Technical writers are proficient in writing technical documents, they're not necessarily computer power users or systems administrators. Many of them don't even work in the software industry.
Finding a technical writer who knows all about development, operating systems, hardware, etc. is still a very rare occurrence.
Actually, tracks from the iTunes store haven't had any DRM since April.
I've always made a point of buying MP3s or DRM-free AACs when CDs weren't available from the artist (or the compression wouldn't make a difference; being a fan of industrial and metal helps here, it would probably be worse for jazz and classical).
My response was "Screw you guys, I'm getting Satellite." Sure I traded one monopolistic juggernaut (Rogers) for another (Bell), but I go an HD PVR with fully supported USB ports.
No idea if this works with 3rd party PVR systems, but it does let me plug in any USB storage device and save recorded programs to it.
As of later today, I'll only have one Rogers "service" (my wife's cell phone), and that's only until the contract expires in October.
The cable/satellite/cellphone provides in Canada fill me with nerd rage. They're holding us back technologically for maximum profits.
I'm still wondering how they can offer faster-than-5Mbps connections, but none of the third-party DSL companies can. It's the same last mile that's shared, after all.
Last mile should be owned by the municipalities so anyone can take advantage of it. It's been built out by our tax dollars, and Bell and Rogers clearly aren't willing to spend any money upgrading things or even providing half decent service at a reasonable price.
Happy TekSavvy user here, unhappy Rogers cell owner (contract is up in a couple of weeks, but my "choices" for new service suck just as much).
I recently turned on pobox.com's spam filter (I've had my email addresses at pobox.com since the 90s) and was really impressed with the amount of spam it caught... I went from having ~300/day coming in to maybe 1-2. Still haven't seen a false positive either.
LaTeX is awesome if you want your document to look exactly like a LaTeX document. If you're trying to make a customized page layout (say, so your documents look like they come from your company instead of from LaTeX) it's more trouble than you can imagine.
"Every application" can use IE's engine, except Outlook. They implement their own half-assed HTML renderer (not even up to HTML 3.2/CSS 1.0 standards; http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/aa338201.aspx) to help ensure pain and suffering for folks who "need" to send out HTML newsletters. The doc I link to there redefines "full" CSS 1.0 support to mean "the subset of CSS 1.0 supported by Word". *facepalm*
Not that I'm bitter about wasting many hours on working around Outlook's brain damage.
This is for "security reasons" but nobody's ever figured out why or how CSS's "float" is a security issue. I just love mutating a carefully designed-for-usability-and-accessibility div based layout into a nested tables abomination.
Silverlight (and Flash, for that matter) don't even seem to have 64-bit plugins for Windows, what makes you think they'll show up any time soon for OS X and/or Linux? 64-bit XP has been around for how long and there's no plugin for 64-bit IE? Come on...
If HTML5 browsers come in 64-bit flavours and uptake on 64-bit Windows 7 is good (with Snow Leopard "all" Macs will be 64-bit; on Windows, you'll want 64-bit so you can actually use the 4GB so many machines have installed now), HTML5 might "win" by default... it'll be the only one that works on 64-bit browsers.
The only "64" associated with Silverlight 3 betas is H.264 support.
$0/month, unlimited Interac transactions, unlimited online banking, etc. I've been using President's Choice Financial for five years or so and they're great (except for loans and money orders, but how often do you do those?).
I used to work for NCR, so I know how expensive (relatively) it is to process cheques compared to Interac. I'm amazed that people still pay bank fees for web banking and Interac.
Bell got into bed with MSN (and Rogers got into bed with Yahoo!) so they wouldn't actually have to provide any of the services they offer (such as email) as part of their broadband service.
Recently (the last year or so?) Bell reabsorbed the Sympatico brand so they could call all of their stuff "Bell".
In addition to throttling certain types of traffic from other DSL ISPs, you'll note that 5Mbit/s is the fastest you can get from any of the 3rd parties like TekSavvy (which I use). Bell offers 7Mbit/s, 10Mbit/s and 16Mbit/s if you're willing to pay for it.
Why aren't these higher speeds available to people using 3rd party DSL? Aren't they using the same cables, etc. that my tax dollars helped pay for?
Bell having control over a service I buy from an independent company is one kind of bad, and not providing the same access to third party DSL companies is another. Back when Sympatico was a "separate" ISP, weren't Bell ordered to give other DSL companies the same access?
So very sick of the "choice" we've got in Canada for broadband (and cell phones, but that's another thread's rant).
Why would they? Seems to me like releasing it at all was a huge step for a business; they could've sat on it and kept it to their storage systems as a competitive advantage.
Releasing it under two different licenses just to appease FSF fanatics at least doubles the effort required to review the code and get it released. It probably gives their lawyers high blood pressure, too.
I just can't see how this is Sun's problem and not Linux's problem. Why isn't the kernel flexible enough to allow loading filesystems without being merged into the kernel (or is it? I honestly don't know)?
It's so very nice actually using ZFS (on my FreeBSD server) instead of waiting around for the Linux guys to reinvent the wheel with BTRFS.
Dynamically adding storage to your filesystems is a killer feature, although ZFS certainly likes to have a lot of memory handy. I've actually held off on adding a few things to the server (Squid proxy) because I don't want to add more things to memory.
How about changing the way Linux loads filesystems instead of complaining about the flavour of license? Seems to me like it would be faster and less bug-prone that implementing a new filesystem.
In the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft, a lawyer is a member of a nocturnal subterranean race. Some lawyers were once human, but a diet of human corpses, and perhaps the tutelage of proper lawyers, mutated them into horrific bestial humanoids. In the short story "Pickman's Model" (1927), they are unutterably terrible monsters; however, in his earlier novella The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1926), the lawyers are somewhat less disturbing, even comical at times, and both helpful and loyal to the protagonist. Richard Upton Pickman, a noteworthy Boston painter who disappeared mysteriously in "Pickman's Model", appears as a lawyer himself in Dream-Quest. Similar themes appear in "The Lurking Fear" (1922) and "The Rats in the Walls" (1924), both of which posit the existence of subterranean clans of degenerate, retrogressive cannibals or carrion-eating humans.
Please, Obsidian, don't waste time "tweaking" the engine, just make the game. Spend your time doing what you do best... writing.
IMHO, with Neverwinter 2, they spent a huge amount of time working on the engine, and then had to rush together a game so they had something to ship. The writing and game design suffered for it.
With Knights of the Old Republic 2, they spent more time writing (until Lucasarts forced it out way too early) and it showed... the start of that game is completely awesome.
I'm not even sure it's that big... the "all these RPMs in a ZIP" archive of the Mono 2.2 runtime for RedHad is around 40MB.
Actually, I just checked, the.NET 2.0 runtime for XP is a 22MB download.
IMHO (and I'm sure this will earn me some/. flames).NET and C# are a couple of the best things to come out of MS. And I'm quite happy about being able to use them on my Mac (via Mono) when the need arises (and it does, 'cause I do C#/.NET stuff in my day job).
Amazon only sells MP3s to Americans. As a Canadian, I'm extremely annoyed by this... on several occaisions I've been quite willing to throw money their way, but they just won't take it.
eMusic (with a somewhat annoying subscription system) and Magnatune (100% pure awesome) also sell DRM-free music through a normal web interface.
iTunes Plus (which will be all of iTunes "soon") tracks are higher-quality than normal iTunes store files and DRM free; their format (M4A) is described in ISO/IEC 13818-7:2003 and it's slightly less patent-encumbered than MP3.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that's spelled "PPPoE".
Technical writers are proficient in writing technical documents, they're not necessarily computer power users or systems administrators. Many of them don't even work in the software industry.
Finding a technical writer who knows all about development, operating systems, hardware, etc. is still a very rare occurrence.
See also The Sheep Look Up. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sheep_Look_Up
Is it still a dystopian near-future once it starts coming true? :-\
Actually, tracks from the iTunes store haven't had any DRM since April.
I've always made a point of buying MP3s or DRM-free AACs when CDs weren't available from the artist (or the compression wouldn't make a difference; being a fan of industrial and metal helps here, it would probably be worse for jazz and classical).
My response was "Screw you guys, I'm getting Satellite." Sure I traded one monopolistic juggernaut (Rogers) for another (Bell), but I go an HD PVR with fully supported USB ports.
No idea if this works with 3rd party PVR systems, but it does let me plug in any USB storage device and save recorded programs to it.
As of later today, I'll only have one Rogers "service" (my wife's cell phone), and that's only until the contract expires in October.
The cable/satellite/cellphone provides in Canada fill me with nerd rage. They're holding us back technologically for maximum profits.
I'm still wondering how they can offer faster-than-5Mbps connections, but none of the third-party DSL companies can. It's the same last mile that's shared, after all.
Last mile should be owned by the municipalities so anyone can take advantage of it. It's been built out by our tax dollars, and Bell and Rogers clearly aren't willing to spend any money upgrading things or even providing half decent service at a reasonable price.
Happy TekSavvy user here, unhappy Rogers cell owner (contract is up in a couple of weeks, but my "choices" for new service suck just as much).
I recently turned on pobox.com's spam filter (I've had my email addresses at pobox.com since the 90s) and was really impressed with the amount of spam it caught... I went from having ~300/day coming in to maybe 1-2. Still haven't seen a false positive either.
Definitely a satisfied customer.
LaTeX is awesome if you want your document to look exactly like a LaTeX document. If you're trying to make a customized page layout (say, so your documents look like they come from your company instead of from LaTeX) it's more trouble than you can imagine.
"Every application" can use IE's engine, except Outlook. They implement their own half-assed HTML renderer (not even up to HTML 3.2/CSS 1.0 standards; http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/aa338201.aspx) to help ensure pain and suffering for folks who "need" to send out HTML newsletters. The doc I link to there redefines "full" CSS 1.0 support to mean "the subset of CSS 1.0 supported by Word". *facepalm*
Not that I'm bitter about wasting many hours on working around Outlook's brain damage.
This is for "security reasons" but nobody's ever figured out why or how CSS's "float" is a security issue. I just love mutating a carefully designed-for-usability-and-accessibility div based layout into a nested tables abomination.
Silverlight (and Flash, for that matter) don't even seem to have 64-bit plugins for Windows, what makes you think they'll show up any time soon for OS X and/or Linux? 64-bit XP has been around for how long and there's no plugin for 64-bit IE? Come on...
If HTML5 browsers come in 64-bit flavours and uptake on 64-bit Windows 7 is good (with Snow Leopard "all" Macs will be 64-bit; on Windows, you'll want 64-bit so you can actually use the 4GB so many machines have installed now), HTML5 might "win" by default... it'll be the only one that works on 64-bit browsers.
The only "64" associated with Silverlight 3 betas is H.264 support.
Wow, you're getting screwed.
$0/month, unlimited Interac transactions, unlimited online banking, etc. I've been using President's Choice Financial for five years or so and they're great (except for loans and money orders, but how often do you do those?).
I used to work for NCR, so I know how expensive (relatively) it is to process cheques compared to Interac. I'm amazed that people still pay bank fees for web banking and Interac.
I'd try it again (played a bit during beta) if there was a Mac client.
Bell got into bed with MSN (and Rogers got into bed with Yahoo!) so they wouldn't actually have to provide any of the services they offer (such as email) as part of their broadband service.
Recently (the last year or so?) Bell reabsorbed the Sympatico brand so they could call all of their stuff "Bell".
In addition to throttling certain types of traffic from other DSL ISPs, you'll note that 5Mbit/s is the fastest you can get from any of the 3rd parties like TekSavvy (which I use). Bell offers 7Mbit/s, 10Mbit/s and 16Mbit/s if you're willing to pay for it.
Why aren't these higher speeds available to people using 3rd party DSL? Aren't they using the same cables, etc. that my tax dollars helped pay for?
Bell having control over a service I buy from an independent company is one kind of bad, and not providing the same access to third party DSL companies is another. Back when Sympatico was a "separate" ISP, weren't Bell ordered to give other DSL companies the same access?
So very sick of the "choice" we've got in Canada for broadband (and cell phones, but that's another thread's rant).
There should be a +1, Sad But True.
Wait, wait, wait.
You and your son have HP computers that both failed in the same way, and they're both on the recall list.
And you just bought a new one from the same company.
Why would you do such a thing?!
Why would they? Seems to me like releasing it at all was a huge step for a business; they could've sat on it and kept it to their storage systems as a competitive advantage.
Releasing it under two different licenses just to appease FSF fanatics at least doubles the effort required to review the code and get it released. It probably gives their lawyers high blood pressure, too.
I just can't see how this is Sun's problem and not Linux's problem. Why isn't the kernel flexible enough to allow loading filesystems without being merged into the kernel (or is it? I honestly don't know)?
It's so very nice actually using ZFS (on my FreeBSD server) instead of waiting around for the Linux guys to reinvent the wheel with BTRFS.
Dynamically adding storage to your filesystems is a killer feature, although ZFS certainly likes to have a lot of memory handy. I've actually held off on adding a few things to the server (Squid proxy) because I don't want to add more things to memory.
How about changing the way Linux loads filesystems instead of complaining about the flavour of license? Seems to me like it would be faster and less bug-prone that implementing a new filesystem.
From Wikipedia:
I think you've misspelled "nice" there. ;-)
Please, Obsidian, don't waste time "tweaking" the engine, just make the game. Spend your time doing what you do best... writing.
IMHO, with Neverwinter 2, they spent a huge amount of time working on the engine, and then had to rush together a game so they had something to ship. The writing and game design suffered for it.
With Knights of the Old Republic 2, they spent more time writing (until Lucasarts forced it out way too early) and it showed... the start of that game is completely awesome.
At least one of those people was kind enough to tag their shilling with #magpie for eash ad-whore detection.
Has anyone registered stupidit.ie yet?
I'm not even sure it's that big... the "all these RPMs in a ZIP" archive of the Mono 2.2 runtime for RedHad is around 40MB.
Actually, I just checked, the .NET 2.0 runtime for XP is a 22MB download.
IMHO (and I'm sure this will earn me some /. flames) .NET and C# are a couple of the best things to come out of MS. And I'm quite happy about being able to use them on my Mac (via Mono) when the need arises (and it does, 'cause I do C#/.NET stuff in my day job).
Amazon only sells MP3s to Americans. As a Canadian, I'm extremely annoyed by this... on several occaisions I've been quite willing to throw money their way, but they just won't take it.
eMusic (with a somewhat annoying subscription system) and Magnatune (100% pure awesome) also sell DRM-free music through a normal web interface.
iTunes Plus (which will be all of iTunes "soon") tracks are higher-quality than normal iTunes store files and DRM free; their format (M4A) is described in ISO/IEC 13818-7:2003 and it's slightly less patent-encumbered than MP3.