From TFA: "We need information. Information helps us makes cases." - Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez.
Number 6: Where am I? Number 2: In the Village. Number 6: What do you want? Number 2: We want information. Number 6: Whose side are you on? Number 2: That would be telling.
We want information... information... information. Number 6: You won't get it. Number 2: By hook or by crook, we will.
Come to think of it...
Number Six: Everybody votes for a dictator.
...and also...
Chessmaster: "You must be new here. In time, most of us join the enemy - against ourselves."
I guess it takes a village to raise a Prisoner as well as a Child.
The thing I miss most about the Republican wing of the Party is the wing that asked questions like "What would the Democrat wing of the Party do with these powers?"
I just wonder how long the Democrat wing of the Party that's currently asking these sorts of questions will last when they're handed power in 2008?
> At one point the Napster brand might have had all the gravitas of a Che Guevara shirt. At this point it has all the gravitas of a Jar Jar Binks shirt.
Thanks! As a Mind about to be installed in a Culture GSV, I've been looking everywhere for the name of my ship. Who'd have thunk that I'd have found it in this little corner of the universe?
/cracks a bottle of Champagne across the bow of the GSV About As Much Gravitas As A Jar Jar Binks Shirt
> Arrr, 'tis International Talk Like A Pirate Day! What a fell blow to pirates everywhere! Let's keel-haul the negative vibes by keepin' the parlance circa 1700's, me hearties!
Arrrr! And next time, we'll win, by gum, for we'll have Diebold votin' machines doin' the countin' for us! (Get away from my poop deck, CmdrTaco:)
> On the other hand, this sort of thing could also seriously undermine the confidence that people have in online transactions and the like, so I can't help but wonder if maybe it isn't shortsighted not to just take the hit.
Exactly. I exercise a lot more due diligence than most customers do: Hardware firewall (ingress/egress), software firewall (egress), Firefox (instead of IE) Javashit disabled (in Firefox and IE), autorun and other "conveniences" in Windows disabled, following security news, and patching for things (like the WMF and JPEG header exploits) that my previous defenses wouldn't have defended me against, and keeping a known good disk image on read-only media to wipe the box and start over. I've yet to see anything get past the hardware firewall. So far. But someday I'll screw up. Or just be unlucky. (Hmm, how sure can any of us be that the routers and/or DNS servers between your box and your bank's box are never compromised, especially with ISPs getting into the "let's fuck around with DNS" game like Verizon did a while back, and Earthpink's trying to do now:)
If my bank's no longer willing to back its customers up, I'll do the only sensible thing: go back to meatspace banking.
So, Bank, what's it gonna be? Do you really want to have to hire enough tellers to support a significant fraction of your customers going back to meatspace? Or are the cost savings you deliver to your shareholders (and the market share and deposit base that you gain by being easier to do business with) sufficient to justify the occasional payout to a duped/phished customer?
But seeing as how electronic banking has enabled you to offer some of the most powerful and convenient financial services to the market anywhere in the world, you gotta ask yourself a question: "Do I feel unlucky?"
I know what you're thinking. You're thinking "does phishing cost me $6B/year, and will my customers going back to meatspace or to my competitors cost me only $5B?"
Well, to tell you the truth, in all the technological excitement, I'm not really sure myself.
But it comes down to just one question: Your customers don't want to be phished. You don't want your customers to be phished. You're implementing security measures, but they're not perfect. So it comes down to just one question. Do you feel unlucky?
>...for getting into the minds of spammers is a couple rounds of semi-jacketed.357 hollow-points.
*BLAM!*
You have received this delivery of copper and lead because you or a friend subscribed you to the "Bullet of the Week" list.
To opt out of "Bullet of the Week", please have each spammer in your MLM's downline submit the following form in triplicate, including at least one of their own fingerprints, as well as one of your fingerprints, dipped in the bloody goo from your still-steaming remains.
Your security and privacy are important to us, so please allow 6-8 weeks for us to conduct the proper forensic analysis to verify the identity of your downline member before we can remove you from our "Bullet of the Week" list.
NOTE TO DOWNLINE MEMBERS: Pay no attention to the fact that the middle of the three forms includes the verbiage "By placing my bloody fingerprint on this form, I hereby opt in to the Bullet of the Week mailing list".
> Well, unzip your tinfoil, already. If I'm a designer, I'm sure not going to spend time and effort supporting users who disable Javascript and images. What, do you expect me to support Lynx, too?
Yeah, but would using an ALT attribute with, say, "up" or "down" instead of "*" really kill you guys?:)
> THANK YOU. I was thinking the same thing. Flat mode FTW. I was pissed when they started splitting things into pages and I couldn't load all the comments at once anymore on discussions with 100+ replies.
You can use the weird little box on the side to get something approximating a flat mode, but it's still got lots of eye candy, but it takes multiple mouse clicks (and Javascript enabled) to get to it. The left margin of the text is still pretty ragged with various threading indentations.
I think the root cause of these UI bugs is that people who write web apps aren't the people who read textual content.
For instance, people who don't spend much time reading (books, web pages, whatever), you probably want to make sure "everything fits on a computer screen, browser maximized, no vertical scrolling"
If you are a chronic reader, that'll give you a headache within 30 seconds. There's a reason why dead-tree books, dead-tree newspapers, and even PDFs and e-books, are oriented portrait-style -- taller vertically than horizontally. And the text is presented in a flat view -- paragraph after paragraph of words, left margin static, right margin ragged.
If you're a web designer, that's unthinkably boring.
If you're a programmer, that's also pretty weird -- because there's a huge amount of information packed into every line of text, and the more you can show on the screen -- both by showing indentation and even highlighting syntax -- is a great idea.
Those models fail when applied to English. There's simply not enough information in the first 30-80 characters of a good post, for instance, to make the Abbreviated mode useful. There's a lot of noise in English. I could have made this point by saying something as short as "English has lots of syntactical sugar" -- but instead I phrased it three or four different ways, figuring that one of them would stick.
The syntactic sugar in English means that it's a language that's great for skimming -- but a skimmable pile of text is something more akin to a book than either an interactive web application, and it's definitely nothing like the code in your editor.
Hence, flat mode FTW. Make the browser look like a big book, use the PgUp/PgDn keys to replace forward/back, and if it's got 300 kilobytes of text, so be it!
My beef with D2 may be with the design -- but my meta-beef is about a design process that started based on an incorrect assumptions about what Slashdot is all about: It's as much a means for reading discussions as it is for having them. I'll even wager that people like us (who post to threads) are in the minority of the/. userbase.
> Just use the threshold menu on the left to move the threshold down. You'll still keep the capability to close comment threads.
It took me 5 minutes and 20-30 mouse clicks to figure out two things:
1) You must have images turned on. The "up arrow" and "down arrow" things are represented in non-image mode by a bunch of asterisks, and there's nothing to indicate that they're live.
2) You must have javashit turned on. OK, I wasn't that surprised by the need for Javascript since this is supposedly the new AJAX hawtness, but I was surprised that it failed so ungracefully.
3) There's a lag (because we're dealing with Javascript) between the mouse click and the re-rendering of the page and the threshold box/menu.
4) There's an annoying thing about the threshold box, in that if all I want to do is crank it to "80 full / 0 abbreviated / 0 hidden" (I have zero interest ever seeing an abbreviated comment. This isn't Digg - It's OK to say something that takes more than one line to express.), I've gotta reposition the mouse after every click on the threshold box.
How about we find a middle ground: Website uses D2, but fails gracefully: If Javascript is disabled, it reverts back to D1.
(Yeah, I disable Javascript wherever possible. Google Maps and online shopping/banking are probably the only exceptions I make to this rule. I'm also occasionally on bandwidth-restricted connections, and have developed a habit of browsing as lean as possible. If a website's contents are mostly text, it should be just as usable with its images, javascript, and even colors/fonts overridden. I still prefer a good serif font over the "new" default, too:)
> When reading a comment, sometimes I want to read all its responses so I click on "X hidden comments". When done, I would like to collapse those comments I have just revealed. Is there a way to do this?
I have the opposite problem. How do I get "the old "Flat" view" mode? I'm interested in maximizing the number of words on my screen, and minimizing the number of mouse clicks.
From TFA:
Rethink What Old Functionality By this I primarily mean discussion filters and ordering. By default D2 uses a thread ordered, chronological display. The old system had many other sort modes, but I'm not how sure how effective these are once threaded. So I may simply leave the old system in place for users who want to see a flat discussion ignorant of threads ordered by date or score. Since this is only a tiny percentage of users, I figure it can wait.
What makes Slashdot so great is that I can pop open a tab with 100 - or even 5 tabs of 100 posts each - and simply skim the entire discussion, without having to do any navigation more complicated than hitting PgDn every few seconds.
If I have to move a mouse and click on every one of 100 messages, or even 10 seperate subthreads, I'm not going to bother reading any of it.
The fact that I can expand a thread without a page load is cool -- but the fact that I have to expand threads without a page load isn't a feature -- it's a bug. Seriously -- if I can expand a comment/thread with a mouseclick but without a page load, then it means my browser has every word of the entire discussion sitting in RAM, and your UI is getting in the way of the user experience because it's preventing my browser from rendering it.
> "observers noted that players had difficulty ascertaining what organizations and whom within those organizations to contact when there was no previously established relationship or pre-determined plans for response coordination and risk assessments/mitigation. There was a general recognition of the difficulties organizations faced when attempting to establish trust with unfamiliar organizations during time of crisis."
> > The limited width of the beam also gives me reason to believe that even the most poorly-trained/sadistic operator isn't going to leave it pointed at any one target for a prolonged period of time: when you're outnumbered 100:1 by an angry mob and can only fry those protestors in the path of a very narrow beam, you're going to have a very strong incentive to keep that beam moving across as many protestors as possible. The operator who elects to fry the hell out of some poor schmuck like an ant under a magnifying glass does so at the risk of having his position very quickly overrun by the remaining 99 ants:)
> >I can see it now, it's going to be like Vietnam where the first person to get capped is the radio operator. When you hurt somebody this badly with "non-lethal means" it's going to escalate. I wonder if they're going to put a bullet-proof shield up covering the operator's position.
Well, for permanent static installations, the operator could be miles away in a bunker.
Looking again at the brochure, it looks like the operator is in a metal shedlike housing beneath the emitter. That looks to be pretty bulletproof relative to most civilian environments, while allowing for quick setup and removal. Haul it in on a flatbed a few days before the event, defend the target, and haul it away the next weekend.
The brochure also points out that the emitter can be mounted on (and presumably powered by) a vehicle such as a Humvee, which gives you the advantage of mobility while remaining pretty bulletproof against the sorts of crowds likely to be encountered in US cities. Baghdad, maybe not so much -- but sufficiently bulletproof (as well as mobile enough) to deal with football/hockey/basketball celebrations, LA riots, Seattle protestors, or Katrina refugees, who are the intended "target audience":)
> Read the product sheet on the page linked in my comment. It will explain why damage isn't permanent (non-lethal). Also, while I am not positive about this) the system isn't designed to sustain energy for durations long enough to cause damage (pulsing, maybe).
Thanks for linking to the brochure.
It looks like the beam is sufficiently narrow that it can target individuals or small groups, so I can see how targets can move away from the beam even in large crowds.
The limited width of the beam also gives me reason to believe that even the most poorly-trained/sadistic operator isn't going to leave it pointed at any one target for a prolonged period of time: when you're outnumbered 100:1 by an angry mob and can only fry those protestors in the path of a very narrow beam, you're going to have a very strong incentive to keep that beam moving across as many protestors as possible. The operator who elects to fry the hell out of some poor schmuck like an ant under a magnifying glass does so at the risk of having his position very quickly overrun by the remaining 99 ants:)
With the wavelengths discussed, I can also see why the energy is absorbed near the surface of the skin and is unlikely to effect things like pins/plates or other surgically implanted devices such as pacemakers.
The only question I'd have about safety is the effects that rapid heating would have on the human cornea. Is there anything in the public literature regarding this? (I'm thinking that much of this must have been researched back in the WW2 and Korean War era when we were learning how to train techs to work on radar installations without cooking themselves, but I'm damned if I'm gonna Google for stuff like that these days:)
> i'd really like to know why it downloaded all those outlook patches, considering i don't have that installed and have never had it installed...
DIR C:\PROGRA~1\OUTLOO~1
Son of a bitch. They're back on my box too. I remember how many hoops I had to jump through to delete them when I first set up this box. Now they're back, but the old batch file that wiped the multiple copies of the.DL_ files in \I386 as well as the copies in the DLLCACHE directory no longer works. WTF?
> > Death is not permanent online. > >
Need to read your copy of Neuromancer again, fuck with the wrong black ice, and death online is infact, permanent.
> >
Oh, wait I guess I'm about 20 years ahead of reality.
And wouldn't it be great if it was...
Any doubts on the size of the market for software capable of killing a fucktard over TCP/IP can be resolved by spending 20 minutes in any MMORPG. 10 if the MMORPG is SWG and you're talking about Jedi.
> The resulting disk conforms to DVD standards so
it can be played on DVD players, and also on HD-DVD
players after upgrading the firmware. The disk can
have either Single Layer DVD (4.7GB) + Dual Layer
HD DVD (30GB); or Dual Layer DVD (8.5GB) + Single Layer HD DVD (15GB).
Going by the number of stretched video I've seen
from users who don't know the difference between
widescreen/letterboxed/4:3/16:9/pan-and-scan, (just when you thought "but I don't like the horizontal black bars at the top and bottom" was dying out on 4:3 screens, the very same who now have 16:9 screens are sying things like "I don't like the vertical black bars on the left and right!")...
The dirty little secret of this technology
is that it's just a regular DVD, but you can
convince yourself that it's HD-DVD when you play it back on an HD-DVD player... on your NTSC display. Or something.
(And if you can't immediately tell the difference, I'm sure there's a guy
in a blue shirt who'll be happy to sell you some triple-layer
Monster Cables that'll cure what ails ya. "Only triple-layer
monster cables are compliant with triple-layer HD, sir, and can we interest you in the extended warranty on your new cables?")
> When you have a monopoly > >
What're your customers going to do?
The guy at the keyboard of a Windows Vista box, using Microsoft Office at work, and Windows Media Player at home is not the customer, he is the product. The customers are Dell, AOL, media licensing conglomerates, and so on.
> > I thought "The Man Trap" was an idiom for "Marriage" >
> Isn't that what it is?:)
Umm, sir? This is a Star Trek thread. Kirk isn't the Admiral you're looking for, even if his fingers always smell like fish. You want that other Admiral whose fingers also smell like fish.
> While it may be funny to joke about it serving the customers' best interest if Microsoft were to go belly up,
Microsoft is serving its customers' best interests. Their customers are system builders such as Dell, purchasing managers at businesses, and media companies.
The guy at the keyboard of a Windows Vista box, using Microsoft Office at work, and Windows Media Player at home is not the customer, he is the product.
Slashdot Mirror
- Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez.
Number 6: Where am I?
Number 2: In the Village.
Number 6: What do you want?
Number 2: We want information.
Number 6: Whose side are you on?
Number 2: That would be telling.
We want information... information... information.
Number 6: You won't get it.
Number 2: By hook or by crook, we will.
Come to think of it...
Number Six: Everybody votes for a dictator.
Chessmaster: "You must be new here. In time, most of us join the enemy - against ourselves."
I guess it takes a village to raise a Prisoner as well as a Child.
The thing I miss most about the Republican wing of the Party is the wing that asked questions like "What would the Democrat wing of the Party do with these powers?"
I just wonder how long the Democrat wing of the Party that's currently asking these sorts of questions will last when they're handed power in 2008?
Thanks! As a Mind about to be installed in a Culture GSV, I've been looking everywhere for the name of my ship. Who'd have thunk that I'd have found it in this little corner of the universe?
AVAST! Ah've had it with these landlubbin' memes on this landlubbin' website!
Arrrr! And next time, we'll win, by gum, for we'll have Diebold votin' machines doin' the countin' for us! (Get away from my poop deck, CmdrTaco :)
Exactly. I exercise a lot more due diligence than most customers do: Hardware firewall (ingress/egress), software firewall (egress), Firefox (instead of IE) Javashit disabled (in Firefox and IE), autorun and other "conveniences" in Windows disabled, following security news, and patching for things (like the WMF and JPEG header exploits) that my previous defenses wouldn't have defended me against, and keeping a known good disk image on read-only media to wipe the box and start over. I've yet to see anything get past the hardware firewall. So far. But someday I'll screw up. Or just be unlucky. (Hmm, how sure can any of us be that the routers and/or DNS servers between your box and your bank's box are never compromised, especially with ISPs getting into the "let's fuck around with DNS" game like Verizon did a while back, and Earthpink's trying to do now :)
If my bank's no longer willing to back its customers up, I'll do the only sensible thing: go back to meatspace banking.
So, Bank, what's it gonna be? Do you really want to have to hire enough tellers to support a significant fraction of your customers going back to meatspace? Or are the cost savings you deliver to your shareholders (and the market share and deposit base that you gain by being easier to do business with) sufficient to justify the occasional payout to a duped/phished customer?
But seeing as how electronic banking has enabled you to offer some of the most powerful and convenient financial services to the market anywhere in the world, you gotta ask yourself a question: "Do I feel unlucky?"
I know what you're thinking. You're thinking "does phishing cost me $6B/year, and will my customers going back to meatspace or to my competitors cost me only $5B?"
Well, to tell you the truth, in all the technological excitement, I'm not really sure myself.
But it comes down to just one question: Your customers don't want to be phished. You don't want your customers to be phished. You're implementing security measures, but they're not perfect. So it comes down to just one question. Do you feel unlucky?
Well do ya ... Bank?
*BLAM!*
You have received this delivery of copper and lead because you or a friend subscribed you to the "Bullet of the Week" list.
To opt out of "Bullet of the Week", please have each spammer in your MLM's downline submit the following form in triplicate, including at least one of their own fingerprints, as well as one of your fingerprints, dipped in the bloody goo from your still-steaming remains.
Your security and privacy are important to us, so please allow 6-8 weeks for us to conduct the proper forensic analysis to verify the identity of your downline member before we can remove you from our "Bullet of the Week" list.
NOTE TO DOWNLINE MEMBERS: Pay no attention to the fact that the middle of the three forms includes the verbiage "By placing my bloody fingerprint on this form, I hereby opt in to the Bullet of the Week mailing list".
Naw, that'd be a BSD-style license, not a GPL :)
Yeah, but would using an ALT attribute with, say, "up" or "down" instead of "*" really kill you guys? :)
Cloud, silver lining, and all that.
You can use the weird little box on the side to get something approximating a flat mode, but it's still got lots of eye candy, but it takes multiple mouse clicks (and Javascript enabled) to get to it. The left margin of the text is still pretty ragged with various threading indentations.
I think the root cause of these UI bugs is that people who write web apps aren't the people who read textual content.
For instance, people who don't spend much time reading (books, web pages, whatever), you probably want to make sure "everything fits on a computer screen, browser maximized, no vertical scrolling"
If you are a chronic reader, that'll give you a headache within 30 seconds. There's a reason why dead-tree books, dead-tree newspapers, and even PDFs and e-books, are oriented portrait-style -- taller vertically than horizontally. And the text is presented in a flat view -- paragraph after paragraph of words, left margin static, right margin ragged.
If you're a web designer, that's unthinkably boring.
If you're a programmer, that's also pretty weird -- because there's a huge amount of information packed into every line of text, and the more you can show on the screen -- both by showing indentation and even highlighting syntax -- is a great idea.
Those models fail when applied to English. There's simply not enough information in the first 30-80 characters of a good post, for instance, to make the Abbreviated mode useful. There's a lot of noise in English. I could have made this point by saying something as short as "English has lots of syntactical sugar" -- but instead I phrased it three or four different ways, figuring that one of them would stick.
The syntactic sugar in English means that it's a language that's great for skimming -- but a skimmable pile of text is something more akin to a book than either an interactive web application, and it's definitely nothing like the code in your editor.
Hence, flat mode FTW. Make the browser look like a big book, use the PgUp/PgDn keys to replace forward/back, and if it's got 300 kilobytes of text, so be it!
My beef with D2 may be with the design -- but my meta-beef is about a design process that started based on an incorrect assumptions about what Slashdot is all about: It's as much a means for reading discussions as it is for having them. I'll even wager that people like us (who post to threads) are in the minority of the /. userbase.
It took me 5 minutes and 20-30 mouse clicks to figure out two things:
1) You must have images turned on. The "up arrow" and "down arrow" things are represented in non-image mode by a bunch of asterisks, and there's nothing to indicate that they're live.
2) You must have javashit turned on. OK, I wasn't that surprised by the need for Javascript since this is supposedly the new AJAX hawtness, but I was surprised that it failed so ungracefully.
3) There's a lag (because we're dealing with Javascript) between the mouse click and the re-rendering of the page and the threshold box/menu.
4) There's an annoying thing about the threshold box, in that if all I want to do is crank it to "80 full / 0 abbreviated / 0 hidden" (I have zero interest ever seeing an abbreviated comment. This isn't Digg - It's OK to say something that takes more than one line to express.), I've gotta reposition the mouse after every click on the threshold box.
How about we find a middle ground: Website uses D2, but fails gracefully: If Javascript is disabled, it reverts back to D1.
(Yeah, I disable Javascript wherever possible. Google Maps and online shopping/banking are probably the only exceptions I make to this rule. I'm also occasionally on bandwidth-restricted connections, and have developed a habit of browsing as lean as possible. If a website's contents are mostly text, it should be just as usable with its images, javascript, and even colors/fonts overridden. I still prefer a good serif font over the "new" default, too :)
I have the opposite problem. How do I get "the old "Flat" view" mode? I'm interested in maximizing the number of words on my screen, and minimizing the number of mouse clicks.
From TFA:
What makes Slashdot so great is that I can pop open a tab with 100 - or even 5 tabs of 100 posts each - and simply skim the entire discussion, without having to do any navigation more complicated than hitting PgDn every few seconds.
If I have to move a mouse and click on every one of 100 messages, or even 10 seperate subthreads, I'm not going to bother reading any of it.
The fact that I can expand a thread without a page load is cool -- but the fact that I have to expand threads without a page load isn't a feature -- it's a bug. Seriously -- if I can expand a comment/thread with a mouseclick but without a page load, then it means my browser has every word of the entire discussion sitting in RAM, and your UI is getting in the way of the user experience because it's preventing my browser from rendering it.
> "observers noted that players had difficulty ascertaining what organizations and whom within those organizations to contact when there was no previously established relationship or pre-determined plans for response coordination and risk assessments/mitigation. There was a general recognition of the difficulties organizations faced when attempting to establish trust with unfamiliar organizations during time of crisis."
English:
"Situation Normal, All Fucked Up."
>
>I can see it now, it's going to be like Vietnam where the first person to get capped is the radio operator. When you hurt somebody this badly with "non-lethal means" it's going to escalate. I wonder if they're going to put a bullet-proof shield up covering the operator's position.
Well, for permanent static installations, the operator could be miles away in a bunker.
Looking again at the brochure, it looks like the operator is in a metal shedlike housing beneath the emitter. That looks to be pretty bulletproof relative to most civilian environments, while allowing for quick setup and removal. Haul it in on a flatbed a few days before the event, defend the target, and haul it away the next weekend.
The brochure also points out that the emitter can be mounted on (and presumably powered by) a vehicle such as a Humvee, which gives you the advantage of mobility while remaining pretty bulletproof against the sorts of crowds likely to be encountered in US cities. Baghdad, maybe not so much -- but sufficiently bulletproof (as well as mobile enough) to deal with football/hockey/basketball celebrations, LA riots, Seattle protestors, or Katrina refugees, who are the intended "target audience" :)
Thanks for linking to the brochure.
It looks like the beam is sufficiently narrow that it can target individuals or small groups, so I can see how targets can move away from the beam even in large crowds.
The limited width of the beam also gives me reason to believe that even the most poorly-trained/sadistic operator isn't going to leave it pointed at any one target for a prolonged period of time: when you're outnumbered 100:1 by an angry mob and can only fry those protestors in the path of a very narrow beam, you're going to have a very strong incentive to keep that beam moving across as many protestors as possible. The operator who elects to fry the hell out of some poor schmuck like an ant under a magnifying glass does so at the risk of having his position very quickly overrun by the remaining 99 ants :)
With the wavelengths discussed, I can also see why the energy is absorbed near the surface of the skin and is unlikely to effect things like pins/plates or other surgically implanted devices such as pacemakers.
The only question I'd have about safety is the effects that rapid heating would have on the human cornea. Is there anything in the public literature regarding this? (I'm thinking that much of this must have been researched back in the WW2 and Korean War era when we were learning how to train techs to work on radar installations without cooking themselves, but I'm damned if I'm gonna Google for stuff like that these days :)
DIR C:\PROGRA~1\OUTLOO~1
Son of a bitch. They're back on my box too. I remember how many hoops I had to jump through to delete them when I first set up this box. Now they're back, but the old batch file that wiped the multiple copies of the .DL_ files in \I386 as well as the copies in the DLLCACHE directory no longer works. WTF?
>
> Need to read your copy of Neuromancer again, fuck with the wrong black ice, and death online is infact, permanent.
>
> Oh, wait I guess I'm about 20 years ahead of reality.
And wouldn't it be great if it was...
Any doubts on the size of the market for software capable of killing a fucktard over TCP/IP can be resolved by spending 20 minutes in any MMORPG. 10 if the MMORPG is SWG and you're talking about Jedi.
Going by the number of stretched video I've seen from users who don't know the difference between widescreen/letterboxed/4:3/16:9/pan-and-scan, (just when you thought "but I don't like the horizontal black bars at the top and bottom" was dying out on 4:3 screens, the very same who now have 16:9 screens are sying things like "I don't like the vertical black bars on the left and right!")...
The dirty little secret of this technology is that it's just a regular DVD, but you can convince yourself that it's HD-DVD when you play it back on an HD-DVD player... on your NTSC display. Or something.
(And if you can't immediately tell the difference, I'm sure there's a guy in a blue shirt who'll be happy to sell you some triple-layer Monster Cables that'll cure what ails ya. "Only triple-layer monster cables are compliant with triple-layer HD, sir, and can we interest you in the extended warranty on your new cables?")
>
> What're your customers going to do?
The guy at the keyboard of a Windows Vista box, using Microsoft Office at work, and Windows Media Player at home is not the customer, he is the product. The customers are Dell, AOL, media licensing conglomerates, and so on.
Depends. What if his original hypothesis was the result of a divide by fish error? Proof, I tell you. Or at least 180 proof.
> > Isn't that what it is?
Umm, sir? This is a Star Trek thread. Kirk isn't the Admiral you're looking for, even if his fingers always smell like fish. You want that other Admiral whose fingers also smell like fish.
Funny. Pretty much sums up how I feel about the prohibition industry.
Microsoft is serving its customers' best interests. Their customers are system builders such as Dell, purchasing managers at businesses, and media companies.
The guy at the keyboard of a Windows Vista box, using Microsoft Office at work, and Windows Media Player at home is not the customer, he is the product.
> That's sort of fast.
> I guess.
Pleesedtameetcha, Anonymous Coward. So where is the best place to get pizza in Fort Meade these days? :)
(I saw a man upon the stair,
A little man who wasn't there,
He wasn't there again today,
I guess he works for NSA.)
That's what's so beautiful about standards. There are so many implementations to choose from!