My IE settings on one of my boxes was set at default, as they had never been changed. Browsing to some site (either Geocities or Tripod) evidently downloaded it and installed it. There was most definatly NO dialog box, or request to install. Literally, I came back to the machine, started IE, and there was a toolbar that wasn't there before. Freaked me out.
AdAware found it, and tried to removed it, but not everything was deleted, as there were still at least 1 or 2 DLLs that were registered and running, that couldn't be deleted. Couldn't find the processes, either. Had to use regserv to get rid of them. This company is about the lowest of the low in my book.
I agree with the Penny Arcade comic. AICN comments attract the absolute lowest forms of Internet life in existance. We're talking lower in the chain than 14-year-old AOL girls here.
That, and the fact that it's perhaps the ugliest "popular" site on the Internet. From the lovely "baby poop brown" color scheme, to the 800 pt. Ariel font used whenever Harry speaks. It just screams "hype".
AICN is the movie industry equivilent of the game-review/preview genre: Sellouts with no journalistic intergrity, who are just looking to keep the free "exclusives" flowing by pumping out as many hyped-up positive reviews as possible. And now, what do you know! AICN is actually moving into the game-review/preview genre!
And, the Voodoo with TV-Out was the 3500, not the 3000 that he mentions
Not true. I have an AGP Voodoo3 3000 with an S-Video TV-out sitting right here next to me. The 3500 just had a (slightly) faster processor.
From the interview with Peter Houston: I still believe Linux is an extension of the Unix paradigm. It's a command-line-focused approach that's not particularly designed to be user friendly. The Windows approach is very different.
This kind of shows how clueless Microsoft really is about competing with Linux. Lest anyone forget that Windows was nothing more than a extension of a command-line-focused operating system called MS-DOS that wasn't particularly use friendly? Microsoft just started to hide the command-line with Windows 95. The same is happening with Linux, as it gains more acceptance. More and more tools are being developed that eliminate the need for command-line work.
True, any distro of Linux isn't quite at the XP level not needing to use the command-line, but it's starting to head in that direction. And if more and more companies and, more importantly, governments start to actively look at switching, there will be a big boom in eliminating the command-lind dependence.
It's interesting to note that downloading music you already own is most likely perfectly legal, whether the RIAA likes to admit it or not, simply because of they way they are trying to categorize the sale of music.
Say for instance, a bunch of my CDs get scratched and are now unplayable on a couple of my players. So, I just download the whole albums off of Kazaa to replace them. Technically, I am within my rights to do this. Why? Because the music industry is trying to look at it like the software model, where the content is wholy apart from the media. Therefore, I've a payed for a licence to listen to this music, and not for a fragile disk that's been destroyed.
Interestingly, if they looked at it like they were selling you the CD (something they're loathe to do; see: the hard, bitter battle against used CD sales), instead of licencing the content, it could be argued illegal to do that. After all, if you scratch your car, you can't just walk down to the lot and drive another one off without asking, can you?
Of course, the RIAA once tried to convince people on their website that making backup copies of music you've bought was against the law. So, pesky legal "rights" are of little concern to them anyway.
Sold my Amiga 500 with monitor for a song a few years back. It was fun to play around with, kind of wish I still had it.
Also used to have a Commodore PET with a CBM 4040 years ago. But I got it from someone who stored it in a basement, and it smelled like mouse poop, which my family didn't appreciate.
On a side note, found this gem when searching eBay for "Amiga 500":
Commodore AMIGA 500 computer system in original box with Keyboard, Power Adapter, Video Cable, and Mouse. Very clean and box in great shape with some wear but has all inserts and packing material. Untested due to unfamiliarity, could not find ON button.
The problem is, advertising companies are trying to ignore the fact that the boom is over, done with, soooo 2000. And they're trying to convince everyone else that it's not over. And when people start to ignore them, they just get louder and more annoying.
The online advertising industry is long overdue for a HUGE meltdown. They've been dying for a while now, but they've just been postponing the inevetable.
I don't have a problem with paid listings, as long as they don't mess with the search order based on how much the companies pay. The Yellow Pages don't put the highest paying customers all in the front of the book with no regard to what you're looking for.
Let them have a nice little relevant ad in the search results, but keep the search results in proper order.
Usually with this sort of thing it's because they're trying to stick with a "theme". The media is designed to fit in with the look of the site. It's usually the product of letting graphic artists have too much say over the site design. Or, in small sites like this, thinking you're a graphic artist yourself.
The other reason is generally for copy protection. Sure, all you need to do is sift through the page source to locate the URL of the file... but average users aren't going to go through that much trouble, or aren't going to know how to do that. Of course, with these guys, I don't think they're very concerned about copyright, since fan films can be argued to violate all kinds of IP laws. You'd think they wouldn't be that uptight about someone spreading their movie around.
but users are forced to sign a seven month contract.
Forced? For a little over $17 a month? Heck, almost all broadband providers in the US force you to sign a 12-month contract, at $35+ a month! I'd take a 7-month contract at that price any day!
Hotmail is notoriously bad about spam. Their filters are easily the worst, and the "Junk Mail" folder only seems to catch a small fraction of the incoming spam, while filing away a good portion of vaild incoming messages. They also seem to have no protection against email bombing. I had a lame spammer mail bomb me overnight with a few hundred duplicates advertising NEW LOW MORGTAGE RATES, and Hotmail kindly managed to place the messages in the Junk Mail folder... and then disabled my account for going over the mailbox limit. And this happened three seperate times, over the course of a couple weeks, once when I was on vacation, and I missed who knows how many valid emails when I returned.
I ditched Hotmail shortly after that.
I wonder if the filters that are used by corporate America could be used by Hotmail, actually I wonder why they are not.
Because Microsoft caters to internet advertising companies. Internet Explorer alone can tell you that. I wouldn't be surprised if MS left Hotmail open to spam on purpose, while pocketing a few extra bucks from spam kings.
I used to, when I was pretty young, subscribe to 3-2-1 Contact. Every once in a while they would have 2-4 pages of BASIC code. Usually some goofy text game of some sort. Better than hex code, though...
SciFi is starting to pull an MTV. They don't seem to play that much sci-fi anymore. Slasher flicks are NOT sci-fi. Hellraiser is NOT sci-fi. They seem to play more horror movies than anything else. And not just because of Halloween.
The Time Warner/RoadRunner guy simply came in, installed a new NIC, installed the cable modem, set up the new email settings in Outlook, and changed the IE homepage to their portal. I scoured the system when I got home from work (my wife was the only one here when he did the install) and was quite relieved that he didn't install any software.
Firefly is also hindered by the fact that it's on Fox, which has a horrible record of giving up on sci-fi shows right as they start to get good and build a following.
A querky show like Firefly isn't going to catch on right away. It takes some time for the word to pass on, and people to start reccomending it to their friends. Unfortunatly, Fox will never afford it this time. It'll be gone by December.
Flamebait? Who's the idiot who modded this? Unfortunatly, I don't have mod points today.
Anyway, I agree. The show isn't the same without Daniel. This probably will be it's last season. 7 seasons isn't a bad run for a cult-followed sci-fi show!
Patents can provide a valuable service. I work for a non-profit research company who takes out patents on medical treatments to insure they are available for everyone to benefit from. To specifically prevent some hoser like you from keeping people from benefiting from innovations just to pad your pocketbook.
How the heck are your patents "protecting people who create value from those who would steal it"? You freely admit you didn't even do any of the inventing! You just pick up patents from others, and exploit them for your own profit!
How is this "protecting" anything? The only thing it's protecting is your greedy, greasy little hands.
If some of the larger companies, such as Amazon and eBay, were smart, and thinking ahead, they'd help fund some of these smaller companies defense funds, and back them up in court. Cut these idiots in San Diego off before they can build their "war chest".
My HP laptop came with WordPerfect2000. Can't stand it. Akward to use, lacks in features. WordPerfect was cool back in version 5.1. Of course, it was just about the ONLY viable word processor back in 5.1.
The first thing I did was uninstall it and install OpenOffice 1.0.1.
A lot of companies still do the completely outdated and pointless electronic-to-paper check thing... usually because of one reason: They can charge some huge "service" fee for having to print the check, which is almost pure profit for them.
In this regard, Europe is still lightyears ahead of the US banking system. Quite a few European banks are fully electronic, no checks needed at all, with almost every personal transaction being direct account-to-account electronic transfers. No phony check clearing periods, and no lame "service" fees charged to you for actually doing something that saves the bank money.
Slashdot Mirror
Who's got the first "priest walks into a bar" joke/post?
In the past, they have done several tests of their ICBMs in the Atlantic whithout notifying neither the Americans, nor the Brits
And one of those tests gave birth to Godzilla!
Well, at least the American Godzilla.
And more importantly, why would they accept said submission?
My IE settings on one of my boxes was set at default, as they had never been changed. Browsing to some site (either Geocities or Tripod) evidently downloaded it and installed it. There was most definatly NO dialog box, or request to install. Literally, I came back to the machine, started IE, and there was a toolbar that wasn't there before. Freaked me out.
AdAware found it, and tried to removed it, but not everything was deleted, as there were still at least 1 or 2 DLLs that were registered and running, that couldn't be deleted. Couldn't find the processes, either. Had to use regserv to get rid of them. This company is about the lowest of the low in my book.
I agree with the Penny Arcade comic. AICN comments attract the absolute lowest forms of Internet life in existance. We're talking lower in the chain than 14-year-old AOL girls here.
That, and the fact that it's perhaps the ugliest "popular" site on the Internet. From the lovely "baby poop brown" color scheme, to the 800 pt. Ariel font used whenever Harry speaks. It just screams "hype".
AICN is the movie industry equivilent of the game-review/preview genre: Sellouts with no journalistic intergrity, who are just looking to keep the free "exclusives" flowing by pumping out as many hyped-up positive reviews as possible. And now, what do you know! AICN is actually moving into the game-review/preview genre!
And, the Voodoo with TV-Out was the 3500, not the 3000 that he mentions Not true. I have an AGP Voodoo3 3000 with an S-Video TV-out sitting right here next to me. The 3500 just had a (slightly) faster processor.
From the interview with Peter Houston:
I still believe Linux is an extension of the Unix paradigm. It's a command-line-focused approach that's not particularly designed to be user friendly. The Windows approach is very different.
This kind of shows how clueless Microsoft really is about competing with Linux. Lest anyone forget that Windows was nothing more than a extension of a command-line-focused operating system called MS-DOS that wasn't particularly use friendly? Microsoft just started to hide the command-line with Windows 95. The same is happening with Linux, as it gains more acceptance. More and more tools are being developed that eliminate the need for command-line work.
True, any distro of Linux isn't quite at the XP level not needing to use the command-line, but it's starting to head in that direction. And if more and more companies and, more importantly, governments start to actively look at switching, there will be a big boom in eliminating the command-lind dependence.
It's interesting to note that downloading music you already own is most likely perfectly legal, whether the RIAA likes to admit it or not, simply because of they way they are trying to categorize the sale of music.
Say for instance, a bunch of my CDs get scratched and are now unplayable on a couple of my players. So, I just download the whole albums off of Kazaa to replace them. Technically, I am within my rights to do this. Why? Because the music industry is trying to look at it like the software model, where the content is wholy apart from the media. Therefore, I've a payed for a licence to listen to this music, and not for a fragile disk that's been destroyed.
Interestingly, if they looked at it like they were selling you the CD (something they're loathe to do; see: the hard, bitter battle against used CD sales), instead of licencing the content, it could be argued illegal to do that. After all, if you scratch your car, you can't just walk down to the lot and drive another one off without asking, can you?
Of course, the RIAA once tried to convince people on their website that making backup copies of music you've bought was against the law. So, pesky legal "rights" are of little concern to them anyway.
All in about 20 seconds from start to finish.
And if you act now, they'll throw in 4 hours of waiting in line absolutely free!
Sold my Amiga 500 with monitor for a song a few years back. It was fun to play around with, kind of wish I still had it.
Also used to have a Commodore PET with a CBM 4040 years ago. But I got it from someone who stored it in a basement, and it smelled like mouse poop, which my family didn't appreciate.
On a side note, found this gem when searching eBay for "Amiga 500":
Commodore AMIGA 500 computer system in original box with Keyboard, Power Adapter, Video Cable, and Mouse. Very clean and box in great shape with some wear but has all inserts and packing material. Untested due to unfamiliarity, could not find ON button.
The problem is, advertising companies are trying to ignore the fact that the boom is over, done with, soooo 2000. And they're trying to convince everyone else that it's not over. And when people start to ignore them, they just get louder and more annoying.
The online advertising industry is long overdue for a HUGE meltdown. They've been dying for a while now, but they've just been postponing the inevetable.
I don't have a problem with paid listings, as long as they don't mess with the search order based on how much the companies pay. The Yellow Pages don't put the highest paying customers all in the front of the book with no regard to what you're looking for.
Let them have a nice little relevant ad in the search results, but keep the search results in proper order.
Usually with this sort of thing it's because they're trying to stick with a "theme". The media is designed to fit in with the look of the site. It's usually the product of letting graphic artists have too much say over the site design. Or, in small sites like this, thinking you're a graphic artist yourself.
The other reason is generally for copy protection. Sure, all you need to do is sift through the page source to locate the URL of the file... but average users aren't going to go through that much trouble, or aren't going to know how to do that. Of course, with these guys, I don't think they're very concerned about copyright, since fan films can be argued to violate all kinds of IP laws. You'd think they wouldn't be that uptight about someone spreading their movie around.
but users are forced to sign a seven month contract.
Forced? For a little over $17 a month? Heck, almost all broadband providers in the US force you to sign a 12-month contract, at $35+ a month! I'd take a 7-month contract at that price any day!
If your Wi-Fi network extends 4 miles, then the terrorists have already won.
Hotmail is notoriously bad about spam. Their filters are easily the worst, and the "Junk Mail" folder only seems to catch a small fraction of the incoming spam, while filing away a good portion of vaild incoming messages. They also seem to have no protection against email bombing. I had a lame spammer mail bomb me overnight with a few hundred duplicates advertising NEW LOW MORGTAGE RATES, and Hotmail kindly managed to place the messages in the Junk Mail folder... and then disabled my account for going over the mailbox limit. And this happened three seperate times, over the course of a couple weeks, once when I was on vacation, and I missed who knows how many valid emails when I returned.
I ditched Hotmail shortly after that.
I wonder if the filters that are used by corporate America could be used by Hotmail, actually I wonder why they are not.
Because Microsoft caters to internet advertising companies. Internet Explorer alone can tell you that. I wouldn't be surprised if MS left Hotmail open to spam on purpose, while pocketing a few extra bucks from spam kings.
I used to, when I was pretty young, subscribe to 3-2-1 Contact. Every once in a while they would have 2-4 pages of BASIC code. Usually some goofy text game of some sort. Better than hex code, though...
SciFi is starting to pull an MTV. They don't seem to play that much sci-fi anymore. Slasher flicks are NOT sci-fi. Hellraiser is NOT sci-fi. They seem to play more horror movies than anything else. And not just because of Halloween.
The Time Warner/RoadRunner guy simply came in, installed a new NIC, installed the cable modem, set up the new email settings in Outlook, and changed the IE homepage to their portal. I scoured the system when I got home from work (my wife was the only one here when he did the install) and was quite relieved that he didn't install any software.
Firefly is also hindered by the fact that it's on Fox, which has a horrible record of giving up on sci-fi shows right as they start to get good and build a following.
A querky show like Firefly isn't going to catch on right away. It takes some time for the word to pass on, and people to start reccomending it to their friends. Unfortunatly, Fox will never afford it this time. It'll be gone by December.
Flamebait? Who's the idiot who modded this? Unfortunatly, I don't have mod points today. Anyway, I agree. The show isn't the same without Daniel. This probably will be it's last season. 7 seasons isn't a bad run for a cult-followed sci-fi show!
If you really are an "executive" of Pan IP...
Patents can provide a valuable service. I work for a non-profit research company who takes out patents on medical treatments to insure they are available for everyone to benefit from. To specifically prevent some hoser like you from keeping people from benefiting from innovations just to pad your pocketbook.
How the heck are your patents "protecting people who create value from those who would steal it"? You freely admit you didn't even do any of the inventing! You just pick up patents from others, and exploit them for your own profit!
How is this "protecting" anything? The only thing it's protecting is your greedy, greasy little hands.
If some of the larger companies, such as Amazon and eBay, were smart, and thinking ahead, they'd help fund some of these smaller companies defense funds, and back them up in court. Cut these idiots in San Diego off before they can build their "war chest".
My HP laptop came with WordPerfect2000. Can't stand it. Akward to use, lacks in features. WordPerfect was cool back in version 5.1. Of course, it was just about the ONLY viable word processor back in 5.1.
The first thing I did was uninstall it and install OpenOffice 1.0.1.
Off topic:
A lot of companies still do the completely outdated and pointless electronic-to-paper check thing... usually because of one reason: They can charge some huge "service" fee for having to print the check, which is almost pure profit for them.
In this regard, Europe is still lightyears ahead of the US banking system. Quite a few European banks are fully electronic, no checks needed at all, with almost every personal transaction being direct account-to-account electronic transfers. No phony check clearing periods, and no lame "service" fees charged to you for actually doing something that saves the bank money.