you have absolutely no right to the domain; everything that you can do is done with the consent of domains-by-proxy - and they can shut your domain or sell it on, or do whatever they want
Yeah well your bank can refuse to give you back all your money, but they rarely do that. Problems like you describe are with the business, not the business model.
Dude - it's an article about a novel conceptual environment for mobile phone usage... not a prompt for you to tell us about your fantasies... both hands on the desk now, please.
I really have noticed a dramatic decrease in the amount of spam I've received in the past 4-5 days. I figured it was just due to my dilligence with unsubscribing myself to mailing lists but everything just suddenly dropped off.
Hmm let's see - an anonymous coward uses a subject line of "Me too" to provide a brief anecdote about noticing an unspecified decrease in spam received during an approximated timeframe, then speculates on attributing this to an untested hypothesis, and gets moderated "+4, Informative".
Come on - you know you wanna blockquote me now, and get a +5, Funny for saying "You're new here, aren't you"...
Playing ignorant and using excuses doesn't make it any less astonishing and annoying.
It also won't stand up in court when some for-profit company sues for libel. Seriously, this is incorrect information about a for-profit company that could damage their public image. Don't worry about the "real impact" - we all know that's irrelevant in the US legal system.
All I saw when I read the title "Divx (sic) Now Adware Supported Only" was "DivX alters business model to something I won't like". The headline is misleading even in context of the original post - it is NOT only adware, you can (still) pay for a non-advertisement-supported version just like most other software in the world.
If this FUD was about your company, wouldn't you be pissed off?
RTAC (read the article carefully). I think you've misinterpreted this:
If you're located in an area that only qualifies for IDSL or T1 services, setting up NetShare in your neighborhood would allow all surrounding locations to contribute to the cost of a T1 circuit while sharing in high quality broadband access!
Their FAQ page has more detail that indicates it's a change in your status from a Speakeasy customer to their reseller / support guy . You become admin for your neighbours, and attend to their support requests, charge them the amount you decide, etc.
This would apply to whatever your current connection is, or else this FAQ answer wouldn't make any sense:
Because signing up as a NetShare Admin means you will be sharing your existing broadband connection, you will need to expect some decrease in your own service levels the more NetShare Customers you sign up. If you experience a serious decrease in speed levels as you add more customers, you may want to upgrade your broadband connection.
Thanks for your link. It amazes me that people still post 429K jpegs when the same image quickly converted to PNG is 39K without losing anything. An 8 bit GIF is 8K and given the nature of the image, losing the colour doesn't really hurt much at all.
Sniff sniff... won't somebody please think of the bandwidth!!
What, you mean like these guys? Interest/lobby groups existing aren't enough. They also need to be able to raise heaps of money so they can redirect those funds over to elected representatives at appropriate moments of their choosing. Perhaps if all that.com money didn't get spent as quickly as it did...
And since this is a multiplayer-only mod, it can only boost sales of the existing retail product.
Bzzzzzt - this isn't a mod, by the strict definition of the term "mod" - you don't need the original game to play. It might generate a few indirect sales, but that's it.
Not many Australians realise that we don't have the same "fair use" rights that Americans and other nationals do.
We have no legal right to rip mp3s from our own legal CDs. We have no legal right to backup CDs for self-insurance. Check it out (374KB PDF).
Hell - I'm probably infringing Copyright by quoting this paragraph from the Australian Copyright Council PDF I linked to above:
Making a backup copy of a CD will involve making a reproduction of the music, lyrics and sound recordings on that CD.
The right to reproduce the work is one of the exclusive rights of the owners of copyright in those items. You may not
legally make a back up copy of a CD when the CD contains material that is protected by copyright unless you have
permission from the owner of copyright or a special exception applies to your use.
Check it and see for yourself. At time of this post, there are six channels serving 361 files.
And that's just DALnet.
Seems to me that the only real losers from this are the dudes who now have to add this moderation to their job description. DALnet won't miss the leechers, the leechers won't miss DALnet.
Psssst - I know where you might be able to pick up a suitable enclosure really cheaply, if you don't mind using second hand equipment. As an added benefit - it seems to do a good job of discouraging tourists!;-)
Arguably, they have succeeded magnificently. Unit conversion jokes and quibbles about current management aside, there are some remarkable achievements happening in NASA, as well as other national/international space agencies, notably Japan and the ESA, and hopefully China sometime soon.
Exactly how could the next generation be inspired if they think NASA was lying up-front about its most inspiring accomplishment?
Of course they wouldn't. There will always be doubters and/or feeble-minded individuals. But remember - we know that scientists and engineers in the 20th Century from a variety of backgrounds managed to shoot stuff and people all over the solar system. There was no NASA before that to inspire them, and somehow they still did it because the science was sound, and they took the time to learn about it and work out how to use it.
The real issue is how many people are discouraged from pursuing a career in the space industry, and how many people with cash are willing to fund the industry in the first place. Somehow I (optimistically) doubt FOX FUDumentary viewers are a significant proportion of those groups.
NASA's core business is delivering science and engineering, not education.
There are plenty of educated, credible and vocal people who don't work for NASA who can and will provide necessary refutations (word??) for pseudoscientific nonsense.
NASA could probably achieve the same goal (convincing swinging skeptics) to the same level of efficiency through a PR department staffed with a couple of researchers and the occasional "read this or ask them" press release.
And fight to shut down/cripple something that's obviously filling a real e-commerce niche?
How about instead writing to your bank, who are regulated, insured and already have infrastructure to tell them to expand into escrow services online. Given the choice, who would you rather transact through - Paypal, or your bank?
...resulted in a massive media panic twenty years later. Oh, and it caused a couple glitches
I would say the Y2K phenomenon caused a lot more than a media panic and a couple of glitches. How different would the IT industry be today, if the countless billions spent upgrading everything were still around to be spent now? Or if proper analyses were done first to see if things that could be upgraded really should? Ok so that second part is more to do with a bug in western legal frameworks that allow "liability" to be a guilty-until-proven-otherwise sort of thing...
Hmmmm - LCD vs CRT - the first holy war of 2003!!:)
I just bought a Samsung 172T (read an early glowing review). It's the first LCD screen I've owned, although I've used plenty before; I have a laptop for work.
Just like plenty of comments from this thread from yesterday, plenty of non-LCD-owning people here seem to have a strong opinion on the matter:)
I couldn't be happier with my new screen. At the stated response rate of 25ms, I have an effective screen refresh rate of 40 updates a second, ie. faster than my eye can detect. The monitor can handle being fed 72Hz at 1280x1024 (native res), which is better than my old Acer 77c 17" could manage. I've always played games with v-sync switched on to prevent tearing in the past (for the uninitiated, v-sync means the card sends the same number of frames per second as the screen refresh rate, so that monitor doesn't try to display parts of two frames at once and cause visible tearing).
The long and the short of all this is that the screen is happily updating as fast as my eyes and brain need it to. As a bonus:
I have a "true" 17" viewable monitor (equiv. to a 19" CRT)
a screen that doesn't hurt to look at for day-long gaming sessions
I can lift it with two fingers! ie it's portable for LANs
It chews far less power than a CRT
it gives off far less HEAT than a CRT - a cool room makes for a cooler PC
it looks way cooler than any CRT on the planet
I can use a smaller desk, or fit more on my existing desk
My girlfriend thinks I'm cooler for owning it:)
Yes it cost more. But doesn't almost everything worthwhile cost more?
Sure - many gamers won't get an LCD because on paper they doesn't match current CRT capabilities. But good ones come close enough.
If I didn't have so many files to convert, I'd consider the technically better Ogg Vorbis format. Anyone know of a batch MP3>OGG converter?
You won't pick up any quality converting an already-mp3 file to ogg - it's still lossy compression on top of lossy compression. Anyone know of a batch cd-ripper/robot arm disc changer combo??:)
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah well your bank can refuse to give you back all your money, but they rarely do that. Problems like you describe are with the business, not the business model.
Dude - it's an article about a novel conceptual environment for mobile phone usage... not a prompt for you to tell us about your fantasies... both hands on the desk now, please.
Hmm let's see - an anonymous coward uses a subject line of "Me too" to provide a brief anecdote about noticing an unspecified decrease in spam received during an approximated timeframe, then speculates on attributing this to an untested hypothesis, and gets moderated "+4, Informative".
Come on - you know you wanna blockquote me now, and get a +5, Funny for saying "You're new here, aren't you"...
It also won't stand up in court when some for-profit company sues for libel. Seriously, this is incorrect information about a for-profit company that could damage their public image. Don't worry about the "real impact" - we all know that's irrelevant in the US legal system.
All I saw when I read the title "Divx (sic) Now Adware Supported Only" was "DivX alters business model to something I won't like". The headline is misleading even in context of the original post - it is NOT only adware, you can (still) pay for a non-advertisement-supported version just like most other software in the world.
If this FUD was about your company, wouldn't you be pissed off?
Thanks for your link. It amazes me that people still post 429K jpegs when the same image quickly converted to PNG is 39K without losing anything. An 8 bit GIF is 8K and given the nature of the image, losing the colour doesn't really hurt much at all. Sniff sniff... won't somebody please think of the bandwidth!!
What, you mean like these guys? Interest/lobby groups existing aren't enough. They also need to be able to raise heaps of money so they can redirect those funds over to elected representatives at appropriate moments of their choosing. Perhaps if all that .com money didn't get spent as quickly as it did...
We have no legal right to rip mp3s from our own legal CDs. We have no legal right to backup CDs for self-insurance. Check it out (374KB PDF).
Hell - I'm probably infringing Copyright by quoting this paragraph from the Australian Copyright Council PDF I linked to above:
http://www.bsa.org/usa/report/offices.phtml
Paste in here:
http://www.bsa.org/usa/report/report.php
Hours of fun, I promise you!
And that's just DALnet.
Seems to me that the only real losers from this are the dudes who now have to add this moderation to their job description. DALnet won't miss the leechers, the leechers won't miss DALnet.
Psssst - I know where you might be able to pick up a suitable enclosure really cheaply, if you don't mind using second hand equipment. As an added benefit - it seems to do a good job of discouraging tourists! ;-)
Arguably, they have succeeded magnificently. Unit conversion jokes and quibbles about current management aside, there are some remarkable achievements happening in NASA, as well as other national/international space agencies, notably Japan and the ESA, and hopefully China sometime soon.
Of course they wouldn't. There will always be doubters and/or feeble-minded individuals. But remember - we know that scientists and engineers in the 20th Century from a variety of backgrounds managed to shoot stuff and people all over the solar system. There was no NASA before that to inspire them, and somehow they still did it because the science was sound, and they took the time to learn about it and work out how to use it.
The real issue is how many people are discouraged from pursuing a career in the space industry, and how many people with cash are willing to fund the industry in the first place. Somehow I (optimistically) doubt FOX FUDumentary viewers are a significant proportion of those groups.
Outsource it!
NASA's core business is delivering science and engineering, not education.
There are plenty of educated, credible and vocal people who don't work for NASA who can and will provide necessary refutations (word??) for pseudoscientific nonsense.
NASA could probably achieve the same goal (convincing swinging skeptics) to the same level of efficiency through a PR department staffed with a couple of researchers and the occasional "read this or ask them" press release.
http://space-simulator.lanl.gov/
Umm, thanks for proving my point :)
I just bought a Samsung 172T (read an early glowing review). It's the first LCD screen I've owned, although I've used plenty before; I have a laptop for work.
Just like plenty of comments from this thread from yesterday, plenty of non-LCD-owning people here seem to have a strong opinion on the matter :)
I couldn't be happier with my new screen. At the stated response rate of 25ms, I have an effective screen refresh rate of 40 updates a second, ie. faster than my eye can detect. The monitor can handle being fed 72Hz at 1280x1024 (native res), which is better than my old Acer 77c 17" could manage. I've always played games with v-sync switched on to prevent tearing in the past (for the uninitiated, v-sync means the card sends the same number of frames per second as the screen refresh rate, so that monitor doesn't try to display parts of two frames at once and cause visible tearing). The long and the short of all this is that the screen is happily updating as fast as my eyes and brain need it to. As a bonus:
- I have a "true" 17" viewable monitor (equiv. to a 19" CRT)
- a screen that doesn't hurt to look at for day-long gaming sessions
- I can lift it with two fingers! ie it's portable for LANs
- It chews far less power than a CRT
- it gives off far less HEAT than a CRT - a cool room makes for a cooler PC
- it looks way cooler than any CRT on the planet
- I can use a smaller desk, or fit more on my existing desk
- My girlfriend thinks I'm cooler for owning it
:)
Yes it cost more. But doesn't almost everything worthwhile cost more?Sure - many gamers won't get an LCD because on paper they doesn't match current CRT capabilities. But good ones come close enough.
Now all we need is a three hundred metre tall trebuchet to launch the satellite itself into orbit, and we're as green as Kermit :)
Since MP3 > Ogg will sound worse than CD > Ogg, those who aren't bound to MP3-specific hardware might want to re-rip everything.
Gorak replied to a post of mine a while ago, with a link to the Ripperbot - a cd-changer style machine that holds and rips 200 CDs or DVDs at once.
Sure beats sitting at a PC for a week opening and closing the drink-holder!
You won't pick up any quality converting an already-mp3 file to ogg - it's still lossy compression on top of lossy compression. Anyone know of a batch cd-ripper/robot arm disc changer combo??
This may be the only time in history where the dotcom business model worked like a charm:
Step 1: Ponder the implications of hypothetical Y2K bug, still fifteen years away
Step 2: ??????
Step 3: Profit!!!!