A bit OT, but in Portuguese, it's "Boa sorte"... "buena fortuna" is spanish...
The main countries that speak portuguese are Brasil (with a version of their own), Portugal (the tiny country next to Spain, the one with the Azores islands and all) and some african countries, mostly ex-portuguese-colonies.
Like lots of people said before, the "secret" here is the backcatalog. Sure, lot's of people download the latest album from Britney Spears or something like that, but that doesn't seem to be hurting her revenues...
The issue is really the oldies, the past, the "when-they-were-good" times, and the (ilegal) downloads are nothing more than the comodity of digging up and finding the first album of your favorite band, or the whole discography of some artist that you just recently heard for the first time. As "incredible" as it may sound to the record companies, not everyone knows the same artists at the same time, and an artist that came and went in the 70's or 80's or whatever, can be the "next big thing" for a lot of people that never heard of him. The thing is that the record companies try to capitalize on that by issuing those "Best of something-something" albuns, instead of (like someone mentioned) printing a CD by demand with that really old, really hard to find album from your favorite band.
If they "open up" their backcatalogs, if they turn it into a "comodity", they will really have to invest in new acts, instead of reashing old stuff (i.e. no more bitchy-but-inocent-looking-britney-type "artists", no more generic-heavy-metal-band, no more "hey-this-is-the-same-stuff-from-last-year-but-wit h-a-diferent-face!")
In a nutshell, the record companies argument of having to invest in new acts falls short when we get stuffed with reashes of old things and re-re-re-edits (now! the songs that so-and-so wrote when he was 5!) and "unreleased" tracks. They might argue "hey! people like it and want another britney-type-o-girl!", but if that's really the truth why not let people get the "old" britney stuff easelly, instead of hiding it all away after just a couple of years from the inicial CD launch and comming up with a "new" (cof-reash-cof) artist that looks just like britney....
PS - I use the britney example because it's probably the most visible face of the kind of "new artists" that the record companies come up with. Madonna was a bitchy-naughty-but-sometimes-inocent-girl even before Britney was in dippers:D
Well, normaly I use Opera, wich has the wonderfull "disable javascript" option, just 2 keypresses away from the normal browsing. Click F12, then "j" and you can toogle javascript on and off. Usualy I browse with javascript OFF, avoiding prety much all of that add crapt (floaters or no floaters). When I need to use a javascript enabled site (a legitimate one, not some site that tells me that they "really, really, really need it" so I can read text from their site) I use Firefox, wich is much better than IE blocking adds in the "javascript enabled" side of the web.
I'm no developer and I don't usually peeked into webpages code, but I guess that the "nexgen" of add blockers should "sniff" all the javascript passed to the browser(s) and sort it out if its an popup/floater/whatever piece of garbage or if it's something actualy usefull for the browsing.
To sum it up: Opera (javascript off), then Firefox, then (gasp!) IE.
I guess that the reviewer is mixing 2 (or 3) very diferent things: the Microsoft anti-virus-light (wich looks like a sort of Stinger, from NAI) and the anti-spyware tool itself, wich has 2 main components: remove and prevent spyware.
About the antivirus bit, I see those kinds of tools as a sort of "quick fix": they can catch half a dozen virus (usually the group of viruses of the month/week and it's variants) but won't do much more. I usually use them as the "first wave" against an infected PC, followed by a proper full, *updated* scan by an antivirus.
About the spyware tool itself, in my opinion, its really well put together (I didn't knew the GIANT product, so the MS version was my first contact with it). But I guess that spyware poses a diferent problem concerning detections and all: how do we count a "hit"? by the simple count of files and reg keys? by the grouping of "infected" objects from a certain product? it's really a very murky area, as I've come to figure, after a long time using the "wonder-trio": Ad-Aware, Spybot and Spyblaster.
And I guess that this hole "counting" problem is in the genesis of a lot of confusion about how efective an anti-spyware tool can be. If the MS Tool removes, for example, 129 objects and Ad-Aware (on the same test bed) removes just 89, does it mean that the MS tool is more efective? I don't think so.
I think that the main problem resides in the fact that spyware is a much more complex beast than a virus: a virus *must* be simple and discrete enough so that it can pass unnoticed on a given system. Spyware, on the other hand, can aford to be much more "loud" and rub it's efects on the user's face. Ergo, they can aford to be much larger and complex, passing as "legit" apps. A virus can consist in just a single file, and have an identified/identifiable "fingerprint" on the infected files, but spyware can take up several megabytes and be as complex as a normal windows aplication. For example, given the today soup of files and regs and stuff, how can anyone say for certain: this reg key belongs to this and *only this* application?
Eventually the coder of the application can anwser that, but in this case the coders are a bunch of sinister, evil looking goblins, so we can't expect much colaboration from them:P
So, even if tool A gets 3445 "hits", tool B gets 1298 "hits" and tool C gets 982 "hits", I think that we should use A+B+C, instead of dumping C and "idolyzing" A. All the help is welcome on this battle, since the spyware itself is getting nastiers, going for the antispyware tools itself. So if the tools cover each other's asses, as well as misses, that's fine by me.
So are we (the cleaning guys, the sysadmins, the helpdesks, the "white hats" of this world) loosing the batle? I don't think so. Logically, the solution resides in pluging the hole(s), and in my opinion, Microsoft is moving in the right direction, altough slowly, no doubt. I just hope that this hole thing about virus and spyware and stuff won't put the DRM, locked computer (sorry, Windows-inside computer) a couple of steps closer...
Anyways, summing it up: are the MS Antivirus and Spyware tools totally worthless? I don't think so. They are not 100% efective (neither is Ad-Aware, or Spybot or anyother), but they are a much needed help in this "batle". Add then to your usual swiss-army-knife/bootcd of cleaning/security tools, and you'll have adden horsepower, wich is good:D
In oposition to antivirus (1 is enough, 2 is a mess), another *good* spyware tool on the system is allways welcome.
I've been an Amazon (both.com and.co.uk) for a couple of years now and it shows that they really care about customer service, as Jeff mentions.
Just an example, I ordered an old PC game some time ago, and when I got it, I noticed that it was lacking a CD (it was one of those 4 CD games of old age). I write to Amazon, not knowing what to expect from them. But, to my surprise, they wrote back, saying that they would ship another package, no charge, and that I could keep the first one and do with it whatever I chose to! (they sugested giving it to charity)
It was really a surprise to me, I'm not used to this kind of service, not even on "live" stores, let alone on online ones!
Anyway, I'm prety happy with my relationship with Amazon and I'll continue to buy from them whenever I can.
I guess that there ain't no "silver bullet" on this matter.
Internet piracy must have its share of blame, of course, but it's not the only cause, and problably there isn't a only cause.
Other factors may include economic recession, poor quality, repetitive artist offers, rehash of old "hits" in spite of new, refreshing sounds, much broader offer in entertaiment, etc, and the record labels are moving too slow to face these multiple factors.
Of course, the multiplicity of "causes" and the speed at wich the entertaiment industry moves nowadays may harm the diagnostics of the situation, but I guess that the solution must involve some profound changes in the sector.
Well, speaking from Portugal, a country with a bad record in car crashes per year (I think we are ahead of the rest of the EU countries on this one), I only have one question: are we ready for 3D travel? I mean, we hardly seem to handle 2D, let alone 3D.
And I'm not even getting to drunk-driving and the works, I'm just refering to plain 3D space travel. Unless we simply try to reproduce our 2D model in diferent "planes" on the 3D space (a la Back to the Future 2), I think that flying cars will need a lot of "getting used to".
If we manage to do so much wreck with just excessive speed in a 2D plane, what would we do with an aditional dimention (and the gravity pull)?
I don't think that we are ready for it, not for the masses, at least. Afterall, we can fly planes and stuff, but I would rather not think about having something move on 3D, at high speed, in the hands of a drunk person.
Eventually we will get flying "cars", but I think that not this soon, and not as widespread as "normal" cars...
"A sysadmin is a cross between a detective, a police officer, a gardener, a doctor and a fireman"
too dark, too good, too obvious:D
I think that Lucas would follow the "less obvious" route and simply rewrite all that we know about the Star Wars universe in the post-RotJ years...
Well, for start, I guess that ANYONE KNEW that Revs wouldn't explain every single bit of doubt that the previous 2 movies raised... or did u expected to find the REASON why there are numerous references to the number pi in the matrix?
Second, revolutions is ENTIRELLY coherent with Reload IF u pay attention to this: MAYBE there was a reload again this time! maybe everything proceded as planed! And then u ask: "hell, then why neo died? in vain? etc, etc". Well, my view on the triology is this: there is this normal cicle, right? with the reload, the Ones, etc, right? and we were just going there: we had a One, we had the choice, blablabla. BUT this time is diferent! because of Smith! HE ends up being the most important part of it all, you know why? because he was the unexpected part of the whole thing! Let's see why. Scenario 1: Neo goes and totally kicks the machines asses, urray! let's free up 6 bilion (or whatever) persons all at once... or would the people from zion "take over" the Matrix main fraim while they disconected everyone? I don't think so... anyway, smith would be in every single one of them, so it would be a bad ideia to unleash 6 bilion smiths on the "real" (ahem) world. Scenario 2: the machines totally kill everyone in Zion. urray for the machines, they can continue their "human-power sucking"... but... damn! there is this smith guy all over the place, wrecking everything up! Ok, they could give up that entire "crop" and restart a new, but i don't think they would want that very much... so the only choice they had was to load neo up, clean the smith virus and then procede as planed: reload on the matrix and (maybe) in zion.... end of story... well, not end, just another cicle, matrix 7.0, if u want. It sucks? maybe... and so does life and the universe and everything, if everything goes in a cicle, if the universe it self is cyclic.... was there a LOT that was unwansered? yes it was. was there any need to explain EVERY SINGLE THING? no. why? because i think that all that yellow code wasn't there just for eyecandy, it means something else... but i don't want to attract the anti-mwam mob;)
To sum it up: this is the story about a simbiotic relationship that sufered an "hicup", but was then again balanced. I think it closes the cicle pretty well. SOOO MUCH better than what Terminator 3 did for its own franchise: basically, there are no rules, and we can send terminator after another and go on and on with that. The diference to the matrix is that in the matrix there are a set of rules and controls: one One, a reload, lets continue, etc.
Anyhow, i guess i've said a lot already, i'm sorry:( but i'm sick and tired of people bashing Revolutions because it didn't awnser all the questions that 4 years and six months of hype and speculation raised...
Just to finish: summing up the triology in simple words:
Matrix 1: this is all a lie!
Matrix 2: yes it is! and it needs a reboot!
Matrix 3: shit, a virus! we can't reboot! oh, wait a minute, we can proceed now...
Slashdot Mirror
A bit OT, but in Portuguese, it's "Boa sorte"... "buena fortuna" is spanish... The main countries that speak portuguese are Brasil (with a version of their own), Portugal (the tiny country next to Spain, the one with the Azores islands and all) and some african countries, mostly ex-portuguese-colonies.
The issue is really the oldies, the past, the "when-they-were-good" times, and the (ilegal) downloads are nothing more than the comodity of digging up and finding the first album of your favorite band, or the whole discography of some artist that you just recently heard for the first time. As "incredible" as it may sound to the record companies, not everyone knows the same artists at the same time, and an artist that came and went in the 70's or 80's or whatever, can be the "next big thing" for a lot of people that never heard of him. The thing is that the record companies try to capitalize on that by issuing those "Best of something-something" albuns, instead of (like someone mentioned) printing a CD by demand with that really old, really hard to find album from your favorite band.
If they "open up" their backcatalogs, if they turn it into a "comodity", they will really have to invest in new acts, instead of reashing old stuff (i.e. no more bitchy-but-inocent-looking-britney-type "artists", no more generic-heavy-metal-band, no more "hey-this-is-the-same-stuff-from-last-year-but-wit h-a-diferent-face!")
In a nutshell, the record companies argument of having to invest in new acts falls short when we get stuffed with reashes of old things and re-re-re-edits (now! the songs that so-and-so wrote when he was 5!) and "unreleased" tracks. They might argue "hey! people like it and want another britney-type-o-girl!", but if that's really the truth why not let people get the "old" britney stuff easelly, instead of hiding it all away after just a couple of years from the inicial CD launch and comming up with a "new" (cof-reash-cof) artist that looks just like britney....
PS - I use the britney example because it's probably the most visible face of the kind of "new artists" that the record companies come up with. Madonna was a bitchy-naughty-but-sometimes-inocent-girl even before Britney was in dippers :D
I'm no developer and I don't usually peeked into webpages code, but I guess that the "nexgen" of add blockers should "sniff" all the javascript passed to the browser(s) and sort it out if its an popup/floater/whatever piece of garbage or if it's something actualy usefull for the browsing.
To sum it up: Opera (javascript off), then Firefox, then (gasp!) IE.
About the antivirus bit, I see those kinds of tools as a sort of "quick fix": they can catch half a dozen virus (usually the group of viruses of the month/week and it's variants) but won't do much more. I usually use them as the "first wave" against an infected PC, followed by a proper full, *updated* scan by an antivirus.
About the spyware tool itself, in my opinion, its really well put together (I didn't knew the GIANT product, so the MS version was my first contact with it). But I guess that spyware poses a diferent problem concerning detections and all: how do we count a "hit"? by the simple count of files and reg keys? by the grouping of "infected" objects from a certain product? it's really a very murky area, as I've come to figure, after a long time using the "wonder-trio": Ad-Aware, Spybot and Spyblaster.
And I guess that this hole "counting" problem is in the genesis of a lot of confusion about how efective an anti-spyware tool can be. If the MS Tool removes, for example, 129 objects and Ad-Aware (on the same test bed) removes just 89, does it mean that the MS tool is more efective? I don't think so.
I think that the main problem resides in the fact that spyware is a much more complex beast than a virus: a virus *must* be simple and discrete enough so that it can pass unnoticed on a given system. Spyware, on the other hand, can aford to be much more "loud" and rub it's efects on the user's face. Ergo, they can aford to be much larger and complex, passing as "legit" apps. A virus can consist in just a single file, and have an identified/identifiable "fingerprint" on the infected files, but spyware can take up several megabytes and be as complex as a normal windows aplication. For example, given the today soup of files and regs and stuff, how can anyone say for certain: this reg key belongs to this and *only this* application?
Eventually the coder of the application can anwser that, but in this case the coders are a bunch of sinister, evil looking goblins, so we can't expect much colaboration from them :P
So, even if tool A gets 3445 "hits", tool B gets 1298 "hits" and tool C gets 982 "hits", I think that we should use A+B+C, instead of dumping C and "idolyzing" A. All the help is welcome on this battle, since the spyware itself is getting nastiers, going for the antispyware tools itself. So if the tools cover each other's asses, as well as misses, that's fine by me.
So are we (the cleaning guys, the sysadmins, the helpdesks, the "white hats" of this world) loosing the batle? I don't think so. Logically, the solution resides in pluging the hole(s), and in my opinion, Microsoft is moving in the right direction, altough slowly, no doubt. I just hope that this hole thing about virus and spyware and stuff won't put the DRM, locked computer (sorry, Windows-inside computer) a couple of steps closer...
Anyways, summing it up: are the MS Antivirus and Spyware tools totally worthless? I don't think so. They are not 100% efective (neither is Ad-Aware, or Spybot or anyother), but they are a much needed help in this "batle". Add then to your usual swiss-army-knife/bootcd of cleaning/security tools, and you'll have adden horsepower, wich is good :D
In oposition to antivirus (1 is enough, 2 is a mess), another *good* spyware tool on the system is allways welcome.
Just an example, I ordered an old PC game some time ago, and when I got it, I noticed that it was lacking a CD (it was one of those 4 CD games of old age). I write to Amazon, not knowing what to expect from them. But, to my surprise, they wrote back, saying that they would ship another package, no charge, and that I could keep the first one and do with it whatever I chose to! (they sugested giving it to charity)
It was really a surprise to me, I'm not used to this kind of service, not even on "live" stores, let alone on online ones!
Anyway, I'm prety happy with my relationship with Amazon and I'll continue to buy from them whenever I can.
Keep up the good work, guys!
Internet piracy must have its share of blame, of course, but it's not the only cause, and problably there isn't a only cause.
Other factors may include economic recession, poor quality, repetitive artist offers, rehash of old "hits" in spite of new, refreshing sounds, much broader offer in entertaiment, etc, and the record labels are moving too slow to face these multiple factors.
Of course, the multiplicity of "causes" and the speed at wich the entertaiment industry moves nowadays may harm the diagnostics of the situation, but I guess that the solution must involve some profound changes in the sector.
And I'm not even getting to drunk-driving and the works, I'm just refering to plain 3D space travel. Unless we simply try to reproduce our 2D model in diferent "planes" on the 3D space (a la Back to the Future 2), I think that flying cars will need a lot of "getting used to".
If we manage to do so much wreck with just excessive speed in a 2D plane, what would we do with an aditional dimention (and the gravity pull)?
I don't think that we are ready for it, not for the masses, at least. Afterall, we can fly planes and stuff, but I would rather not think about having something move on 3D, at high speed, in the hands of a drunk person.
Eventually we will get flying "cars", but I think that not this soon, and not as widespread as "normal" cars...
"A sysadmin is a cross between a detective, a police officer, a gardener, a doctor and a fireman"
too dark, too good, too obvious :D
I think that Lucas would follow the "less obvious" route and simply rewrite all that we know about the Star Wars universe in the post-RotJ years...
Well, for start, I guess that ANYONE KNEW that Revs wouldn't explain every single bit of doubt that the previous 2 movies raised... or did u expected to find the REASON why there are numerous references to the number pi in the matrix? Second, revolutions is ENTIRELLY coherent with Reload IF u pay attention to this: MAYBE there was a reload again this time! maybe everything proceded as planed! And then u ask: "hell, then why neo died? in vain? etc, etc". Well, my view on the triology is this: there is this normal cicle, right? with the reload, the Ones, etc, right? and we were just going there: we had a One, we had the choice, blablabla. BUT this time is diferent! because of Smith! HE ends up being the most important part of it all, you know why? because he was the unexpected part of the whole thing! Let's see why. Scenario 1: Neo goes and totally kicks the machines asses, urray! let's free up 6 bilion (or whatever) persons all at once... or would the people from zion "take over" the Matrix main fraim while they disconected everyone? I don't think so... anyway, smith would be in every single one of them, so it would be a bad ideia to unleash 6 bilion smiths on the "real" (ahem) world. Scenario 2: the machines totally kill everyone in Zion. urray for the machines, they can continue their "human-power sucking"... but... damn! there is this smith guy all over the place, wrecking everything up! Ok, they could give up that entire "crop" and restart a new, but i don't think they would want that very much... so the only choice they had was to load neo up, clean the smith virus and then procede as planed: reload on the matrix and (maybe) in zion.... end of story... well, not end, just another cicle, matrix 7.0, if u want. It sucks? maybe... and so does life and the universe and everything, if everything goes in a cicle, if the universe it self is cyclic.... was there a LOT that was unwansered? yes it was. was there any need to explain EVERY SINGLE THING? no. why? because i think that all that yellow code wasn't there just for eyecandy, it means something else... but i don't want to attract the anti-mwam mob ;)
To sum it up: this is the story about a simbiotic relationship that sufered an "hicup", but was then again balanced. I think it closes the cicle pretty well. SOOO MUCH better than what Terminator 3 did for its own franchise: basically, there are no rules, and we can send terminator after another and go on and on with that. The diference to the matrix is that in the matrix there are a set of rules and controls: one One, a reload, lets continue, etc.
Anyhow, i guess i've said a lot already, i'm sorry :( but i'm sick and tired of people bashing Revolutions because it didn't awnser all the questions that 4 years and six months of hype and speculation raised...
Just to finish: summing up the triology in simple words:
Matrix 1: this is all a lie!
Matrix 2: yes it is! and it needs a reboot!
Matrix 3: shit, a virus! we can't reboot! oh, wait a minute, we can proceed now...