I was going to post a snide remark, but others have made my point eloquently and directly in my absence.
Still, I really can't shed any tears or lose sleep over this so-called "digital divide". Park my butt on a desert island or Zipolite with a cool buzz, some tasty waves and I'm fine. Keep ur damned binary noise generators away from me and I could live a very happy life indeed.
It takes a huge investment in infrastructure to construct this kind of network. Those survivors who are still around these days are the only companies with the viability to continue to expand. I don't fault them for being big, that is silly to criticize them for that. Size matters in this game. Note 1
The bigger point, which has been missed here, is that 'research shows' that people really don't care much about all these whizzy services that we keep hearing that we want. Mobile video and other streaming stuff is not the killer app. People want to get text messages and have the person they called answer the damned phone. Oh, they also want the call to stay up instead of getting dropped during rush hour. Beyond that, it has not been shown that there is a significant demand for much more than what we have now. That, and technology's financial crash has cooled the jets of the 3G mavens. I know for a fact that Verizon is installing 3G equipment, but don't know the details.
Note 1 - I think it is even sillier that there are people on/. who think that if everybody goes out and buys 802.11 junk that the world will be one big happy access point. Such an endeavor requires the kind of commitment that only a large entity can command. I'm not going to put up an access point so that you can use 'my minutes'. Sorry.
Note 2 - Well, I thought that I formatted this message properly, at least it looks OK elsewhere. Naturally, selecting 'HTML Formatted' in the/. preview mode doesn't really show you what the final post will look like. Russian roulette, anyone?
man, if they put simplt text (apples text/scripting/voice filter program) on one of those things, no one will gt there work done!!!
With all due respect to the_2nd_coming, the quoted text is a perfect example of why text-to-speech systems will not be very useful for general purpose communications. Unless there is a fool-proof built-in spell checker that includes the latest/usr/dict on the chip.
Call me madcap, but I always thought that a heatsink *is* a radiator.
As to fan noise, some here seem to be speaking of acoustic noise while others offer solutions to electronic noise.
My hard drives make way more noise than the cooling fan, so those of you who object to the cooling fan noise should mount the computer in another room or inside a hush cover.
The other possibility is the frequent tendency of people to send unsubscribe requests from addresses which are not subscribed to the group. The confirmation e-mail sent by eGroups goes to the subscribed address which might be dead or unread by the subscriber, so the he thinks "Those bastards at Yahoo are locking me in!"
This has to be at the top of the 'common mistake' list. Of course, we all know the #1 mistake of sending 'unsubscribe' to the list address and not the listserv address. ARRRRGHHH!
If the concerned party is an eGroup moderator, go to the group's web page and click on 'Activity' in the panel to the left. It will show you subscription activity, including e-mail requests to unsubscribe. That should verify one way or another what happened. I have seen rare screwups with that mechanism, but I think the address in question in that case had "issues".
To their credit, Yahoo does allow you to specify other addresses for posting and perhaps administering the account via e-mail. I'm sure this is yet another sinister plot to collect addresses, though.:(
...perhaps not true at all. I own several eGroups and just used one to test the subscribe/unsubscribe process entirely by e-mail. I chose a fairly new address that is 'clean'. It worked flawlessly, in fact it was lightning fast!
Admittedly this address was unknown to Yahoo before today, so I cannot comment about long-time eGroups subscribers, but I must say that many of the gloom-and-doom predictions from a year ago about Yahoo's takeover of eGroups turned out to be so much hot air.
Of the three addresses that Yahoo knows about in conjunction with eGroups, none seemed to get junk mail as a result. The one which is posted on several web pages suffers an almost continual onslaught of "horny teenage girls" and "secret stock tips" junk mail, so I just consider that one my throw-away address.
Then, why is the 'epoch' taken to be January 1, 1969? This puzzled me more than anything when I read the headline to this story that November 3, 2001 was the 30th b-day of unix. I'll leave the math as an exercise to the reader, but I came up with November 3, 1971 as this birthdate, which does not line up with 1969 at all.
Perhaps I have developed bad habits, but I have developed the habit of scrolling the pointer the hell out of my way so that a stray mouse click doesn't perform some unintended function. This causes needless changes to the presentation on the u.i. for no good reason under the scheme you advocate. Keyboard shortcuts provide a handy way to change focus as well.
If I want to change focus, I will take the explicit action to do so, but simply moving the pointer around is akin to 'operator overloading'--I move the pointer for other reasons, too, not only to change which window gets the cheese.
I agree that there is not enough real estate on the most widely used monitor sizes to do things a better way. I suppose the original poster who wanted a quick way to hide something has a point as well: don't let your boss see you viewing pr0n at work!
---
Re:it isn't just about hotmail and passport wallet
on
Passport's Pocket Picked
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I would also like to note that Microsoft has been quite forthcoming with details and admitting the problems and fixing them. They are very good at being reactive. We will have to see how well this works going forward.
As good as MS has been at reacting to problems, I think the fear here is that MS has not shown much interest in being PROactive in preventing such problems, particularly problems with such potential for ruining people's credit histories or bank accounts. If that is a legitimate fear, then it's a whopper!
As you imply, this is the tip of the iceberg, if Passport is intended to be the be-all, end-all for.Net access to those services offered by MS and its agents.
---
Re:Passed away My furry little hiney
on
MS DOS: A Eulogy
·
· Score: 1
Agreed.
There are those who *can not* stop using DOS, such as radio shops that must reprogram Motorola radios built in an earlier time. The contractor that wrote the Radio Service Software for the Big-M tied the timing of the program to the clock used in the radio and the prevailing computer technology of the time.
It's bad enough trying to find a cpu that will run the r.s.s. successfully, but you can almost always forget about running it inside a DOS emulation window. You must boot to real-mode DOS, so keep those DOS floppies around, boyz and grrrlz!
Maybe I should start selling DOS 6.2 boot floppies at hamfests? Hmmmmmm....
This is a prime example of why stopping bad legislation in committee is much easier and more effective than waiting for enactment, then fighting it in the courts.
If you send snail mail in the form of a letter inside an envelope, tape the envelope shut so that this suddenly ever-present white powder cannot be injected in transit. Ensure that you include a valid return address and spell everything correctly (a Herculean task for Internet users these days!).
HAZMAT teams have been running numerous calls each day in many areas of the U.S. to respond to reports of letters in the mail with a white powder seeping from them.
Does anybody else agree with me that this tendency to create cutsie little names like "My Computer", "My Services", "My Billy Gates" is a bit demeaning to the user?
It sounds like my first day of kindergarten class, as Mrs. McGee was handing out little name tags that said "My name is..."
It's hard to believe that "professional" developers lap up this stuff so readily. Oh well, back to the usual ranting...
This is a very sensible view, IMO, but the compensation part is tricky. Especially because once peace is restored, tempers & public sentiment are still running hot and the public (read: voters and hence representatives) may not be in a compassionate mood.
That's why God made voting booths, hold the chads, please. I only hope that the generation that had to see these restrictions enacted is still around after the 'war' so that they make take the voters' ultimate revenge.
This fear of MS world domination is not as big a concern among my very knowledgable non-Slashdot friends who have been beta testing XP right along now. You still have some control over the browser, plus if you are that concerned then just put bogus identification into the concerned fields.
Reading the comments here indicate, as expected, that each user has different needs and each browser meets those needs differently. The important point is that if AOL does include Mozilla inside an upcoming release of its bloatware and assuming people know that it's Mozilla and not just that AOL browser window-thingy, it might give (l)users the idea that I.E. is *not* the only game in town. Hell, they might even recommend Mozilla to a friend, and so on, and so on...
I hadn't paid much attention to it before 1.5 years ago so I thought that Navigator identifying itself as Mozilla was simply a quaint holdover from the Good Ol' Days. It never occurred to me that it was still under development as its own project. Seriously. Now that I know better, I can do something about it. This AOL initiative might give others the same kick in the butt.
By the way, I know I'll sound extremely lame by asking this, but I throw myself at the mercy of/.
What is the origin of this phrase "All your base are belong to us!" I've just got to know. Obviously, I don't play games on my computer, the likely source of this. Thank you. Good night!
Can you say "Citizen's Band"? Sure, I knew you could!
If and when such equipment becomes readily available at reasonable prices, do you really think anybody will give half a damn about considerations such as regulations, emission masks, adjacent-channel users, coverage patterns, or anything besides "WOW! Look at all the pr0n I can get poolside in my back yard!!" ? I don't.
Why must you propogate this mistake that standards are ever-changing?
Standards are called that precisely because they are fixed reference points on which all can agree, and without which chaos results in the particular field of endeavor in question.
What is being discussed here can be described as nothing more than a specification, because it will undoubtedly be revised over time.
When I had MediaOne's flavor of RoadRunner service, they changed out the ever-failing General Instruments box with a Toshiba DOCSIS box and I never had a lick of trouble out of it.
I did not note any upgrade to the cable plant serving me. Made a great impression on me, and I now wish that I had that cable modem instead of this CRAP Telocity sometimes-on connection.
Just like so many bad laws are passed "for the children, we're trying to protect children!", why not frame the argument *against* Ashcroft's wish list as being for our children, that they may live to enjoy the same liberties that ol' gramps and grandma used to, instead of clamping down on them further.
Wasn't the Internet originally designed as a survivable network? I remember some guy named Rick Adams at the Defense Advanced Research Products Agency seeing the advantage of such a net some time ago.
Does no one have any historical view on this at all? The government creates a survivable network precisely to prevent its destruction by making it redundant to a large degree. Can't other threats be anticipated and handled? Or is the U.S. so devoid of thoughtful people that no effort can be expended on trying?
Slashdot Mirror
I was going to post a snide remark, but others have made my point eloquently and directly in my absence.
Still, I really can't shed any tears or lose sleep over this so-called "digital divide". Park my butt on a desert island or Zipolite with a cool buzz, some tasty waves and I'm fine. Keep ur damned binary noise generators away from me and I could live a very happy life indeed.
Now I must return to work...where's my cursor?
---
Thanks for 'enlightening' them. Another place we will not be able to escape the madness!
---
It takes a huge investment in infrastructure to construct this kind of network. Those survivors who are still around these days are the only companies with the viability to continue to expand. I don't fault them for being big, that is silly to criticize them for that. Size matters in this game. Note 1
The bigger point, which has been missed here, is that 'research shows' that people really don't care much about all these whizzy services that we keep hearing that we want. Mobile video and other streaming stuff is not the killer app. People want to get text messages and have the person they called answer the damned phone. Oh, they also want the call to stay up instead of getting dropped during rush hour. Beyond that, it has not been shown that there is a significant demand for much more than what we have now. That, and technology's financial crash has cooled the jets of the 3G mavens. I know for a fact that Verizon is installing 3G equipment, but don't know the details.
Note 1 - I think it is even sillier that there are people on /. who think that if everybody goes out and buys 802.11 junk that the world will be one big happy access point. Such an endeavor requires the kind of commitment that only a large entity can command. I'm not going to put up an access point so that you can use 'my minutes'. Sorry.
Note 2 - Well, I thought that I formatted this message properly, at least it looks OK elsewhere. Naturally, selecting 'HTML Formatted' in the /. preview mode doesn't really show you what the final post will look like. Russian roulette, anyone?
---Dude, you get paid to surf at work?
We just got some great waves from Hurricane Michele, but guys were sneaking out of work to surf. I can't believe you get paid to do it!
---
With all due respect to the_2nd_coming, the quoted text is a perfect example of why text-to-speech systems will not be very useful for general purpose communications. Unless there is a fool-proof built-in spell checker that includes the latest
---
Call me madcap, but I always thought that a heatsink *is* a radiator.
As to fan noise, some here seem to be speaking of acoustic noise while others offer solutions to electronic noise.
My hard drives make way more noise than the cooling fan, so those of you who object to the cooling fan noise should mount the computer in another room or inside a hush cover.
---
Hmmm. So you're saying that there might be a market for my T.N.G. tapes recorded directly off the satellite after all?
---
The other possibility is the frequent tendency of people to send unsubscribe requests from addresses which are not subscribed to the group. The confirmation e-mail sent by eGroups goes to the subscribed address which might be dead or unread by the subscriber, so the he thinks "Those bastards at Yahoo are locking me in!"
:(
This has to be at the top of the 'common mistake' list. Of course, we all know the #1 mistake of sending 'unsubscribe' to the list address and not the listserv address. ARRRRGHHH!
If the concerned party is an eGroup moderator, go to the group's web page and click on 'Activity' in the panel to the left. It will show you subscription activity, including e-mail requests to unsubscribe. That should verify one way or another what happened. I have seen rare screwups with that mechanism, but I think the address in question in that case had "issues".
To their credit, Yahoo does allow you to specify other addresses for posting and perhaps administering the account via e-mail. I'm sure this is yet another sinister plot to collect addresses, though.
---
...perhaps not true at all. I own several eGroups and just used one to test the subscribe/unsubscribe process entirely by e-mail. I chose a fairly new address that is 'clean'. It worked flawlessly, in fact it was lightning fast!
Admittedly this address was unknown to Yahoo before today, so I cannot comment about long-time eGroups subscribers, but I must say that many of the gloom-and-doom predictions from a year ago about Yahoo's takeover of eGroups turned out to be so much hot air.
Of the three addresses that Yahoo knows about in conjunction with eGroups, none seemed to get junk mail as a result. The one which is posted on several web pages suffers an almost continual onslaught of "horny teenage girls" and "secret stock tips" junk mail, so I just consider that one my throw-away address.
Tempest in a teapot? You be the judge.
---
Then, why is the 'epoch' taken to be January 1, 1969? This puzzled me more than anything when I read the headline to this story that November 3, 2001 was the 30th b-day of unix. I'll leave the math as an exercise to the reader, but I came up with November 3, 1971 as this birthdate, which does not line up with 1969 at all.
What gives?
---
WARNING: you are subject to pre-emption!
Or were you?
---
I absolutely abhor this behavior.
Perhaps I have developed bad habits, but I have developed the habit of scrolling the pointer the hell out of my way so that a stray mouse click doesn't perform some unintended function. This causes needless changes to the presentation on the u.i. for no good reason under the scheme you advocate. Keyboard shortcuts provide a handy way to change focus as well.
If I want to change focus, I will take the explicit action to do so, but simply moving the pointer around is akin to 'operator overloading'--I move the pointer for other reasons, too, not only to change which window gets the cheese.
I agree that there is not enough real estate on the most widely used monitor sizes to do things a better way. I suppose the original poster who wanted a quick way to hide something has a point as well: don't let your boss see you viewing pr0n at work!
---
As good as MS has been at reacting to problems, I think the fear here is that MS has not shown much interest in being PROactive in preventing such problems, particularly problems with such potential for ruining people's credit histories or bank accounts. If that is a legitimate fear, then it's a whopper!
As you imply, this is the tip of the iceberg, if Passport is intended to be the be-all, end-all for
---
Agreed.
There are those who *can not* stop using DOS, such as radio shops that must reprogram Motorola radios built in an earlier time. The contractor that wrote the Radio Service Software for the Big-M tied the timing of the program to the clock used in the radio and the prevailing computer technology of the time.
It's bad enough trying to find a cpu that will run the r.s.s. successfully, but you can almost always forget about running it inside a DOS emulation window. You must boot to real-mode DOS, so keep those DOS floppies around, boyz and grrrlz!
Maybe I should start selling DOS 6.2 boot floppies at hamfests? Hmmmmmm....
---
Where does this leave all the "free, as in beer" types around here?
Funny how the shoe feels when it's on the other foot, eh?
---
This is a prime example of why stopping bad legislation in committee is much easier and more effective than waiting for enactment, then fighting it in the courts.
Speak out now or forever hold your peace.
---
If you send snail mail in the form of a letter inside an envelope, tape the envelope shut so that this suddenly ever-present white powder cannot be injected in transit. Ensure that you include a valid return address and spell everything correctly (a Herculean task for Internet users these days!).
HAZMAT teams have been running numerous calls each day in many areas of the U.S. to respond to reports of letters in the mail with a white powder seeping from them.
---
Does anybody else agree with me that this tendency to create cutsie little names like "My Computer", "My Services", "My Billy Gates" is a bit demeaning to the user?
It sounds like my first day of kindergarten class, as Mrs. McGee was handing out little name tags that said "My name is..."
It's hard to believe that "professional" developers lap up this stuff so readily. Oh well, back to the usual ranting...
---
That's why God made voting booths, hold the chads, please. I only hope that the generation that had to see these restrictions enacted is still around after the 'war' so that they make take the voters' ultimate revenge.
---
This fear of MS world domination is not as big a concern among my very knowledgable non-Slashdot friends who have been beta testing XP right along now. You still have some control over the browser, plus if you are that concerned then just put bogus identification into the concerned fields.
/.
Reading the comments here indicate, as expected, that each user has different needs and each browser meets those needs differently. The important point is that if AOL does include Mozilla inside an upcoming release of its bloatware and assuming people know that it's Mozilla and not just that AOL browser window-thingy, it might give (l)users the idea that I.E. is *not* the only game in town. Hell, they might even recommend Mozilla to a friend, and so on, and so on...
I hadn't paid much attention to it before 1.5 years ago so I thought that Navigator identifying itself as Mozilla was simply a quaint holdover from the Good Ol' Days. It never occurred to me that it was still under development as its own project. Seriously. Now that I know better, I can do something about it. This AOL initiative might give others the same kick in the butt.
By the way, I know I'll sound extremely lame by asking this, but I throw myself at the mercy of
What is the origin of this phrase "All your base are belong to us!" I've just got to know. Obviously, I don't play games on my computer, the likely source of this. Thank you. Good night!
---
Can you say "Citizen's Band"? Sure, I knew you could!
If and when such equipment becomes readily available at reasonable prices, do you really think anybody will give half a damn about considerations such as regulations, emission masks, adjacent-channel users, coverage patterns, or anything besides "WOW! Look at all the pr0n I can get poolside in my back yard!!" ? I don't.
Why must you propogate this mistake that standards are ever-changing?
Standards are called that precisely because they are fixed reference points on which all can agree, and without which chaos results in the particular field of endeavor in question.
What is being discussed here can be described as nothing more than a specification, because it will undoubtedly be revised over time.
I'm surprised to hear this.
When I had MediaOne's flavor of RoadRunner service, they changed out the ever-failing General Instruments box with a Toshiba DOCSIS box and I never had a lick of trouble out of it.
I did not note any upgrade to the cable plant serving me. Made a great impression on me, and I now wish that I had that cable modem instead of this CRAP Telocity sometimes-on connection.
Excellent idea!
Just like so many bad laws are passed "for the children, we're trying to protect children!", why not frame the argument *against* Ashcroft's wish list as being for our children, that they may live to enjoy the same liberties that ol' gramps and grandma used to, instead of clamping down on them further.
Wasn't the Internet originally designed as a survivable network? I remember some guy named Rick Adams at the Defense Advanced Research Products Agency seeing the advantage of such a net some time ago.
Does no one have any historical view on this at all? The government creates a survivable network precisely to prevent its destruction by making it redundant to a large degree. Can't other threats be anticipated and handled? Or is the U.S. so devoid of thoughtful people that no effort can be expended on trying?