01:00), so downloading series and buying them in DVD formats is more of a norm for me and many of my friends.
Now, a legal torrent.. that I'd pay for (and they'd even get my upload bandwidth for free).
Well the lockdown + whitelist part has been pretty trivial to do ever since Windows 2000 - just adjust the local policy (or distribute the GPO if in AD/Domain).
Not sure (never done it myself), but I'd imagine the "notify admin" button could be established with couple of lines of VBScript.
The article states that there's nothing in the phone that makes it particularly susceptible to viruses and that Nokia knows of no capabilities within any of its devices that a virus might exploit. Fair enough, I suppose, but what happens when one day they release a version which has a bug in it.
The AV software subscription seems to be an monthly based fee type thingy. (Hats off to F-Secure, looks like they're right there on the bleeding edge of squeezing money out of everything).
What I'd really like to see is Nokia (and other manufacturers) taking their responsibility and offering online (or SMS based) free updates to their OS.
I don't want to be forced to subscribing into some monthly fee based bloodsucking anti-virus scheme just to be able to use my phone without having to worry about viruses turning my phone into SMS spamming zombie.
Even Microsoft releases patches every now and then, why not Nokia (and other cell phone manufacturers)?
Ok, so there's two checkboxes for excluding Politics in the preferences, neither of them seems to work and as long a these stories get posted on the front page, there's no way to avoid them.
So a small plea to the editors; please keep politics in their own Section until someone fixes the Exclusion? Please?
Ok, I can imagine this post will be redundant in about 5 seconds, but why on earth would you consider a publicly editable web encyclopedia to be authorative in the first place? This is the Internet, not all you read is true.
That's what you'd think, isn't it.
However the cold reality of today is that many western countries are currently adopting very US-centric copyright laws that restrict fair-use and basically give big corps all the power to shut down any protocols/applications/companies they want.
It'll take a while, since laws are always playing catch-up with the technology, but we're slowly getting there.
Of course, after EU and Australia adopt these laws, there's still a plenty of free countries left in the world... but just to illustrate that
Big Money will find a way, and some of the organizations and companies lobbying for this sort of stuff have very deep pockets indeed..