But hark: What is this, some sort of link that says "edit"? Could it be..? Click. Select all. Delete. Type. Submit. Giggles ensue as the staid article has been successfully replaced by the single word "fuck". My my, how naughty.
Fifteen minutes later, the vandalism has been reverted by one of the tireless editors, possibly using a tool such as VandalProof.
15 minutes? Hardly. Trivial vandalism like blanking or inserting profanities is typically reverted within seconds by TawkerBot or one of its clones.
There's more probability of that if the graphics automatically upgrade on new hardware. It would make the graphics less of a selling point.
Nobody said anything about "automatically". This is about graphics being upgradeable manually by replacing the program that generates them, instead of having to replace gigabytes of textures. The point is that it would use very little bandwidth to upgrade everyone's game. It would not happen magically, and it would still require considerable time and expense to prepare an upgrade.
...your point being? Are you bragging about how it's short, or about how it's cryptic?
perl -e 'print join 9,(1..9),""'
By the way, hardcoding a path like "/usr/bin/ruby" is begging for your scripts to break. Try "/usr/bin/env ruby" -- still fragile, but likely at least to work on most Linices and BSDs.
Why the assumption that everyone who prefers Windows is an astroturfer?
Believe it or not, Microsoft does have some genuine grassroots support -- for their software, not for their abusive monopoly. Love Windows, hate the uncompetitive practices. It's no harder than being pro-American but anti-Bush.
One of our customers has a policy that Norton must be installed on every machine (whole other story as to why there is no corporate version...) and now NAV will no longer offer a 12 month subscription to NAV 2002 (the version they all had installed). I cannot obtain NAV 2003-2005 simply and am forced to "upgrade" to the 2005 shitpile, however oh lookie here (after purchasing and downloading...) it cannot run on 98.
Why the hell are you using consumer software on corporate machines? Switch them to Symantec Antivirus. You can downgrade SAV 10 licenses to SAV 9 for Win98 machines just by asking.
If the end of support for Win98 will boost *anything* it's the purchases of Macs.
You have got to be joking. There are only three possible reasons not to upgrade from Windows 98:
1. Cannot justify the expense when Windows 98 works fine. 2. Need to run programs that don't work in newer versions of Windows. 3. Too lazy to care.
People in category (1) are hardly going to pay the extortionate premium for an Apple: they'll keep on using their old computer until it breaks, and then they'll buy the cheapest Dell they can get.
People in category (2) are hardly going to switch to a totally incompatible operating system that doesn't run any of their software: they'll keep on using their old computer until it breaks, and then they'll buy the cheapest Dell they can get and put Windows 98 on that. Sure, you could theoretically buy a Mac and run Win98 on it in Virtual PC. But why bother, when you can get a Dell for a fraction of the price?
People in category (3) don't care about the end of support, so they'll keep on using their old computer until it breaks, and then they'll... you guessed it, they'll buy the cheapest Dell they can get and not care about that either.
Oh, they won't switch to Linux either, but they certainly won't be interested in Apple hardware. For all its advantages, it does not have anything whatsoever to offer the kind of person who is still using Windows 98 in 2006.
For a country were there is no legal copying allowed for private use for example, like in UK
*sigh*
This is simply NOT TRUE. While we do not have a concept in British law that goes by the name of "fair use", this does NOT mean that you are not allowed to make private copies under any circumstances.
Look, here it is from the horse's mouth: "there are a number of exceptions to copyright that allow limited use of copyright works without the permission of the copyright owner" (source).
Specifically, "private study" does not infringe copyright, and "private study" is defined to include usage "purely for personal enjoyment" (source).
Also, look up "fair dealing", which in practice is extremely similar to the USA's "fair use".
You should give Gnucash another chance. Gnucash, if anything, has a European emphasis.
I just did. Sorry, but it has a very, very strong American emphasis. I eventually figured out that a "checking account" was nothing to do with accounts being checked, but was in fact just a weird name for a current account, but as I couldn't work out whether it was safe to delete all the totally irrelevant accounts like "federal taxes" and "state taxes", I gave up very quickly.
I'll try again at 2.1. Maybe by then it'll have got to the stage of letting me choose what accounts I actually want, instead of giving me a choice of (a) a complete set of irrelevant American stuff, or (b) trying to set absolutely everything up from scratch.
Sure, that's a pretty well known library. Try a few more: cewmdm.dll,
Oh, come on. That one tells you exactly what it is if you just right click on it and select "Properties". It's the Windows CE Windows Media Device Manager Service Provider.
bopomofo.uce,
Something to do with the Zhuyin phonetic alphabet used to teach Chinese character pronunciations in Taiwan. The UC in the extension will stand for UniCode. Don't know what the E is.
8532.ax
Some kind of ActiveX filter, I think. They're just DLL files with a different extension; right-click, "Properties", read description, and you know what it is.
More to the point, though, why do you care what this stuff is? Are you seriously going to tell me you do stuff like go through all 3,000-odd system files checking to make sure you know exactly what each is for, and deleting the ones you know you don't want, or something? I mean, go right ahead if it makes you happy, but I have better things to do with my time than worry about what spcmdcon.sys might be. (But it only took me 2 seconds to ascertain that it's the "Windows NT Setup mini command console". Seriously, this ain't rocket science.)
What do you use to edit the C code, or Java code, or the letter to your grandmother?
Let's just say that when I'm editing source code I don't want a spellchecker, and when I'm writing a letter to my grandmother I'm not particularly interested in syntax highlighting.
Not homosexual behaviour, BISEXUAL behaviour. That's an entire world of differences in there.
Why? How is a homosexual any different from a bisexual who merely happens to be chaste with members of the opposite sex?
And I haven't heard any religious types claiming that chastity is bad, even though it goes against basic biological urges and is useless for producing children...;)
Anything, and I mean ANYTHING that is shown over the ABC airwaves that is recorded and shared via the internet IS NOT piracy. Over the air television, HD or analog, is free for the taking.
Bullshit. Sorry, but that is complete and utter bullshit. "Let's be accurate about something." Just because something is shown over the airwaves does not mean it's free for the taking.
Unlike you, I will back up my claims with evidence.
It is not "free for the taking" in the USA. See this statement from the US Copyright Office website, which says "anybody who wishes to retransmit copyrighted broadcast programming--whether over the Internet or by more established means of transmission such as cable or satellite--may do so only by obtaining the consent of the copyright owners."
It is not "free for the taking" in Britain, either. See the official guide to UK copyrights.
I don't know about other countries, but I suspect you're based in the USA, in which case you are simply wrong.
Just curious, is there any precedent that uploading/downloading tv shows that have been broadcast publicly is illegal?
I don't know much law, but to pull a precedent from what I do know, what about the Betamax case? That established that "private, noncommercial time-shifting in the home" counts as fair use under US law. If you can do whatever you like with TV shows that have been broadcast publicly, why did this case even reach the Supreme Court, and why did the justices add so many qualifications to the very limited use of home recording that they decided was legal?
I was under the impression that this still was in a bit of a 'grey area', since they were publicly aired...
The vast majority of the things that people believe are "grey areas" are, in fact, simple black-and-white questions that people just want to believe are grey, because it makes them feel better about doing something they know damn well is probably illegal.
Now with the advent of universal development (PPC/Intel), selling a packaged yellow box (or just giving it away) could drive people to develop for the Mac by being able to run one binary on 2 OS's
Hardly. The Mac and Windows UI conventions are so different that it is impossible to conceive of a single binary that would not be totally alien on one or the other. Unless it contained completely separate code for Mac and Windows, but in that case why not just have two binaries? And use one of the many solutions that exist today, like Qt or wxWidgets?
I wonder what goes through the mind of the average person, when thinking about buying there next computer. Do they buy PCs because that is what they always have had, and it is what everyone they know has? Or is it a certain love for applications that aren't on macs. (surely not) Is it the salesmen in the stores, pushing pcs?
Had you considered the possibility that we might actually prefer Windows, or even think it's better?
I'm perfectly serious here. I'm not clueless or an idiot; I probably know more about computers than most people here. I've used Macs and various Linices extensively, and I consider myself skilled with both. But I still use Windows for my primary computer, because I just happen to find it a pleasanter environment. I can get stuff done faster in Windows. It does what I want, the way I want to do it. That's why.
Why not use Linux? Because Linux GUIs have always struck me as clunky and fragile, and there's no useful Linux software that I can't run either in Cygwin or remotely over an ssh tunnel to a Debian system. Meanwhile, much of the software I do need -- notably professional graphics applications -- is not available for Linux at all. (GIMP and Inkscape are fine for web design, but they don't even try to do print.)
Why not use a Mac? Primarily because I don't see any point in paying extra for a proprietary and incompatible system that doesn't offer me anything significant over a PC. Also, the Mac interface is an abomination. A hodgepodge of totally different (but equally hideous) skins, blurry fonts, and whizz-bang effects that do nothing but slow down any attempt at serious work. And the dock? Seriously, what were they smoking? I've seen hardened Apple fanatics break down in tears because they can't figure out how the dock is supposed to work. Apple stopped doing intuitive when they retired OS 9. I'm surprised more people haven't noticed yet.
And what about security? I'm not worried. A hardware firewall, coupled with basic precautions like not using IE, not opening random email attachments, and not browsing Russian porn/warez sites, keeps me perfectly secure. I haven't been hit by a single virus, worm, or piece of spyware in my entire life, and I see no reason to suppose that's about to change.
So that's why my next computer will be another Windows PC. Sorry if my failure to subscribe to Slashdot groupthink offends you.
If some reasonable indentation value like 4 or 5 had been chosen, everything would have been fine.
No: if some reasonable indentation value had been chosen, tabs would have been less useful for their intended purpose, namely tabulation.
The idea was to let you make a table (of numbers, for example) easily by entering
1[tab]32[tab]1.268[cr][lf] 992[tab]5[tab]whatever[cr][lf]...and it would all line up nicely without you having to work out how many spaces to insert. 8 was a suitable value for most purposes.
It only became a problem when people started misusing tabs for other purposes.
Ever heard of Shadow API's?? Microsoft got in trouble for this because they told companies how to work with their products through one API and in secret had their OWN products using different API's. The outcome? Their products ran faster.
This is a myth.
While Microsoft did indeed have some undocumented APIs that were used by Microsoft applications, they certainly were not designed to make products "run faster". They're just a ragtag bunch of random helper functions and low-level interfaces of extremely limited utility. See this for the documentation they were forced to release as part of the antitrust settlement in the USA.
I cannot find a single example in that lot of anything that is merely a faster equivalent of an existing Win32 function.
Easy. Refuse to honor their IP. All MS copyrights in europe become public domain, all patents are invalid. Done deal.
That would be the nuclear option in the ongoing trade wars with the USA. America would retaliate in kind, and the likely outcome would merely be to increase the rate of economic decline in the West and economic growth in neutral powers such as India and China.
I doubt either the USA or the EU would see this as a beneficial outcome.
Search for "posamist silky smooth" (no quotes) and you only get links to some old shit on K5 mentioning the song and band. You won't find the MP3, even though I linked to all their MP3s on my (Google indexed) blog September of last year. Which is what the RIAA/MPAA want. A Yahoo search DOES return the file, it's the fourth result. What was that about Google not being evil again?
Um. I searched for "posamist silky smooth" (no quotes) on Google, and the third result was this. Is that the MP3 you're talking about, or are there two bands called Posamist who have released songs called Silky Smooth?
And even if I hadn't been able to find the MP3 you named on Google in three clicks, I'm not sure exactly how that would make Google "evil". Evil is when you contribute to human suffering, not when you don't index binary files on your text search engine.
Although GTA doesn't do conventional linear storytelling, it does offer a compelling environment (ok, I'll say it -- a sandbox, if you will) for those who want to create their own mental narrative.
Right. So what you're saying is that GTA doesn't tell much of a story at all, but instead encourages people to make up their own story. In other words, GTA doesn't have much in the way of storytelling. A sandbox is not a storybook.
And there's nothing wrong with that. The world has room for both. They serve different purposes and are enjoyed in different ways. Let's all say it together: "GTA is a great game with primitive storytelling."
I simply cannot understand why so many people assume that any statement of the form "X does not have Y" must be a criticism of X. "Thank God Slashdot got rid of the pony theme." "STFU ur gay! Only Slashdot-bashing Digg fagboys would bash Slashdot for not having ponies! It does so have poines anyways!!!1"
While I won't even attempt to address specific numbers, the service life of a Mac is markedly longer. Five times as long? Frequently, yes. Both of my Macs are about that old, a G4 tower and a G3 iBook dating from 2001.
I'm supposed to be impressed by 2001? Dude, I'm typing this on a 1999-vintage PC running Windows 98. Still working just fine for general office work. I somehow think you've got a while to go before your machines have been going "five times as long" as this one, and it's far from the oldest PC I know that's still in regular use.
My own daily-use PC is arguably even older, in fact. It depends on how you measure the age of a computer. Some components of my own PC, like the keyboard, date back to the early 90s; others, like the motherboard and CPU, are about 2002 vintage; the monitor is only a couple of years old, and the memory was just replaced yesterday. See, it's this concept called "upgradability", which I understand never really caught on in the Apple world...:P
Gee, perhaps because it will be the cheapest 1080p BluRay player on the market at 500 bucks?
And I'm supposed to be so excited at the prospect of watching a handful of expensive BluRay disks (of things I doubtless have on DVD already) that I'm going to rush out and pay $500 for a PS3 (actually a lot more, since I live in rip-off Britain where the PS3 will be more like $800), when I don't even have an HDTV yet?
I think not. Anyway the time that HDTV market penetration is sufficiently high that a lot of people will want BluRay players and that movies are starting to appear on BluRay exclusively, the Chinese imports will be flooding the player market at a fraction of the cost of a PS3.
And that's assuming BluRay doesn't turn out to be the new Laserdisc.
Grief, if this is what they're betting the firm on, I'm glad I don't have any Sony stock.
So you can be sued for breaking licensing laws in the countries where consumers are?
If you do business in a country, you have to abide by its laws. I don't know what's so difficult about this concept. ZOMG INTARWEBS doesn't change anything; when you sell someone something, even if you aren't shipping anything physical, you know damn well where he is, because he has to provide his billing address or you can't charge his credit card.
IIRC, AllOfMp3 themselves admit that they are perfectly aware that the product they are selling is illegal in many places outside Russia. Sorry, this looks like an open-and-shut case, with an up-front admission of guilt.
As for how this can be enforced, it's trivial. British ISPs will be required to block the site or something. I have no problem with that, any more than I object to ISPs blocking known child porn sites; I'd rather my fellow-countrymen bought their music from stores that actually pay money to the artists, instead of being duped into paying for pirated music by smooth-talking Russian con-artists. Wake me up when they actually start limiting my human rights in some way.
This is disturbing, because the way the internet works is that its like a load of tubes (not trucks) and some of these connect different countries. So you could be sued for publishing something on the internet if its illegal in any country where it can be read, in theory.
"Publishing" != "selling". It's difficult to establish where someone is located when they view your website. It's trivial when they have just given you their postal address as a necessary part of a credit-card transaction. When you're selling goods, you can choose which countries to accept custom from.
So it's quite reasonable for people to enforce their laws, and not disturbing at all, provided commerce continues to be treated specially - as it always has been (cf. customs charges being waived for personal-use imports, and "fair use" being easier to prove for non-commercial activities, and so forth).
Lulu.tv is actually all creative commons. So copyrighted materials will not get paid.
Is this your clever get-out clause to avoid having to pay anyone anything? Or are you only accepting material with the Creative-Commons-branded public domain notice?
Seriously, please do not misuse "copyrighted" when you mean "unlicensed". It leads to confusion, and plays into the hands of the media cartels who wish to spread their two dangerous myths: that restrictive licenses are the only viable option, and that the world should be divided into "producers" who own copyrights and "consumers" who do not. I would have hoped that Creative-Commons-based sites would be leading the way in taking a stand against these myths.
Precise language use is the first battle -- if we accept the misleading terminology of the media cartels, we have already lost.
Slashdot Mirror
But hark: What is this, some sort of link that says "edit"? Could it be..? Click. Select all. Delete. Type. Submit. Giggles ensue as the staid article has been successfully replaced by the single word "fuck". My my, how naughty.
Fifteen minutes later, the vandalism has been reverted by one of the tireless editors, possibly using a tool such as VandalProof.
15 minutes? Hardly. Trivial vandalism like blanking or inserting profanities is typically reverted within seconds by TawkerBot or one of its clones.
There's more probability of that if the graphics automatically upgrade on new hardware. It would make the graphics less of a selling point.
Nobody said anything about "automatically". This is about graphics being upgradeable manually by replacing the program that generates them, instead of having to replace gigabytes of textures. The point is that it would use very little bandwidth to upgrade everyone's game. It would not happen magically, and it would still require considerable time and expense to prepare an upgrade.
Why the assumption that everyone who prefers Windows is an astroturfer?
Believe it or not, Microsoft does have some genuine grassroots support -- for their software, not for their abusive monopoly. Love Windows, hate the uncompetitive practices. It's no harder than being pro-American but anti-Bush.
One of our customers has a policy that Norton must be installed on every machine (whole other story as to why there is no corporate version...) and now NAV will no longer offer a 12 month subscription to NAV 2002 (the version they all had installed).
I cannot obtain NAV 2003-2005 simply and am forced to "upgrade" to the 2005 shitpile, however oh lookie here (after purchasing and downloading...) it cannot run on 98.
Why the hell are you using consumer software on corporate machines? Switch them to Symantec Antivirus. You can downgrade SAV 10 licenses to SAV 9 for Win98 machines just by asking.
If the end of support for Win98 will boost *anything* it's the purchases of Macs.
You have got to be joking. There are only three possible reasons not to upgrade from Windows 98:
1. Cannot justify the expense when Windows 98 works fine.
2. Need to run programs that don't work in newer versions of Windows.
3. Too lazy to care.
People in category (1) are hardly going to pay the extortionate premium for an Apple: they'll keep on using their old computer until it breaks, and then they'll buy the cheapest Dell they can get.
People in category (2) are hardly going to switch to a totally incompatible operating system that doesn't run any of their software: they'll keep on using their old computer until it breaks, and then they'll buy the cheapest Dell they can get and put Windows 98 on that. Sure, you could theoretically buy a Mac and run Win98 on it in Virtual PC. But why bother, when you can get a Dell for a fraction of the price?
People in category (3) don't care about the end of support, so they'll keep on using their old computer until it breaks, and then they'll... you guessed it, they'll buy the cheapest Dell they can get and not care about that either.
Oh, they won't switch to Linux either, but they certainly won't be interested in Apple hardware. For all its advantages, it does not have anything whatsoever to offer the kind of person who is still using Windows 98 in 2006.
For a country were there is no legal copying allowed for private use for example, like in UK
*sigh*
This is simply NOT TRUE. While we do not have a concept in British law that goes by the name of "fair use", this does NOT mean that you are not allowed to make private copies under any circumstances.
Look, here it is from the horse's mouth: "there are a number of exceptions to copyright that allow limited use of copyright works without the permission of the copyright owner" (source).
Specifically, "private study" does not infringe copyright, and "private study" is defined to include usage "purely for personal enjoyment" (source).
Also, look up "fair dealing", which in practice is extremely similar to the USA's "fair use".
(IANAL. Seek legal advice if you really care.)
You should give Gnucash another chance. Gnucash, if anything, has a European emphasis.
I just did. Sorry, but it has a very, very strong American emphasis. I eventually figured out that a "checking account" was nothing to do with accounts being checked, but was in fact just a weird name for a current account, but as I couldn't work out whether it was safe to delete all the totally irrelevant accounts like "federal taxes" and "state taxes", I gave up very quickly.
I'll try again at 2.1. Maybe by then it'll have got to the stage of letting me choose what accounts I actually want, instead of giving me a choice of (a) a complete set of irrelevant American stuff, or (b) trying to set absolutely everything up from scratch.
Sure, that's a pretty well known library. Try a few more: cewmdm.dll,
Oh, come on. That one tells you exactly what it is if you just right click on it and select "Properties". It's the Windows CE Windows Media Device Manager Service Provider.
bopomofo.uce,
Something to do with the Zhuyin phonetic alphabet used to teach Chinese character pronunciations in Taiwan. The UC in the extension will stand for UniCode. Don't know what the E is.
8532.ax
Some kind of ActiveX filter, I think. They're just DLL files with a different extension; right-click, "Properties", read description, and you know what it is.
More to the point, though, why do you care what this stuff is? Are you seriously going to tell me you do stuff like go through all 3,000-odd system files checking to make sure you know exactly what each is for, and deleting the ones you know you don't want, or something? I mean, go right ahead if it makes you happy, but I have better things to do with my time than worry about what spcmdcon.sys might be. (But it only took me 2 seconds to ascertain that it's the "Windows NT Setup mini command console". Seriously, this ain't rocket science.)
What do you use to edit the C code, or Java code, or the letter to your grandmother?
Let's just say that when I'm editing source code I don't want a spellchecker, and when I'm writing a letter to my grandmother I'm not particularly interested in syntax highlighting.
Not homosexual behaviour, BISEXUAL behaviour.
;)
That's an entire world of differences in there.
Why? How is a homosexual any different from a bisexual who merely happens to be chaste with members of the opposite sex?
And I haven't heard any religious types claiming that chastity is bad, even though it goes against basic biological urges and is useless for producing children...
Let's be accurate about something.
Yes, that would be a nice idea, wouldn't it?
Anything, and I mean ANYTHING that is shown over the ABC airwaves that is recorded and shared via the internet IS NOT piracy. Over the air television, HD or analog, is free for the taking.
Bullshit. Sorry, but that is complete and utter bullshit. "Let's be accurate about something." Just because something is shown over the airwaves does not mean it's free for the taking.
Unlike you, I will back up my claims with evidence.
It is not "free for the taking" in the USA. See this statement from the US Copyright Office website, which says "anybody who wishes to retransmit copyrighted broadcast programming--whether over the Internet or by more established means of transmission such as cable or satellite--may do so only by obtaining the consent of the copyright owners."
It is not "free for the taking" in Britain, either. See the official guide to UK copyrights.
I don't know about other countries, but I suspect you're based in the USA, in which case you are simply wrong.
Just curious, is there any precedent that uploading/downloading tv shows that have been broadcast publicly is illegal?
I don't know much law, but to pull a precedent from what I do know, what about the Betamax case? That established that "private, noncommercial time-shifting in the home" counts as fair use under US law. If you can do whatever you like with TV shows that have been broadcast publicly, why did this case even reach the Supreme Court, and why did the justices add so many qualifications to the very limited use of home recording that they decided was legal?
I was under the impression that this still was in a bit of a 'grey area', since they were publicly aired...
The vast majority of the things that people believe are "grey areas" are, in fact, simple black-and-white questions that people just want to believe are grey, because it makes them feel better about doing something they know damn well is probably illegal.
Now with the advent of universal development (PPC/Intel), selling a packaged yellow box (or just giving it away) could drive people to develop for the Mac by being able to run one binary on 2 OS's
Hardly. The Mac and Windows UI conventions are so different that it is impossible to conceive of a single binary that would not be totally alien on one or the other. Unless it contained completely separate code for Mac and Windows, but in that case why not just have two binaries? And use one of the many solutions that exist today, like Qt or wxWidgets?
I wonder what goes through the mind of the average person, when thinking about buying there next computer. Do they buy PCs because that is what they always have had, and it is what everyone they know has? Or is it a certain love for applications that aren't on macs. (surely not) Is it the salesmen in the stores, pushing pcs?
Had you considered the possibility that we might actually prefer Windows, or even think it's better?
I'm perfectly serious here. I'm not clueless or an idiot; I probably know more about computers than most people here. I've used Macs and various Linices extensively, and I consider myself skilled with both. But I still use Windows for my primary computer, because I just happen to find it a pleasanter environment. I can get stuff done faster in Windows. It does what I want, the way I want to do it. That's why.
Why not use Linux? Because Linux GUIs have always struck me as clunky and fragile, and there's no useful Linux software that I can't run either in Cygwin or remotely over an ssh tunnel to a Debian system. Meanwhile, much of the software I do need -- notably professional graphics applications -- is not available for Linux at all. (GIMP and Inkscape are fine for web design, but they don't even try to do print.)
Why not use a Mac? Primarily because I don't see any point in paying extra for a proprietary and incompatible system that doesn't offer me anything significant over a PC. Also, the Mac interface is an abomination. A hodgepodge of totally different (but equally hideous) skins, blurry fonts, and whizz-bang effects that do nothing but slow down any attempt at serious work. And the dock? Seriously, what were they smoking? I've seen hardened Apple fanatics break down in tears because they can't figure out how the dock is supposed to work. Apple stopped doing intuitive when they retired OS 9. I'm surprised more people haven't noticed yet.
And what about security? I'm not worried. A hardware firewall, coupled with basic precautions like not using IE, not opening random email attachments, and not browsing Russian porn/warez sites, keeps me perfectly secure. I haven't been hit by a single virus, worm, or piece of spyware in my entire life, and I see no reason to suppose that's about to change.
So that's why my next computer will be another Windows PC. Sorry if my failure to subscribe to Slashdot groupthink offends you.
If some reasonable indentation value like 4 or 5 had been chosen, everything would have been fine.
...and it would all line up nicely without you having to work out how many spaces to insert. 8 was a suitable value for most purposes.
No: if some reasonable indentation value had been chosen, tabs would have been less useful for their intended purpose, namely tabulation.
The idea was to let you make a table (of numbers, for example) easily by entering
1[tab]32[tab]1.268[cr][lf]
992[tab]5[tab]whatever[cr][lf]
It only became a problem when people started misusing tabs for other purposes.
Ever heard of Shadow API's?? Microsoft got in trouble for this because they told companies how to work with their products through one API and in secret had their OWN products using different API's. The outcome? Their products ran faster.
This is a myth.
While Microsoft did indeed have some undocumented APIs that were used by Microsoft applications, they certainly were not designed to make products "run faster". They're just a ragtag bunch of random helper functions and low-level interfaces of extremely limited utility. See this for the documentation they were forced to release as part of the antitrust settlement in the USA.
I cannot find a single example in that lot of anything that is merely a faster equivalent of an existing Win32 function.
Easy. Refuse to honor their IP. All MS copyrights in europe become public domain, all patents are invalid. Done deal.
That would be the nuclear option in the ongoing trade wars with the USA. America would retaliate in kind, and the likely outcome would merely be to increase the rate of economic decline in the West and economic growth in neutral powers such as India and China.
I doubt either the USA or the EU would see this as a beneficial outcome.
Search for "posamist silky smooth" (no quotes) and you only get links to some old shit on K5 mentioning the song and band. You won't find the MP3, even though I linked to all their MP3s on my (Google indexed) blog September of last year.
Which is what the RIAA/MPAA want. A Yahoo search DOES return the file, it's the fourth result. What was that about Google not being evil again?
Um. I searched for "posamist silky smooth" (no quotes) on Google, and the third result was this. Is that the MP3 you're talking about, or are there two bands called Posamist who have released songs called Silky Smooth?
And even if I hadn't been able to find the MP3 you named on Google in three clicks, I'm not sure exactly how that would make Google "evil". Evil is when you contribute to human suffering, not when you don't index binary files on your text search engine.
As my boss says (without a hint of irony) "When you assume, you make an ass of yourself
At last, a sane saying. I've never understood precisely how you assuming something is supposed to make an ass of me.
Although GTA doesn't do conventional linear storytelling, it does offer a compelling environment (ok, I'll say it -- a sandbox, if you will) for those who want to create their own mental narrative.
Right. So what you're saying is that GTA doesn't tell much of a story at all, but instead encourages people to make up their own story. In other words, GTA doesn't have much in the way of storytelling. A sandbox is not a storybook.
And there's nothing wrong with that. The world has room for both. They serve different purposes and are enjoyed in different ways. Let's all say it together: "GTA is a great game with primitive storytelling."
I simply cannot understand why so many people assume that any statement of the form "X does not have Y" must be a criticism of X. "Thank God Slashdot got rid of the pony theme." "STFU ur gay! Only Slashdot-bashing Digg fagboys would bash Slashdot for not having ponies! It does so have poines anyways!!!1"
While I won't even attempt to address specific numbers, the service life of a Mac is markedly longer. Five times as long? Frequently, yes. Both of my Macs are about that old, a G4 tower and a G3 iBook dating from 2001.
:P
I'm supposed to be impressed by 2001? Dude, I'm typing this on a 1999-vintage PC running Windows 98. Still working just fine for general office work. I somehow think you've got a while to go before your machines have been going "five times as long" as this one, and it's far from the oldest PC I know that's still in regular use.
My own daily-use PC is arguably even older, in fact. It depends on how you measure the age of a computer. Some components of my own PC, like the keyboard, date back to the early 90s; others, like the motherboard and CPU, are about 2002 vintage; the monitor is only a couple of years old, and the memory was just replaced yesterday. See, it's this concept called "upgradability", which I understand never really caught on in the Apple world...
Gee, perhaps because it will be the cheapest 1080p BluRay player on the market at 500 bucks?
And I'm supposed to be so excited at the prospect of watching a handful of expensive BluRay disks (of things I doubtless have on DVD already) that I'm going to rush out and pay $500 for a PS3 (actually a lot more, since I live in rip-off Britain where the PS3 will be more like $800), when I don't even have an HDTV yet?
I think not. Anyway the time that HDTV market penetration is sufficiently high that a lot of people will want BluRay players and that movies are starting to appear on BluRay exclusively, the Chinese imports will be flooding the player market at a fraction of the cost of a PS3.
And that's assuming BluRay doesn't turn out to be the new Laserdisc.
Grief, if this is what they're betting the firm on, I'm glad I don't have any Sony stock.
So you can be sued for breaking licensing laws in the countries where consumers are?
If you do business in a country, you have to abide by its laws. I don't know what's so difficult about this concept. ZOMG INTARWEBS doesn't change anything; when you sell someone something, even if you aren't shipping anything physical, you know damn well where he is, because he has to provide his billing address or you can't charge his credit card.
IIRC, AllOfMp3 themselves admit that they are perfectly aware that the product they are selling is illegal in many places outside Russia. Sorry, this looks like an open-and-shut case, with an up-front admission of guilt.
As for how this can be enforced, it's trivial. British ISPs will be required to block the site or something. I have no problem with that, any more than I object to ISPs blocking known child porn sites; I'd rather my fellow-countrymen bought their music from stores that actually pay money to the artists, instead of being duped into paying for pirated music by smooth-talking Russian con-artists. Wake me up when they actually start limiting my human rights in some way.
This is disturbing, because the way the internet works is that its like a load of tubes (not trucks) and some of these connect different countries. So you could be sued for publishing something on the internet if its illegal in any country where it can be read, in theory.
"Publishing" != "selling". It's difficult to establish where someone is located when they view your website. It's trivial when they have just given you their postal address as a necessary part of a credit-card transaction. When you're selling goods, you can choose which countries to accept custom from.
So it's quite reasonable for people to enforce their laws, and not disturbing at all, provided commerce continues to be treated specially - as it always has been (cf. customs charges being waived for personal-use imports, and "fair use" being easier to prove for non-commercial activities, and so forth).
Lulu.tv is actually all creative commons. So copyrighted materials will not get paid.
Is this your clever get-out clause to avoid having to pay anyone anything? Or are you only accepting material with the Creative-Commons-branded public domain notice?
Seriously, please do not misuse "copyrighted" when you mean "unlicensed". It leads to confusion, and plays into the hands of the media cartels who wish to spread their two dangerous myths: that restrictive licenses are the only viable option, and that the world should be divided into "producers" who own copyrights and "consumers" who do not. I would have hoped that Creative-Commons-based sites would be leading the way in taking a stand against these myths.
Precise language use is the first battle -- if we accept the misleading terminology of the media cartels, we have already lost.