I feel bad about it. It looks awsome, does everything anyone would want in a computer, and it's dirt cheap. It's also really, really small. Anyone remember the TurboGrafx-16? Ever see its Japanese counterpart the PC-Engine? The American version was 2.5 times bigger for no other reason than that to an American Big == Good. Oh well, maybe it'll do better in Japan and Europe. I can't wait to get one. But heck then again I thought the PC-Engine was cooler than the TG-16, and I still remember being amazed how small Sega Genesis cartridges were...
$250 dollars a support call, and move a good chunk of that to low paid overseas outsourcers, I bet you'll see them supporting their products for a long time. Until then, I guess you'll just have to upgrade to Fedora if you're on the cheap. Or White Hat Linux if you want stability.
Oh, and for the record, NT4 -> WinXP is not a supported upgrade path.
Then again it is Apple, and I'd be willing to give up the screen to know the quality was spot on. I've been eyeing those Creative Nuvos, but I've heard good and bad about them. Oh well, if I can mount it under Linux I'm sold:).
Come 'on poeple, not to troll or anything but this isn't anything to be surprised over. Heck, real charities were throwing out warnings about this crap as soon as talk of charity hit. People are evil, film at 11. Get used to it.
Now what is kinda fscked up is seeing spam used for this, especially ala 419 scamming. Still, you got to be kinda dumb to fall for this:
My home and everything I own was destroyed by the Tsunami, except mysteriously for my computer and the power lines running to it. Truely it is a miracle. Now if you'd just send me some money....
Either you lack imagination or you're just lazy. Not trolling btw, just stickin' up for Miyazaki and for unrealistic animation in general. I've never once understood why people would go to the movies to see reality, or why they'd complain when they don't. Then again, I'm a boy, and I watch my niece play pretend that she's a mom/teenager all day and I don't understand that.
Anyway, back on topic, what makes Miyazaki great is that it isn't real, it's better than real. When you're being real, you're limited by what's believable. When you don't bother with reality, you're only limited by consistency (i.e. stuff shouldn't come out of nowhere, and it doesn't in a Miyazaki film). It's easier, and more fun, to suspend disbelief when reality isn't smacking you in the face every couple of minutes....
because of subsidies. Our entire economy is geared towards cheap beef. If you look at parts of the world where beef isn't heavily subsidised it's often a pricy luxury. Beef's cheap because you already paid for half of it when you wrote your check to Uncle Sam for taxes this year.
the great thing about high capacity optical media and dirt cheap electronics designed by engineers working for slave wages is you can redefine the standards every couple of years and keep backwards compatibility with the old disks. The reason the industry wasn't doing this has nothing to do with pissing off consumers and everything to do with the fact that electronics were expensive and space was limited.
When the standards change people will buy new hardware. They'll have to if they want to keep watching (and they do). And who cares really, when the play is $30 bucks at Walmart? Heck, you might see the player industry become like video games (razor blade model), although I'm sure the guys in charge of making players aren't happy with that thought....
if you get bit by this, you're in no position to fight back. Sure, you can sue for the damage done to your computer, but that money is dwarfed by what they sue for if you have just one pirated mp3, let alone the collection most people have. So the short answer is: they can get away with it, and they know it.
[waits for laughter to die down....]. Seriously folks, Microsoft isn't going to let this spyware crap go on too much longer. Not out of their great love of their customers, but because it's costing them money. Lots of money. Support calls aren't free ya know (at least for Microsoft, for their customers all it takes is saying you have a virus and you're in like Flynn). And with Dell, Compaq, Gateway, etc acting as a call dispatcher for mssupport (and offering helpful tips on getting free support out of MS), Redmond's taken notice.
OSS should look at spyware as a one-time, temporary boon. Once Microsoft solves this problem you'll see interest among the general public drop like a rock. Use it while you can to make converts. Once you've got 'em using Firefox, it'll be just as hard getting them back to IE. Heck, they only reason most of 'em switch from Netscape 4.7 is their bank sites stopped supporting it.
If spammer's kill everyone using their products, no more idiots buying from spammers. Problem solved. Who knew it was so simple. Now if we can just get Lycos to write a screensaver/open proxy to help speed things along.
the thing you don't realize is just how cheap it is to replace a computer in the US right now. Thanks to Mexican assembly lines and Asia slave labor you can get a nice Dell, Compaq or Gateway for $499. Sounds like a lot? Well, consider the average idiot whose harddrive just died. He needs a new drive ($100), someone to install it ($50), a new OS because he lost his CDs or didn't get any ($100), someone to install his OS, it's software, and all the patches ($100). This is at least $350. Typically they also are in need of new antivirus ($50), and a new wordprocessor ($100, and no, they don't know what openoffice and abiword are). Finally, most of them, having bought shitty OEM computers have some bad ram that needs to be replaced which is only a serious problem during an install of Windows XP, and in anycase they need more than the 128 they've got now ($100, installed). Finally they've got to wait while all this is done.
Now, to me, I'd rather take my computer to an honest shop and have the work done, because I'd know what I'm getting into. Trouble is finding an honest shop, since any idiot with a screwdriver and a copy of Norton can start a computer repair biz (I spend all day dealing with computers that have been 'fixed' by clean-booting in msconfig). I also am aware that a there's a pretty good DOA and failure rate in those $499 computers thanks to the lack of real burn in testing (not that I blame 'em, that's what you get for $499). People don't know this, so computer repair isn't usually economically viable.
What the heck is WinMX doing there? Admititly it's been years since I installed it, but I remember uninstalling it specifically because it was infested with spyware. Also, what collection of spyware free software is complete without a weatherbug replacement. Not that I have one (KWeather doesn't count:) ). And, yes, I know it's technically 'adware', but making that distinction is like drawing the line between a 'virus' and a 'trojan', i.e. who really cares? Anyway, anyone know a truely free alternative that doesn't involved KDE under cygwin?
Microsoft has be fighting tooth and nail for years to finish off apple in the Educational market. This is brilliant. They take their fine, pay it in software whose value has been bloated by the monopoly ($100 dollars for a wordprocessor, wtf?), and get thosands (millions?) of schools teaching the next gen of lusers to use Microsoft, and only Microsoft (yeah, they can apply all those 'computer skills' to a Mac, but most are too lazy, Believe it or not). It's amazing how Microsoft has turned every aspect of this trial to their advantage. I'd be sickened if it wasn't so impressive...
It's too high for the upper class' liking. The lesser people are starting to get downright uppity, expecting such unheard of luxuries as a steady food supply, 40 hour work weeks, and maybe even (gasp) health care. Seriously though, the problem is, there's a limit on what society can produce, but no limit on the number of greedy, conscienceless bastards who will do horrible things to get absolutely everything they want. These people want society to bend and break to their will, giving them anything they want no matter the consequences. Simply put, this is a class of people that's growing, and as they grow, you (if you're in America) suffer. You have to. They can't have it all, and leave you anything.
There are other factors involved, like overpopulation (it's not that we can't feed them, it's that we won't), poor education, the debilitating effects of religion on a society (gotta love a system that encourages child birth during famines). It's a complex issue. For 2000 years, human society has been about giving everything it could to %1 percent of the people and leaving the crumbs to the rest. The world wars cut the labor force and hid this fact for a bit (like the plague did earlier), but it only takes one healthy Generation to undo all that progess.
But the main thing to take away from all this: your happiness and well being are not compatible with the desires of the upper class. No matter how little you have, there's always someone willing to take it away so that he can have just a bit more. And if he can do it to enough people, well then, he's rich.
but Bush really did win this time, but such a margine that even if there was voter tampering, it wasn't needed. And really, who's surprised. It was too rich dudes against each other. Kerry's only campaign promise was that we wasn't Bush (I still voted for him, lesser of two evils and all). They both supported the work visa program (oh yeah, give 20 million poor desparate Mexicans free reign to work in the US, that's a great idea), Kerry wasn't exactly anti-war, just anti-Bush's-war.
Something that was pointed out to me for why people like Bush (by rotten.com of all people) is that he provides simple solutions to complex problems. Sure they don't work work, but he makes people believe that with a little hard work and Gumption everything will be all right, and their children's future isn't busy being sold down the river to India/China. People don't want to be told that stuff like outsourcing, energy, environment and war are complex, multifacted issues. Any candidate that tries is going to lose. I guess Americans will get what they deserve in the long run, but it sucks for the few innocent who see it comming and can't really do much about it.
as the center of the world's economy moves away from the US (which is is). Americans have way too high a Standard of Living. Worse, we've got a high SoL for most anybody here. The rich bastards of the world are busy ballancing the books and it looks like India and China (with their hugh, easily abusable populations) will come out ahead. Just give it time and the spammers won't have nearly enough Americans with more money than sense anymore, but they'll be plenty elsewhere.
No it doesn't. If you try to force it (by booting directly off the CD and running a repair) it may let you, but it'll be a disaster. The SP2 control panel applets will still be there (and a bunch of other SP2 related files), but most of the files with be SP1. The system will be unstable, and they'll be no easy way to turn on the firewall. It's like trying to install Win98 over XP, even if you can swing it it's a bad idea....
The solution is to uninstall SP2, upgrade, then reinstall SP2. SP2 does a pretty damn good job of uninstalling (manually if necessary, using the batch file spuninst.txt) so this is usually not a problem unless there's already something wrong with the computer (spyware, viruses, crappy outdated antivirus, etc), and in that case you shouldn't be upgrading anyway. Do a clean install and save yourselve some major headaches.
I've been far too lazy to check up on this. Was the stuff broke in 2.6.8 related to cd-recording fixed (you could only write as root, no matter what your perms were)?
Microsoft releases 'Service Packs' because it's a break in the Operating System version that lets sys admins know what they're getting into when they upgrade. A Service Pack is an upgrade so large and significant that it's considered a new Operating System Version, kinda like going from Kernel 2.4 to 2.6. Try upgradeing XP Home to XP Pro with SP2 installed in Home using a Pro SP1 CD, it'll helpfully stop you before you do something dumb. Service Packs also help identify to a technician (which I am) what's on the computer, what tools we can expect to be available, how those tools will behave, and where they can be found.
Also, modularity doesn't work so well when you're pushing 800+ megs worth of updates to a user base that just wants the darn thing to work. With SP2, I can give a friend a copy of the network install and say "here, install this before your internet" and not worry nearly as much about spyware / viruses. I don't have to worry about them getting tired after double clicking 20 separate patches and missing an important one....
what you want. When I first got Blondie's "No Exit", I only liked one or two songs. About half a year later I was board, so I listened to the whole album, and found I really, really liked the rest of the songs when I finnally sat down and listened to them. Yeah, you don't get this with the latest Britney Spears Opus, but then again I don't buy Britney Spears albums. If I just bought the 2 songs I wnated on iTunes, I'd probably never realized how great the rest of the album was.
A jail is precariously close to a Denial of Service. Simular to when your ISP goes out for a bit. I'm pretty sure it's illegal to bill someone for a service they cannot use. If you jail someone (making it so they can't use the service), and you do it accout wide, you'd (legally) have to refund their money for the time. Give it a few years for all that 'money' from jail time to pile up, and you'll have a clever lawyer smelling a class action lawsuit in no time. Lets see, 150,000 users, $20 dollars/month.... If 1% of your populace is in jail in any given month, thats 1500 * $20 dollars a month. Do that for a few years and you'll have 100,000 grand or so. Not much, but more than enough to get a clever ambulance chaser or two...
If I buy it online, and you ban me, do I get a refund? How about if I send you the box I got at EB? Better question: If I'm banned from Steam for pirating HL2, does that lock me out of HL1? This is why I don't want activation in games (or the OS, for that matter). Presumably, if you piss off the company, they can lock you out of dozens of your legit products. Imagine pirating 1 EA game (or having your kid do it) and finding every EA game you own doesn't work anymore.
is probably hot to nail a spammer. It'll boost his political career ("I'm tough on spammers" sounds great). I mean, if they just nail him for trade secrets, what's the big deal?.
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I feel bad about it. It looks awsome, does everything anyone would want in a computer, and it's dirt cheap. It's also really, really small. Anyone remember the TurboGrafx-16? Ever see its Japanese counterpart the PC-Engine? The American version was 2.5 times bigger for no other reason than that to an American Big == Good. Oh well, maybe it'll do better in Japan and Europe. I can't wait to get one. But heck then again I thought the PC-Engine was cooler than the TG-16, and I still remember being amazed how small Sega Genesis cartridges were...
$250 dollars a support call, and move a good chunk of that to low paid overseas outsourcers, I bet you'll see them supporting their products for a long time. Until then, I guess you'll just have to upgrade to Fedora if you're on the cheap. Or White Hat Linux if you want stability.
Oh, and for the record, NT4 -> WinXP is not a supported upgrade path.
Then again it is Apple, and I'd be willing to give up the screen to know the quality was spot on. I've been eyeing those Creative Nuvos, but I've heard good and bad about them. Oh well, if I can mount it under Linux I'm sold :).
surrounded by many beautiful woman.
Come 'on poeple, not to troll or anything but this isn't anything to be surprised over. Heck, real charities were throwing out warnings about this crap as soon as talk of charity hit. People are evil, film at 11. Get used to it.
Now what is kinda fscked up is seeing spam used for this, especially ala 419 scamming. Still, you got to be kinda dumb to fall for this:
My home and everything I own was destroyed by the Tsunami, except mysteriously for my computer and the power lines running to it. Truely it is a miracle. Now if you'd just send me some money....
Either you lack imagination or you're just lazy. Not trolling btw, just stickin' up for Miyazaki and for unrealistic animation in general. I've never once understood why people would go to the movies to see reality, or why they'd complain when they don't. Then again, I'm a boy, and I watch my niece play pretend that she's a mom/teenager all day and I don't understand that.
Anyway, back on topic, what makes Miyazaki great is that it isn't real, it's better than real. When you're being real, you're limited by what's believable. When you don't bother with reality, you're only limited by consistency (i.e. stuff shouldn't come out of nowhere, and it doesn't in a Miyazaki film). It's easier, and more fun, to suspend disbelief when reality isn't smacking you in the face every couple of minutes....
a whole state? I could see fitting a township in there, maybe even a county or two. Anything more is just silly.
because of subsidies. Our entire economy is geared towards cheap beef. If you look at parts of the world where beef isn't heavily subsidised it's often a pricy luxury. Beef's cheap because you already paid for half of it when you wrote your check to Uncle Sam for taxes this year.
the great thing about high capacity optical media and dirt cheap electronics designed by engineers working for slave wages is you can redefine the standards every couple of years and keep backwards compatibility with the old disks. The reason the industry wasn't doing this has nothing to do with pissing off consumers and everything to do with the fact that electronics were expensive and space was limited.
When the standards change people will buy new hardware. They'll have to if they want to keep watching (and they do). And who cares really, when the play is $30 bucks at Walmart? Heck, you might see the player industry become like video games (razor blade model), although I'm sure the guys in charge of making players aren't happy with that thought....
if you get bit by this, you're in no position to fight back. Sure, you can sue for the damage done to your computer, but that money is dwarfed by what they sue for if you have just one pirated mp3, let alone the collection most people have. So the short answer is: they can get away with it, and they know it.
[waits for laughter to die down....]. Seriously folks, Microsoft isn't going to let this spyware crap go on too much longer. Not out of their great love of their customers, but because it's costing them money. Lots of money. Support calls aren't free ya know (at least for Microsoft, for their customers all it takes is saying you have a virus and you're in like Flynn). And with Dell, Compaq, Gateway, etc acting as a call dispatcher for mssupport (and offering helpful tips on getting free support out of MS), Redmond's taken notice.
OSS should look at spyware as a one-time, temporary boon. Once Microsoft solves this problem you'll see interest among the general public drop like a rock. Use it while you can to make converts. Once you've got 'em using Firefox, it'll be just as hard getting them back to IE. Heck, they only reason most of 'em switch from Netscape 4.7 is their bank sites stopped supporting it.
If spammer's kill everyone using their products, no more idiots buying from spammers. Problem solved. Who knew it was so simple. Now if we can just get Lycos to write a screensaver/open proxy to help speed things along.
do you really need to spend that much just to play EQ2? Jeez, just turn down some settings or something...
the thing you don't realize is just how cheap it is to replace a computer in the US right now. Thanks to Mexican assembly lines and Asia slave labor you can get a nice Dell, Compaq or Gateway for $499. Sounds like a lot? Well, consider the average idiot whose harddrive just died. He needs a new drive ($100), someone to install it ($50), a new OS because he lost his CDs or didn't get any ($100), someone to install his OS, it's software, and all the patches ($100). This is at least $350. Typically they also are in need of new antivirus ($50), and a new wordprocessor ($100, and no, they don't know what openoffice and abiword are). Finally, most of them, having bought shitty OEM computers have some bad ram that needs to be replaced which is only a serious problem during an install of Windows XP, and in anycase they need more than the 128 they've got now ($100, installed). Finally they've got to wait while all this is done.
Now, to me, I'd rather take my computer to an honest shop and have the work done, because I'd know what I'm getting into. Trouble is finding an honest shop, since any idiot with a screwdriver and a copy of Norton can start a computer repair biz (I spend all day dealing with computers that have been 'fixed' by clean-booting in msconfig). I also am aware that a there's a pretty good DOA and failure rate in those $499 computers thanks to the lack of real burn in testing (not that I blame 'em, that's what you get for $499). People don't know this, so computer repair isn't usually economically viable.
What the heck is WinMX doing there? Admititly it's been years since I installed it, but I remember uninstalling it specifically because it was infested with spyware. Also, what collection of spyware free software is complete without a weatherbug replacement. Not that I have one (KWeather doesn't count :) ). And, yes, I know it's technically 'adware', but making that distinction is like drawing the line between a 'virus' and a 'trojan', i.e. who really cares? Anyway, anyone know a truely free alternative that doesn't involved KDE under cygwin?
Microsoft has be fighting tooth and nail for years to finish off apple in the Educational market. This is brilliant. They take their fine, pay it in software whose value has been bloated by the monopoly ($100 dollars for a wordprocessor, wtf?), and get thosands (millions?) of schools teaching the next gen of lusers to use Microsoft, and only Microsoft (yeah, they can apply all those 'computer skills' to a Mac, but most are too lazy, Believe it or not). It's amazing how Microsoft has turned every aspect of this trial to their advantage. I'd be sickened if it wasn't so impressive...
It's too high for the upper class' liking. The lesser people are starting to get downright uppity, expecting such unheard of luxuries as a steady food supply, 40 hour work weeks, and maybe even (gasp) health care. Seriously though, the problem is, there's a limit on what society can produce, but no limit on the number of greedy, conscienceless bastards who will do horrible things to get absolutely everything they want. These people want society to bend and break to their will, giving them anything they want no matter the consequences. Simply put, this is a class of people that's growing, and as they grow, you (if you're in America) suffer. You have to. They can't have it all, and leave you anything.
There are other factors involved, like overpopulation (it's not that we can't feed them, it's that we won't), poor education, the debilitating effects of religion on a society (gotta love a system that encourages child birth during famines). It's a complex issue. For 2000 years, human society has been about giving everything it could to %1 percent of the people and leaving the crumbs to the rest. The world wars cut the labor force and hid this fact for a bit (like the plague did earlier), but it only takes one healthy Generation to undo all that progess.
But the main thing to take away from all this: your happiness and well being are not compatible with the desires of the upper class. No matter how little you have, there's always someone willing to take it away so that he can have just a bit more. And if he can do it to enough people, well then, he's rich.
but Bush really did win this time, but such a margine that even if there was voter tampering, it wasn't needed. And really, who's surprised. It was too rich dudes against each other. Kerry's only campaign promise was that we wasn't Bush (I still voted for him, lesser of two evils and all). They both supported the work visa program (oh yeah, give 20 million poor desparate Mexicans free reign to work in the US, that's a great idea), Kerry wasn't exactly anti-war, just anti-Bush's-war.
Something that was pointed out to me for why people like Bush (by rotten.com of all people) is that he provides simple solutions to complex problems. Sure they don't work work, but he makes people believe that with a little hard work and Gumption everything will be all right, and their children's future isn't busy being sold down the river to India/China. People don't want to be told that stuff like outsourcing, energy, environment and war are complex, multifacted issues. Any candidate that tries is going to lose. I guess Americans will get what they deserve in the long run, but it sucks for the few innocent who see it comming and can't really do much about it.
as the center of the world's economy moves away from the US (which is is). Americans have way too high a Standard of Living. Worse, we've got a high SoL for most anybody here. The rich bastards of the world are busy ballancing the books and it looks like India and China (with their hugh, easily abusable populations) will come out ahead. Just give it time and the spammers won't have nearly enough Americans with more money than sense anymore, but they'll be plenty elsewhere.
No it doesn't. If you try to force it (by booting directly off the CD and running a repair) it may let you, but it'll be a disaster. The SP2 control panel applets will still be there (and a bunch of other SP2 related files), but most of the files with be SP1. The system will be unstable, and they'll be no easy way to turn on the firewall. It's like trying to install Win98 over XP, even if you can swing it it's a bad idea....
The solution is to uninstall SP2, upgrade, then reinstall SP2. SP2 does a pretty damn good job of uninstalling (manually if necessary, using the batch file spuninst.txt) so this is usually not a problem unless there's already something wrong with the computer (spyware, viruses, crappy outdated antivirus, etc), and in that case you shouldn't be upgrading anyway. Do a clean install and save yourselve some major headaches.
I've been far too lazy to check up on this. Was the stuff broke in 2.6.8 related to cd-recording fixed (you could only write as root, no matter what your perms were)?
Microsoft releases 'Service Packs' because it's a break in the Operating System version that lets sys admins know what they're getting into when they upgrade. A Service Pack is an upgrade so large and significant that it's considered a new Operating System Version, kinda like going from Kernel 2.4 to 2.6. Try upgradeing XP Home to XP Pro with SP2 installed in Home using a Pro SP1 CD, it'll helpfully stop you before you do something dumb. Service Packs also help identify to a technician (which I am) what's on the computer, what tools we can expect to be available, how those tools will behave, and where they can be found.
Also, modularity doesn't work so well when you're pushing 800+ megs worth of updates to a user base that just wants the darn thing to work. With SP2, I can give a friend a copy of the network install and say "here, install this before your internet" and not worry nearly as much about spyware / viruses. I don't have to worry about them getting tired after double clicking 20 separate patches and missing an important one....
what you want. When I first got Blondie's "No Exit", I only liked one or two songs. About half a year later I was board, so I listened to the whole album, and found I really, really liked the rest of the songs when I finnally sat down and listened to them. Yeah, you don't get this with the latest Britney Spears Opus, but then again I don't buy Britney Spears albums. If I just bought the 2 songs I wnated on iTunes, I'd probably never realized how great the rest of the album was.
A jail is precariously close to a Denial of Service. Simular to when your ISP goes out for a bit. I'm pretty sure it's illegal to bill someone for a service they cannot use. If you jail someone (making it so they can't use the service), and you do it accout wide, you'd (legally) have to refund their money for the time. Give it a few years for all that 'money' from jail time to pile up, and you'll have a clever lawyer smelling a class action lawsuit in no time. Lets see, 150,000 users, $20 dollars/month.... If 1% of your populace is in jail in any given month, thats 1500 * $20 dollars a month. Do that for a few years and you'll have 100,000 grand or so. Not much, but more than enough to get a clever ambulance chaser or two...
If I buy it online, and you ban me, do I get a refund? How about if I send you the box I got at EB? Better question: If I'm banned from Steam for pirating HL2, does that lock me out of HL1? This is why I don't want activation in games (or the OS, for that matter). Presumably, if you piss off the company, they can lock you out of dozens of your legit products. Imagine pirating 1 EA game (or having your kid do it) and finding every EA game you own doesn't work anymore.
is probably hot to nail a spammer. It'll boost his political career ("I'm tough on spammers" sounds great). I mean, if they just nail him for trade secrets, what's the big deal?.