No, but they do rot by themselves. I've got a shelf full of DVDS I bough back in 2005 that are now unreadable. Totally scratch free, but all the golden 'dye' or what ever that shit is has been OHM NOM NOMED into oblivion by my local tropical weather and bacteria.
Ive got no CD's from the 80's left working, they look like a worm farm when you hold them up to the light.
So no, physical media is not the knees of bees either.
I think science is doing a fine job of putting forward testable answers to a lot of "why".
Oh, you meant Why with a capital W. Im guessing that is a sort of "Why am I here" thing. Guess that one is still a work in progress.
Just out of curiosity, what is your religions answer to that one? From what I gather its "To endure a life time of temptation, guilt, fear and confliction steadfastly believing in a concept in order to be granted eternal life but which differs slightly (or greatly) from similar concepts that a whole bunch of other people also believe in (but they are wrong - no eternal life for them) "
I don't know, bin laden sounds like just a poor little rich kid with a lot of charisma, free time and shoulder chips. I don't think he has a real plan beyond what any angst ridden 17 year old who just wants to fuck shit up has. Sure he can be attributed with the deaths of a couple of thousand people and a few big arse buildings, but from all that has happened and reported I doubt he is some super Dr evil mastermind. (Note: I do not mean to belittle that event in any way - I would have been 100% with the US if on that day they carpet bombed the major Afghanistan cities out existence and took it over as the next US state)
I would be very surprised if he (BL) had envisioned the flagellation the US is currently applying to itself. I personally think you credit him with to much imagination.
"Fear, pseudo-change, and a new boss" - Bang on the money. Its not bin laden, its the same fuck heads that have been fucking their fellow man over and over again since the start of time (A good example: The SF Bridge - the dude selling the wires was replacing them with cheap arse crap after that trucks rolled by the inspectors - didnt matter that he was endangering the lives of thousands, just that he could make a quick buck)
The big problem now is that this bastards are making the rules or/and have most of the money and I don't know what to do about it either.
Wot a bummer of a thought for the day. Fuck it, I'm off to eat left over plum pudding and brandy custard with my family when they wake up from the mid afternoon snooze.
Merry xmas all - try not to loose that tiny spark of rebellion (Unless its heartburn)!
Are you upset someone who publicly humiliated the U.S. government to the entire world is being jailed on trumped-up charges? How about being executed and your entire family sent to a labor camp because you talked to a neighbor wondering if your country's style of government could be improved.
What I'm upset about is the perception that the US government is heading down the path of your second scenario.
Already people are seriously *afraid* of vocally or financially supporting wikileaks for fear of unknown reprisals from the government - just read some of the/. post in wikileaks stories.
One of the released cables describes the kidnapping, extradition and detainment of a German citizen and the subsequent pressure exerted to keep it all under wraps.
Another points to 15,000 thousand additional, unreported casualties from the Iraq.
Unarmed journalists were killed by the US Military and the event was covered up.
(Unconfirmed?) Reports are coming in that US citizens are being threatened in relation to their future employment just for reading this material.
Real people are being kidnapped. Real people are DYING. Government sponsored oppression seems to have started.
This is scary shit, but so far it seems that because its happening to other people "its unfortunate, but acceptable".
As others have already stated: 1) If worlds news media was actually doing their job properly there would be no need for wikileaks - all the worthy stuff would be reported. 2) When the total number of innocent people's kill as a direct result of released gets even remotely close to 15000, then we will talk about responsibility.
PS: Can I repeat the bit about PEOPLE ARE DYING as a direct result of government actions. Don't you think that its right & proper for an informed and healthy democracy that the people are aware of how their elected representative are responsible for the loss of life? What should happen if the government would prefer not to to publicly provide this information?
'The harsh reality,' warns Wadhwa, is that for every Zuckerberg, there are a thousand who drop out of college and fail,'
The harsher reality is that there is another thousand that finishes college and still fails.
And the even harsher reality that with all our knowledge and skills, thousands of babies die during childbirth in 1st world hospitals.
Question: Does this mean we should all go have our babies in replicated third world squalid conditions without doctors.
Seriously dude, if you actually attend college/university *properly* your in good shape for the future.
Pointing out the college 'failures' just stinks of tall poppy syndrome and/or a sad attempt to justify your own status by comparing it the target weaknesses of a peer group.
No, this issue wasn't even on the radar of mainstream voters
We have a discussion panel program called Q&A over here. Before the election the good senator Conroy appeared with a buch of other people to face the quesion and answers session. The filter attracted over 2000 questions - the largest ever - just about all of them asking 'WTF?'.
So I think that this was on the radar for most people, even if in the form 'my nerd friend says its shit and the guy is a luddite'. The fact that the ministers and government had put on their blinkers and screaming 'la la la cant here you we know best' put them smack bang in the same mindset that the previous government was when they were kicked out.
AND THE BASTARDS STILL HAVEN'T GOT THE HUMILITY OR THE GUTS TO SAY WE WERE WRONG ON THIS, LETS WORK OUT A BETTER WAY OF KEEPING KIDS SAFE!!!! What the hell is wrong with these people.
I'm in the strange position of having reached the realization that essentially, unless I'm willing to devote about 20 years of my life studying the matter on my own I'm going to have to decide to accept it by faith and not by reason. Oh irony, you are so delicious.
But you *could* study the matter and put forward your reasons for it being a load of dingoes kidneys and provide the experiment that 'breaks' the theory. You would be hailed as a genius and mankind would be better off as we stopped diverting our limited smart people resources pursuing a dead end.
Just like there is no way of disproving the invisible purple ghost of my cat that haunts our backyard, there is no research, no study, no experiment and no test that can ever disprove god
You make the point that the science is sufficiently complicated that most of us have just have to accept it - and this is true. There are a lot of things in life we just accept because, well, life is really really big.
But you seem to fail to recognise the importance of fact that the *option* of anyone understanding, testing and refining (or disproving) the theory is there for anyone to pursue. This is important, the day we all just 'accept' all scientific theories because they are scientific theory is the day we loose science forever.
Re:What matters is end user convenience (offtopic)
on
First GNOME Census Results
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· Score: 2, Insightful
As a user, I don't care in the slightest who committed more patches, or lines of code.
... does anyone actually care?
Actually, you should care. Just as you should care where and how your cheap shoes were made and what ingredients went into that chicken nugget you ate.
Your only power as a consumer is that of choice, and by being uninformed you cant make a more meaningful choice than 'this one looks pretty and is the cheapest'.
By being even slightly informed consumers *might* stop buying drm enabled music, they *might* by more ecologically sustainable products and *might* start to realise that the reason why they cant get component video from their HDMI sources is purely by the whim of the MPAA and start looking for alternatives.
Caring doesn't mean entirely hanging your way of life to be the perfect zero carbon imprint, 100% sustainable , super politicly correct guiding social light mega person. Caring just means that you having an interest *why* things are instead of blindly taking the path of least resistance.
Slightly on topic, you are correct about Ubuntu's user friendliness, and a lot of software developers (closed AND free) should try and make the end users experience as painless as possible. But remember, it could be argued that Ubuntu could only do this because of all the amazing work that went into Gnome in the first place.
To put it bluntly, this can't be prevented no matter what you do, and if someone really does this, the children need to be taken away from them.
And this is were your idea suddenly turns into the bureaucratic mess that it was trying to solve. When is it time to take the children away? Who makes that call? where do they go? Who deals with the legal and social problems that this causes? Maybe its better to do everything we can not to take the children away, introduce some conditions on the payments.. but ONLY for these circumstances...oh, what about those disabled people.. and the criminals... and that single young person shouldn't be getting the same as a mother of 3...
A big big reason why governments are so full of rules and regulations is because they are (for the most part) OLD, and during their lifetime they have had to deal with exception after exception and what initially started out as a simple rule 'Everyone is entitled to health care' turns into several encyclopaedias of terms and conditions.
Don't get me wrong, I firmly believe that in a lot of cases we have ended up with to much bureaucracy, especially in government but the large private corporations are getting there as well, and a lot of it self generating. But to think that the solution is to get rid of it all is not going to work either.
Oh, and people are dicks who will game any system they can.
If IE still has more than 30% worldwide marketshare, and doesn't have basic requirements for this, its not going to be used. Period.
People who use "Period" to end their sentences are close minded absolutists with no capacity for argument, contrary views or the small possibility that they may just be completely wrong. Period.
Seriously dude, this is a technology news site. Period. A good proportion of readers will see this as being cool and may knock up a few 'tech demo' pages to do some tricky stuff. Period. That means the technology has been used. Period. Someone may come up with 'the next big thing' that the commercial sites decide they cant live without. Period. MS will eventually patch in canvas support and you can go and declare your authoritative prophecies on other ideas. Period.
Next time, try the following, less inflammatory statement and watch the world explode into smiles, cuddles and happiness:
If IE still has more than 30% worldwide marketshare, and doesn't have basic requirements for this, its probably not going to be used on any significant or commercial scale.
An executive at EA just blew his nose on $1,030,536. They are not interested.
As someone else mentioned, a few *old* indie games have made over a million bucks in the span of a week. This is news worthy.
If your having trouble in understanding why, your not thinking about it properly.
This isn't about impressing or replacing the EA's of the world its about:
1) Demonstrating that you don't need a multi million dollar empire to create fun games that people want to play. 2) Small developers making a reasonable/good living by developing games. 3) (potentially) open sourced works != no more income.
Personally, I'm saddened that when ever there is a story about some open/gpl project making money, the highest modded posts all say "But [closed multi mega corp] makes 3 times that much during coffee break". What is this obsession with striking it rich? Why do we look down upon people making a "reasonable" amount from their efforts because other entities with questionable business ethics make more money?
Just don't sign it? Good luck getting anything done in this world then.
Or haven't you noticed that just about everything you do these days requires a contract?
Job - Contract. Home loan - contract. Mobile phone - contract. Airline ticket - contract. Credit card - contract. Bank Account - Contract. Online account at some games forum - contract. Basic Utilities - contract ISP - contract. Ticket to a show - contract. the list goes on and on.
So yes, if you want to live as a hermit licking lichen of the rocks in the back of your cave, goof for you. For the rest of us, contracts (of varying complexity) are now a way of life.
I reckon by the time we are 20 we have become trained to just sign on the line without reading. Most of the time its because what is written in the contract does have any real effect on us and in the back of our heads we tell ourselves 'I'm not going to do anything bad so I'm safe'
The fact is, contracts are now standard practice and anything that reduces the complexity of these things gets my vote.
Personally Id like to see the party who demands the signing of a contract before providing services be forced to pay for the layer of of signers choice to check the bloody thing.
every one has their breaking point and you found mine.
I can mostly handle txt speak, but WTF is up with ur == (your|you're)?
Every time I see 'ur' I cant help but mentally pronounce it 'uhrrr', as in what dumb giant cartoon character grunt when posed with a difficult question or situation.
Why not yr? Shirley it is a more obvious representation of what is trying to be conveyed?
So, you are saying there's absolutely bug-free software?
sure the is, here's one I prepared earlier:
10 REM HELLO WORLD PROGRAM 20 PRONT "HELLO WORLD" 30 END
See, the trick is to start out with a small piece of bug free software. Then, you just keep adding small bug free sections to it.
Its the same principle as staying underwater for ever: You can hold your breath for 5 seconds, but you cant hold your breath for a minute, so instead, just hold your breath for 5 seconds 12 times.
OK, cool, $1100 grand and your set to do documents.
Did you keep the receipt? Did you file it away in such a manner that that you can conclusively prove to the Microsoft auditors that you have indeed payed for that software? Did you do that for every computer and every piece of software in you organisation? Are you now spending a significant amount of a administrative staff time and effort keeping track of these things (Or have you ignored the problem and hope that you don't get a visit from the software police)
have you got a server? Have you paid for the correct 'CALS'? Running terminal server? Great, you've now paid 3 times for an OS (The host servers, the terminal server and the clients pc) on top of the cost of terminal server. Are you keeping track of these licenses?
Maybe its become to hard? Why not subscribe - no more licensing worries. Buy another server to manage your licenses. You are now paying yearly and effectively *own* nothing.
The cost of software is not insignificant. Paying hundreds of thousands of dollars each to rent something is crazy.
Just come out and say 'its to hard, ms lets me get away with the minimal effort for the maximum cost and that suits me just fine'.
Mind you, if your organisation is now at the mercy of some geniuses magic excel marco, then the CIO/boss of IT is so not doing there job properly (like how I'm not doing my job properly by bleating to the wind on/. instead of wrestling with an inherited SSIS package from hell).
You sir win my thanks for the day and my wifes scowl of the week.
Now I can put a proper engine behind my amateur game 'lots of blue dots bounce randomly around the screen but stop when the red dot gets close to them'. Be on the lookout for 'LOBDBRATSBSWTRDGCTT - 3D' coming soon to a dusty unmaintained source forge project page near YOU!
(Seriously though, those links are gold!)
Hmm you'd probably have to put it into some kind of sandbox that doesn't allow stuff like local file access...
But still, you'd need support for 3D graphics. If only such a thing would exist...
All have been proven false. Other long term theories have been proven false too, like Newton's gravity model even though they are close enough for a lot of work.
All theories? Every single one of them? Wow, when did that happen.
So the OP is stating (and I agree), how can you disprove God when there is some evidence (why are we here, incredible complexities, irreducible complexity, etc).
Can you see your contradiction here?
Why is that that (to pick at random) Newton's theories, whilst adequately describing so many physical phenomena, due to the exhaustive works of scientist and researchers (their own work based on other 'false' theories) has been shown to be not correct in all (extreme) circumstances but none the less can be used to shoot satellites into space and predict the path of interstellar objects can be thrown in the big ol false basket, but GOD is allowed a free pass. Most of the bible stories have been shown to be just that: stories (ie: polite way of say big ol FIB) but that's fine because look, we are far to complex a creature to have just appeared.
Tell you what, read up on evolution. No really. Read it until you understand it. Read it until you know the difference between 'our ancestors ARE apes' and 'APES and US share the same ancestry' Read the bits about iterative mutations over thousands of generations. Especially read the bits about 'selection' being a poor choice of word substituted for 'did not cause creature to die, may have slightly helped creature to live longer but that bit isn't as important as not getting killed.'
If the best argument for god is 'we are to complex to not have a creator' then you must, MUST, answer the question, well who made the creator? Because if man is to complex and improbable not to have a creator, then the creator must be even more complex and improbable not to have one him/her/itself.
No, they're usually staffed by professionals. The kind of people who avoid mindless MS-bashing sites like/. and instead read actual security advisories and learn how to lock systems down to mitigate risks.
Let me guess, you are one of these *professionals* right? Building your mission critical systems in ASP, no doubt with the connection strings and passwords hard coded into each and every page, liberal sprinkles of obscure third party pretty components. Reading all those security bulletins but not noticing the pattern of ie6 is teh sux0ers, upgrade to 8!
Oh wait, you had to read Slashdot to post to it so that rules you out of the professional stream, I guess you must work in catering or something..
And as for the site being mindless ms bashing, one of the first +5 modded posts basically calls BS on the original story's claim that ie7/8 remain vulnerable.
Relax a bit, take breath and throw out those angry pills!
So basically the data is incomplete, and you have to make guesses to fill it in. Oh, wait, I mean 'educated' guesses, since the only people you let guess are the ones whose guesses agree with yours.
Bloody hell dude, did you take in anything this guy said? Did you notice the bit about people 'cherry picking' evidence - like how how you just cherry picked and smarty pants the comment about incomplete data?
Collecting and analyzing data is *hard*. Im working for our states education department, it took a team of 5 people over 4 months to gather, check and correct our student population counts. I know that the numbers released inaccurate - Why? Its filled in with 'corrected' results and values altered to comply with the (35 years out of date) national counting rules. Now these errors aren't deliberate, they are just there because of the lack of sophistication in our various school administrations systems, a data source with about a 5% shit data rate and a decades old process that no longer reflects the current state of student education.
A well funded, reasonably resourced govt department can not provide an accurate count of bums in seats. They certainly are not releasing the source data either. Why? Because the "in-accurate" results are accurate enough for its purpose. Releasing source data would prompt questions about these minor inaccuracies that would waste tens/hundreds of thousands on education dollars of clarifying the numbers that could of been spent on, oh i don't know, educating our kids maybe?
If I want to become an expert on SQL, I go read the specs.
WTF? Your the bastard who Ive been cleaning up after all my friken life. "SQL for dummies" a database wizard does not make.
And how bout that aviation industry - they wont let me drive one of there jet planes without years of training. They should just give me the manual and the keys man, (it's all done by computers now anyway, its a government CONSPIRACY to keep us driving our cars so they can collect car taxes!.)
If I want to become an expert on climatology, I go ask people to tell me how to guess which numbers will be useful to feed into the statistical analysis specs
Ok, here's one. There's a competition with a million zillion dollar prize for the person that can produce the most accurate avg temperature for a specific week/place. You set up your monitoring station to record the temp a 1 second intervals and at the end of week retrieve your black box. You notice that every 10 minutes, you get a 30 temperature readings in a row of 999 degrees. As you were living nearby in a tent for the week and were not incinerated every ten minutes, you reckon there might be a fault with the equipment.
Me? Id throw away the 999 measurements and use the other ones. I'm guessing your quitting the race because your results aren't 100% accurate and can not be 100% verified. Thanks for the million zillion bucks.
If its just for you and one or two others, Access (boo hiss) is your friend here. Ive found a PROJECT(or system)->TASK->HOURS table structure works out well and because its Access you can pretty much bolt on the extra bits as required.
tip: Don't forget to include a field in the TASKS table for the not just the client, but the client area. That way, at the end of the year or at review time you can show exactly where all your man power costs are going.
Yes Access is the bane of my existence from an existing system support role, but it *does* excel at these sort of small quick and dirty systems. It also works well as long as you design it properly - plus, you can move the back end to a real DB after a couple of years
Huh wot? I play Savage2 pretty much exclusively these days - and its a full on 3d shoot and slash and build em up with a propa musical score and everything.
Linux can play nice looking video games just fine thank you very much.
Slashdot Mirror
No, but they do rot by themselves. I've got a shelf full of DVDS I bough back in 2005 that are now unreadable. Totally scratch free, but all the golden 'dye' or what ever that shit is has been OHM NOM NOMED into oblivion by my local tropical weather and bacteria.
Ive got no CD's from the 80's left working, they look like a worm farm when you hold them up to the light.
So no, physical media is not the knees of bees either.
When science can answer "Why?", let me know.
I think science is doing a fine job of putting forward testable answers to a lot of "why".
Oh, you meant Why with a capital W. Im guessing that is a sort of "Why am I here" thing. Guess that one is still a work in progress.
Just out of curiosity, what is your religions answer to that one? From what I gather its "To endure a life time of temptation, guilt, fear and confliction steadfastly believing in a concept in order to be granted eternal life but which differs slightly (or greatly) from similar concepts that a whole bunch of other people also believe in (but they are wrong - no eternal life for them) "
I don't know, bin laden sounds like just a poor little rich kid with a lot of charisma, free time and shoulder chips. I don't think he has a real plan beyond what any angst ridden 17 year old who just wants to fuck shit up has. Sure he can be attributed with the deaths of a couple of thousand people and a few big arse buildings, but from all that has happened and reported I doubt he is some super Dr evil mastermind. (Note: I do not mean to belittle that event in any way - I would have been 100% with the US if on that day they carpet bombed the major Afghanistan cities out existence and took it over as the next US state)
I would be very surprised if he (BL) had envisioned the flagellation the US is currently applying to itself. I personally think you credit him with to much imagination.
"Fear, pseudo-change, and a new boss" - Bang on the money. Its not bin laden, its the same fuck heads that have been fucking their fellow man over and over again since the start of time (A good example: The SF Bridge - the dude selling the wires was replacing them with cheap arse crap after that trucks rolled by the inspectors - didnt matter that he was endangering the lives of thousands, just that he could make a quick buck)
The big problem now is that this bastards are making the rules or/and have most of the money and I don't know what to do about it either.
Wot a bummer of a thought for the day. Fuck it, I'm off to eat left over plum pudding and brandy custard with my family when they wake up from the mid afternoon snooze.
Merry xmas all - try not to loose that tiny spark of rebellion (Unless its heartburn)!
Are you upset someone who publicly humiliated the U.S. government to the entire world is being jailed on trumped-up charges? How about being executed and your entire family sent to a labor camp because you talked to a neighbor wondering if your country's style of government could be improved.
What I'm upset about is the perception that the US government is heading down the path of your second scenario.
Already people are seriously *afraid* of vocally or financially supporting wikileaks for fear of unknown reprisals from the government - just read some of the /. post in wikileaks stories.
One of the released cables describes the kidnapping, extradition and detainment of a German citizen and the subsequent pressure exerted to keep it all under wraps.
Another points to 15,000 thousand additional, unreported casualties from the Iraq.
Unarmed journalists were killed by the US Military and the event was covered up.
(Unconfirmed?) Reports are coming in that US citizens are being threatened in relation to their future employment just for reading this material.
Real people are being kidnapped. Real people are DYING. Government sponsored oppression seems to have started.
This is scary shit, but so far it seems that because its happening to other people "its unfortunate, but acceptable".
As others have already stated:
1) If worlds news media was actually doing their job properly there would be no need for wikileaks - all the worthy stuff would be reported.
2) When the total number of innocent people's kill as a direct result of released gets even remotely close to 15000, then we will talk about responsibility.
PS: Can I repeat the bit about PEOPLE ARE DYING as a direct result of government actions. Don't you think that its right & proper for an informed and healthy democracy that the people are aware of how their elected representative are responsible for the loss of life? What should happen if the government would prefer not to to publicly provide this information?
Nothing new here; vote with and for the politicians to keep things this way.
Fixed that for you..
From what I gather:
The guy was in a different STATE to the fire department he called.
The guy has wilfully chosen not to pay the next States fire department for coverage.
The guy lives in a state that has chosen no income tax which would normally provide for an internal fire department.
No lives were reported to be at risk.
The biggest casualties of this are the animals that were left to burn inside the house by both the owner and fire department.
I'm with the fire department on this one. The guy made his choices and they were wrong.
'The harsh reality,' warns Wadhwa, is that for every Zuckerberg, there are a thousand who drop out of college and fail,'
The harsher reality is that there is another thousand that finishes college and still fails.
And the even harsher reality that with all our knowledge and skills, thousands of babies die during childbirth in 1st world hospitals.
Question: Does this mean we should all go have our babies in replicated third world squalid conditions without doctors.
Seriously dude, if you actually attend college/university *properly* your in good shape for the future.
Pointing out the college 'failures' just stinks of tall poppy syndrome and/or a sad attempt to justify your own status by comparing it the target weaknesses of a peer group.
No, this issue wasn't even on the radar of mainstream voters
We have a discussion panel program called Q&A over here. Before the election the good senator Conroy appeared with a buch of other people to face the quesion and answers session. The filter attracted over 2000 questions - the largest ever - just about all of them asking 'WTF?'.
So I think that this was on the radar for most people, even if in the form 'my nerd friend says its shit and the guy is a luddite'. The fact that the ministers and government had put on their blinkers and screaming 'la la la cant here you we know best' put them smack bang in the same mindset that the previous government was when they were kicked out.
AND THE BASTARDS STILL HAVEN'T GOT THE HUMILITY OR THE GUTS TO SAY WE WERE WRONG ON THIS, LETS WORK OUT A BETTER WAY OF KEEPING KIDS SAFE!!!! What the hell is wrong with these people.
I'm in the strange position of having reached the realization that essentially, unless I'm willing to devote about 20 years of my life studying the matter on my own I'm going to have to decide to accept it by faith and not by reason. Oh irony, you are so delicious.
But you *could* study the matter and put forward your reasons for it being a load of dingoes kidneys and provide the experiment that 'breaks' the theory. You would be hailed as a genius and mankind would be better off as we stopped diverting our limited smart people resources pursuing a dead end.
Just like there is no way of disproving the invisible purple ghost of my cat that haunts our backyard, there is no research, no study, no experiment and no test that can ever disprove god
You make the point that the science is sufficiently complicated that most of us have just have to accept it - and this is true. There are a lot of things in life we just accept because, well, life is really really big.
But you seem to fail to recognise the importance of fact that the *option* of anyone understanding, testing and refining (or disproving) the theory is there for anyone to pursue. This is important, the day we all just 'accept' all scientific theories because they are scientific theory is the day we loose science forever.
As a user, I don't care in the slightest who committed more patches, or lines of code.
... does anyone actually care?
Actually, you should care. Just as you should care where and how your cheap shoes were made and what ingredients went into that chicken nugget you ate.
Your only power as a consumer is that of choice, and by being uninformed you cant make a more meaningful choice than 'this one looks pretty and is the cheapest'.
By being even slightly informed consumers *might* stop buying drm enabled music, they *might* by more ecologically sustainable products and *might* start to realise that the reason why they cant get component video from their HDMI sources is purely by the whim of the MPAA and start looking for alternatives.
Caring doesn't mean entirely hanging your way of life to be the perfect zero carbon imprint, 100% sustainable , super politicly correct guiding social light mega person. Caring just means that you having an interest *why* things are instead of blindly taking the path of least resistance.
Slightly on topic, you are correct about Ubuntu's user friendliness, and a lot of software developers (closed AND free) should try and make the end users experience as painless as possible. But remember, it could be argued that Ubuntu could only do this because of all the amazing work that went into Gnome in the first place.
To put it bluntly, this can't be prevented no matter what you do, and if someone really does this, the children need to be taken away from them.
And this is were your idea suddenly turns into the bureaucratic mess that it was trying to solve. When is it time to take the children away? Who makes that call? where do they go? Who deals with the legal and social problems that this causes? Maybe its better to do everything we can not to take the children away, introduce some conditions on the payments.. but ONLY for these circumstances...oh, what about those disabled people.. and the criminals... and that single young person shouldn't be getting the same as a mother of 3...
A big big reason why governments are so full of rules and regulations is because they are (for the most part) OLD, and during their lifetime they have had to deal with exception after exception and what initially started out as a simple rule 'Everyone is entitled to health care' turns into several encyclopaedias of terms and conditions.
Don't get me wrong, I firmly believe that in a lot of cases we have ended up with to much bureaucracy, especially in government but the large private corporations are getting there as well, and a lot of it self generating. But to think that the solution is to get rid of it all is not going to work either.
Oh, and people are dicks who will game any system they can.
If IE still has more than 30% worldwide marketshare, and doesn't have basic requirements for this, its not going to be used. Period.
People who use "Period" to end their sentences are close minded absolutists with no capacity for argument, contrary views or the small possibility that they may just be completely wrong. Period.
Seriously dude, this is a technology news site. Period. A good proportion of readers will see this as being cool and may knock up a few 'tech demo' pages to do some tricky stuff. Period. That means the technology has been used. Period. Someone may come up with 'the next big thing' that the commercial sites decide they cant live without. Period. MS will eventually patch in canvas support and you can go and declare your authoritative prophecies on other ideas. Period.
Next time, try the following, less inflammatory statement and watch the world explode into smiles, cuddles and happiness:
If IE still has more than 30% worldwide marketshare, and doesn't have basic requirements for this, its probably not going to be used on any significant or commercial scale.
An executive at EA just blew his nose on $1,030,536. They are not interested.
As someone else mentioned, a few *old* indie games have made over a million bucks in the span of a week. This is news worthy.
If your having trouble in understanding why, your not thinking about it properly.
This isn't about impressing or replacing the EA's of the world its about:
1) Demonstrating that you don't need a multi million dollar empire to create fun games that people want to play.
2) Small developers making a reasonable/good living by developing games.
3) (potentially) open sourced works != no more income.
Personally, I'm saddened that when ever there is a story about some open/gpl project making money, the highest modded posts all say "But [closed multi mega corp] makes 3 times that much during coffee break". What is this obsession with striking it rich? Why do we look down upon people making a "reasonable" amount from their efforts because other entities with questionable business ethics make more money?
Just don't sign it? Good luck getting anything done in this world then.
Or haven't you noticed that just about everything you do these days requires a contract?
Job - Contract.
Home loan - contract.
Mobile phone - contract.
Airline ticket - contract.
Credit card - contract.
Bank Account - Contract.
Online account at some games forum - contract.
Basic Utilities - contract
ISP - contract.
Ticket to a show - contract.
the list goes on and on.
So yes, if you want to live as a hermit licking lichen of the rocks in the back of your cave, goof for you. For the rest of us, contracts (of varying complexity) are now a way of life.
I reckon by the time we are 20 we have become trained to just sign on the line without reading. Most of the time its because what is written in the contract does have any real effect on us and in the back of our heads we tell ourselves 'I'm not going to do anything bad so I'm safe'
The fact is, contracts are now standard practice and anything that reduces the complexity of these things gets my vote.
Personally Id like to see the party who demands the signing of a contract before providing services be forced to pay for the layer of of signers choice to check the bloody thing.
every one has their breaking point and you found mine.
I can mostly handle txt speak, but WTF is up with ur == (your|you're)?
Every time I see 'ur' I cant help but mentally pronounce it 'uhrrr', as in what dumb giant cartoon character grunt when posed with a difficult question or situation.
Why not yr? Shirley it is a more obvious representation of what is trying to be conveyed?
He has his problem licked!
That comment was in poor taste..
So, you are saying there's absolutely bug-free software?
sure the is, here's one I prepared earlier:
10 REM HELLO WORLD PROGRAM
20 PRONT "HELLO WORLD"
30 END
See, the trick is to start out with a small piece of bug free software. Then, you just keep adding small bug free sections to it.
Its the same principle as staying underwater for ever: You can hold your breath for 5 seconds, but you cant hold your breath for a minute, so instead, just hold your breath for 5 seconds 12 times.
OK, cool, $1100 grand and your set to do documents.
Did you keep the receipt? Did you file it away in such a manner that that you can conclusively prove to the Microsoft auditors that you have indeed payed for that software? Did you do that for every computer and every piece of software in you organisation? Are you now spending a significant amount of a administrative staff time and effort keeping track of these things (Or have you ignored the problem and hope that you don't get a visit from the software police)
have you got a server? Have you paid for the correct 'CALS'? Running terminal server? Great, you've now paid 3 times for an OS (The host servers, the terminal server and the clients pc) on top of the cost of terminal server. Are you keeping track of these licenses?
Maybe its become to hard? Why not subscribe - no more licensing worries. Buy another server to manage your licenses. You are now paying yearly and effectively *own* nothing.
The cost of software is not insignificant. Paying hundreds of thousands of dollars each to rent something is crazy.
Just come out and say 'its to hard, ms lets me get away with the minimal effort for the maximum cost and that suits me just fine'.
Mind you, if your organisation is now at the mercy of some geniuses magic excel marco, then the CIO/boss of IT is so not doing there job properly (like how I'm not doing my job properly by bleating to the wind on /. instead of wrestling with an inherited SSIS package from hell).
You sir win my thanks for the day and my wifes scowl of the week.
Now I can put a proper engine behind my amateur game 'lots of blue dots bounce randomly around the screen but stop when the red dot gets close to them'. Be on the lookout for 'LOBDBRATSBSWTRDGCTT - 3D' coming soon to a dusty unmaintained source forge project page near YOU!
(Seriously though, those links are gold!)
Hmm you'd probably have to put it into some kind of sandbox that doesn't allow stuff like local file access...
But still, you'd need support for 3D graphics. If only such a thing would exist...
All have been proven false. Other long term theories have been proven false too, like Newton's gravity model even though they are close enough for a lot of work.
All theories? Every single one of them? Wow, when did that happen.
So the OP is stating (and I agree), how can you disprove God when there is some evidence (why are we here, incredible complexities, irreducible complexity, etc).
Can you see your contradiction here?
Why is that that (to pick at random) Newton's theories, whilst adequately describing so many physical phenomena, due to the exhaustive works of scientist and researchers (their own work based on other 'false' theories) has been shown to be not correct in all (extreme) circumstances but none the less can be used to shoot satellites into space and predict the path of interstellar objects can be thrown in the big ol false basket, but GOD is allowed a free pass. Most of the bible stories have been shown to be just that: stories (ie: polite way of say big ol FIB) but that's fine because look, we are far to complex a creature to have just appeared.
Tell you what, read up on evolution. No really. Read it until you understand it. Read it until you know the difference between 'our ancestors ARE apes' and 'APES and US share the same ancestry' Read the bits about iterative mutations over thousands of generations. Especially read the bits about 'selection' being a poor choice of word substituted for 'did not cause creature to die, may have slightly helped creature to live longer but that bit isn't as important as not getting killed.'
If the best argument for god is 'we are to complex to not have a creator' then you must, MUST, answer the question, well who made the creator? Because if man is to complex and improbable not to have a creator, then the creator must be even more complex and improbable not to have one him/her/itself.
Who cares? He owns it, its his responsibility to fix it. Pay someone if he cant figure it out and stop clicking on NAKED_PHOTOS.EXE
Your link doesn't work, can you send me this via email?
No, they're usually staffed by professionals. The kind of people who avoid mindless MS-bashing sites like /. and instead read actual security advisories and learn how to lock systems down to mitigate risks.
Let me guess, you are one of these *professionals* right? Building your mission critical systems in ASP, no doubt with the connection strings and passwords hard coded into each and every page, liberal sprinkles of obscure third party pretty components. Reading all those security bulletins but not noticing the pattern of ie6 is teh sux0ers, upgrade to 8!
Oh wait, you had to read Slashdot to post to it so that rules you out of the professional stream, I guess you must work in catering or something..
And as for the site being mindless ms bashing, one of the first +5 modded posts basically calls BS on the original story's claim that ie7/8 remain vulnerable.
Relax a bit, take breath and throw out those angry pills!
So basically the data is incomplete, and you have to make guesses to fill it in. Oh, wait, I mean 'educated' guesses, since the only people you let guess are the ones whose guesses agree with yours.
Bloody hell dude, did you take in anything this guy said? Did you notice the bit about people 'cherry picking' evidence - like how how you just cherry picked and smarty pants the comment about incomplete data?
Collecting and analyzing data is *hard*. Im working for our states education department, it took a team of 5 people over 4 months to gather, check and correct our student population counts. I know that the numbers released inaccurate - Why? Its filled in with 'corrected' results and values altered to comply with the (35 years out of date) national counting rules. Now these errors aren't deliberate, they are just there because of the lack of sophistication in our various school administrations systems, a data source with about a 5% shit data rate and a decades old process that no longer reflects the current state of student education.
A well funded, reasonably resourced govt department can not provide an accurate count of bums in seats. They certainly are not releasing the source data either. Why? Because the "in-accurate" results are accurate enough for its purpose. Releasing source data would prompt questions about these minor inaccuracies that would waste tens/hundreds of thousands on education dollars of clarifying the numbers that could of been spent on, oh i don't know, educating our kids maybe?
If I want to become an expert on SQL, I go read the specs.
WTF? Your the bastard who Ive been cleaning up after all my friken life. "SQL for dummies" a database wizard does not make.
And how bout that aviation industry - they wont let me drive one of there jet planes without years of training. They should just give me the manual and the keys man, (it's all done by computers now anyway, its a government CONSPIRACY to keep us driving our cars so they can collect car taxes!.)
If I want to become an expert on climatology, I go ask people to tell me how to guess which numbers will be useful to feed into the statistical analysis specs
Ok, here's one. There's a competition with a million zillion dollar prize for the person that can produce the most accurate avg temperature for a specific week/place. You set up your monitoring station to record the temp a 1 second intervals and at the end of week retrieve your black box. You notice that every 10 minutes, you get a 30 temperature readings in a row of 999 degrees. As you were living nearby in a tent for the week and were not incinerated every ten minutes, you reckon there might be a fault with the equipment.
Me? Id throw away the 999 measurements and use the other ones. I'm guessing your quitting the race because your results aren't 100% accurate and can not be 100% verified. Thanks for the million zillion bucks.
Dude, just knock up your own little application.
If its just for you and one or two others, Access (boo hiss) is your friend here. Ive found a PROJECT(or system)->TASK->HOURS table structure works out well and because its Access you can pretty much bolt on the extra bits as required.
tip: Don't forget to include a field in the TASKS table for the not just the client, but the client area. That way, at the end of the year or at review time you can show exactly where all your man power costs are going.
Yes Access is the bane of my existence from an existing system support role, but it *does* excel at these sort of small quick and dirty systems. It also works well as long as you design it properly - plus, you can move the back end to a real DB after a couple of years
Huh wot? I play Savage2 pretty much exclusively these days - and its a full on 3d shoot and slash and build em up with a propa musical score and everything.
Linux can play nice looking video games just fine thank you very much.