They can talk about adding all the new gimmicks they want but they still have to convince the buying public to upgrade from their older versions that don't have these "features," and their monopoly power ain't what it used to be. They should perhaps spend a little time studying those Windows XP sales figures.
Seriously, I use Windows 2000 and there are a few new features in Windows XP that might be worth the upgrade. But I'll be damned if I'm going to get their software if I have to deal with their new registration BS, especially when there is currently verey little that NT 5.1 can do that NT 5.0 can't.
... is a big price drop in all of those "broadband" routers from folks at Linksys and such. The more you have to pay for a broadband connection, the less money you have left over to share that connection.
"Why is it that the audience here is unwilling to get behind an "All American" company and support it, yet they feel its perfectly ok to promote a product that they are not involved in ?"
Because us silly Americans tend to like a competitive market and want the best product available. Microsoft seems to be about as capable of producing a competing console as Atari.
We don't automaticly support whatever crap that is produced in our country because we simply aren't French.
"Microsoft = bad yet Sony who have media and hardware control than M$ can only dream of are somehow good !"
There are plenty of households out there that don't have any Sony hardware but still have Microsoft software. Heck, you find Microsoft sofware running on Sony hardware. Remember that by far the best selling piece of Sony hardware is the PlayStation.
Oh, and in terms of manufacturing a competitive console, Sony does a better job. To the victor goes the spoils. Again, we're not French.
"Microsoft have done more to promote computing worldwide than _any other company_"
*cough* IBM *cough*
"yet you kick sand in their faces when you actually have an opportunity to promote this "product of America""
At this point I think even the French would be insulted by the way you confuse us.
That really annoying guy in their commercials... "Can you hear me now?" I'm glad he's roving around the country. I'm looking forward to bludgeoning the annoying SOB senseless with whatever blunt instrument happens to be handy...
Your snail mail analogy doesn't hold water. In order to mail a letter the sender must pay all communications costs or it gets returned for insufficient postage. Intel spent a non-negligible amount of money setting up those e-mail servers for the ability to receive e-mail and that resource expenditure alone should give them some right to control who can use it and when.
My Sprint PCS e-mail account has yet to get spam, and I've had it since December last year. And even if I did, I believe I have the option of disabling SMS notifications when I receive e-mail.
Oh, and my phone doesn't beep when I get SMS. It vibrates.:)
If it makes you feel any better, you can probably use your phone in more countries than I can mine. So you can get multi-lingual spam!:)
Here in Louisiana (where "Corruption and Graft" isn't just a state motto, it's a way of life), we have to pay to be put on the no-call list. After paying income tax. And 9% sales tax. And yet the state and local legislatures are always looking to raise taxes. And I thought Maryland was the tax state...
A friend of mine who currently lives in DC is getting charged out the rear end for her Verizon account. I've got to Verizon's website and then to Spint PCS's website and compared numbers and... well... it just ain't pretty.
"If Time Warner Cable is bothering you for things other than billing, why not try complaining to the billing department...if that doesn't work, complain to the executive offices...they love to receive your call"
I find it more satisfying to demand to talk to their billing dept. immediately so that you can cancel your account with them. Tell them you're switching to DSS because at least they won't solicit you over the phone. If they try to remind you that you can't easily get local channels with DSS, tell them that you think it's a price worth paying to avoid telemarketers.
I'm sorry but IMO the cable television industry is hard pressed to compete with DSS as it is and they should know better than to try to test their customers' patience like this. If they haven't figured that out by now then they deserve to lose business in the most painful way possible. Not that they will care about losing customers until it's too late (see my sig)...
BTW, the "Forward me to your billing department so I can cancel my account" bit also works well with credit card people (so long as you can afford it).
Ditch the land line and use cellular exclusively. You get the added advantages of not having to pay to put your number on a no-call list as well as giving the Baby Bells the shaft (unless you're dumb enough to use one as your cellular provider, in which case you better hold on to the land line to dial into AOL).
... is that I'm expected to pay money to put my number on a list in order to prevent people from using the phone line that I'M paying for without MY permission.
State-wide or nation-wide no-call lists? Sure. But put the financial burden on the telemarketers or the Baby Bells (often one and the same anyway).
So this court of appeals decided that it didn't want to hear yet another appeal from 2600. This could mean either one of two very different things:
1.) The appeals court sees no problem with either the district court ruling or the first appeals court ruling. As far as they're concerned, the case is done.
2.) The appeals court sees that there is a few very important issues in the case and feels it would be best to defer the case to the Supreme Court ASAP in order to set a new nation-wide precedent. If this is what happened, then they're very interested in the case in question.
So... which is it? The news articles talk of a one-line ruling. What did the one-line ruling say?
Hey! Einstein! Look here!
on
Disconnecting
·
· Score: 2
"you sure won't find any little cancellation box on the home page."
"I heard the usual chirpy recorded message urging me onto the site's website, where, the voice assured me, all my questions could be answered."
Go to support.earthlink.net Log in. Without even scrolling down, look on the left side of your screen, under "Customer Service," right next to the bit that tells you their call center wait times (which you obviously didn't check before calling). What do you see?
From my memory of the last time the Nuremberg List was posted on Slashdot, I predict that there will be at least two dozen posts talking about how the Nuremberg trials after the end of World War II were retroactive. They weren't. The surviving leaders of Germany and Japan (and the other Axis countries) were tried for violations international laws Germany had signed well before WWII.
The Geneva Conventions in question were first ratified in 1864 and later modified in 1906. They dealt with the treatment of the sick and wounded. Additions were made to the conventions in 1929 concerning the treatment of prisoners of war. There were more modifications made in 1949, but by then the trials were long done.
The Hague Conventions were first ratified in 1899 and modified in 1907. They dealt with certain kinds of weapons (such as chemical weapons) and outlined the treatment of both prisoners of war and civillians.
The Kellogg-Briand Pact, ratified in 1928, outlawed war as a tool of national policy (ie. aggression).
There were also a few other laws that were brought up (such as the naval law against false flags and such), but these were the big ones.
As can be seen, all of these treaties were drawn up well before the start of World War II. More importantly, Germany signed on to each and every one of these treaties, bringing themselves under their jurisdiction. This is similar to the way that Milosveic is being brought to trial for violations of the Dayton Accords (to name one) he signed on to years earlier.
Of course, the people who maintain the Nuremberg List are those kinds of people that, if you begin to understand their "logic," you should seek professional help...
"Just like a person committing fraud online in the U.S. can be convicted of interstate fraud, no new rules are required for convictions of organized threats just because they are online."
You missed the point. The post's author was talking about the Nuremberg List's stated goal of maintaining a record of all abortionists for when abortion becomes a "crime against humanity." That's the "law" the poster was talking about.
"It's a bit like Columbus discovered America and now we've been to American 6 times"
Columbus stumbled across the New World in 1492. How many permanent European settlements were established between and the end of the 15th century? Heck, let me be generous: Between then and the end of the 16th century?
We got to the moon and back six times in a span of half a decade or so. Starting from 1492, when's the first time that there were six expeditions to the New World in such a small time frame?
"it's a vacuum"
For a planet with no atmosphere, it sure seems to have a lot of dust storms. Not to mention all the erosion that's apparent on the surface...
"We need to mine something that isn't at the bottom of a gravity well."
As I recall from my physics courses, if it's something, by definition it's in the bottom of a gravity well.
And while we're on the subject of asteroid mining, sure they tend to have lots of heavy elements, but if you're looking for light stuff (say, oh, I dunno... reaction mass!?!), you need a heavy duty gravity well to hang on to it and collect it.
"Phobos or Deimos- yes."
After expelling enough reaction mass to get to Mars in a reasonable amount of time (ie. before the crew gets microwaved into crispy critters), you honestly think bringing enough fuel to reach Martian escape velocity (remember, 1/3 G) is really going to make that much of a difference? Heck, landing on Mars has the advantage over its satellites in that it at least has SOME atmosphere, so you don't need near as much shielding once you get there. Especially when you consider how long you're going to have to be there until Earth catches up with you again (even if you're using nuclear rockets).
"a NEA or a comet, yes"
Instead of going on a manned interplanetary expedition to someplace we run into once or twice a year or so, you're in favor of trying to catch up with and land on something that doesn't come anywhere near here for a few centuries or millenia? And what will the crew do when they get there? Start digging their own graves?
"Mars? Later."
"If not now, when? If not us, who?"
Re:You need Applixware...
on
StarOffice 6.0
·
· Score: 1
*sigh* What is that, a form letter?
"The underlying language (ELF) is open-source (SHELF) and supports networking and talks nice to other languages"
I have exactly zero need for networking a database, and I'm not interested in learning yet another language, no matter how "nice" it is with the ones I already know.
I'm also not interested in open source because I'm not a programmer. It means nothing to me.
"I use it to open the.csv files from my bank, cut/paste the records into a PostgreSQL database, and then open a couple of spreadsheets with running balanc calculations and category breakdowns."
Here is where it really shows how useless this program would be to me. Instead of opening a browser, telling my bank to send me the file, opening the file, cutting it to the clipboard, opening another database and some spreadsheets and pasting that information to those other files, I want to be able to write a script that does all of that all by itself.
And again, I'm not a programmer. I'm not interested in downloading a bunch of GNU apps and trying to figure out how to modify the code and make them do what I want them to do. I want applications that can do what I want them to do out of the box.
Wrong. We're talking about corporations here. The #1 rule there is "Don't let anyone get between you and your investors."
Re:Just when I'm beginning to rely on 5.2, too...
on
StarOffice 6.0
·
· Score: 2
"With regards to email clients, well, you can call external programs for the email client."
E-mail a document or a spreadsheet from within StarOffice, sure. But can I download an e-mail message, scan it for certain information, and based on that information generate a response e-mail, create a new mail folder, and/or make or update records in one or two different databases? Without leaving the StarOffice API?
"Wonder if they think charging for it will make people more likely to use it."
I wouldn't be surprised if it does. When it comes to buying applications, most purchasers believe in the addage "You get what you pay for." While StarOffice may not be above and beyond what OpenOffice can do, the price tag demonstrates to most buyers that it's a "real" program and also suggests that there is guaranteed support behind it as well.
After all, look how well RedHat is doing compared to competitors. Or how much Mandrake is taking off as they establish a similar model.
Just when I'm beginning to rely on 5.2, too...
on
StarOffice 6.0
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Here I am, setting up an Adabas database as well as working on some StarBasic scripts to automate my eBay transactions and related e-mails, and it turns out that version 6 has no browser, e-mail client or true database application (the three things I need to make the scripts do what they're supposed to do). Heck, I'm having a hard time finding out if I need to look into translating the StarBasic into JavaScript for 6.0.
I'm about ready to spend the $35 for the boxed product just to make sure I have access to the software when Sun stops supporting it. Then and only then can I even consider moving on to 6.0, and I will probably end up having the two installations sitting side-by-side.
The features that died with StarOffice 5.2 were fairly useless for the personal user (their own browser and e-mail) as well as large enterprise networks (their own database structures), but damn it if they weren't useful for us middle-of-the-road types. Unless I grab one of the last copies of 5.2, I might as well invest in a copy of Office 2000 for Access 2000, Outlook and the VBA to use between them. That or learn how to script/program for real...
Slashdot Mirror
You won wireless broadband! Mmm, very tasty! Now, you want keep high speed access, or you want try getting HDTV broadcast instead?
HDTV? Turn on set and...
NOTHING! You so stupid!
"Stage 1 of the European Space Agency study involved 14 male volunteers spending 3 months carrying out all activities whilst lying on their backs..."
... while us crazy loons in the US (Russia too, I hear) have the daft idea of conducting weightlessness studies in actual microgravity. Go figure!
I'm waiting for the ESA to announce their intention to put people in space with a really tall ladder ala Eddie Izzard.
They can talk about adding all the new gimmicks they want but they still have to convince the buying public to upgrade from their older versions that don't have these "features," and their monopoly power ain't what it used to be. They should perhaps spend a little time studying those Windows XP sales figures.
Seriously, I use Windows 2000 and there are a few new features in Windows XP that might be worth the upgrade. But I'll be damned if I'm going to get their software if I have to deal with their new registration BS, especially when there is currently verey little that NT 5.1 can do that NT 5.0 can't.
... is a big price drop in all of those "broadband" routers from folks at Linksys and such. The more you have to pay for a broadband connection, the less money you have left over to share that connection.
:)
Of course, then there's those of us out there with enough foresight to buy a router with modem support.
"Why is it that the audience here is unwilling to get behind an "All American" company and support it, yet they feel its perfectly ok to promote a product that they are not involved in ?"
Because us silly Americans tend to like a competitive market and want the best product available. Microsoft seems to be about as capable of producing a competing console as Atari.
We don't automaticly support whatever crap that is produced in our country because we simply aren't French.
"Microsoft = bad yet Sony who have media and hardware control than M$ can only dream of are somehow good !"
There are plenty of households out there that don't have any Sony hardware but still have Microsoft software. Heck, you find Microsoft sofware running on Sony hardware. Remember that by far the best selling piece of Sony hardware is the PlayStation.
Oh, and in terms of manufacturing a competitive console, Sony does a better job. To the victor goes the spoils. Again, we're not French.
"Microsoft have done more to promote computing worldwide than _any other company_"
*cough* IBM *cough*
"yet you kick sand in their faces when you actually have an opportunity to promote this "product of America""
At this point I think even the French would be insulted by the way you confuse us.
That really annoying guy in their commercials... "Can you hear me now?" I'm glad he's roving around the country. I'm looking forward to bludgeoning the annoying SOB senseless with whatever blunt instrument happens to be handy...
Your snail mail analogy doesn't hold water. In order to mail a letter the sender must pay all communications costs or it gets returned for insufficient postage. Intel spent a non-negligible amount of money setting up those e-mail servers for the ability to receive e-mail and that resource expenditure alone should give them some right to control who can use it and when.
My Sprint PCS e-mail account has yet to get spam, and I've had it since December last year. And even if I did, I believe I have the option of disabling SMS notifications when I receive e-mail.
:)
:)
Oh, and my phone doesn't beep when I get SMS. It vibrates.
If it makes you feel any better, you can probably use your phone in more countries than I can mine. So you can get multi-lingual spam!
Here in Louisiana (where "Corruption and Graft" isn't just a state motto, it's a way of life), we have to pay to be put on the no-call list. After paying income tax. And 9% sales tax. And yet the state and local legislatures are always looking to raise taxes. And I thought Maryland was the tax state...
A friend of mine who currently lives in DC is getting charged out the rear end for her Verizon account. I've got to Verizon's website and then to Spint PCS's website and compared numbers and... well... it just ain't pretty.
"If Time Warner Cable is bothering you for things other than billing, why not try complaining to the billing department...if that doesn't work, complain to the executive offices...they love to receive your call"
I find it more satisfying to demand to talk to their billing dept. immediately so that you can cancel your account with them. Tell them you're switching to DSS because at least they won't solicit you over the phone. If they try to remind you that you can't easily get local channels with DSS, tell them that you think it's a price worth paying to avoid telemarketers.
I'm sorry but IMO the cable television industry is hard pressed to compete with DSS as it is and they should know better than to try to test their customers' patience like this. If they haven't figured that out by now then they deserve to lose business in the most painful way possible. Not that they will care about losing customers until it's too late (see my sig)...
BTW, the "Forward me to your billing department so I can cancel my account" bit also works well with credit card people (so long as you can afford it).
Ditch the land line and use cellular exclusively. You get the added advantages of not having to pay to put your number on a no-call list as well as giving the Baby Bells the shaft (unless you're dumb enough to use one as your cellular provider, in which case you better hold on to the land line to dial into AOL).
... is that I'm expected to pay money to put my number on a list in order to prevent people from using the phone line that I'M paying for without MY permission.
State-wide or nation-wide no-call lists? Sure. But put the financial burden on the telemarketers or the Baby Bells (often one and the same anyway).
So this court of appeals decided that it didn't want to hear yet another appeal from 2600. This could mean either one of two very different things:
1.) The appeals court sees no problem with either the district court ruling or the first appeals court ruling. As far as they're concerned, the case is done.
2.) The appeals court sees that there is a few very important issues in the case and feels it would be best to defer the case to the Supreme Court ASAP in order to set a new nation-wide precedent. If this is what happened, then they're very interested in the case in question.
So... which is it? The news articles talk of a one-line ruling. What did the one-line ruling say?
"you sure won't find any little cancellation box on the home page."
"I heard the usual chirpy recorded message urging me onto the site's website, where, the voice assured me, all my questions could be answered."
Go to support.earthlink.net Log in. Without even scrolling down, look on the left side of your screen, under "Customer Service," right next to the bit that tells you their call center wait times (which you obviously didn't check before calling). What do you see?
The fourth hyperlink down:
How to cancel your Earthlink account.
And, yes, their on-line chat tech support works, and the wait time on that is a heck of a lot shorter than their call-in lines.
When you write your Congresscritters, be sure to mention that you're talking about bill HR 4742.
From my memory of the last time the Nuremberg List was posted on Slashdot, I predict that there will be at least two dozen posts talking about how the Nuremberg trials after the end of World War II were retroactive. They weren't. The surviving leaders of Germany and Japan (and the other Axis countries) were tried for violations international laws Germany had signed well before WWII.
The Geneva Conventions in question were first ratified in 1864 and later modified in 1906. They dealt with the treatment of the sick and wounded. Additions were made to the conventions in 1929 concerning the treatment of prisoners of war. There were more modifications made in 1949, but by then the trials were long done.
The Hague Conventions were first ratified in 1899 and modified in 1907. They dealt with certain kinds of weapons (such as chemical weapons) and outlined the treatment of both prisoners of war and civillians.
The Kellogg-Briand Pact, ratified in 1928, outlawed war as a tool of national policy (ie. aggression).
There were also a few other laws that were brought up (such as the naval law against false flags and such), but these were the big ones.
As can be seen, all of these treaties were drawn up well before the start of World War II. More importantly, Germany signed on to each and every one of these treaties, bringing themselves under their jurisdiction. This is similar to the way that Milosveic is being brought to trial for violations of the Dayton Accords (to name one) he signed on to years earlier.
Of course, the people who maintain the Nuremberg List are those kinds of people that, if you begin to understand their "logic," you should seek professional help...
"Just like a person committing fraud online in the U.S. can be convicted of interstate fraud, no new rules are required for convictions of organized threats just because they are online."
You missed the point. The post's author was talking about the Nuremberg List's stated goal of maintaining a record of all abortionists for when abortion becomes a "crime against humanity." That's the "law" the poster was talking about.
"It's a bit like Columbus discovered America and now we've been to American 6 times"
Columbus stumbled across the New World in 1492. How many permanent European settlements were established between and the end of the 15th century? Heck, let me be generous: Between then and the end of the 16th century?
We got to the moon and back six times in a span of half a decade or so. Starting from 1492, when's the first time that there were six expeditions to the New World in such a small time frame?
"it's a vacuum"
For a planet with no atmosphere, it sure seems to have a lot of dust storms. Not to mention all the erosion that's apparent on the surface...
"We need to mine something that isn't at the bottom of a gravity well."
As I recall from my physics courses, if it's something, by definition it's in the bottom of a gravity well.
And while we're on the subject of asteroid mining, sure they tend to have lots of heavy elements, but if you're looking for light stuff (say, oh, I dunno... reaction mass!?!), you need a heavy duty gravity well to hang on to it and collect it.
"Phobos or Deimos- yes."
After expelling enough reaction mass to get to Mars in a reasonable amount of time (ie. before the crew gets microwaved into crispy critters), you honestly think bringing enough fuel to reach Martian escape velocity (remember, 1/3 G) is really going to make that much of a difference? Heck, landing on Mars has the advantage over its satellites in that it at least has SOME atmosphere, so you don't need near as much shielding once you get there. Especially when you consider how long you're going to have to be there until Earth catches up with you again (even if you're using nuclear rockets).
"a NEA or a comet, yes"
Instead of going on a manned interplanetary expedition to someplace we run into once or twice a year or so, you're in favor of trying to catch up with and land on something that doesn't come anywhere near here for a few centuries or millenia? And what will the crew do when they get there? Start digging their own graves?
"Mars? Later."
"If not now, when? If not us, who?"
*sigh* What is that, a form letter?
.csv files from my bank,
"The underlying language (ELF) is open-source
(SHELF) and supports networking and talks
nice to other languages"
I have exactly zero need for networking a database, and I'm not interested in learning yet another language, no matter how "nice" it is with the ones I already know.
I'm also not interested in open source because I'm not a programmer. It means nothing to me.
"I use it to open the
cut/paste the records into a PostgreSQL database,
and then open a couple of spreadsheets with running balanc calculations and category breakdowns."
Here is where it really shows how useless this program would be to me. Instead of opening a browser, telling my bank to send me the file, opening the file, cutting it to the clipboard, opening another database and some spreadsheets and pasting that information to those other files, I want to be able to write a script that does all of that all by itself.
And again, I'm not a programmer. I'm not interested in downloading a bunch of GNU apps and trying to figure out how to modify the code and make them do what I want them to do. I want applications that can do what I want them to do out of the box.
Wrong. We're talking about corporations here. The #1 rule there is "Don't let anyone get between you and your investors."
"With regards to email clients, well, you can call external programs for the email client."
E-mail a document or a spreadsheet from within StarOffice, sure. But can I download an e-mail message, scan it for certain information, and based on that information generate a response e-mail, create a new mail folder, and/or make or update records in one or two different databases? Without leaving the StarOffice API?
"Wonder if they think charging for it will make people more likely to use it."
I wouldn't be surprised if it does. When it comes to buying applications, most purchasers believe in the addage "You get what you pay for." While StarOffice may not be above and beyond what OpenOffice can do, the price tag demonstrates to most buyers that it's a "real" program and also suggests that there is guaranteed support behind it as well.
After all, look how well RedHat is doing compared to competitors. Or how much Mandrake is taking off as they establish a similar model.
Here I am, setting up an Adabas database as well as working on some StarBasic scripts to automate my eBay transactions and related e-mails, and it turns out that version 6 has no browser, e-mail client or true database application (the three things I need to make the scripts do what they're supposed to do). Heck, I'm having a hard time finding out if I need to look into translating the StarBasic into JavaScript for 6.0.
I'm about ready to spend the $35 for the boxed product just to make sure I have access to the software when Sun stops supporting it. Then and only then can I even consider moving on to 6.0, and I will probably end up having the two installations sitting side-by-side.
The features that died with StarOffice 5.2 were fairly useless for the personal user (their own browser and e-mail) as well as large enterprise networks (their own database structures), but damn it if they weren't useful for us middle-of-the-road types. Unless I grab one of the last copies of 5.2, I might as well invest in a copy of Office 2000 for Access 2000, Outlook and the VBA to use between them. That or learn how to script/program for real...
... integrate well with Sun's StarOffice 6.0, which was also released today?