I don't know about cheques (used in the United Kingdom), but checks (used in the United States) can have two endorsements on the back when presented to a bank; as long as the first matches "Pay to the order of" and the second matches the ID of the person presenting the check, it's negotiable as a "third party check". That's part of why you shouldn't endorse a check unless you'll immediately be handing it to a bank teller or cashier or putting it in an envelope.
Or you can write "FOR DEPOSIT ONLY" on the line below your endorsement signature, and your checking account number on the line below that.
Actually, that's not a bad idea. One of the few Firefox 'features' that really annoys me is that each update requires a full download of the installer package.
Rumor has it the next version of Firefox will include client patching.
Don't be silly. PS3 is coming out in a year, there's no way Sony will be buying a chip that has been out in mass market for a year for their new flagship entertainment product...IMO, the PS3 will be using the next-generation GPU that will most likely be available for PC at about the same time as the PS3.
"As we mentioned before, NVIDIA's RSX is the more PC-like of the two GPU solutions. Unlike ATI's offering, the RSX is based on a NVIDIA GPU, the upcoming G70 (the successor to the GeForce 6)."
It depresses me that the American public appears to think that the United States has any particular authority over the regulation of the Internet. I think it's this sense of ignorant entitlement that makes us so unpopular around the globe.
Up until recently, I thought terraforming was a neat idea and great fodder for science fiction. Then it made me realize how fragile the human body is, that we would have to orchestrate a Great Pyramid-caliber exercise to make a planet livable for our delicate bodies.
I'd much sooner see this R&D money go towards solving the geopolitical and socioeconomic problems that plague us already--rather than towards bluesky research that may be aborted by nuclear or bio-weapon cataclysm.
Don't be ridiculous. It's not the card's fault that it costs what it does, which is probably why the site didn't tank the score. They understand that some games will require 512MB of video RAM (as Tim Sweeney said of UE3-based games, in an interview he did a year ago). It's still a fine card--just way overpriced, even by enthusiast standards. And the price is determined by the marketing/sales department, not the R&D guys.
PC Gamer reviews ridiculously expensive--but highly-rated--systems all the time, and no one accuses them of taking bribes.
It just links to them. Same with Google News. Google posts a blurb, but its length is short enough to avoid copyright infringement (i.e., less than 100 words). The images in Google News link directly back to the domain where the story was posted. Sounds like the AP is asking everyone to prioritize Rueters over them, inadvertently. It also sounds like the AP is starting to recognize the Internet as a very influential source of information. It's not nearly ubiquitous as radio and TV, but it reaches a powerful demographic.
On the whole, organisms don't biologically adapt to survive. What typically happens is that the organisms with useful traits survive. Sometimes biological adaptability is itself a trait, as with amphibians capable of changing their gender after birth. But for the most part, adaptation and evolution are separate elements of biology.
"Headlining an appearance with other Democratic women senators on behalf of Sen. Barbara Boxer, who is up for re-election this year, Hillary Clinton told several hundred supporters -- some of whom had ponied up as much as $10,000 to attend -- to expect to lose some of the tax cuts passed by President Bush if Democrats win the White House and control of Congress.
"Many of you are well enough off that... the tax cuts may have helped you," Sen. Clinton said. "We're saying that for America to get back on track, we're probably going to cut that short and not give it to you. We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good."
It's sad that it took until last year to get the grandmother of sci-fi inducted. You'd think they would have jumped at the opportunity to be gender-friendly in a genre that is historically dominated by men. Tiptree, LeGuin, and Vonda McIntyre would have been high on my priority list as well.
I don't know about you guys, but my company, on the order of 350 people nationally, doesn't upgrade every time a new CPU comes out, and we all have at least one computer at our desks. And as we all know, weak security is overwhelmingly a Windows problem, not a PC problem. Oh, but he said it happens every couple years. Oh, but before that, he implied that it's a constant stream of upgrades. Never mind that security has overwhelmingly been a Windows problem, not a PC problem. Twit.
And when it comes to hosted apps, that's probably more cost-effective in the long run...as long as you can guarantee rock-solid uptime and consistently updated security...Oops. Better not be using PCs for that task, eh? Twit.
There, now you don't have to wade through Gatesian propaganda.
If the 'Net as a whole gravitates towards pay content, it will not happen overnight. People have gotten used to getting all kinds of stuff for free for so long (email, web hosting, image hosting, personal portals, et cetera) that it causes an unholy uproar every time you dare to put a price tag on something. Speaking as someone who writes for a news outlet with a little under 100k subscriptions, I can tell you that this is why the online subscription model has been so slow to evolve.
And not only do you create an uproar, but there's always someone on the 'Net who's (1) willing to survive on a threadbare advertising-based margin for the sake of indie glory, or (2) a freebie-dishing moron who will crash and burn in a blaze of glory, but not before he's induldged the masses with months of Free Stuff that a sustainable business could not hope to afford.
The more fundamental problem here is that the 'Net is inherently an information resource with a deep basis in the belief of freedom of information and a right to privacy. It began as a network of universities exchanging research data, and it continues as a global village of topics ad nauseum. Good luck trying to make people pay for something when they can get a reasonly close approximation by simply entering a different URL. This is the beauty and the curse of online business. You're easily accessible, but so is everyone else, forcing the provider to make a huge content proposition just to get their foot in the door with the customer. For a news outlet, it's the amount and quality of stories you can put up. For a reseller, it's the size of your inventory and the ease of navigation. For a search engine, it's the speed and accuracy of your results, among other things. And so forth.
Meanwhile the ruthless prosper while throwing breadcrumbs to their employees. Seems one more failure ensures the continued trend.
I certainly don't disagree about the intimidating weight of EA, but, respectfully, I think it oversimplifies things to position Troika and EA as David vs. Goliath. Troika had some great ideas and some great licenses, but their trio of games suffered from consistenly lackluster technical execution, and, in the case of Arcanum, a presentation so glacial that it dissuaded the majority of the audience from digging in.
If it did get into the court system, the court may end up legally defining spyware. Think of it in terms of libel, slander, defamation, etc. If you call the software spyware, it can damage their business and reputation. You could be held liable for their losses, even. But that would require that the claim was false. To prove it was false, the court would have to officially declare their software one way or another.
From what I understand, you not only have to prove that the claim is false, but also prove that the claim has caused loss of reputation for it to be classified as libel. (Slander only covers oral claims, while libel covers written claims.) A claim of defamation has to prove malice or be proved false, but still has to prove loss of reputation.
This whole system acts as a kind of corollary to the First Amendment, allowing a free press to make "watchdog" claims without fear of being unfairly litigated. In theory, at least.
From what I understand, the majority of those BBB complaints are from disgruntled players who had their Diablo II, Warcraft III, and StarCraft II keys blocked from online play due to user violations.
(1) P2P is a geometrically larger distribution method. It is in a completely different ballpark from recording a football game or making a copy of your neighbor's tape of A Fistful of Dollars. That is why Betamax won in the court room.
(2) P2P is a geometrically larger distrobution method that can also be
--completely anonymous --requiring no transfer of a physical object --taking a matter of minutes --hoarded by the terabytes within the space of a few square inches.
This is a different beast. This is a different model. When you can download an entire album from across the world in a matter of minutes, with sound quality virtually indistinguishable from the original, without anyone seeing your face or knowing your name, without leaving your house, you are no longer in Betamax territory.
This model invites a completely different demographic. This model is highly skewed towards illegal activity. I'm not saying that P2P is wrong--I think the system, in theory, is awesome. I'm saying that there's too many pie-eyed people out there who thing it's the best thing since garlic bread and snort at anyone who says the method, in practice, actually has serious problems.
And the RIAA/MPAA doesn't give a whit if someone wants to innovate or not. They're not threatened by creatitivity. As I said in my previous post, they are not dogmatic. They are rhetorical. The difference here is the difference between tradition enforced by law, which is enforce by lobbyists, versus evolution championed by those outside the political system. These record labels merely intend to protect their copyrights. Their manner of protection is debatable, but it is their legal right. The creator of a P2P program merely intends to make a statement on his opinion of those rights. However, he does not have the right to exercise his speech in this manner--by subverting ownership on a geometric, global, high-speed and (in most cases) anonymous level. Betamax has virtually no connection to what's going on here.
But, in fact, the user experience of performance hasn't improved much over the past 15 years.
"And why should it?" asked Cynical Executive.
Once performance reaches the realm of Good Enough, you can start adding features to existing systems and rely on the hardware development curve to keep those inreasingly bloated systems at a Good Enough level. The lay user doesn't care if Word takes 10 seconds to open instead of 3 seconds, so efficiency R&D is wasted time and money. Just make it look nice, add a spellchecker, search feature, etc., and you're good to go.
I recall an anecdote about a major auto manufacture, back in the dawn of the automobile age. I think it was Ford. A high-level executive told his men to scour the junkyards for their cars and bring back whatever was in the best condition. What invariably came back was a piece called the "kingpin," which no longer exists in modern vehicles. The executive told them to stop making such a good kingpin, because its quality was much higher than it needed to be. It was wasted quality. Make it Good Enough, and save yourself a lot of money in R&D in the long run. Proper? Doubtful. Profitable? Hell yes. Make the product as good as it needs to be, and not an inch better.
This is where the power of monopoly comes in, by the way. And this is why companies that prioritize quality charge a premium.
Where did he post anything about stealing peoples property? You're as bad as the xxIA.. p2p is evil, its STEALING, which even in the case of piracy (of which the parents post in NOT talking about) is not stealing.. its copyright infringement.
p2p can be used for many legitimate purposes.
Oh, quit it. Debating for hair-splitting's sake can be a fun mental exercise, but come on. The majority of the P2P/IRC/Usenet community is not using these file sharing capabilities to trade Grandma's recipe for Alaskan upside-down cake. Quit hanging on to a technicality of decency. Sure, I'll get modded down by the screw-the-man idealists, but you know that's how this sharing system plays out in the end. Movies, music, computer games, and porn.
The RIAA/MPAA isn't correct, but neither are the P2Pers. What you've actually stumbled into is morass of legal rhetoric and artistic dogma that hides greed on one side and a refusal to pay for services on the other.
The Government thinks it is a better parent than you and knows what is best for your family.
A reality that does not change much, no matter what party is in the White House, really. One group tries to make a level playing field for everyone, to a fault, and the other tells you how to behave in the privacy of your own home. But staying on topic--I'm tired of this "do it for the children" crap that solely blames external factors for adolescent misbehavior.
Preventing my hypothetical 16 year-old son from playing DooM 3, and having him walk over to the TV and watch a slasher film on some pay cable channel, just shows that standards only apply to those who don't have the power to decide their own freedoms, and that these legislators have been practically programmed by moralist lobbyists to believe that playing out violence creates violence. If that was a case, there would have been a national carjacking epidemic directly following the release of GTA3. But there wasn't, because children actually do understand the difference between a TV and the fucking driveway in front of their house. I'm far more concerned about gangster rap's glorification of the coldly violent and mysogynistic thug.
I'll feel sympathy for Best Buy having to deal with bargain hunters when it stops pushing local stores out of business and fucking up street traffic wherever it parks its fat ass. Aside from the sale items, I can get everything cheaper online, and from a local store called Central Computer, which is able to survive against the SF BB by sheer volume of potential customers.
If your revenue's greatest strength is the ignorance of your customers, your days are numbered.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know about cheques (used in the United Kingdom), but checks (used in the United States) can have two endorsements on the back when presented to a bank; as long as the first matches "Pay to the order of" and the second matches the ID of the person presenting the check, it's negotiable as a "third party check". That's part of why you shouldn't endorse a check unless you'll immediately be handing it to a bank teller or cashier or putting it in an envelope.
Or you can write "FOR DEPOSIT ONLY" on the line below your endorsement signature, and your checking account number on the line below that.
Rumor has it the next version of Firefox will include client patching.
No, the RSX is G70-based.
From the Anandtech article:
"As we mentioned before, NVIDIA's RSX is the more PC-like of the two GPU solutions. Unlike ATI's offering, the RSX is based on a NVIDIA GPU, the upcoming G70 (the successor to the GeForce 6)."
It depresses me that the American public appears to think that the United States has any particular authority over the regulation of the Internet. I think it's this sense of ignorant entitlement that makes us so unpopular around the globe.
Up until recently, I thought terraforming was a neat idea and great fodder for science fiction. Then it made me realize how fragile the human body is, that we would have to orchestrate a Great Pyramid-caliber exercise to make a planet livable for our delicate bodies.
I'd much sooner see this R&D money go towards solving the geopolitical and socioeconomic problems that plague us already--rather than towards bluesky research that may be aborted by nuclear or bio-weapon cataclysm.
Am I just a party pooper?
82% Rating? These guys are on the take.
Don't be ridiculous. It's not the card's fault that it costs what it does, which is probably why the site didn't tank the score. They understand that some games will require 512MB of video RAM (as Tim Sweeney said of UE3-based games, in an interview he did a year ago). It's still a fine card--just way overpriced, even by enthusiast standards. And the price is determined by the marketing/sales department, not the R&D guys.
PC Gamer reviews ridiculously expensive--but highly-rated--systems all the time, and no one accuses them of taking bribes.
It just links to them. Same with Google News. Google posts a blurb, but its length is short enough to avoid copyright infringement (i.e., less than 100 words). The images in Google News link directly back to the domain where the story was posted. Sounds like the AP is asking everyone to prioritize Rueters over them, inadvertently. It also sounds like the AP is starting to recognize the Internet as a very influential source of information. It's not nearly ubiquitous as radio and TV, but it reaches a powerful demographic.
On the whole, organisms don't biologically adapt to survive. What typically happens is that the organisms with useful traits survive. Sometimes biological adaptability is itself a trait, as with amphibians capable of changing their gender after birth. But for the most part, adaptation and evolution are separate elements of biology.
Regardless of the "context", the fact that she even uttered that string of words should scare the hell out of anybody who values their freedom.
Respectfully, Pres. Bush has her beat on that score, and he's already in the White House.
Completely out of context.
... the tax cuts may have helped you," Sen. Clinton said. "We're saying that for America to get back on track, we're probably going to cut that short and not give it to you. We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good."
Context:
"Headlining an appearance with other Democratic women senators on behalf of Sen. Barbara Boxer, who is up for re-election this year, Hillary Clinton told several hundred supporters -- some of whom had ponied up as much as $10,000 to attend -- to expect to lose some of the tax cuts passed by President Bush if Democrats win the White House and control of Congress.
"Many of you are well enough off that
It's sad that it took until last year to get the grandmother of sci-fi inducted. You'd think they would have jumped at the opportunity to be gender-friendly in a genre that is historically dominated by men. Tiptree, LeGuin, and Vonda McIntyre would have been high on my priority list as well.
I don't know about you guys, but my company, on the order of 350 people nationally, doesn't upgrade every time a new CPU comes out, and we all have at least one computer at our desks. And as we all know, weak security is overwhelmingly a Windows problem, not a PC problem. Oh, but he said it happens every couple years. Oh, but before that, he implied that it's a constant stream of upgrades. Never mind that security has overwhelmingly been a Windows problem, not a PC problem. Twit.
And when it comes to hosted apps, that's probably more cost-effective in the long run...as long as you can guarantee rock-solid uptime and consistently updated security...Oops. Better not be using PCs for that task, eh? Twit.
There, now you don't have to wade through Gatesian propaganda.
If the 'Net as a whole gravitates towards pay content, it will not happen overnight. People have gotten used to getting all kinds of stuff for free for so long (email, web hosting, image hosting, personal portals, et cetera) that it causes an unholy uproar every time you dare to put a price tag on something. Speaking as someone who writes for a news outlet with a little under 100k subscriptions, I can tell you that this is why the online subscription model has been so slow to evolve.
And not only do you create an uproar, but there's always someone on the 'Net who's (1) willing to survive on a threadbare advertising-based margin for the sake of indie glory, or (2) a freebie-dishing moron who will crash and burn in a blaze of glory, but not before he's induldged the masses with months of Free Stuff that a sustainable business could not hope to afford.
The more fundamental problem here is that the 'Net is inherently an information resource with a deep basis in the belief of freedom of information and a right to privacy. It began as a network of universities exchanging research data, and it continues as a global village of topics ad nauseum. Good luck trying to make people pay for something when they can get a reasonly close approximation by simply entering a different URL. This is the beauty and the curse of online business. You're easily accessible, but so is everyone else, forcing the provider to make a huge content proposition just to get their foot in the door with the customer. For a news outlet, it's the amount and quality of stories you can put up. For a reseller, it's the size of your inventory and the ease of navigation. For a search engine, it's the speed and accuracy of your results, among other things. And so forth.
Meanwhile the ruthless prosper while throwing breadcrumbs to their employees. Seems one more failure ensures the continued trend.
I certainly don't disagree about the intimidating weight of EA, but, respectfully, I think it oversimplifies things to position Troika and EA as David vs. Goliath. Troika had some great ideas and some great licenses, but their trio of games suffered from consistenly lackluster technical execution, and, in the case of Arcanum, a presentation so glacial that it dissuaded the majority of the audience from digging in.
3000 people before me didn't notice. Cha-ching!
If it did get into the court system, the court may end up legally defining spyware. Think of it in terms of libel, slander, defamation, etc. If you call the software spyware, it can damage their business and reputation. You could be held liable for their losses, even. But that would require that the claim was false. To prove it was false, the court would have to officially declare their software one way or another.
From what I understand, you not only have to prove that the claim is false, but also prove that the claim has caused loss of reputation for it to be classified as libel. (Slander only covers oral claims, while libel covers written claims.) A claim of defamation has to prove malice or be proved false, but still has to prove loss of reputation.
This whole system acts as a kind of corollary to the First Amendment, allowing a free press to make "watchdog" claims without fear of being unfairly litigated. In theory, at least.
Look, I'm no fan of MS, but guess what? A monopoly is not illegal. Yes, you read that correctly. What is illegal is to abuse your monopoly.
From what I understand, the majority of those BBB complaints are from disgruntled players who had their Diablo II, Warcraft III, and StarCraft II keys blocked from online play due to user violations.
And this is my typical response:
(1) P2P is a geometrically larger distribution method. It is in a completely different ballpark from recording a football game or making a copy of your neighbor's tape of A Fistful of Dollars. That is why Betamax won in the court room.
(2) P2P is a geometrically larger distrobution method that can also be
--completely anonymous
--requiring no transfer of a physical object
--taking a matter of minutes
--hoarded by the terabytes within the space of a few square inches.
This is a different beast. This is a different model. When you can download an entire album from across the world in a matter of minutes, with sound quality virtually indistinguishable from the original, without anyone seeing your face or knowing your name, without leaving your house, you are no longer in Betamax territory.
This model invites a completely different demographic. This model is highly skewed towards illegal activity. I'm not saying that P2P is wrong--I think the system, in theory, is awesome. I'm saying that there's too many pie-eyed people out there who thing it's the best thing since garlic bread and snort at anyone who says the method, in practice, actually has serious problems.
And the RIAA/MPAA doesn't give a whit if someone wants to innovate or not. They're not threatened by creatitivity. As I said in my previous post, they are not dogmatic. They are rhetorical. The difference here is the difference between tradition enforced by law, which is enforce by lobbyists, versus evolution championed by those outside the political system. These record labels merely intend to protect their copyrights. Their manner of protection is debatable, but it is their legal right. The creator of a P2P program merely intends to make a statement on his opinion of those rights. However, he does not have the right to exercise his speech in this manner--by subverting ownership on a geometric, global, high-speed and (in most cases) anonymous level. Betamax has virtually no connection to what's going on here.
But, in fact, the user experience of performance hasn't improved much over the past 15 years.
"And why should it?" asked Cynical Executive.
Once performance reaches the realm of Good Enough, you can start adding features to existing systems and rely on the hardware development curve to keep those inreasingly bloated systems at a Good Enough level. The lay user doesn't care if Word takes 10 seconds to open instead of 3 seconds, so efficiency R&D is wasted time and money. Just make it look nice, add a spellchecker, search feature, etc., and you're good to go.
I recall an anecdote about a major auto manufacture, back in the dawn of the automobile age. I think it was Ford. A high-level executive told his men to scour the junkyards for their cars and bring back whatever was in the best condition. What invariably came back was a piece called the "kingpin," which no longer exists in modern vehicles. The executive told them to stop making such a good kingpin, because its quality was much higher than it needed to be. It was wasted quality. Make it Good Enough, and save yourself a lot of money in R&D in the long run. Proper? Doubtful. Profitable? Hell yes. Make the product as good as it needs to be, and not an inch better.
This is where the power of monopoly comes in, by the way. And this is why companies that prioritize quality charge a premium.
Where did he post anything about stealing peoples property? You're as bad as the xxIA.. p2p is evil, its STEALING, which even in the case of piracy (of which the parents post in NOT talking about) is not stealing.. its copyright infringement.
p2p can be used for many legitimate purposes.
Oh, quit it. Debating for hair-splitting's sake can be a fun mental exercise, but come on. The majority of the P2P/IRC/Usenet community is not using these file sharing capabilities to trade Grandma's recipe for Alaskan upside-down cake. Quit hanging on to a technicality of decency. Sure, I'll get modded down by the screw-the-man idealists, but you know that's how this sharing system plays out in the end. Movies, music, computer games, and porn.
The RIAA/MPAA isn't correct, but neither are the P2Pers. What you've actually stumbled into is morass of legal rhetoric and artistic dogma that hides greed on one side and a refusal to pay for services on the other.
I tend to agree, considering that Gran Turismo 4 is out in Japan and has preview builds circulating in the States.
A reality that does not change much, no matter what party is in the White House, really. One group tries to make a level playing field for everyone, to a fault, and the other tells you how to behave in the privacy of your own home. But staying on topic--I'm tired of this "do it for the children" crap that solely blames external factors for adolescent misbehavior.
Preventing my hypothetical 16 year-old son from playing DooM 3, and having him walk over to the TV and watch a slasher film on some pay cable channel, just shows that standards only apply to those who don't have the power to decide their own freedoms, and that these legislators have been practically programmed by moralist lobbyists to believe that playing out violence creates violence. If that was a case, there would have been a national carjacking epidemic directly following the release of GTA3. But there wasn't, because children actually do understand the difference between a TV and the fucking driveway in front of their house. I'm far more concerned about gangster rap's glorification of the coldly violent and mysogynistic thug.
I've noticed that the first few negative responses to Michael's in-story soapboxing are typically rebutted by ACs.
I'll feel sympathy for Best Buy having to deal with bargain hunters when it stops pushing local stores out of business and fucking up street traffic wherever it parks its fat ass. Aside from the sale items, I can get everything cheaper online, and from a local store called Central Computer, which is able to survive against the SF BB by sheer volume of potential customers.
If your revenue's greatest strength is the ignorance of your customers, your days are numbered.