Just bought 20Gb extra storage (mainly for picasaweb) a month ago. Payed 5 bucks a year for 20Gb. Now for 25Gb, i would have to pay 2,5 bucks a month. The pricing went for about 6 times the previous pricing plans. That's very disappointing. I won't go for google new pricing plans. If i ever need more, i'd rather pay for smugmug or something for my pictures, and may be keep my old good plan for google drive, until they kick me out.. Honestly, google, why do you want me to pay that much for synced data (means that those data are duplicated -and thus backed up- around my computers) ?
I think they really missed the point. (and increasing pricing to that level is just non-sense to me).
Stella Artois is a french brand, and well, i'm french (sorry 'bout that, at the time, i had no say in the matter:P ). So you can trust me if i tell you that this beer is nowhere near "cool" (and even a good fridge won't do anything about it:) ).. You may call it "piss" or any other weird name you can think of, but "cool" does not apply... never... i swear...
1) Direct download starts immediately and does not require others doing the same download to be more effective (all the contrary, in fact) 2) Direct Download does not require Mister I-Am-Not-A-Geek to fiddle with router or firewall configuration, opening ports and so on 3) Direct Download can go through your enterprise http proxy
yeah, i know that. The point is, that if tha law has taken shortcuts to catch someone to blame, there may be position where you can't really secure your access no matter what. Knowing that, i personnally would consider the law un-applicable. Not to mention the obligation to use WEP secured (hum) wifi to be able to connect a nintendo DS, for instance...
150k IPs a day does not mean they'll have 150k new IP each day. I'd rather bet it's the same old IPs from download going from one day to another (hey, those divx are HUGE;-) ).
Besides, not everyone goes emule or p2p. So, they won't have everyone listed.
Just 2 more things to tell about it : 1) The main effect of this is that everyone wanting to keep on with their illegal activities will jump on the foreing VPN provider. That will cost them, but "hey, now i'm paying 10 bucks a month, i'll have no remorse downloading tons of those illegal material". i'd rather say it'll give money to those private provider and finally tears people that were buying to the cartels from time to time (for the price of a spotify account, i can now have films, music and warez, without being annoyed...) 2) Every other ISP in France offer a free bandwidth sharing for the people within the same ISP circle. I.e. say i'm a ISP A client, i can connect to wifi hotspots everywhere ISP A has a client with a box up and running. Point is : who is to know it was me or somebody in the street using my internet access ? (but maybe this is biaised and ISP have a mean to know)
On a side note I'm curious how the US postal service survives. The UK postal service is on the brink of financial collapse and is for privatisation. If at a rough estimation, the US postal service has to travel up to 8 times the distance per person (in some areas), how the hell do they manage to stay afloat? Clearly the UK postal service needs to hire some of the guys the Americans have running their postal service and get rid of the imbeciles that run the British Royal Mail.
Well i guess the US postal service does not have to cover any cow field here and there and concentrate on where people actually lives. The distances are stretched, yes, but the 8 multiplicator is misleading. For instance, austin and houston metro only are about the third of the state population (around 7,5 Millions according to wikipedia).
I could put humidity sensors in my beer-hat, and it could tell me when to stop drinking so much booze.
Well, you're leaning to the "computer can do it for myself" track. That's something i can't buy and quite a dangerous trend that get some hypes here and there. Don't misunderstand me, they are things computer are good at (better than people), and things computer are just not suitable for (or shouldn't be used for).
If this stuff is just used to help people being even more lazy and behaves on "autopilot" like getting messages such as "Stop drinking so much booze", "it's time to go to bed", "you've been sit too much, go take a walk" (that's about what you propose). Well i'm definitely not for it. I once had a mum and dad looking up for such things, but i'm now past age. My remark is about having people acting adult and having responsible behavior. You are NO SHEEP.
If this is about improving the way computer behaves with people (Alt+Enter is not what your grandpa thinks about when looking at the holiday video you posted), in a way which means "keyboard and mouse are outdated, let's see how we can extend", well, that can be interesting (and more natural by the way : you don't need a keyboard or a mouse to communicate with real persons, after all. So, if we can avoid it with computer...).
I also had hard time for the 1st 45 minutes of avatar, trying to watch the nice environment in the background. Then i got picked up by the main action and the head aches disappeared : i was focusing on the same point as the camera. Conclusion : with 3D films, you have to watch where the camera focused...
For the 3D feature in itself, i'd say it's not that bad (even if not deserving the extra price.. and here it's 2€, which is 30% more expensive than 2$, hey !!;-) ). It's just the theater screen looks too small for real immersion : you really feel the borders. And for that reason i'd say that 3D flat screen TV will fail (not to mention the real interest of having the guy from "the price is right" in 3 D in your room;-) ?? Duh !).
I fully agree. For instance, phone service has been working reliably in France for years, but still, since years 200 or so, the ADSL offer became really interesting : 30 for unlimited access on a maximum of 16MB down (1M up) AND Free phone IP call (also unlimited). The phone quality was worse than the analogic one (at the beginning at least there was some echo, eventually), and sometimes the call would drop. But still, it didn't matter : it's Free with the internet access. So far, people are not ready to pay for the 5 9s reliability. They will pester when it doesn't work but won't pay for better quality. They consider the cost/quality ratio. Quality is good, but bucks are even better;)
Now you can also get your vista/XP whatever with IE7 , and have a virtual PC (vmware or whatever MS calls their stuff) runinng an linux image, that have ie4linux installed... Then you have IE7 on your main windows machines (god.. did i say windows is your primary OS ?) and test backward compatibility with IE 6, IE5.5 and another i don't remember the number within your neat little Linux image through wine... May be easier than having a win2k computer somewhere...
tried Stealther, and it seems to work fine. it juste log nothing while you're in stealth mode : the corresponding information logger are just disabled. As for a forensic investigation, i doubt it would find anything, since nothing is dumped to the hard disk. may be a RAM or swap dump would do it, but that's harder to do, and the data there are very likely to be overwritten,, so i guess stealther is good enough. Still, it doesn't prevent your companies proxy to write down logs or the targeted web site to log your IP, but you can however use some proxy anonymizer (simple free to use anonymous proxy) for wasting the target site log and combine it with transconnect (given you're using linux or some unix flavor) for preventing the proxy to log anything valuable (else the CONNECT command).
just a few word about that : 1) Minitel was never even close to a computer. It was an "advanced" terminal (advanced meaning more advanced than a simple phone : B&W 25x40 screen is nowhere close to "advanced" right now) 2) The Minitel network is now close to death in france, thanks to the web. No one keep on putting money in it, there are just a few historical service than crawl along for the ones that are not blessed by the ADSL fairy's magic wand)
Hey i got a 4 digits id, and a special 4 5 in a row one (great, isn't it)... Anyway, since i got this nice UID, i totally disagree with you... low digit are right, i am right, and truth lies in the special first uid account;d
When do they map the reste of Europe ? Honestly this is interesting, but since i won't go to the US anywhere near now, this stuff is useless to me... and even the satellite view won't do it, since they only map big european town and i'm leaving only 15 km from one, my town is not mapped... Now Google, stop the eye candy for a while and get fill in the data buckets... If you wan tto overtake the world, you'll have to map it:p
i did not say it would be easy. I just say i have a right to consume what i have paid for, and if i cannot make a copy of my property to keep it safe, then someone have to do. So if the majors don't want us to make copy, then they have to face this responsability.
No, here the appeal court ("cassation") is somewhat different. It will only judge wether the previous judging process was legal or not, but won't judge the fact again. For instance, if some evidence presenting process was not legally made, the appeal court could break the judgement. (and this implies a new trial).
So, AFAIK, this is quite definitive (but hey, that's law, it's always complicated enough so there is a way to work around).
Obviously, the protection systems are hurting the loyal consumers (yes, there are some, trust me) as a side effect. In France, it is legal to copy your CD and DVD, and anything. What is forbidden is to widespread them around, or even worse, selling illegal copies (the latter have always been toughly sued). But now, with these protection systems, when you damage your cd/dvd (kids scratching them, anyone ?), you've lost the benefits of them. IMHO, i globally agree the idea that you have to pay for what you consume (stealing is BAD. final dot.) -but may disagree on the price it is sold, or the insane way the bill is dispatched to the artists and producer amongst others-. A good thing would be to life guarantee the possible exchange of your broken/damaged CD/DVD, thus allowing them to be protected and uncopy-able. Also coming as a MUST is "stop making protection system that make your CD/DVD unusable on some legacy device" (like protected CD that could not be played on car player). That would be a good idea. But that implies that the majors invest some money in these, and also implies the majors cares about the consumer as a whole, not only his money...
Wrong, people from north of France does mayonnaise on their fries (but hey, they're quite near the belgians...) -it's definitely cultural- As far as i am concerned i don't like mayonnaise anyway...
well i haven't really used it, but plan to do so as soon as i can. I've wandered around the documentation, and, as far as i've read, it seems to be possible to use hibernate to map object on tables , but also to execute direct sql queries. All queries can be externalized to a xml ressource, so that should meet your nowadays requirements.
May be you (and your co-worker) should take a look at Hibernate
In my company, we are using something similar (well, same concept, just another implementation with less feature -don't shoot at me, i'm not to blame for that-) and the whole stuff performs quite well (so hibernate should perform even better, heh;-) )
In case anyone wonder, and since we did not have a slashdot article to promote this (but i don't care anyway), the frenchies can get an ADSL2+ (20Mb/s max), unlimited phone calls (mobile call for.19 cents () a minute -charged by second from the 1st second-) and TV through ADSL (when your close enough of the DSLAM) for 30 a month. Sure, the country is not as wide as Australia (people are more concentrated), and only half the population is covered (others can get a 512k. the providers should yet reach 80% of the population by the end of 2005), but the broadband is getting quite common here. For those who wonder, i'm 5km from the DSLAM, got a 61dB loss on my line, and still get 1,5kb down and 1kb up (phone service running fine, but no Tv)
Well, ant is running java and call for the Compiler class inside the same JVM. Java startup time is known to be slow, so make will never get close to ant compilation speed. I've been an Xemacs fan for a few years, and tried JDE. I had the feeling JDE was an attempt to bump some feature xemacs would not support otherwise : it worked, but was somehow painfull and laggy (Not to mention the times when you need to kill the BSH to get a refresh). Still, i've stick with it until a got a more powerfull computer, with enough RAM to run eclipse. Eclipse is not, by any way, bloated, but it requires large amount of RAM, and a fairly powerfull CPU. The slowdown i've experienced with eclipse were all due to the computer swapping the eclipse process (and swapping a 120Mb+ process is not trivial). Once you get enough RAM to avoid swapping, it runs smoothly. And once, you're used to "my file is saved, then it's compiled), you'll forget all your makefile, ant script what-so-ever...
Speaking of a toolkit, SWT is less linux centered and also quite a good toolkit. Never saw how gtk bindings looks like, so i won't compare, but for playing a bit with SWT (writing eclipse plugin), it's definitely worth a look (and wraps gtk as well).
this just can't work because it's not designed to be efficient but friendly for people who never learned to type (and are to lazy to, or just illogically scared):
1) laying keys alphabetically is easy for people looking at what they type and searching for keys, but inefficient for real typing (qwerty or even azerty keyboards are layed to optimize the dispatching of key typing through the different fingers while typing common letters combinations)
2) the keyborad colors : Hell ! who wants to type on a playskool keyboard sort of. That just makes me think of those keyboards you wrap on your real keyboard for the games designed for babies...
3) Too few keys. I'm sorry, but how the hell am i supposed to type in symbols and digits ? using some shift/caps lock-like key all the time is pain, even if they are placed in the middle so everything can be typed one hand. It would have been far more "user-friendly" to have some sort of numeric keypad (everyone is used to numeric keypads), and, why not, some symbol keypad. That would have been, even if ugly for real typer efficiency, more in the spirit of this user-friendly keyboard wannabe... 4) English don't use accents. But many of us out there do. Latin-based language go for cute and grave accents, spanish have some tilde, german loves "umlaut", and nordic language have '' (angstrom sort of). These are common letters. Having to reach them as symbol is NOT acceptable.
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Just bought 20Gb extra storage (mainly for picasaweb) a month ago. Payed 5 bucks a year for 20Gb.
Now for 25Gb, i would have to pay 2,5 bucks a month.
The pricing went for about 6 times the previous pricing plans. That's very disappointing.
I won't go for google new pricing plans. If i ever need more, i'd rather pay for smugmug or something for my pictures, and may be keep my old good plan for google drive, until they kick me out..
Honestly, google, why do you want me to pay that much for synced data (means that those data are duplicated -and thus backed up- around my computers) ?
I think they really missed the point. (and increasing pricing to that level is just non-sense to me).
Stella Artois is a french brand, and well, i'm french (sorry 'bout that, at the time, i had no say in the matter :P ). So you can trust me if i tell you that this beer is nowhere near "cool" (and even a good fridge won't do anything about it :) ) ..
You may call it "piss" or any other weird name you can think of, but "cool" does not apply... never... i swear...
1) Direct download starts immediately and does not require others doing the same download to be more effective (all the contrary, in fact)
2) Direct Download does not require Mister I-Am-Not-A-Geek to fiddle with router or firewall configuration, opening ports and so on
3) Direct Download can go through your enterprise http proxy
yeah, i know that. The point is, that if tha law has taken shortcuts to catch someone to blame, there may be position where you can't really secure your access no matter what. Knowing that, i personnally would consider the law un-applicable.
Not to mention the obligation to use WEP secured (hum) wifi to be able to connect a nintendo DS, for instance...
150k IPs a day does not mean they'll have 150k new IP each day. I'd rather bet it's the same old IPs from download going from one day to another (hey, those divx are HUGE ;-) ).
Besides, not everyone goes emule or p2p. So, they won't have everyone listed.
Just 2 more things to tell about it :
1) The main effect of this is that everyone wanting to keep on with their illegal activities will jump on the foreing VPN provider. That will cost them, but "hey, now i'm paying 10 bucks a month, i'll have no remorse downloading tons of those illegal material". i'd rather say it'll give money to those private provider and finally tears people that were buying to the cartels from time to time (for the price of a spotify account, i can now have films, music and warez, without being annoyed...)
2) Every other ISP in France offer a free bandwidth sharing for the people within the same ISP circle. I.e. say i'm a ISP A client, i can connect to wifi hotspots everywhere ISP A has a client with a box up and running. Point is : who is to know it was me or somebody in the street using my internet access ? (but maybe this is biaised and ISP have a mean to know)
my .2 french cents of euro
On a side note I'm curious how the US postal service survives. The UK postal service is on the brink of financial collapse and is for privatisation. If at a rough estimation, the US postal service has to travel up to 8 times the distance per person (in some areas), how the hell do they manage to stay afloat? Clearly the UK postal service needs to hire some of the guys the Americans have running their postal service and get rid of the imbeciles that run the British Royal Mail.
Well i guess the US postal service does not have to cover any cow field here and there and concentrate on where people actually lives. The distances are stretched, yes, but the 8 multiplicator is misleading.
For instance, austin and houston metro only are about the third of the state population (around 7,5 Millions according to wikipedia).
I could put humidity sensors in my beer-hat, and it could tell me when to stop drinking so much booze.
Well, you're leaning to the "computer can do it for myself" track. That's something i can't buy and quite a dangerous trend that get some hypes here and there.
Don't misunderstand me, they are things computer are good at (better than people), and things computer are just not suitable for (or shouldn't be used for).
If this stuff is just used to help people being even more lazy and behaves on "autopilot" like getting messages such as "Stop drinking so much booze", "it's time to go to bed", "you've been sit too much, go take a walk" (that's about what you propose). Well i'm definitely not for it. I once had a mum and dad looking up for such things, but i'm now past age. My remark is about having people acting adult and having responsible behavior. You are NO SHEEP.
If this is about improving the way computer behaves with people (Alt+Enter is not what your grandpa thinks about when looking at the holiday video you posted), in a way which means "keyboard and mouse are outdated, let's see how we can extend", well, that can be interesting (and more natural by the way : you don't need a keyboard or a mouse to communicate with real persons, after all. So, if we can avoid it with computer...).
I also had hard time for the 1st 45 minutes of avatar, trying to watch the nice environment in the background. Then i got picked up by the main action and the head aches disappeared : i was focusing on the same point as the camera.
Conclusion : with 3D films, you have to watch where the camera focused...
For the 3D feature in itself, i'd say it's not that bad (even if not deserving the extra price.. and here it's 2€, which is 30% more expensive than 2$, hey !! ;-) ). It's just the theater screen looks too small for real immersion : you really feel the borders. ;-) ?? Duh !).
And for that reason i'd say that 3D flat screen TV will fail (not to mention the real interest of having the guy from "the price is right" in 3 D in your room
Actually, i possess a dlna-enabled tv, and half my video library won't play for codec reasons. Now, if i could get a full screen vlc in this...
I fully agree. For instance, phone service has been working reliably in France for years, but still, since years 200 or so, the ADSL offer became really interesting : 30 for unlimited access on a maximum of 16MB down (1M up) AND Free phone IP call (also unlimited). ;)
The phone quality was worse than the analogic one (at the beginning at least there was some echo, eventually), and sometimes the call would drop. But still, it didn't matter : it's Free with the internet access.
So far, people are not ready to pay for the 5 9s reliability. They will pester when it doesn't work but won't pay for better quality. They consider the cost/quality ratio. Quality is good, but bucks are even better
Now you can also get your vista/XP whatever with IE7 , and have a virtual PC (vmware or whatever MS calls their stuff) runinng an linux image, that have ie4linux installed ...
e
Then you have IE7 on your main windows machines (god.. did i say windows is your primary OS ?) and test backward compatibility with IE 6, IE5.5 and another i don't remember the number within your neat little Linux image through wine...
May be easier than having a win2k computer somewhere...
Check it here :
http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/page/Main_Pag
tried Stealther, and it seems to work fine. it juste log nothing while you're in stealth mode : the corresponding information logger are just disabled. As for a forensic investigation, i doubt it would find anything, since nothing is dumped to the hard disk. may be a RAM or swap dump would do it, but that's harder to do, and the data there are very likely to be overwritten,, so i guess stealther is good enough. Still, it doesn't prevent your companies proxy to write down logs or the targeted web site to log your IP, but you can however use some proxy anonymizer (simple free to use anonymous proxy) for wasting the target site log and combine it with transconnect (given you're using linux or some unix flavor) for preventing the proxy to log anything valuable (else the CONNECT command).
just a few word about that :
1) Minitel was never even close to a computer. It was an "advanced" terminal (advanced meaning more advanced than a simple phone : B&W 25x40 screen is nowhere close to "advanced" right now)
2) The Minitel network is now close to death in france, thanks to the web. No one keep on putting money in it, there are just a few historical service than crawl along for the ones that are not blessed by the ADSL fairy's magic wand)
Hey i got a 4 digits id, and a special 4 5 in a row one (great, isn't it)... Anyway, since i got this nice UID, i totally disagree with you ... low digit are right, i am right, and truth lies in the special first uid account ;d
When do they map the reste of Europe ? :p
Honestly this is interesting, but since i won't go to the US anywhere near now, this stuff is useless to me... and even the satellite view won't do it, since they only map big european town and i'm leaving only 15 km from one, my town is not mapped...
Now Google, stop the eye candy for a while and get fill in the data buckets... If you wan tto overtake the world, you'll have to map it
i did not say it would be easy. I just say i have a right to consume what i have paid for, and if i cannot make a copy of my property to keep it safe, then someone have to do.
So if the majors don't want us to make copy, then they have to face this responsability.
No, here the appeal court ("cassation") is somewhat different.
It will only judge wether the previous judging process was legal or not, but won't judge the fact again.
For instance, if some evidence presenting process was not legally made, the appeal court could break the judgement. (and this implies a new trial).
So, AFAIK, this is quite definitive (but hey, that's law, it's always complicated enough so there is a way to work around).
Obviously, the protection systems are hurting the loyal consumers (yes, there are some, trust me) as a side effect.
.2 cents
In France, it is legal to copy your CD and DVD, and anything. What is forbidden is to widespread them around, or even worse, selling illegal copies (the latter have always been toughly sued).
But now, with these protection systems, when you damage your cd/dvd (kids scratching them, anyone ?), you've lost the benefits of them.
IMHO, i globally agree the idea that you have to pay for what you consume (stealing is BAD. final dot.) -but may disagree on the price it is sold, or the insane way the bill is dispatched to the artists and producer amongst others-.
A good thing would be to life guarantee the possible exchange of your broken/damaged CD/DVD, thus allowing them to be protected and uncopy-able. Also coming as a MUST is "stop making protection system that make your CD/DVD unusable on some legacy device" (like protected CD that could not be played on car player).
That would be a good idea. But that implies that the majors invest some money in these, and also implies the majors cares about the consumer as a whole, not only his money...
my
Wrong, people from north of France does mayonnaise on their fries (but hey, they're quite near the belgians...) -it's definitely cultural-
As far as i am concerned i don't like mayonnaise anyway...
well i haven't really used it, but plan to do so as soon as i can.
I've wandered around the documentation, and, as far as i've read, it seems to be possible to use hibernate to map object on tables , but also to execute direct sql queries. All queries can be externalized to a xml ressource, so that should meet your nowadays requirements.
May be you (and your co-worker) should take a look at Hibernate In my company, we are using something similar (well, same concept, just another implementation with less feature -don't shoot at me, i'm not to blame for that-) and the whole stuff performs quite well (so hibernate should perform even better, heh ;-) )
In case anyone wonder, and since we did not have a slashdot article to promote this (but i don't care anyway), the frenchies can get an ADSL2+ (20Mb/s max), unlimited phone calls (mobile call for .19 cents () a minute -charged by second from the 1st second-) and TV through ADSL (when your close enough of the DSLAM) for 30 a month.
Sure, the country is not as wide as Australia (people are more concentrated), and only half the population is covered (others can get a 512k. the providers should yet reach 80% of the population by the end of 2005), but the broadband is getting quite common here.
For those who wonder, i'm 5km from the DSLAM, got a 61dB loss on my line, and still get 1,5kb down and 1kb up (phone service running fine, but no Tv)
Well, ant is running java and call for the Compiler class inside the same JVM. Java startup time is known to be slow, so make will never get close to ant compilation speed.
I've been an Xemacs fan for a few years, and tried JDE. I had the feeling JDE was an attempt to bump some feature xemacs would not support otherwise : it worked, but was somehow painfull and laggy (Not to mention the times when you need to kill the BSH to get a refresh). Still, i've stick with it until a got a more powerfull computer, with enough RAM to run eclipse.
Eclipse is not, by any way, bloated, but it requires large amount of RAM, and a fairly powerfull CPU. The slowdown i've experienced with eclipse were all due to the computer swapping the eclipse process (and swapping a 120Mb+ process is not trivial). Once you get enough RAM to avoid swapping, it runs smoothly. And once, you're used to "my file is saved, then it's compiled), you'll forget all your makefile, ant script what-so-ever...
Speaking of a toolkit, SWT is less linux centered and also quite a good toolkit. Never saw how gtk bindings looks like, so i won't compare, but for playing a bit with SWT (writing eclipse plugin), it's definitely worth a look (and wraps gtk as well).
this just can't work because it's not designed to be efficient but friendly for people who never learned to type (and are to lazy to, or just illogically scared) :
1) laying keys alphabetically is easy for people looking at what they type and searching for keys, but inefficient for real typing (qwerty or even azerty keyboards are layed to optimize the dispatching of key typing through the different fingers while typing common letters combinations)
2) the keyborad colors : Hell ! who wants to type on a playskool keyboard sort of. That just makes me think of those keyboards you wrap on your real keyboard for the games designed for babies...
3) Too few keys. I'm sorry, but how the hell am i supposed to type in symbols and digits ? using some shift/caps lock-like key all the time is pain, even if they are placed in the middle so everything can be typed one hand. It would have been far more "user-friendly" to have some sort of numeric keypad (everyone is used to numeric keypads), and, why not, some symbol keypad. That would have been, even if ugly for real typer efficiency, more in the spirit of this user-friendly keyboard wannabe...
4) English don't use accents. But many of us out there do. Latin-based language go for cute and grave accents, spanish have some tilde, german loves "umlaut", and nordic language have '' (angstrom sort of). These are common letters. Having to reach them as symbol is NOT acceptable.