I'm obviously biased, but it seems to me that a "gaming" channel is pretty specialized (catering only to a small audience of hard-core gamers), while a tech channel might be of more general interest.
I could imagine putting gamer shows on a tech channel, but I don't really see tech shows being at home on a gaming channel. So it looks to me like they killed the wrong channel.
I used to get TechTV -- it had some interesting shows. In fact, it's probably the only reason I'd consider digital cable. On the other hand, I'd never consider purchasing a "gamer" channel. Not my thing. Expecially considering my knowledge of G4 comes from Penny Arcade:
When my university installed a traffic shaping device to limit P2P access, all of the usual networks essentially became useless. (Transfer rates measured in bytes per second.)
The students came up with a clever way around it, using a program based on Gnucleus LAN (I think.) Basically, it's like a version of Gnutella that limits itself to inside the LAN.
Since there are so many people on the campus network, it was every bit as useful as Kazaa and the others, and transfers were many (many!) times faster.
The best part is, network utilization between the campus network and the internet went down, since all of the traffic was now confined to the LAN.
If you are getting tired of all of your blue LEDs, you may send the devices to me, at this address:
123 Fake St. Toronto, Canada
I haven't yet owned a single blue LED. I'd be disappointed if everyone went back to boring green by the time I can afford a new computer/monitor/phone.
In fact, if you visit http://www.cbc.ca/mondayreport/, there's another oddly relevent commercial spoof called "Don't steal satellite signals! Please?"
I find these commercials funny -- they basically try to scare parents, saying our kids are going to become common criminals because copyright infringement is just like any other form of "theft"...
Next in the news: downloading music results in increased chocolate bar theft!
This is exactly why the blank media levy works in our favour. We already pay something to the artists, and that's why the copyright laws give us the freedoms they do.
Also, Canada imports most of its music from U.S. record companies anyway. Why spend effort protecting mostly foreign interests? Don't send your money to Brittney Spears -- buy locally!
Shouldn't they have found something at least moderately novel to patent? It sounds like they're essentially patenting a hierarcical menu. A bad patent is a bad patent.
Canada's government recently passed a campaign financing reform bill, just in time for this year's election.
"Bill C-24 limits corporate and union donations to political parties to a maximum of $1,000 and allows them only at the riding association level, not directly to federal parties. The bill also places a $5,000 limit on individual donations.
"A new system of public funding will be established to compensate for the funding shortfall, and will be based on the number of votes received by each party. Every vote received by a party in the previous election will earn a $1.75 taxpayer subsidy.
"Introduced on January 29, 2003, Bill C-24 is aimed at drastically reducing the amount of money that business and labour interests can give to political parties."
Yep, they seem to focus on the larger cities. It makes sense -- the cities are a huge percentage of the population, so they can provide better rates by not wasting money building towers (at about $1 million each) to serve every small town.
Of course, the competition is quick to say they cover a greater land mass, but that doesn't matter to those of us who stick to cities (or *prefer* to be unreachable when vacationing away from civilization:) And, as I always say, my home phone line only had a coverage area of about the size of my living room.:)
On the other side of things, they have perhaps the best international roaming of any of the carriers, so if you ever travel to the U.S. or Europe (and you have an international phone), you're covered, and won't pay too much for it.
More on topic -- this wireless internet trial is going on in two cities -- Richmond (a larger area, from my understanding), and the suburbs of Ottawa. Note that the latter is an area that's had a hard time getting DSL service from the usual suspects, despite an abundance of people who are willing to pay for it. That may be an interesting target marker.
Probably has something to do with those people who say, "when I run out of ink, I just buy a new printer beacuse it's cheaper."
Re:A card is more than just a magnetic strip...
on
The Universal Card
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· Score: 1
A few weeks ago, I saw another invention that would let you combine several cards onto a signal piece of plastic.
The innovative method was....... put two magnetic stripes on the same card. (Or three or four stripes.)
No fancy, expensive, scary technology involved.
Solves the worries of the banks, and can actually be used as a selling point for them -- you've got an Air Miles credit card? Put the Air Miles card and the credit card together. A debit card from the same bank? Throw it on there too. Now the bank can give you all their services on one card, in a package so simple anyone could use it.
I can't seem to remember what it was called... but it was invented by some 12 year old kid or something... recently patented too, of course...
The linked article seems to have changed slightly from the version I read yesterday. The original version mentioned that if SOCAN gets their way, it would open the door for publishers of software, movies, books, photographic works, etc, to demand compensation for their respective "losses." SOCAN wants 10% -- imagine if all of those groups got 10%
I'm currently developing some freeware. Next version, I think I'll start charging $100,000 per license. Then, when people continue to download it without paying, I'll go to the Supreme Court and demand compensation.
They (or any company, especially a smaller company) might simply decide the risk in developing software is too high, and they'd get out of the business.
Would this apply to free software developers too -- say, someone writes an app for one of these phones, and it's discovered to have a security flaw?
It's not that people don't take security seriously -- it's that the field hasn't advanced to a degree that writing bug-free software is possible.
This is why the EULAs say the things they do. If companies were financially liable for any bugs in their software, you'd see a lot less software.
Re:I've been trying my best to switch people away
on
New IE Holes Discovered
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· Score: 2, Informative
I believe there are a few issues the Mozilla people need to address before their browser will be widely accepted by the general population. I'm not talking about people like you and me, I'm talking about people like my mother.
For example, install Mozilla, and all your Favourites disappear. They're probably buried in the Bookmarks menu somewhere (sometimes they're not imported at all), but to the average user, they might as well be gone. Or, at best, it takes longer to get to them. There's no good reason for that. I want my bookmarks where I put them -- who is Mozilla to move them into a submenu? Same with the Links toolbar -- all the bookmarks the user is used to having one click away are now gone. This creates the perception that IE is easier to use, and encourages users to switch back to IE. Worse, when you modify the bookmarks in Mozilla, the changes don't show up in IE, the Start menu, or anywhere else that uses the Microsoft method of storing favourites. You end up with two unsynchronized sets of bookmarks.
These sorts of things may not matter to any of you, reading this, but put Mozilla down in front of your mother, and she'll say, "I want it back the way I'm used to."
It's the little, basic features, that matter most to the general population.
Look at what they say towards the end of the article. First, they say, "ok, the ISPs are just carrying other people's content." But when the recording industry appealed:
"The Federal Court held that the act of creating a cache of content means that ISPs are moving from their role as carrier to a role in which they actively decide what kind of content will exist on their systems. And that means, under Canadian copyright law, they should be responsible for that content."
Two things I see wrong with this.
1. Just because they're caching the content doesn't mean they're "actively" deciding anything. It's just a pile of bits. The ISP doesn't approve everything that goes into the cache.
2. P2P networks don't use caching servers. The argument appears to be that just because the ISP uses caching servers, they're no longer just a carrier. That just doesn't make sense to me. (Well, it might make sense, but only in the "I don't know anything about how networks function" sort of way.)
MS figures out a workaround... all the big plugin vendors will change their access methods to support the new workaro
The problem with this conspiracy theory is that the workaround doesn't break backwards-compatibility. Breaking backwards-compatibility would also break IE6 and earlier, which they're obviously not about to do.
Windows Messenger doesn't have banner ads, only MSN Messenger does.
So why aren't they concerned with losing recenue from all those Windows XP users getting a free ride on their IM system?
The answer is probably that Windows Messenger users paid for it indirectly by buying Windows XP. But since Trillian is a Windows program, all of its users have Windows licenses too. (Maybe not XP, but nobody would upgrade to Windows XP just to get WM.)
Maybe they're just assuming that they can trick Windows Messenger people into installing the MSN Add-In (which adds ads), but Trillian people won't.
Does Microsoft advertise anything except itself through those ads, anyway? Last I tried it, they were just ads for MSN. It can't be their greatest revenue source, unless they're signing up a lot of new customers through that link.
Re:Great, more cr*p in the atmosphere...
on
42-Volt Autos
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· Score: 1
Please read before posting. From the very first paragraph of the article:
"A 42-volt system will slash weight, improve fuel economy, permit the replacement of many mechanical parts with electrical ones..."
Re:Thats the profile 3, not the profile 4.
on
iMac LCD Impostors
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· Score: 1
Also note that the Profile 3 (a current product) was out before the iLamp. In other words, Gateway isn't the one copying others on this one. In fact, the idea of an all-in-one computer with an LCD display is hardly new. Whoever submitted this article didn't do their homework.
Conspiracy theories aside, that's a great feature for your average internet user. Instead of, "you made a mistake somewhere, or maybe it's someone else's fault... anyway, something bad happened", you get a link directly to where they think you wanted to go. Usually it's just 2 or 3 links they give you. It's not as if they're giving you biased results. If there was some conspiracy here, typing "linux.xom" would redirect you to a Microsoft.com page telling you that Linux sucks. I believe you will see that this is not the case. There a grand total of one link to a Microsoft site, that being MSN Search. There are no ads on the page, so they probably make no money from this. After examining all these details, I must conclude that you were probably trolling anyway. Oh well.
The way people interpreted the "640k ought to be enough for anyone" rumour didn't make sense to begin with. It doesn't seem like it was necessarily a forward-looking statement. For all we know, the rest of that quote could have been "... to run MS-DOS 2.0."
I have a Compaq with the "recovery partition" concept, too. It has 20 GB disk and they took 5 GB of that for the recovery partition. (Only 1.2 GB of that was actually used -- the rest, I assume, was for some backup feature I never used.)
The thing that really annoyed me was that they advertised the system as having a 20 GB disk, and it wasn't until you got it home that you discovered only about 13 GB of that was actually free space you could use.
Whether you get paid by Linux or not, the result is the same. Whether you send 10000 Microsoft employees to vote, or send 10000 Linux advocates to vote, both do an equally good job at skewing the results. Money doesn't factor into it.
It depends what you think "Internet Explorer" is. Is it that icon? Is it the HTML rendering engine that's now the basis of everything from help files to the desktop and the standard Explorer window? Obviously, they can remove the icon, but they can't remove the HTML rendering engine.
I don't know what the point of all this is. They're still, 5 years later, trying to force Microsoft to sell a separate version of Windows without IE? Why? It wouldn't be any cheaper, considering the actual percentage of code that would be involved. Is there huge public demand for a version of Windows that doesn't have the IE icon?
Why are they asking for the source code, anyway? You can't understand a software system by asking for the source code. A higher-level overview of how the modules fit together would be much more useful.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm obviously biased, but it seems to me that a "gaming" channel is pretty specialized (catering only to a small audience of hard-core gamers), while a tech channel might be of more general interest.
0 -28 5 -16
I could imagine putting gamer shows on a tech channel, but I don't really see tech shows being at home on a gaming channel. So it looks to me like they killed the wrong channel.
I used to get TechTV -- it had some interesting shows. In fact, it's probably the only reason I'd consider digital cable. On the other hand, I'd never consider purchasing a "gamer" channel. Not my thing. Expecially considering my knowledge of G4 comes from Penny Arcade:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2002-1
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2003-0
So, in other words, "you're not really being greedy if someone else is greedier than you."
I understand the argument, but it's still... weird.
Where would those profits go, otherwise? Shareholders? New shows? Who really benefits from it?
When my university installed a traffic shaping device to limit P2P access, all of the usual networks essentially became useless. (Transfer rates measured in bytes per second.)
The students came up with a clever way around it, using a program based on Gnucleus LAN (I think.) Basically, it's like a version of Gnutella that limits itself to inside the LAN.
Since there are so many people on the campus network, it was every bit as useful as Kazaa and the others, and transfers were many (many!) times faster.
The best part is, network utilization between the campus network and the internet went down, since all of the traffic was now confined to the LAN.
If you are getting tired of all of your blue LEDs, you may send the devices to me, at this address:
123 Fake St.
Toronto, Canada
I haven't yet owned a single blue LED. I'd be disappointed if everyone went back to boring green by the time I can afford a new computer/monitor/phone.
In fact, if you visit http://www.cbc.ca/mondayreport/, there's another oddly relevent commercial spoof called "Don't steal satellite signals! Please?"
I find these commercials funny -- they basically try to scare parents, saying our kids are going to become common criminals because copyright infringement is just like any other form of "theft"...
Next in the news: downloading music results in increased chocolate bar theft!
This is exactly why the blank media levy works in our favour. We already pay something to the artists, and that's why the copyright laws give us the freedoms they do.
Also, Canada imports most of its music from U.S. record companies anyway. Why spend effort protecting mostly foreign interests? Don't send your money to Brittney Spears -- buy locally!
Shouldn't they have found something at least moderately novel to patent? It sounds like they're essentially patenting a hierarcical menu. A bad patent is a bad patent.
Canada's government recently passed a campaign financing reform bill, just in time for this year's election.
"Bill C-24 limits corporate and union donations to political parties to a maximum of $1,000 and allows them only at the riding association level, not directly to federal parties. The bill also places a $5,000 limit on individual donations.
"A new system of public funding will be established to compensate for the funding shortfall, and will be based on the number of votes received by each party. Every vote received by a party in the previous election will earn a $1.75 taxpayer subsidy.
"Introduced on January 29, 2003, Bill C-24 is aimed at drastically reducing the amount of money that business and labour interests can give to political parties."
Yep, they seem to focus on the larger cities. It makes sense -- the cities are a huge percentage of the population, so they can provide better rates by not wasting money building towers (at about $1 million each) to serve every small town.
:) And, as I always say, my home phone line only had a coverage area of about the size of my living room. :)
Of course, the competition is quick to say they cover a greater land mass, but that doesn't matter to those of us who stick to cities (or *prefer* to be unreachable when vacationing away from civilization
On the other side of things, they have perhaps the best international roaming of any of the carriers, so if you ever travel to the U.S. or Europe (and you have an international phone), you're covered, and won't pay too much for it.
More on topic -- this wireless internet trial is going on in two cities -- Richmond (a larger area, from my understanding), and the suburbs of Ottawa. Note that the latter is an area that's had a hard time getting DSL service from the usual suspects, despite an abundance of people who are willing to pay for it. That may be an interesting target marker.
Probably has something to do with those people who say, "when I run out of ink, I just buy a new printer beacuse it's cheaper."
A few weeks ago, I saw another invention that would let you combine several cards onto a signal piece of plastic.
The innovative method was....... put two magnetic stripes on the same card. (Or three or four stripes.)
No fancy, expensive, scary technology involved.
Solves the worries of the banks, and can actually be used as a selling point for them -- you've got an Air Miles credit card? Put the Air Miles card and the credit card together. A debit card from the same bank? Throw it on there too. Now the bank can give you all their services on one card, in a package so simple anyone could use it.
I can't seem to remember what it was called... but it was invented by some 12 year old kid or something... recently patented too, of course...
Speaking of can of worms...
The linked article seems to have changed slightly from the version I read yesterday. The original version mentioned that if SOCAN gets their way, it would open the door for publishers of software, movies, books, photographic works, etc, to demand compensation for their respective "losses." SOCAN wants 10% -- imagine if all of those groups got 10%
I'm currently developing some freeware. Next version, I think I'll start charging $100,000 per license. Then, when people continue to download it without paying, I'll go to the Supreme Court and demand compensation.
They (or any company, especially a smaller company) might simply decide the risk in developing software is too high, and they'd get out of the business.
Would this apply to free software developers too -- say, someone writes an app for one of these phones, and it's discovered to have a security flaw?
It's not that people don't take security seriously -- it's that the field hasn't advanced to a degree that writing bug-free software is possible.
This is why the EULAs say the things they do. If companies were financially liable for any bugs in their software, you'd see a lot less software.
I believe there are a few issues the Mozilla people need to address before their browser will be widely accepted by the general population. I'm not talking about people like you and me, I'm talking about people like my mother.
For example, install Mozilla, and all your Favourites disappear. They're probably buried in the Bookmarks menu somewhere (sometimes they're not imported at all), but to the average user, they might as well be gone. Or, at best, it takes longer to get to them. There's no good reason for that. I want my bookmarks where I put them -- who is Mozilla to move them into a submenu? Same with the Links toolbar -- all the bookmarks the user is used to having one click away are now gone. This creates the perception that IE is easier to use, and encourages users to switch back to IE. Worse, when you modify the bookmarks in Mozilla, the changes don't show up in IE, the Start menu, or anywhere else that uses the Microsoft method of storing favourites. You end up with two unsynchronized sets of bookmarks.
These sorts of things may not matter to any of you, reading this, but put Mozilla down in front of your mother, and she'll say, "I want it back the way I'm used to."
It's the little, basic features, that matter most to the general population.
Look at what they say towards the end of the article. First, they say, "ok, the ISPs are just carrying other people's content." But when the recording industry appealed:
"The Federal Court held that the act of creating a cache of content means that ISPs are moving from their role as carrier to a role in which they actively decide what kind of content will exist on their systems. And that means, under Canadian copyright law, they should be responsible for that content."
Two things I see wrong with this.
1. Just because they're caching the content doesn't mean they're "actively" deciding anything. It's just a pile of bits. The ISP doesn't approve everything that goes into the cache.
2. P2P networks don't use caching servers. The argument appears to be that just because the ISP uses caching servers, they're no longer just a carrier. That just doesn't make sense to me. (Well, it might make sense, but only in the "I don't know anything about how networks function" sort of way.)
MS figures out a workaround... all the big plugin vendors will change their access methods to support the new workaro
The problem with this conspiracy theory is that the workaround doesn't break backwards-compatibility. Breaking backwards-compatibility would also break IE6 and earlier, which they're obviously not about to do.
Windows Messenger doesn't have banner ads, only MSN Messenger does.
So why aren't they concerned with losing recenue from all those Windows XP users getting a free ride on their IM system?
The answer is probably that Windows Messenger users paid for it indirectly by buying Windows XP. But since Trillian is a Windows program, all of its users have Windows licenses too. (Maybe not XP, but nobody would upgrade to Windows XP just to get WM.)
Maybe they're just assuming that they can trick Windows Messenger people into installing the MSN Add-In (which adds ads), but Trillian people won't.
Does Microsoft advertise anything except itself through those ads, anyway? Last I tried it, they were just ads for MSN. It can't be their greatest revenue source, unless they're signing up a lot of new customers through that link.
Please read before posting. From the very first paragraph of the article:
"A 42-volt system will slash weight, improve fuel economy, permit the replacement of many mechanical parts with electrical ones..."
Also note that the Profile 3 (a current product) was out before the iLamp. In other words, Gateway isn't the one copying others on this one. In fact, the idea of an all-in-one computer with an LCD display is hardly new. Whoever submitted this article didn't do their homework.
Conspiracy theories aside, that's a great feature for your average internet user. Instead of, "you made a mistake somewhere, or maybe it's someone else's fault... anyway, something bad happened", you get a link directly to where they think you wanted to go. Usually it's just 2 or 3 links they give you. It's not as if they're giving you biased results. If there was some conspiracy here, typing "linux.xom" would redirect you to a Microsoft.com page telling you that Linux sucks. I believe you will see that this is not the case. There a grand total of one link to a Microsoft site, that being MSN Search. There are no ads on the page, so they probably make no money from this. After examining all these details, I must conclude that you were probably trolling anyway. Oh well.
The way people interpreted the "640k ought to be enough for anyone" rumour didn't make sense to begin with. It doesn't seem like it was necessarily a forward-looking statement. For all we know, the rest of that quote could have been "... to run MS-DOS 2.0."
I have a Compaq with the "recovery partition" concept, too. It has 20 GB disk and they took 5 GB of that for the recovery partition. (Only 1.2 GB of that was actually used -- the rest, I assume, was for some backup feature I never used.)
The thing that really annoyed me was that they advertised the system as having a 20 GB disk, and it wasn't until you got it home that you discovered only about 13 GB of that was actually free space you could use.
The icon is actually a year out of date anyway. :-) They have a new logo now.
Whether you get paid by Linux or not, the result is the same. Whether you send 10000 Microsoft employees to vote, or send 10000 Linux advocates to vote, both do an equally good job at skewing the results. Money doesn't factor into it.
It depends what you think "Internet Explorer" is. Is it that icon? Is it the HTML rendering engine that's now the basis of everything from help files to the desktop and the standard Explorer window? Obviously, they can remove the icon, but they can't remove the HTML rendering engine.
I don't know what the point of all this is. They're still, 5 years later, trying to force Microsoft to sell a separate version of Windows without IE? Why? It wouldn't be any cheaper, considering the actual percentage of code that would be involved. Is there huge public demand for a version of Windows that doesn't have the IE icon?
Why are they asking for the source code, anyway? You can't understand a software system by asking for the source code. A higher-level overview of how the modules fit together would be much more useful.