After all, you've learned all the nasty little icons on your desktop and productivity applications.
Speak for yourself, dude. I got this key on my keyboard (actually 2 of them right next to the "alt" keys) that have an icon I think is supposed to be a landscaping truck turned into a "just married" limo dragging a bunch of cans driven by some drunk swerving a bit. Never have been able to figure out what they are for. Press either one, nothing happens.;)
So, tell me this isn't a real-world application of the technique to send data over power lines, is it? They're using their control cables or stuff instead?
Yeah, the article sure was unclear on that. I think it is safe to assume this is NOT running over power lines, but something like fiber. It just takes advantage of the conduit/right of way they own.
man... and i was just going to post a joke about getting my toilet connected to the internet, too.
Hehe. Back when I was working at U.S.Robotics we had an April Fools press release describing our new "sewer modem" that used sewers as a transmission medium. It even went down to detail as to how we detected and overcame "noise" such as a toilet flushing. It was too funny, too bad I don't still have a copy to share.
Sprint was used for internal communications until 1968, when the FCC (Carter Phone Decision) allowed alternative to the Bell system. After that they parlayed it into a business.
Actually, the CarterPhone decision related to connecting 3rd party (not leased from the telco) telephones and equipment to your phone line. It was instrumental in allowing things like modems. More info on CarterPhone (and a real cool telco history page) here.
It did not relate to Long Distance at all, that was more related to Judge Green's decision to break up AT&T. Sprint did not enter the LD market until the 80s, with details here. You are correct about the internal communications part though (I know IBM used them for inter-office comms in the 70s).
Is that code for wasting an exhorbinant amount of taqxpayers dollars?
I think Americans will love this. Now we definitely don't have to learn any language other than American, uh, I mean English. Not that most of us were going to anyway;)
Now we know why so many companies go out of business.
Events like this cost nearly nothing and the benefits far outweigh the minimal costs. Most folks in the tech industry work long hours and are rarely paid O/T. I don't mean this as some kind of whining, just your post indicates you have no clue as to how to make employees happy. If we were talking about some expensive jaunt to Aspen I might agree, but a trip to the movie theater? If they could measure the ROI on this one I bet it is massive.
Off-topic: I heard that AMC Empire 25 in NYC's Times Square has a digital projector. Anyone know if it's running Episode II in digital?
This page at starwars.com lists the theaters that are playing it in digital. The Wired article mentioned in the/. thread a few weeks ago was just plain wrong in many ways, so use this link instead.
Be warned, many theaters that are listed only have one digital theater but are playing AOTC on several screens, so you need to find out which times are for the digital screen.
Lastly, as you might expect, the digital ones sell out quickly. I went Friday for a noon matinee an hour and a half early only to find out all digital shows were sold out for 2 days! Bottom line you need to plan ahead or wait for the rush to subside.
I agree with you. My response was directed to fmaxwell's exhortations that everyone should buy StarOffice rather than using OpenOffice.
Cool, then we are on the same page. But, in the spirit of fmaxwell's perhaps overzealous, but not completely out of line, rant, perhaps we all ought to buy at least one copy of the software as well as convince our bosses to buy lots. Maybe even buy our parents a copy so they have someone else to call for support;) We have a lot to gain, and much to lose. Even the MS Office folks have something to gain as prices could go down, and interoperability go up, if StarOffice is even mildly successful. We definitely want them in there for the long haul.
Re:Here we go again...
on
StarOffice 6.0
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
. It's about having the ability to put it into a standard system image that's installed over the network to every machine in the department without any licensing hassles.
You bring up a very valid point. Is it easy to build into an image that can be deployed cookie-cutter style without an administrative headache?
My guess is they (Sun) are not going to be jerks about it, and probably not enforcing it with s/n's being entered, etc. Maintaining all the license paperwork for the BSA audits are also painful and expensive. That is what makes MS Office and Windows and many other apps so difficult, it is a royal pain to manage and deploy it all in an enterprise setting. If they take a laissez-fair attitude, take corp folks reasonable efforts to maintain legality as "good enough" and only go after companies that blatantly disregard the licensing, they will have achieved their goals and made a lot of friends. There are not likely to be too many companies in the blatant disregard category as they could just use OpenOffice if they want to be cheap.
Bottom line, it appears Sun is not in this office game to make a killing, but primarily to stick their fork in Microsoft's side and break their lock on the market a bit and trying to break even while doing it. I just can't see them making a fuss over licensing like MS does. As far as sharing with your friends, share OpenOffice, do you really need the extras? Corps do, you and your friends probably don't. I think this is going to work just fine.
Does anyone know what kind of licensing enforcement mechanisms are being put in SO? Are they "mass deployment friendly"?
Get together with the other companies that they have sued
Even better, get some of the big guys interested in this. There are a whole boatload of giant companies involved in e-commerce in some way that would probably take this case on to protect their own interests. The last thing these parasites would want would be Amazon or Sears legal teams crawling down their throats. The last thing Sears or Amazon would want to see is some kind of legal precedent bolstering these patents.
National business groups like the Chamber of Commerce, and there are probably similar groups specific to e-commerce, might find it in their interests to fund a challenge to this.
I've been thinking about putting up "Keep Right Except to Pass" signs
I share your pet-peeve. But, one of the worst places for this offense is Washington state. Even worse, is if you do find a way around the left-lane turtles they will speed up to prevent you from passing. There are signs and they are ignored. I don't mean little signs, but BIG, GIANT signs that make it VERY clear you must stay right except to pass. I guess some folks up there just can't read. It is very clear the state is aware of the issue, but a sizable group of people just ignore them and crawl along in the left lane. It seems almost intentional.
- Install Linux on all the workstations, make them work a little harder to install their P2Ps and they might learn something along the way. The ones that can't figure it out will not bother and just focus on their work.
- That will save the school lots of money and make the kids and teachers smarter.
- Use the money saved to buy more bandwidth.;)
Am I kidding, well, yeah, a little. But, quite seriously, kids (and us big kids) are curious and at times a bit mischievous. I know when I was a kid (a long, long time ago) a roadblock like this would just get me going and I would figure out how to make it happen, a learn a lot along the way. They aren't learning shit by downloading some Windoze setup.exe and loading up Kazaa or whatever. They are learning quite a bit by figuring out how to do it in Linux.
Heh, I'm still getting 28.8 connections out of my USR 56K modem. It's only because there are two A/D conversions between me and the phone C.O.
Yup, a hair under 10% is a very large number of people. Sorry to hear you are a part of that large minority. Unless you know for a fact you have an additional A/D in the path, be sure to check you have the latest code. There were some significant improvements made to the code, post V.90, that got a whole lot more people working with V.90. A good sign that you have the latest code is if you get 3 "bongs" at the end of the training sequence. Note: not all models had new code built for them. Also note: the third "bong" only kicks in during certain conditions (the modem "thinks" there is a chance it might work). These fixes were to deal with situations like a long local loop (often rural lines) that caused the signal to appear to have encountered an additional A/D when in fact it did not. YMMV.
Re:Shannon's law is still safe from Townsend...
on
The Magic Box Hoax
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The "classic" limitation on analogue dialup modems was the quantization error introduced by the analogue to digital conversion on both ends.
Technically, you are quite correct, I will not argue with you on that fact from a technical perspective. From a perception perspective, he did indeed. Most folks thought, based on Shannon's statements, that we were done and could not squeeze any more data through using a voice channel. So, in many ways, he really did.
However -- 56k depends on one end of the connection being DIGITAL . You're eliminating quant error on one side of the connection, thus you can get better downstream speeds. Upstream speeds, if you notice, are still limited to 33.6k due to quant error on the end user's modem
Hmmm, tell that to the folks using V.92 modems with upstream PCM that claim up to 45K upstream. I have not been involved with them, so can't give you any figures, but I do know that it works for some percentage of the population. From what I understand, quantization is the issue that is keeping it down to 45K, but acquiring timing was the main issue preventing PCM modulation from working in the upstream (A to D) direction. That has now been broken as they figured how to do timing. Yes, this still requires digital on one end, plus I suspect not too many ISPs have installed gear to service it.
Is this technically breaking Shannon's Law? I am not sure enough to make the bold statement that it is.
This was the pre-DSL era. Everybody and their brother was supposed to be searching for this very thing
Ain't that the truth! At the time that scam artist was operating I was an engineer at US Robotics. We had damn near a revolving door of these kinds of kooks coming in and out. Most never got in, but every now and then one would. As a fairly visible, and known very cynical, engineer, I often was invited to meetings with these types to try to flesh out if they were full of it, or had something interesting. I had 2 favorites, one a scam, the other became 56K.
The one that was a scam was hysterical. Like the situation in this article, I am pretty sure the guys I met actually believed in it as I think they were too stupid (or too blinded by instant wealth) to know any better. Their "magic software" (yes, they called it just that) would magically give 2 to 5 times better throughput. Over the phone they would not give any details except that it was NOT compression. They would not give me a copy to eval, but offered to fly out to Chicago to give me a demo. So, what the heck, I invited them out to meet with me and the Product Management exec. It ended up being a waste of two hours, but worth it for a good laughable story.
So, they come out and load their magic on one of our test PCs and demonstrate what was effectively 115 Kbps throughput. Now, remember, at the time the serial port driver that shipped with Windows was limited to 19.2 Kbps. So, when they compared it to a "normal" Windows PC, it was indeed way faster. BUT, we (as well as every other modem mfg) shipped a free driver along with our modem that fixed that problem. MS also fixed the problem in Win98. When I showed them the same type of t-put on another PC in our lab, with the updated driver, their faces dropped, they shook in disbelief that some other genious had discovered this before them. I escorted them out of the building. As a parting gift I gave them a copy of the driver we used, and told them my shortcut back to the airport and recommended a bar on the way.
My other story is when we met a guy that had been thrown out of Rockwell and Lucent. They had basically told him his invention would never work outside the lab, and the real world phone network would kill it with all it's quirks. He was a Stanford math professor named Dr. Brent Townsend. Though not entirely incorrect, the goofy phone network did pose some serious challenges (particularly in US, Canada and Korea), and it took a couple years to really refine it. His invention was what became 56K (err, 54K, grin) modems. It significantly surpassed what "Shannon's Law" says was the max a voice channel could carry. From what I can tell (a very informed guess), a hair over 90% of the modem using populace (at least in industrialized nations) get at least a significant benefit (stable 42K+ speeds, most around 48K) out of this technology. A technology that almost never happened.
I mention Dr. Townsend to remind folks that not all the kooks are really kooks. The former (and many other examples) show it pays to be skeptical (and MOST of the kooks really are kooks).
If I didn't take 15 minutes out of each work day to chill out and read something interesting technology stories, I probably would have flipped out and strangled my bosses a long time ago!
So, assuming your average "boss" costs US$80K/year, and you did not strangle him/her (not saving us that money)..... OH SHIT, overflowed the windows calulator.
I know what you are saying, and I agree, but some marketing idiot said the PC needed a modem and look into a cataloug and found the cheapist thing they could get.
And if they were any good they would realize they could save $7 off the BOM cost and not include any modem at all. Sell a separate modem if it is needed (many don't need a modem anymore). Modems are a support headache anyway.
But they should not be seeking a legal resolution to this conflict. They are dealing with a technical issue, not a legal one. If they don't want people to use their content without having come from their site, then they should design their site in that way.
100% agreed, If they had any brains, they would also just put their ads on the non-home page, as well as nice links to the rest of their site. I know when I get linked to an article or something it is not uncommon for me to use the links and check out the rest of their site. Most sites even go as far as providing links to similar stories on their site, etc.
Basically, they're still too low-res (not even full 1080P res)
Perhaps a stupid question. Is the original "filmed" (or shot, or whatever you call it) at that res? If so, then the celluloid version would just be a copy of a digital rendering at that res.
I am guessing it is shot at a higher res, and this is just a limitation of the projector, but had to ask.
Reserved seating, big leather seats, individual tables at each seat, and best of all, a FULL BAR
Hmmm, looks pretty nice. There is one of those in my area, but it is a good 30 miles away. Here in downtown Chicago there is something kinda similar. It is called "Brew and View". It is a concert venue that is a theatre when there are no concerts. Nowhere near as posh, but a bar and you can smoke!!! Cigarettes that is, but I have smelled other things;)
It is pretty cool, they generally play some decent movie first, then something very heckelable second (as most are pretty trashed by then). Probably a whole lot cheaper too. $5 to get in and they usually have $2 pitchers of some piss water beer that is generally quite tolerable after the first several (who cares after 6 or 7 anyway).
I always laugh when I think about the paperclip, because it reminds me of my first time meeting Mr.Paperclip.
I had just installed Office 97 (at least I think it was Office 97). I went into to Outlook, had not configured any mailboxes, so all that was there was that little welcome email. So, I was poking around at all the options, and was looking at the "properties" of the welcome message. Several levels in I found the "UID" for the message, a long hex string. Strangely, in the middle of that hex string, were the words, in caps, "LOVECANAL". Obviously a little joke from developers they expected few to come across. There, in the bottom right hand corner, was the little paperclip dude, looking up at the UID, then looking at me, winking, over and over.
I politely declined the overture. Sure glad it wasn't the little doggie, I would have been scarred for life.;)
IMO, the best way to cut support costs is to increase quality! So many companies release their products too early, filled with bugs. This makes problems more difficult to troubleshoot (adds to the list of possible problems), and obviously makes calls more plentiful.
If you have a high quality, you can hire fewer, but better, support people. They will be less frustrated, and it is easier to keep a small group well trained.
Of course not all hardware is supported, but that, again, is the result of Microsoft's monopoly.
Wrong. That is the result of lazy open source driver authors with selfish attitudes. If your hardware doesn't work in Linux, you're supposed to submit extremely detailed bug reports to mailing lists where they won't care about your problems or solve them in a timely fashion.
Actually, the parent poster is a bit closer to reality. MS does not, for the most part, produce drivers. The hardware manufacturers are responsible for that. In the Linux world, it is almost always some geek that does it for free. As you found, those geeks often are not too user-friendly.
Now, the reason h/w mfgs often do not write drivers for Linux (or Macintosh for that matter) is due to the fact that MS has 90+% of the market That is mostly (or at least partially) due to their anti-competitive practices.
Slashdot Mirror
After all, you've learned all the nasty little icons on your desktop and productivity applications.
;)
Speak for yourself, dude. I got this key on my keyboard (actually 2 of them right next to the "alt" keys) that have an icon I think is supposed to be a landscaping truck turned into a "just married" limo dragging a bunch of cans driven by some drunk swerving a bit. Never have been able to figure out what they are for. Press either one, nothing happens.
So, tell me this isn't a real-world application of the technique to send data over power lines, is it? They're using their control cables or stuff instead?
Yeah, the article sure was unclear on that. I think it is safe to assume this is NOT running over power lines, but something like fiber. It just takes advantage of the conduit/right of way they own.
man... and i was just going to post a joke about getting my toilet connected to the internet, too.
Hehe. Back when I was working at U.S.Robotics we had an April Fools press release describing our new "sewer modem" that used sewers as a transmission medium. It even went down to detail as to how we detected and overcame "noise" such as a toilet flushing. It was too funny, too bad I don't still have a copy to share.
Sprint was used for internal communications until 1968, when the FCC (Carter Phone Decision) allowed alternative to the Bell system. After that they parlayed it into a business.
Actually, the CarterPhone decision related to connecting 3rd party (not leased from the telco) telephones and equipment to your phone line. It was instrumental in allowing things like modems. More info on CarterPhone (and a real cool telco history page) here.
It did not relate to Long Distance at all, that was more related to Judge Green's decision to break up AT&T. Sprint did not enter the LD market until the 80s, with details here. You are correct about the internal communications part though (I know IBM used them for inter-office comms in the 70s).
Is that code for wasting an exhorbinant amount of taqxpayers dollars?
;)
I think Americans will love this. Now we definitely don't have to learn any language other than American, uh, I mean English. Not that most of us were going to anyway
Now we know why so many companies go out of business.
Events like this cost nearly nothing and the benefits far outweigh the minimal costs. Most folks in the tech industry work long hours and are rarely paid O/T. I don't mean this as some kind of whining, just your post indicates you have no clue as to how to make employees happy. If we were talking about some expensive jaunt to Aspen I might agree, but a trip to the movie theater? If they could measure the ROI on this one I bet it is massive.
Off-topic: I heard that AMC Empire 25 in NYC's Times Square has a digital projector. Anyone know if it's running Episode II in digital?
/. thread a few weeks ago was just plain wrong in many ways, so use this link instead.
This page at starwars.com lists the theaters that are playing it in digital. The Wired article mentioned in the
Be warned, many theaters that are listed only have one digital theater but are playing AOTC on several screens, so you need to find out which times are for the digital screen.
Lastly, as you might expect, the digital ones sell out quickly. I went Friday for a noon matinee an hour and a half early only to find out all digital shows were sold out for 2 days! Bottom line you need to plan ahead or wait for the rush to subside.
I agree with you. My response was directed to fmaxwell's exhortations that everyone should buy StarOffice rather than using OpenOffice.
;) We have a lot to gain, and much to lose. Even the MS Office folks have something to gain as prices could go down, and interoperability go up, if StarOffice is even mildly successful. We definitely want them in there for the long haul.
Cool, then we are on the same page. But, in the spirit of fmaxwell's perhaps overzealous, but not completely out of line, rant, perhaps we all ought to buy at least one copy of the software as well as convince our bosses to buy lots. Maybe even buy our parents a copy so they have someone else to call for support
. It's about having the ability to put it into a standard system image that's installed over the network to every machine in the department without any licensing hassles.
You bring up a very valid point. Is it easy to build into an image that can be deployed cookie-cutter style without an administrative headache?
My guess is they (Sun) are not going to be jerks about it, and probably not enforcing it with s/n's being entered, etc. Maintaining all the license paperwork for the BSA audits are also painful and expensive. That is what makes MS Office and Windows and many other apps so difficult, it is a royal pain to manage and deploy it all in an enterprise setting. If they take a laissez-fair attitude, take corp folks reasonable efforts to maintain legality as "good enough" and only go after companies that blatantly disregard the licensing, they will have achieved their goals and made a lot of friends. There are not likely to be too many companies in the blatant disregard category as they could just use OpenOffice if they want to be cheap.
Bottom line, it appears Sun is not in this office game to make a killing, but primarily to stick their fork in Microsoft's side and break their lock on the market a bit and trying to break even while doing it. I just can't see them making a fuss over licensing like MS does. As far as sharing with your friends, share OpenOffice, do you really need the extras? Corps do, you and your friends probably don't. I think this is going to work just fine.
Does anyone know what kind of licensing enforcement mechanisms are being put in SO? Are they "mass deployment friendly"?
Get together with the other companies that they have sued
Even better, get some of the big guys interested in this. There are a whole boatload of giant companies involved in e-commerce in some way that would probably take this case on to protect their own interests. The last thing these parasites would want would be Amazon or Sears legal teams crawling down their throats. The last thing Sears or Amazon would want to see is some kind of legal precedent bolstering these patents.
National business groups like the Chamber of Commerce, and there are probably similar groups specific to e-commerce, might find it in their interests to fund a challenge to this.
I've been thinking about putting up "Keep Right Except to Pass" signs
I share your pet-peeve. But, one of the worst places for this offense is Washington state. Even worse, is if you do find a way around the left-lane turtles they will speed up to prevent you from passing. There are signs and they are ignored. I don't mean little signs, but BIG, GIANT signs that make it VERY clear you must stay right except to pass. I guess some folks up there just can't read. It is very clear the state is aware of the issue, but a sizable group of people just ignore them and crawl along in the left lane. It seems almost intentional.
OK, make them smarter then.
;)
- Install Linux on all the workstations, make them work a little harder to install their P2Ps and they might learn something along the way. The ones that can't figure it out will not bother and just focus on their work.
- That will save the school lots of money and make the kids and teachers smarter.
- Use the money saved to buy more bandwidth.
Am I kidding, well, yeah, a little. But, quite seriously, kids (and us big kids) are curious and at times a bit mischievous. I know when I was a kid (a long, long time ago) a roadblock like this would just get me going and I would figure out how to make it happen, a learn a lot along the way. They aren't learning shit by downloading some Windoze setup.exe and loading up Kazaa or whatever. They are learning quite a bit by figuring out how to do it in Linux.
Heh, I'm still getting 28.8 connections out of my USR 56K modem. It's only because there are two A/D conversions between me and the phone C.O.
Yup, a hair under 10% is a very large number of people. Sorry to hear you are a part of that large minority. Unless you know for a fact you have an additional A/D in the path, be sure to check you have the latest code. There were some significant improvements made to the code, post V.90, that got a whole lot more people working with V.90. A good sign that you have the latest code is if you get 3 "bongs" at the end of the training sequence. Note: not all models had new code built for them. Also note: the third "bong" only kicks in during certain conditions (the modem "thinks" there is a chance it might work). These fixes were to deal with situations like a long local loop (often rural lines) that caused the signal to appear to have encountered an additional A/D when in fact it did not. YMMV.
The "classic" limitation on analogue dialup modems was the quantization error introduced by the analogue to digital conversion on both ends.
Technically, you are quite correct, I will not argue with you on that fact from a technical perspective. From a perception perspective, he did indeed. Most folks thought, based on Shannon's statements, that we were done and could not squeeze any more data through using a voice channel. So, in many ways, he really did.
However -- 56k depends on one end of the connection being DIGITAL . You're eliminating quant error on one side of the connection, thus you can get better downstream speeds. Upstream speeds, if you notice, are still limited to 33.6k due to quant error on the end user's modem
Hmmm, tell that to the folks using V.92 modems with upstream PCM that claim up to 45K upstream. I have not been involved with them, so can't give you any figures, but I do know that it works for some percentage of the population. From what I understand, quantization is the issue that is keeping it down to 45K, but acquiring timing was the main issue preventing PCM modulation from working in the upstream (A to D) direction. That has now been broken as they figured how to do timing. Yes, this still requires digital on one end, plus I suspect not too many ISPs have installed gear to service it.
Is this technically breaking Shannon's Law? I am not sure enough to make the bold statement that it is.
Small correction. I noticed I mis-spelled the inventor's name. It is Dr. Brent Townshend, not Townsend.
This was the pre-DSL era. Everybody and their brother was supposed to be searching for this very thing
Ain't that the truth! At the time that scam artist was operating I was an engineer at US Robotics. We had damn near a revolving door of these kinds of kooks coming in and out. Most never got in, but every now and then one would. As a fairly visible, and known very cynical, engineer, I often was invited to meetings with these types to try to flesh out if they were full of it, or had something interesting. I had 2 favorites, one a scam, the other became 56K.
The one that was a scam was hysterical. Like the situation in this article, I am pretty sure the guys I met actually believed in it as I think they were too stupid (or too blinded by instant wealth) to know any better. Their "magic software" (yes, they called it just that) would magically give 2 to 5 times better throughput. Over the phone they would not give any details except that it was NOT compression. They would not give me a copy to eval, but offered to fly out to Chicago to give me a demo. So, what the heck, I invited them out to meet with me and the Product Management exec. It ended up being a waste of two hours, but worth it for a good laughable story.
So, they come out and load their magic on one of our test PCs and demonstrate what was effectively 115 Kbps throughput. Now, remember, at the time the serial port driver that shipped with Windows was limited to 19.2 Kbps. So, when they compared it to a "normal" Windows PC, it was indeed way faster. BUT, we (as well as every other modem mfg) shipped a free driver along with our modem that fixed that problem. MS also fixed the problem in Win98. When I showed them the same type of t-put on another PC in our lab, with the updated driver, their faces dropped, they shook in disbelief that some other genious had discovered this before them. I escorted them out of the building. As a parting gift I gave them a copy of the driver we used, and told them my shortcut back to the airport and recommended a bar on the way.
My other story is when we met a guy that had been thrown out of Rockwell and Lucent. They had basically told him his invention would never work outside the lab, and the real world phone network would kill it with all it's quirks. He was a Stanford math professor named Dr. Brent Townsend. Though not entirely incorrect, the goofy phone network did pose some serious challenges (particularly in US, Canada and Korea), and it took a couple years to really refine it. His invention was what became 56K (err, 54K, grin) modems. It significantly surpassed what "Shannon's Law" says was the max a voice channel could carry. From what I can tell (a very informed guess), a hair over 90% of the modem using populace (at least in industrialized nations) get at least a significant benefit (stable 42K+ speeds, most around 48K) out of this technology. A technology that almost never happened.
I mention Dr. Townsend to remind folks that not all the kooks are really kooks. The former (and many other examples) show it pays to be skeptical (and MOST of the kooks really are kooks).
If I didn't take 15 minutes out of each work day to chill out and read something interesting technology stories, I probably would have flipped out and strangled my bosses a long time ago!
..... OH SHIT, overflowed the windows calulator.
So, assuming your average "boss" costs US$80K/year, and you did not strangle him/her (not saving us that money)
I know what you are saying, and I agree, but some marketing idiot said the PC needed a modem and look into a cataloug and found the cheapist thing they could get.
And if they were any good they would realize they could save $7 off the BOM cost and not include any modem at all. Sell a separate modem if it is needed (many don't need a modem anymore). Modems are a support headache anyway.
But they should not be seeking a legal resolution to this conflict. They are dealing with a technical issue, not a legal one. If they don't want people to use their content without having come from their site, then they should design their site in that way.
100% agreed, If they had any brains, they would also just put their ads on the non-home page, as well as nice links to the rest of their site. I know when I get linked to an article or something it is not uncommon for me to use the links and check out the rest of their site. Most sites even go as far as providing links to similar stories on their site, etc.
What a bunch of buffoons.
Basically, they're still too low-res (not even full 1080P res)
Perhaps a stupid question. Is the original "filmed" (or shot, or whatever you call it) at that res? If so, then the celluloid version would just be a copy of a digital rendering at that res.
I am guessing it is shot at a higher res, and this is just a limitation of the projector, but had to ask.
Reserved seating, big leather seats, individual tables at each seat, and best of all, a FULL BAR
;)
Hmmm, looks pretty nice. There is one of those in my area, but it is a good 30 miles away. Here in downtown Chicago there is something kinda similar. It is called "Brew and View". It is a concert venue that is a theatre when there are no concerts. Nowhere near as posh, but a bar and you can smoke!!! Cigarettes that is, but I have smelled other things
It is pretty cool, they generally play some decent movie first, then something very heckelable second (as most are pretty trashed by then). Probably a whole lot cheaper too. $5 to get in and they usually have $2 pitchers of some piss water beer that is generally quite tolerable after the first several (who cares after 6 or 7 anyway).
"UID" for the message, a long hex string.
;)
Before anyone catches me on this, change that from "long hex string" to "long text string"
I always laugh when I think about the paperclip, because it reminds me of my first time meeting Mr.Paperclip.
;)
I had just installed Office 97 (at least I think it was Office 97). I went into to Outlook, had not configured any mailboxes, so all that was there was that little welcome email. So, I was poking around at all the options, and was looking at the "properties" of the welcome message. Several levels in I found the "UID" for the message, a long hex string. Strangely, in the middle of that hex string, were the words, in caps, "LOVECANAL". Obviously a little joke from developers they expected few to come across. There, in the bottom right hand corner, was the little paperclip dude, looking up at the UID, then looking at me, winking, over and over.
I politely declined the overture. Sure glad it wasn't the little doggie, I would have been scarred for life.
IMO, the best way to cut support costs is to increase quality! So many companies release their products too early, filled with bugs. This makes problems more difficult to troubleshoot (adds to the list of possible problems), and obviously makes calls more plentiful.
If you have a high quality, you can hire fewer, but better, support people. They will be less frustrated, and it is easier to keep a small group well trained.
Of course not all hardware is supported, but that, again, is the result of Microsoft's monopoly.
Wrong. That is the result of lazy open source driver authors with selfish attitudes. If your hardware doesn't work in Linux, you're supposed to submit extremely detailed bug reports to mailing lists where they won't care about your problems or solve them in a timely fashion.
Actually, the parent poster is a bit closer to reality. MS does not, for the most part, produce drivers. The hardware manufacturers are responsible for that. In the Linux world, it is almost always some geek that does it for free. As you found, those geeks often are not too user-friendly.
Now, the reason h/w mfgs often do not write drivers for Linux (or Macintosh for that matter) is due to the fact that MS has 90+% of the market That is mostly (or at least partially) due to their anti-competitive practices.
It is a vicious cycle.