...of pointing people to the myriad of mobile phones out there that -are- nothing but a phone because the response, invariably, is: - but I do still want it to carry WiFi? - but it doesn't have a color screen? - can I can't run custom apps on it? - does it have a bluetooth? and so forth and so on.
If you really, really, really want a mobile phone that is 'just a mobile phone' plus the stuff you do want, just get one that does all that -and more-... and use your willpower to NOT use the parts you don't want to use*
I know, it's hard to resist the shiny once it's in your hands.
(* the only exception being workplaces that outright ban camera phones - luckily for those people, there are also a myriad of devices that do indeed have everything-but-a-camera, some of them even targeted especially at this particular audience.)
what makes you think that they think they're -owed- a living?
Maybe they just think that if they sell their damn works for $1 or $2, that people who -want- that content will either buy it or forego on it.
MAYBE they just think that if somebody says "$1 is too much", that the next thing they will say is "I think $0.25 is a much more reasonable price - I'd get it for that price", while instead the next thing they see is "I think I'll just grab it for ZIP ZILCH NOTHING, fuck you and your $1, I'll use that to buy half a sloppy burger instead!"
Maybe, just maybe, they realize that they can make the damn works $0.01 and people will -still- pirate them because THEN all of a sudden the whole 'hassle' of going through a payment system just to pay $0.01 for the song is not worth the effort of clicking through screens. So they price them at $X (be that $1, $1.49, whatever) so that those who -do- buy it, will at least be paying an amount that, once all is said and done, at least the production costs are covered and maybe there's a little extra.
Heck, maybe there's a -lot- extra, maybe the artist becomes a millionaire, so what? Who are we to say they're not allowed?
Why do -we- think we're owed all artists' works for $0.00?
Although I completely concur on the 'play the demo first' part, I do wonder what you mean by "it is not worth the $20".
Yes, there's Flash games online that you can play for 'free'; they have ads around them (yes, you can block those ads, but as long as hundreds of thousands don't, I'm sure they don't mind all that much)
So would rather they put advertising in/around the game and make it available for $0? (knowing that some will then just strip out the advertising, of course.)
Or are you simply saying "It's not worth $20, but it is worth $N"? If so - what's N?
I understand that 'worth' is a subjective thing and can't fully be rationalized as 'at minimum wage for a minor, it's only 5 hours' work - they'll get more than 5 hours of enjoyment out of this game' or 'I suppose you could buy 3 grande super macchiato lattes with whipped cream and cholate shavings for $21 instead - but those don't last at all', so I'm asking you specifically what you think it -is- worth, with rationalization.
That is indeed incredibly stupid - although I've not encountered it after playing a game normally, if a fullscreen game *crashes* I am indeed SOL...well, partly.
Although I would say that your 'app store' isn't so much an 'app store' as a 'game store', I think my biggest beef with all of the 'app stores' out there is that they already existed in one form or another.
One of the biggest sites for mobile downloads, for example, is Handango. It carries utilities, tools, games, etc. for all of the open platforms (e.g. no iPhone, obviously).
So the availability has never been a problem, and opening a new 'app store' that does much the same isn't going to make things much better. ( I will say, though, that judging by the flashy banners, you guys are at least offering a little extra (e.g. the subscription plan and the app that will let users keep an eye on apps from their own mobile device )
The reason the Apple app store is as successful as it is, is because you can manage everything from that single site - browsing, buying, downloading, installing. Once installed, it's also guaranteed to *work* on your mobile device; yes, I know, that's rather easy since there only really is 1 'device', but if you keep in mind how many of the apps for, say, Windows Mobile come in at least 2 different flavors just to deal with square display vs 4:3 display devices, not to mention the resolution separation, then a user easily gets lost.
Thankfully, you were smart enough to add a filter-by-phone so that only compatible games are listed... but then you have to make absolutely sure you get (or collect) the correct information and you have to keep up-to-date on all of the different phone models out there... that's nearly a day-job for one of your staff.
Anyway - good luck with the site, it looks polished (I'm not a big fan of the animated bits, but I know your target audience is), the featureset and what-does-it-offer-extra-over-other-sites looks pretty good (for those who missed it - click on a game, there's a good chance you can play it on-line for 10 minutes so you can decide whether or not it's something you'd like to actually buy... that's brilliant), it's a bit slow to navigate at the moment but that might just be other slashdotters eating your bandwidth a bit.
...just wait until there's a murder or rape or whatever at a location that -was- once targeted by one of the camera's they're taken down, and ( the victim('s family/friends) and ) the media blow(s) the story up of how they *might* have had something useful from those cameras -- but thanks to them being taken down, they'd now have nothing.
It'll take a real level-headed city council to argue that taking them down was still the right thing to do.
I counter your example with the fact that if you think that going to the bathroom etc. are valid alternatives to watching the ads - and they are - then what's the problem with ads at Hulu? Just go to the bathroom etc.
Instead, the GP suggests that *instead*, they take technical means to skip the ads altogether.. without the inconvenience of a delayed viewing experience that a DVR (with ad-skip functionality) would have.
Really, if you want to watch it without the ads, go grab the torrent.. at least then you're not using the provider's bandwidth in ill faith.
Yes, it's great if it's just a random single element in a random single pixel that fluctuates just slightly. But that's not where any inaccuracy is going to be from such a chip as all -that- stuff comes from the screen drivers which are already blazingly fast. Any gains would have to come from the decoder chip and that's where you're going to run into trouble with bits changing - even LSBs.
Open a JPG file, change a random bit somewhere, re-display. If you're lucky, you see virtually no change. If you're unlucky, the entire image -after- the point where you changed the bit will have changed colors (subtly or radically), shifted, become a complete mess or - if you're really unlucky - your JPEG decoder will tell you that the resulting output mismatches the spec for the jpeg (e.g. the headers tell the thing it should be an 800x600 image but while decoding the data it concludes the data ends up being 800x608; whoops.) ( for the curious - yes, that's how some of the more obscure 'jpeg repair' apps work, finding the likely start of corruption and fiddling with bits until you get an acceptable result that you can then retouch if needed ).
And that's just JPG. Now try that with any moden -video- codec where encoding isn't just spatially based, but also temporally.
No, you don't want to have random bits changing in lossy compressed streams. It's a world of hurt.
And time passed validates spoiling something for somebody.. how?
Let's say MindlessAutomata never played the Final Fantasy games.. he'd heard about them in the past, heard they were pretty good, but really he was out and about playing... I don't know, baseball. Whatever. But he grows too old for the game and they kick him out. Too bad, so sad. So what's he to do.. books, sure.. maybe some TV.. but then he thinks back to those computer games and figures 'hell, why not' and gets a buddy to drag over his old PS1 and a bunch of games including Final Fantasy VII. So he sits there on the couch, playing the game for the first time ever, enjoying it (presumably) and getting quite captivated by it.
Then YOU walk in and tell him "oh hey, fun game, eh? Yeah, Aeris dies."
See how f'ed up that is?
As far as Titanic goes.. that's not a spoiler. Even if you'd never heard of the Titanic, if you watch the movie for the first time, it becomes clear pretty early on that the damn thing will sink. But tell somebody who's never seen the movie that Jack dies, and I think they may be a bit miffed with you.
I'm a complete n00b when it comes to 'cloud computing', but given that the article (behind the 2nd link) starts out to explain that nobody's really sure what 'cloud computing' is just yet, I guess I can't help but shrug at that fact.
I did try to read through the thinly-veiled press release article, but at the end... I'm still unsure what the meta data is.
Say I have a 'cloud computing' app that is uhh.. a bouncing ball. Yes, it shows on the screen of the app user a bouncing ball. That'll do.
Now that app is mine. I can take it from one provider to another (assuming they run the same apps - I suppose a standard would have to define that).
Now let's say the provider has options to, say, limit access to that app to a certain IP range. Certainly that's meta-data, right? It's not inherent to the app, it's not crucial to the app's workings, it's just additional data related to the app. Is that data mine? I would certainly say so. I go into the provider's control panel, hit 'limit access', enter the IP addresses... I don't think they can claim that the data I entered is now suddenly the provider's to own, and taking that particular meta-data from that provider and to another provider (presuming they have a limit-by-ip thing) shouldn't be any trouble. Again, a standard may apply here for some common tasks/options and exporting this to a common file format (and I really don't care if that's plaintext, XML, a BLOB or whatever - as long as everybody can read/write them) so it can be imported by another provider would be nice.
But the article seems to be about a bunch of people -at the provider- having a peek at your app and making tweaks in their own 'cloud' to make your app be delivered faster, be delivered more securely, etc. I fail to see how -that- meta-data is yours to own. The 'cloud' isn't yours, the tweaks made to the cloud aren't yours, etc. So maybe you paid them to make those optimizations, great, so pay the people at the other provider to make changes too. That's one of the perils of changing providers / relying on their tweaks in any such business.
I don't think that not having that meta-data breaks portability, though - it just means your app may not be delivered as fast, or as securely.. your problem for choosing an inferior 'cloud computing' provider.
But, again, maybe one of those 'industry moguls' in the arena of cloud computing can explain what the problem actually seems to be.
They clearly need to support their iPods and iPhones under Windows... simply because a lot of people have Windows machines and it would be suicidal to not support the most popular portable media player and one of the most popular smartphones on -the- most popular (well, most-used, at least), desktop operating system.
However, that does not mean they have to build it well. It has to be usable. It can't delete your songs. It can't wipe your phone's contact lists, etc. Beyond that.. it doesn't have to play well with other applications. It doesn't have to look like standard Windows programs. If it does, yay, if it doesn't.. whatever.
But now let's say it behaves... a little 'odd' in Windows. Like iTunes not shutting down properly.. maybe a lockup here or there, a flickering dialog from a bad draw instruction. Not saying that's intentional, probably just odd behavior or bugs they didn't catch before.. but maybe didn't look very hard for either.
Now that same person uses what should be the same application... but on a Mac. Suddenly, no more quirkiness. It closes when you tell it to. It doesn't lock up. The interface doesn't flicker.
Would that person think... A. Why can't they make the Windows version just like this? or B. This works SO much better on an Apple! Maybe I'll get an Apple computer next time, I hear they run Windows apps nowadays anyway.
"it only makes sense that we'd prefer freedom over government bullying." Except, of course, if a company is 'taking away' freedoms.. then you (perhaps not you, specifically) do want the government to bully around.
I know it's not popular, but the whole "you have a choice when it comes to companies" thing is in direct opposition to the whole "zomg Microsoft is an abusive monopoly they should be punished!" thing. Very few people would argue that, back in the day, you had a choice - that you *could* buy alternatives to the 'Wintel' platform... and some believe even now that you don't really have a choice.. and thus want to see Microsoft punished.
Yet your method of punishment (don't use Microsoft products, for example), is not seen as valid.
So, too, do many feel that "so don't use Google" is not valid and would rather see that Google come to their senses, or a watchdog step in and make them come to their senses. Probably not over this EULA, though - and I do suspect that the behavior of constantly re-downloading the updater is something that will be tweaked in no time.
I don't think that Mr. Paget was trying to make a point for "hey, look, Passport data!" at all. In fact, he states in his video himself that all he got were the unique IDs for the RFID, which have a prefix which indicates whether it is, say, a passport.
What I got from his video - and which is a perfectly valid argument against RFID *in general* - is that he now -has- that unique ID. Presumably, you are the only one with your (passport) ID. Next up, link that to an RFID scanned at the very same time.. except this time it's just some grocery store's RFID. It doesn't come with encryption up the wazoo - why would it.. it's just for you to get grocery 'discounts' and for them to know wtf a person may be buying throughout periods of time. But instead of a store ID that correlates to name data somewhere in their database, they decided to just store the name right on the card itself.
Now you have a name to go with the ID from the passport. Congratulations, you can now track not just an ID, but a person.
Yes, I know, you're still 'only tracking that one RFID chip', and sure.. it could be on somebody else's person. Again, though, with a (passport) ID - how likely is that?
There's two that I could find (on spike dot com), maybe there's some I'm missing?
1. Danica Patrick (and yes, she's definitely hot) getting into the shower of which you see, at most, her from the shoulders up in what appears to be a shower. The suggestion being made is that a buy behind a computer is making her do this.
2. Danica Patrick at a 'trial' exclaiming "yes, I've been enhanced" while a shot of her in full gear is shown with - granted - her chest area the focus of the camera's view.. then going on to show a godaddy website somethingorother.... and one of these has the commenters up above - with families or not - throwing hissy fits?
Surely every other shampoo or body wash ad would raise more concern, then.
As I understand it, the problem is that the app that sends the keystrokes (standard windows messaging APIs to interact with a UI) does not have to get around UAC at all. It can simply go to the control utility, lower the UAC level, and reboot.. no prompts (unless UAC is at the highest level - it is 1 lower by default), nothing. After the reboot, the -actual- malware.. that would otherwise get blocked by UAC..can now do its thing without worry.
But reports are sketchy, so that above *may* be incorrect.
Although I'll agree that I doubt anybody is going to get fired - or even demoted - over this (even if the cause must have been something rather silly), I do think there's a big difference between google not being available and google labeling perfectly normal sites as possibly hosting malware.
Say I wasn't aware of this issue (somehow not noticing that -everything- was being flagged), and I visited my bank.. now I call my bank in a worry, wonder if they are still as secure as they claim to be - the bank then has to go out of their way to reassure me that, yes, things are okay.. even if Google says otherwise..so just continue onward. Oh, but now my bank told me that even if Google says something is malware, there's a chance it isn't.. so next time Google warns me about malware.. should I just ignore it?
( of course a bank *should* be telling you to enter the main address of their site in the address bar, rather than 'continue onward' )
Anyway - thanks to whoever over there for fixing things.. presuming it was fixed and not just had everything now flagged as non-malware (even those that -do- (or did in the past 90(?) days) have malware)
yes, the majority. Lemme go pull figures out of my hat while you ponder where I said anything about iPods and harddisks - which, for now anyway, do not carry such a levy.
you can take issue with the notion that filing suits against / prosecuting people is more costly for society than a tiny tax, but if you do so on the basis of "there's a third option - don't do anything", then you should realize how incredible flawed that issue-taking is as it does nothing to prove that it would be cheaper to file suits / prosecute.
that's not to say I disagree with you - legislation does usually give the government either direct, or by direction of private individuals/businesses/interest groups, the power to intervene in what should be issues between two private parties. Quite technically, if somebody stabs you, that should be a private matter between you and the assailant. However you then need cops, do the ambulance and hospital thing, insurance companies get involved and before long people realize that government has to step in here to make these things possible and try to make things 'good enough' again. And yes, I know getting stabbed isn't the same as having your MP3 copied - point is that government realizes that laws are being broken left and right and they don't need the interest groups filing hundreds of civil suits (which still end up in public court houses if going through) that clog up the system.. so they ponder alternative means... and voila, there's the levy on audio casette tapes... then (Video2000/Beta/VHS) tapes, then CD-Recordables, DVD-Recordables, Blu-Ray recordables and - if those interest groups had their way - soon MP3 players, HDD recorders and harddisks themselves as well.
Replace 'internet' with 'CD-Recordables' or 'casette tapes' and you've got the questions people have been asking for well over 20 years now in various countries. The answers have always been the same as well:
1. tough luck for them, the reality of the matter is that the majority of people do use CD-R's/tapes to record things they do not have a right to record - ergo illegal - and it's far more costly to society to actual pursue those people so instead we're making everybody pay a small levy as compensation - and no, that does not automatically make the actions legal.
2. that's none of your concern, groups such as the RIAA and MPAA will deal with that.
...don't blame the tech for any nefarious purposes, right?
'Push Technology' just meant that instead of people refreshing websites all damn day long, the website would shoot the client a new copy if there was anything new on it. Push died, people still didn't want their sites refreshed by clients all the time, so they set up RSS feeds instead. Now everybody hammers the RSS feeds all damn day long. It's less bandwidth than the whole page, but it's still the same problem.
Heck, we actually use 'Push Technology' all the time. Instant Messenging, for example, is push. Sending an e-mail is push. Proper push e-mail (where the service goes to connect to your phone, rather than your phone checking every 3 minutes)... is push.
Yes, there are even RSS subscription services that use push.
Back to the 'nefarious' bit, however.. some people were scared that media moguls/governments would try to squash pull and have clients receive push only - thus limiting the information you can get to whatever is being pushed by those groups. I think it would have taken a *lot* for that to happen back then - it'll be neigh-impossible now.
fwiw, I've got about 180 DVDs and I have yet to have one that did not have English subtitles for the main feature. Most of them in the form of 'English (for the hard of hearing)' subs. It is true, however, that commentaries and the like often lack English subtitles and you're stuck with a selection of, usually, Dutch or French... German, Turkish, Spanish if you're 'lucky'.
But I am now deeply curious which movies GP had wanted to buy and found to only have Dutch subtitles. Even the plethora of Dutch DVDs I have -have- English subtitle options.
A much better reason to download is to be done with the thing... no need for a special player that ignores the unskippable bits, no need to rip the DVD yourself to your media player machine, etc. Just grab the release, call it a day - you still have the DVD if you want to get at the extras / want a higher quality.
unlocker (if you use Vista, make sure to set it to run as administrator by default in its properties tab) is great for -unlocking- files that are in use... e.g. some program or service has a file handle open on it.
it does crap all for permissions issues.. so do the actually permissions tools in Windows if the permissions table itself is corrupt (had to remove two folders recently because vista wouldn't even let me change the owner.. teehee)
a boot CD (UBCD / UBCD4WIN) can be *very* useful for these types of things - presuming you didn't encrypt your drive.
I don't see why it has to be one *or* the other. Just offer a three-tier WiKi. 1. fully reviewed edits reviewed by people who have an expertise in the field applicable. 2. regular reviewed edits - just to remove the "lol coryking sucks cocks!" edits and edits that appear to have no basis / are original research (everything is original research at some point, dammit.) / etc. 3. a free-for-all. yes, that means allowing "animaether sucks cocks". Who cares, it's not in tier 2, let alone tier 1, while at the same time it opens things up to possibly interesting information that doesn't make it into tier 2 due to e.g. the 'original research' thing.
Honestly, the 'original research' and 'citation needed' bits are what annoy me the most about wikipedia... enough that I once tried to make greasemonkey remove those tags from the viewed page altogether. I'd understand the need for them in tier 1, but right now wikipedia is somewhere at tier uhh.. 2.3 or something. If a citation is missing, that's okay.. I google around.
Indeed - not particularly practical as I have many files well over the 4GB limit and I really don't want to muck around with doing things like creating a dozen smaller FAT32 partitions either. (the drive's 1TB, for the curious).
process explorer is great to see what's using CPU/RAM/etc. and what DLLs it's got loaded. It doesn't tell you anything about what files it's accessing, however.
For example - my WD USB drive refuses to 'safely remove' in Vista. It always claims it's in use. When I use Process Explorer, there doesn't seem to be anything going on. The drive isn't in use (open file handles, for example), there's no new processes spawned when I go to 'safely remove' the drive, etc. But then I look at the Process Monitor and wouldn't you know.. scvhost.exe (an existing process) writes to "\system volume information\tracking.log" every time I go to 'safely remove'. 'safely remove' then decides for that fraction of a second that the drive is in use, and thus refuses to proceed.
So now at least I know why. Can't say I know how to fix it (disabling system restore did squat), but at least I changed the caching setting to disabled, meaning I can just yank the plug.
Slashdot Mirror
...of pointing people to the myriad of mobile phones out there that -are- nothing but a phone because the response, invariably, is:
- but I do still want it to carry WiFi?
- but it doesn't have a color screen?
- can I can't run custom apps on it?
- does it have a bluetooth?
and so forth and so on.
If you really, really, really want a mobile phone that is 'just a mobile phone' plus the stuff you do want, just get one that does all that -and more-... and use your willpower to NOT use the parts you don't want to use*
I know, it's hard to resist the shiny once it's in your hands.
(* the only exception being workplaces that outright ban camera phones - luckily for those people, there are also a myriad of devices that do indeed have everything-but-a-camera, some of them even targeted especially at this particular audience.)
what makes you think that they think they're -owed- a living?
Maybe they just think that if they sell their damn works for $1 or $2, that people who -want- that content will either buy it or forego on it.
MAYBE they just think that if somebody says "$1 is too much", that the next thing they will say is "I think $0.25 is a much more reasonable price - I'd get it for that price", while instead the next thing they see is "I think I'll just grab it for ZIP ZILCH NOTHING, fuck you and your $1, I'll use that to buy half a sloppy burger instead!"
Maybe, just maybe, they realize that they can make the damn works $0.01 and people will -still- pirate them because THEN all of a sudden the whole 'hassle' of going through a payment system just to pay $0.01 for the song is not worth the effort of clicking through screens. So they price them at $X (be that $1, $1.49, whatever) so that those who -do- buy it, will at least be paying an amount that, once all is said and done, at least the production costs are covered and maybe there's a little extra.
Heck, maybe there's a -lot- extra, maybe the artist becomes a millionaire, so what? Who are we to say they're not allowed?
Why do -we- think we're owed all artists' works for $0.00?
Although I completely concur on the 'play the demo first' part, I do wonder what you mean by "it is not worth the $20".
Yes, there's Flash games online that you can play for 'free'; they have ads around them (yes, you can block those ads, but as long as hundreds of thousands don't, I'm sure they don't mind all that much)
So would rather they put advertising in/around the game and make it available for $0? (knowing that some will then just strip out the advertising, of course.)
Or are you simply saying "It's not worth $20, but it is worth $N"? If so - what's N?
I understand that 'worth' is a subjective thing and can't fully be rationalized as 'at minimum wage for a minor, it's only 5 hours' work - they'll get more than 5 hours of enjoyment out of this game' or 'I suppose you could buy 3 grande super macchiato lattes with whipped cream and cholate shavings for $21 instead - but those don't last at all', so I'm asking you specifically what you think it -is- worth, with rationalization.
That is indeed incredibly stupid - although I've not encountered it after playing a game normally, if a fullscreen game *crashes* I am indeed SOL. ..well, partly.
Grab this:
http://www.snapfiles.com/get/iconrestore.html
It allows you to easily store and restore the layout of your desktop icons - perfect for these situations.
Although I would say that your 'app store' isn't so much an 'app store' as a 'game store', I think my biggest beef with all of the 'app stores' out there is that they already existed in one form or another.
One of the biggest sites for mobile downloads, for example, is Handango. It carries utilities, tools, games, etc. for all of the open platforms (e.g. no iPhone, obviously).
So the availability has never been a problem, and opening a new 'app store' that does much the same isn't going to make things much better.
( I will say, though, that judging by the flashy banners, you guys are at least offering a little extra (e.g. the subscription plan and the app that will let users keep an eye on apps from their own mobile device )
The reason the Apple app store is as successful as it is, is because you can manage everything from that single site - browsing, buying, downloading, installing. Once installed, it's also guaranteed to *work* on your mobile device; yes, I know, that's rather easy since there only really is 1 'device', but if you keep in mind how many of the apps for, say, Windows Mobile come in at least 2 different flavors just to deal with square display vs 4:3 display devices, not to mention the resolution separation, then a user easily gets lost.
Thankfully, you were smart enough to add a filter-by-phone so that only compatible games are listed... but then you have to make absolutely sure you get (or collect) the correct information and you have to keep up-to-date on all of the different phone models out there... that's nearly a day-job for one of your staff.
Anyway - good luck with the site, it looks polished (I'm not a big fan of the animated bits, but I know your target audience is), the featureset and what-does-it-offer-extra-over-other-sites looks pretty good (for those who missed it - click on a game, there's a good chance you can play it on-line for 10 minutes so you can decide whether or not it's something you'd like to actually buy... that's brilliant), it's a bit slow to navigate at the moment but that might just be other slashdotters eating your bandwidth a bit.
...just wait until there's a murder or rape or whatever at a location that -was- once targeted by one of the camera's they're taken down, and ( the victim('s family/friends) and ) the media blow(s) the story up of how they *might* have had something useful from those cameras -- but thanks to them being taken down, they'd now have nothing.
It'll take a real level-headed city council to argue that taking them down was still the right thing to do.
I counter your example with the fact that if you think that going to the bathroom etc. are valid alternatives to watching the ads - and they are - then what's the problem with ads at Hulu? Just go to the bathroom etc.
Instead, the GP suggests that *instead*, they take technical means to skip the ads altogether.. without the inconvenience of a delayed viewing experience that a DVR (with ad-skip functionality) would have.
Really, if you want to watch it without the ads, go grab the torrent.. at least then you're not using the provider's bandwidth in ill faith.
Yes, it's great if it's just a random single element in a random single pixel that fluctuates just slightly. But that's not where any inaccuracy is going to be from such a chip as all -that- stuff comes from the screen drivers which are already blazingly fast. Any gains would have to come from the decoder chip and that's where you're going to run into trouble with bits changing - even LSBs.
Open a JPG file, change a random bit somewhere, re-display. If you're lucky, you see virtually no change. If you're unlucky, the entire image -after- the point where you changed the bit will have changed colors (subtly or radically), shifted, become a complete mess or - if you're really unlucky - your JPEG decoder will tell you that the resulting output mismatches the spec for the jpeg (e.g. the headers tell the thing it should be an 800x600 image but while decoding the data it concludes the data ends up being 800x608; whoops.)
( for the curious - yes, that's how some of the more obscure 'jpeg repair' apps work, finding the likely start of corruption and fiddling with bits until you get an acceptable result that you can then retouch if needed ).
And that's just JPG. Now try that with any moden -video- codec where encoding isn't just spatially based, but also temporally.
No, you don't want to have random bits changing in lossy compressed streams. It's a world of hurt.
And time passed validates spoiling something for somebody.. how?
Let's say MindlessAutomata never played the Final Fantasy games.. he'd heard about them in the past, heard they were pretty good, but really he was out and about playing... I don't know, baseball. Whatever. But he grows too old for the game and they kick him out. Too bad, so sad. So what's he to do.. books, sure.. maybe some TV.. but then he thinks back to those computer games and figures 'hell, why not' and gets a buddy to drag over his old PS1 and a bunch of games including Final Fantasy VII. So he sits there on the couch, playing the game for the first time ever, enjoying it (presumably) and getting quite captivated by it.
Then YOU walk in and tell him "oh hey, fun game, eh? Yeah, Aeris dies."
See how f'ed up that is?
As far as Titanic goes.. that's not a spoiler. Even if you'd never heard of the Titanic, if you watch the movie for the first time, it becomes clear pretty early on that the damn thing will sink. But tell somebody who's never seen the movie that Jack dies, and I think they may be a bit miffed with you.
I'm a complete n00b when it comes to 'cloud computing', but given that the article (behind the 2nd link) starts out to explain that nobody's really sure what 'cloud computing' is just yet, I guess I can't help but shrug at that fact.
I did try to read through the thinly-veiled press release article, but at the end... I'm still unsure what the meta data is.
Say I have a 'cloud computing' app that is uhh.. a bouncing ball. Yes, it shows on the screen of the app user a bouncing ball. That'll do.
Now that app is mine. I can take it from one provider to another (assuming they run the same apps - I suppose a standard would have to define that).
Now let's say the provider has options to, say, limit access to that app to a certain IP range. Certainly that's meta-data, right? It's not inherent to the app, it's not crucial to the app's workings, it's just additional data related to the app. Is that data mine? I would certainly say so. I go into the provider's control panel, hit 'limit access', enter the IP addresses... I don't think they can claim that the data I entered is now suddenly the provider's to own, and taking that particular meta-data from that provider and to another provider (presuming they have a limit-by-ip thing) shouldn't be any trouble. Again, a standard may apply here for some common tasks/options and exporting this to a common file format (and I really don't care if that's plaintext, XML, a BLOB or whatever - as long as everybody can read/write them) so it can be imported by another provider would be nice.
But the article seems to be about a bunch of people -at the provider- having a peek at your app and making tweaks in their own 'cloud' to make your app be delivered faster, be delivered more securely, etc. I fail to see how -that- meta-data is yours to own. The 'cloud' isn't yours, the tweaks made to the cloud aren't yours, etc. So maybe you paid them to make those optimizations, great, so pay the people at the other provider to make changes too. That's one of the perils of changing providers / relying on their tweaks in any such business.
I don't think that not having that meta-data breaks portability, though - it just means your app may not be delivered as fast, or as securely.. your problem for choosing an inferior 'cloud computing' provider.
But, again, maybe one of those 'industry moguls' in the arena of cloud computing can explain what the problem actually seems to be.
tinfoil hat on...
They clearly need to support their iPods and iPhones under Windows... simply because a lot of people have Windows machines and it would be suicidal to not support the most popular portable media player and one of the most popular smartphones on -the- most popular (well, most-used, at least), desktop operating system.
However, that does not mean they have to build it well. It has to be usable. It can't delete your songs. It can't wipe your phone's contact lists, etc.
Beyond that.. it doesn't have to play well with other applications. It doesn't have to look like standard Windows programs. If it does, yay, if it doesn't.. whatever.
But now let's say it behaves... a little 'odd' in Windows. Like iTunes not shutting down properly.. maybe a lockup here or there, a flickering dialog from a bad draw instruction. Not saying that's intentional, probably just odd behavior or bugs they didn't catch before.. but maybe didn't look very hard for either.
Now that same person uses what should be the same application... but on a Mac. Suddenly, no more quirkiness. It closes when you tell it to. It doesn't lock up. The interface doesn't flicker.
Would that person think...
A. Why can't they make the Windows version just like this?
or
B. This works SO much better on an Apple! Maybe I'll get an Apple computer next time, I hear they run Windows apps nowadays anyway.
tinfoil hat off.
"it only makes sense that we'd prefer freedom over government bullying."
Except, of course, if a company is 'taking away' freedoms.. then you (perhaps not you, specifically) do want the government to bully around.
I know it's not popular, but the whole "you have a choice when it comes to companies" thing is in direct opposition to the whole "zomg Microsoft is an abusive monopoly they should be punished!" thing. Very few people would argue that, back in the day, you had a choice - that you *could* buy alternatives to the 'Wintel' platform... and some believe even now that you don't really have a choice.. and thus want to see Microsoft punished.
Yet your method of punishment (don't use Microsoft products, for example), is not seen as valid.
So, too, do many feel that "so don't use Google" is not valid and would rather see that Google come to their senses, or a watchdog step in and make them come to their senses. Probably not over this EULA, though - and I do suspect that the behavior of constantly re-downloading the updater is something that will be tweaked in no time.
I don't think that Mr. Paget was trying to make a point for "hey, look, Passport data!" at all. In fact, he states in his video himself that all he got were the unique IDs for the RFID, which have a prefix which indicates whether it is, say, a passport.
What I got from his video - and which is a perfectly valid argument against RFID *in general* - is that he now -has- that unique ID. Presumably, you are the only one with your (passport) ID. Next up, link that to an RFID scanned at the very same time.. except this time it's just some grocery store's RFID. It doesn't come with encryption up the wazoo - why would it.. it's just for you to get grocery 'discounts' and for them to know wtf a person may be buying throughout periods of time. But instead of a store ID that correlates to name data somewhere in their database, they decided to just store the name right on the card itself.
Now you have a name to go with the ID from the passport. Congratulations, you can now track not just an ID, but a person.
Yes, I know, you're still 'only tracking that one RFID chip', and sure.. it could be on somebody else's person. Again, though, with a (passport) ID - how likely is that?
In particular, the GoDaddy ads?
There's two that I could find (on spike dot com), maybe there's some I'm missing?
1. Danica Patrick (and yes, she's definitely hot) getting into the shower of which you see, at most, her from the shoulders up in what appears to be a shower. The suggestion being made is that a buy behind a computer is making her do this.
2. Danica Patrick at a 'trial' exclaiming "yes, I've been enhanced" while a shot of her in full gear is shown with - granted - her chest area the focus of the camera's view.. then going on to show a godaddy website somethingorother. ... and one of these has the commenters up above - with families or not - throwing hissy fits?
Surely every other shampoo or body wash ad would raise more concern, then.
As I understand it, the problem is that the app that sends the keystrokes (standard windows messaging APIs to interact with a UI) does not have to get around UAC at all. It can simply go to the control utility, lower the UAC level, and reboot.. no prompts (unless UAC is at the highest level - it is 1 lower by default), nothing. ..can now do its thing without worry.
After the reboot, the -actual- malware.. that would otherwise get blocked by UAC
But reports are sketchy, so that above *may* be incorrect.
Although I'll agree that I doubt anybody is going to get fired - or even demoted - over this (even if the cause must have been something rather silly), I do think there's a big difference between google not being available and google labeling perfectly normal sites as possibly hosting malware.
Say I wasn't aware of this issue (somehow not noticing that -everything- was being flagged), and I visited my bank.. now I call my bank in a worry, wonder if they are still as secure as they claim to be - the bank then has to go out of their way to reassure me that, yes, things are okay.. even if Google says otherwise ..so just continue onward.
Oh, but now my bank told me that even if Google says something is malware, there's a chance it isn't.. so next time Google warns me about malware.. should I just ignore it?
( of course a bank *should* be telling you to enter the main address of their site in the address bar, rather than 'continue onward' )
Anyway - thanks to whoever over there for fixing things.. presuming it was fixed and not just had everything now flagged as non-malware (even those that -do- (or did in the past 90(?) days) have malware)
yes - you just did. There's got to be an award for that :)
was that a serious question?
yes, the majority. Lemme go pull figures out of my hat while you ponder where I said anything about iPods and harddisks - which, for now anyway, do not carry such a levy.
you can take issue with the notion that filing suits against / prosecuting people is more costly for society than a tiny tax, but if you do so on the basis of "there's a third option - don't do anything", then you should realize how incredible flawed that issue-taking is as it does nothing to prove that it would be cheaper to file suits / prosecute.
that's not to say I disagree with you - legislation does usually give the government either direct, or by direction of private individuals/businesses/interest groups, the power to intervene in what should be issues between two private parties. Quite technically, if somebody stabs you, that should be a private matter between you and the assailant. However you then need cops, do the ambulance and hospital thing, insurance companies get involved and before long people realize that government has to step in here to make these things possible and try to make things 'good enough' again. And yes, I know getting stabbed isn't the same as having your MP3 copied - point is that government realizes that laws are being broken left and right and they don't need the interest groups filing hundreds of civil suits (which still end up in public court houses if going through) that clog up the system.. so they ponder alternative means... and voila, there's the levy on audio casette tapes... then (Video2000/Beta/VHS) tapes, then CD-Recordables, DVD-Recordables, Blu-Ray recordables and - if those interest groups had their way - soon MP3 players, HDD recorders and harddisks themselves as well.
Replace 'internet' with 'CD-Recordables' or 'casette tapes' and you've got the questions people have been asking for well over 20 years now in various countries. The answers have always been the same as well:
1. tough luck for them, the reality of the matter is that the majority of people do use CD-R's/tapes to record things they do not have a right to record - ergo illegal - and it's far more costly to society to actual pursue those people so instead we're making everybody pay a small levy as compensation - and no, that does not automatically make the actions legal.
2. that's none of your concern, groups such as the RIAA and MPAA will deal with that.
...don't blame the tech for any nefarious purposes, right?
'Push Technology' just meant that instead of people refreshing websites all damn day long, the website would shoot the client a new copy if there was anything new on it. Push died, people still didn't want their sites refreshed by clients all the time, so they set up RSS feeds instead. Now everybody hammers the RSS feeds all damn day long. It's less bandwidth than the whole page, but it's still the same problem.
Heck, we actually use 'Push Technology' all the time. Instant Messenging, for example, is push. Sending an e-mail is push. Proper push e-mail (where the service goes to connect to your phone, rather than your phone checking every 3 minutes)... is push.
Yes, there are even RSS subscription services that use push.
Back to the 'nefarious' bit, however.. some people were scared that media moguls/governments would try to squash pull and have clients receive push only - thus limiting the information you can get to whatever is being pushed by those groups. I think it would have taken a *lot* for that to happen back then - it'll be neigh-impossible now.
fwiw, I've got about 180 DVDs and I have yet to have one that did not have English subtitles for the main feature. Most of them in the form of 'English (for the hard of hearing)' subs. It is true, however, that commentaries and the like often lack English subtitles and you're stuck with a selection of, usually, Dutch or French... German, Turkish, Spanish if you're 'lucky'.
But I am now deeply curious which movies GP had wanted to buy and found to only have Dutch subtitles. Even the plethora of Dutch DVDs I have -have- English subtitle options.
A much better reason to download is to be done with the thing... no need for a special player that ignores the unskippable bits, no need to rip the DVD yourself to your media player machine, etc. Just grab the release, call it a day - you still have the DVD if you want to get at the extras / want a higher quality.
unlocker (if you use Vista, make sure to set it to run as administrator by default in its properties tab) is great for -unlocking- files that are in use... e.g. some program or service has a file handle open on it.
it does crap all for permissions issues.. so do the actually permissions tools in Windows if the permissions table itself is corrupt (had to remove two folders recently because vista wouldn't even let me change the owner.. teehee)
a boot CD (UBCD / UBCD4WIN) can be *very* useful for these types of things - presuming you didn't encrypt your drive.
I don't see why it has to be one *or* the other. Just offer a three-tier WiKi.
1. fully reviewed edits reviewed by people who have an expertise in the field applicable.
2. regular reviewed edits - just to remove the "lol coryking sucks cocks!" edits and edits that appear to have no basis / are original research (everything is original research at some point, dammit.) / etc.
3. a free-for-all. yes, that means allowing "animaether sucks cocks". Who cares, it's not in tier 2, let alone tier 1, while at the same time it opens things up to possibly interesting information that doesn't make it into tier 2 due to e.g. the 'original research' thing.
Honestly, the 'original research' and 'citation needed' bits are what annoy me the most about wikipedia... enough that I once tried to make greasemonkey remove those tags from the viewed page altogether. I'd understand the need for them in tier 1, but right now wikipedia is somewhere at tier uhh.. 2.3 or something. If a citation is missing, that's okay.. I google around.
Indeed - not particularly practical as I have many files well over the 4GB limit and I really don't want to muck around with doing things like creating a dozen smaller FAT32 partitions either. (the drive's 1TB, for the curious).
and don't forget Process Monitor (replaces FileMon, RegMon, etc.)
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645.aspx
process explorer is great to see what's using CPU/RAM/etc. and what DLLs it's got loaded. It doesn't tell you anything about what files it's accessing, however.
For example - my WD USB drive refuses to 'safely remove' in Vista. It always claims it's in use. When I use Process Explorer, there doesn't seem to be anything going on. The drive isn't in use (open file handles, for example), there's no new processes spawned when I go to 'safely remove' the drive, etc.
But then I look at the Process Monitor and wouldn't you know.. scvhost.exe (an existing process) writes to "\system volume information\tracking.log" every time I go to 'safely remove'. 'safely remove' then decides for that fraction of a second that the drive is in use, and thus refuses to proceed.
So now at least I know why. Can't say I know how to fix it (disabling system restore did squat), but at least I changed the caching setting to disabled, meaning I can just yank the plug.