Don't buy a DVD player that does not let you skip. If you do buy one, take it back and make a fault claim. I've spoken to the people at the local stores. I've told them that if I buy something and one of several things happen then it is being returned. Their view is that they can't do anything about it.
Australian law states that DVD region coding is illegal. Yet, the PS2 is still region locked. I'm wondering what Sony will do with the PS3.
The problem will be: How will I, using my western keyboard and english OS without the Chinese language pack installed, connect to www.server.[X][X] ? By link? Sure. that will work. Type it in? No. Tell it to someone else and have them type it in? Nope.
Perhaps a 3rd party (go Mozilla plugins!! http://addons.mozilla.org/ ) will make a plugin to translate the URL on the fly. [X][X] becomes.sau - which can then be typed in, recognised and used by people who don't speak and write Chinese.
Perhaps they will take this one step further: All chinese character URLs (does this happen today? Are your website urls in English phones or chinese characters?).
I have no problem with China doing this. I feel that it will be China's problem when people have issues connecting to them. Always interesting to visit Japanese sites. I wonder if they will follow suite.
I can still remember puzzling through the first one. The second was good.. but not as good as the first. Monkey Island 3 was excellent. I'm going to pretend that Monkey Island 4 was never released. WHY go 3D if it's not a 3D game?
Monkey Island 3 was the best in the series. Good graphics, puzzles worth solving, amusing storyline and interesting quirks. The interface was very good too.
Choice of IDE shouldn't be dictated by IT or support concerns.
Yes. Well. Unfortunately this is Government. We are pretty much dictated to by the IT Finance Group as to what we can and can't spend money on. Don't bother asking WHY we are using webMethods.
You are correct! We given developers admin access. They can use what they like. However.. we have teams of people working on projects. We have one type of code repository (currently ClearCase). IT support literally doesn't exist for anything else. We don't have time to be experts in the IDE/Other tools we use... we need to get the code out.
'Support an IDE' around here goes like this: "We install it. You set it up. If it's completely broken we'll wipe it and install it again (or tell you where the installer is".:-)
2. They advocate standardizing all development tools in one IDE
We only have one 'standard' IDE - WSAD. There are, at any one given time, three versions (the old, the current, and the new) being used by developers. We have several machine builds that install or rebuild a machine with Rational / WSAD. Why do we only 'support' one IDE?
Money. Time. Support costs. In our organisation now we have one guy who creates/fixes the deployment scripts for windows machines. He is also the one person who the helpdesk / faults go to. So, yes, there can be a business rule behind only having one IDE.
Then again.. there is nothing stopping people here form installing a second IDE. Just don't put in a helpdesk request for someone to fix it for you. There's nothing wrong with this approach.. so long as you know why it the decision to only support one IDE was made. In the same vein we only have one source control product (officially) - ClearCase (for now). Less support required when there is only one product involved.
Never install WebMethods unless you seriously have a reason to use it, know what you are doing, have it installed by someone who knows how to correctly configure it with your current architecture and you have a gold level support contract. Failing all of the above.. try hiding your head under your desk and hope that the problems will just go away. Works here 9 times out of 10.
Well.. here we are split between COBOL and Java. Management recently felt the need to fire people (as you do.. you know.. let go of 15% of the workforce to keep 'within budget'). Strangely.. we released more Java programmers than COBOL programmers. Why? We need the COBOL programmers. We can always get more Java programmers very easily.. but replacing the COBOL programmers is harder. What University still offers COBOL courses? A lot of our processing is currently done in COBOL, but we are slowly moving everything we can to Java.
Where do you rank COBOL in those groups? While you're answering.. can you think of a better language in which the major actions are: READ DATA SOURCE PERFORM CALCULATIONS WRITE DATA SOURCE.
With data source being.. DB2 (table sizes in the 10M rows+ range), VSAM files (equiv to those DB2 tables) and flat files (text files) of similar size. (Comments comparing VSAM vs Flatfile will be ignored).
I work with mainframes. We use COBOL. If you know of something better to use.. I'm listening. I'll even pass on the suggestion to Management (I'm not kidding. They are looking for alternatives).
We have Java for midrange.. but it does not perform (by cost analysis CPU/Environment costs used and incurred) better against the mainframe running COBOL/Delta/etc.
Do you think that people would pay $50 for a 2D game? Maybe. Right now, however, they can't even release all of those excellent 2D games on the current consoles or PC. They've tried to package some up.. but we're still waiting for the classics.
There is a video clip of Death asking a Seer about 'what is the meaning of life'. It's right out of the books and done in the same style of Soul Music. Any idea where it is from? I'm guessing one of the DVDs?
Are Mac users more secure now that this article has been posted twice? Is someone trying to cheer MS on here? Could this be a conspiracy against IE.. on slashdot! of all places? Could people be trying to indicate that IE is so bad that MS can't even be bothered to try and force it down Mac users throats like the do with every other user they get their claws into? Who knows. Who cares. Go Zonk Go! DUPE!:)
The chinese are attempting to wipe out all the Tibetan people and culture. They have been trying to do so for a long time.
It would appear that their usual method of 'send in the army, kill all of the men except children and elderly, rape all of the woman and watch the next generation grow up as chinese' is taking too long.
This is far faster. With this railroad they can ship thousands of people into Tibet. They can also ship thousands of people out.
Price some of the professional video software sometime. AVID is way out of reach. (it even has it's own hardware:) Or did... not sure if it still does)
If they answer 'No' - then load whatever X window manager the user wants (such as KDE, Gnome, Enlightenment etc...)
Yes.. okay.. but how do they know which X window manager to use?
I went for ages using Enlightenment (on FreeBSD in 2000) by flipping a coin to choose a window manager. I did look at the other window managers.. but Enlightenment seemed to be the best at the time. I now use KDE.
Perhaps there could be a fact sheet for window managers (and other programs) so that people can rate programs of similar function.
Knoppix is great in that you can reload the desktop to all of the window managers easily.
1) The networked drives (E through to Z) on XP have different names. Before XP: O:\ NAME XP: FolderName on 'This File Server blah blah blah (servername) (O:)
What the heck? This is my work machine. Most of my documents are on O: H: or L drive. Every single time I go into Explorer (or worse! an applet that's pretending to be explorer) I can't easily see the part which I NEED: O: This drives me nuts.
2) Shortcuts Why, in the highly advanced world of XP, is there not an easily way to always get to the five folders I use every day when opening and saving documents? Now.. those people in the crowd who use windows shortcuts will probably say 'Make a shortcut on your desktop or similar to O:\Projects\This\That\Over\There and you'll be ok. Sure. This works. Until you need want to go to O:\Projects\This\That folder to save/open something. It goes 'back' to where the shortcut was made from. Argl.
3) Recently used files I've given up. The START > DOCUEMNTS folder *is* a good idea. However.. I ask these questions: Q1) There are only 15 files in there. How can I expand this to 20, 30 ot 40? Q2) I access 10 common files every day. Is there a better way to open these files than my current method of 'Drag a shortcut to a folder that is in the Startbar'. This manual method gets around the 'It's not in Recent Docuemnts, and I can't wait to go folder diving again to try and find it'. Another solution here is to have explorer shortcuts to the folders you use regularily. However, you need to know how to change the explorer shortcut to do this. Where's the drag and drop open? Nope. Doesn't exist. No applet either for creating one. A solution here could be to have a nice docking window/bar where you can create virutal folders and shortcuts quickly and easily. Just drag the file from an Explorer window onto the dock, create folders for holding them, assign shortcuts to open them, etc. The windows taskbar and START menus do this.. but it is clunky (ever tried creating a folder or putting something in the START menu?). What would be good is if there was a '20 recent.doc files accessed' and '20 recent.xls files accessed' option for Start > Documents.
Yes. I do know that you can create toolbars. Yes, I do know how the windows Start menu system works.
3) Finding files This has been covered before on/.
4) The inability to change bad defaults
5) Look&Feel There's lots here.. but the easiest one is; 'Microsoft upgraded the whole OS, including Explorer. So, why do chooser boxes (open file, save as, etc) still have tiny non-resizable windows that use the windows 3.11/95 applet? Is there ever a need to lock the size of a file open/save box? (of example)
6) Invisable System Resource Hogging Nasty item here. I have been using windows for over a decade. *I* get frustrated and annoyed when the machine locks up and is 'busy' and I cannot do anything at all until it stops. Try moving over 1GB of files around (drive to drive is good). Windows locks up and shows CPU usage of 100%.. but on the Task Manager no process is using near 100%. Most using less than 2%. Windows loves strangling the processor in the background. How about a nice way of informing the user that the system is currently tying up the processor?
7) Program crashes What ever happened to NT isolating memory and programs from everything else that runs so that a crashing program does not crash your computer? I still have yet to find a way to explain nicely to my parents 'yes, IE is integrated into the OS - it's not a seperate program. You crash it and you will probably need to reboot'. *sigh*. Explained many times. They still use IE. They still hate it.
---
I'm sure everyone else here has pet peeves and horror stories. What it comes down to for me is that I have to use windows at work (I got a new one ripped for me when I used Knoppix for a while:-) ) and I would like it to just *work*.
In the mainframe world they have several ways of costing: Per LPAR (virtual machine) capacity Per CPU seconds used (rationalised for costing) Per access - With some programs you pay for the number of times the program is run.
We recently had to negotiate with CA because we upgraded a mainframe (nearly doubled its capacity) and CA argued that we owed them more due to the LPAR having greater capacity.
This is akin to Windows Server Edition costing more because you are running it on a 3.4Ghz machine rather than a 3.0Ghz machine.
After dealing with mainframes for four years I have come to this concolusion when it comes to money: Companies will charge every cent they can, in every way they can up to the point of the customer not using their product.
The ending to the story above is quite nice. One of our managers nicely told CA that since we have not increased our usage of their product they can either submit a better offer than a $300,000 increase (we're halfway through a contract btw) or we will migrate to another product. We are talking about CA AllFusion Endevor here. There are alternatives. CA knows it. We know it. A better deal was done. (No, we are not privy to the details, only that it was more than what we are currently paying, far less than what they demanded, and we are continuing to use CA Endevor. I think someone tipped them off that we could be expanding to use more CA products in the future and that alienating us could cost them a lot of money).
However: For what we pay for the mainframe to run is nothing compared to what it costs to do the same transactions on Midrange. Ever looked up the price of using webMethods?
I saw that previous too when I saw Serenity last week. What can I say? Wow. I'm impressed. Yet another 'let's show the whole movie in under three minutes'.
This preview showed the story plot setup, action sequences, one of the turning points (kiss on the glass the girl made) and the main star 'solving' the issue (blowing stuff up, using her knowledge of the plane to her advantage). The only thing we don't know is the ending. Having seen most of the movie already - I don't care. It's not worth paying to now see that last 20 minutes.
Let's try this again: The Island. Remember this one? Once again: The preview shows the plot setup (earth has been destroyed, humanity is rebuilding inside advanced shelters) and the main characters. The preview then went on to show the entire movie in split seconds: even the ending!
However.. at this point I thought that too many negative thoughts had been brought forward on this topic: I went to see the movie. What happened was a real shock. I was drawn in for the entire movie. It was GOOD. No, really. Even though I spent the entire movie waiting for scenes from the preview to appear it was captivating (for me anyway).
After I left the cinema I was extremely annoyed. I would have far preferred to have not seen the preview and just seen the movie. It was then that I figure out the movie exec strategy: show most of the movie in the preview and bet on people needing to see the ending.
Let's add to this list: Hellboy. Once again the preview showed most of the movie. No, I didn't see it at the cinema. I saw it later on TV. I'm dissapointed: It would have been far better on the big screen.
Go another one: Fantastic Four Was it absolutely required for them to show all the good bits in the preview? Yes, I went to the flicks to see it.. I figure that it wouldn't be as good on the small screen.
Yet again: Sky High Nope, not seeing it. It's all in the preview.
Why don't cinemas allow people to vote on a 'spare' cinema and show previously released movies? I'd love to see The Fifth Element on the big screen.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't buy a DVD player that does not let you skip.
If you do buy one, take it back and make a fault claim.
I've spoken to the people at the local stores. I've told them that if I buy something and one of several things happen then it is being returned. Their view is that they can't do anything about it.
Australian law states that DVD region coding is illegal. Yet, the PS2 is still region locked. I'm wondering what Sony will do with the PS3.
We've decided to 'implement' Computer Associates ServiceDesk.
Do. Not. Use. This. Product.
Go to http://www.bestpractical.com, download RT3 and ask them about support if you need it.
The problem will be: How will I, using my western keyboard and english OS without the Chinese language pack installed, connect to www.server.[X][X] ? By link? Sure. that will work. Type it in? No. Tell it to someone else and have them type it in? Nope.
.sau - which can then be typed in, recognised and used by people who don't speak and write Chinese.
Perhaps a 3rd party (go Mozilla plugins!! http://addons.mozilla.org/ ) will make a plugin to translate the URL on the fly. [X][X] becomes
Perhaps they will take this one step further: All chinese character URLs (does this happen today? Are your website urls in English phones or chinese characters?).
I have no problem with China doing this. I feel that it will be China's problem when people have issues connecting to them. Always interesting to visit Japanese sites. I wonder if they will follow suite.
I can still remember puzzling through the first one.
The second was good.. but not as good as the first.
Monkey Island 3 was excellent.
I'm going to pretend that Monkey Island 4 was never released. WHY go 3D if it's not a 3D game?
Monkey Island 3 was the best in the series. Good graphics, puzzles worth solving, amusing storyline and interesting quirks. The interface was very good too.
Yes. Well. Unfortunately this is Government. We are pretty much dictated to by the IT Finance Group as to what we can and can't spend money on. Don't bother asking WHY we are using webMethods.
You are correct! We given developers admin access. They can use what they like. However.. we have teams of people working on projects. We have one type of code repository (currently ClearCase). IT support literally doesn't exist for anything else. We don't have time to be experts in the IDE/Other tools we use... we need to get the code out.
'Support an IDE' around here goes like this: "We install it. You set it up. If it's completely broken we'll wipe it and install it again (or tell you where the installer is". :-)
We only have one 'standard' IDE - WSAD. There are, at any one given time, three versions (the old, the current, and the new) being used by developers. We have several machine builds that install or rebuild a machine with Rational / WSAD. Why do we only 'support' one IDE?
Money. Time. Support costs. In our organisation now we have one guy who creates/fixes the deployment scripts for windows machines. He is also the one person who the helpdesk / faults go to. So, yes, there can be a business rule behind only having one IDE.
Then again.. there is nothing stopping people here form installing a second IDE. Just don't put in a helpdesk request for someone to fix it for you. There's nothing wrong with this approach.. so long as you know why it the decision to only support one IDE was made. In the same vein we only have one source control product (officially) - ClearCase (for now). Less support required when there is only one product involved.
Never install WebMethods unless you seriously have a reason to use it, know what you are doing, have it installed by someone who knows how to correctly configure it with your current architecture and you have a gold level support contract. Failing all of the above.. try hiding your head under your desk and hope that the problems will just go away. Works here 9 times out of 10.
Well.. here we are split between COBOL and Java. Management recently felt the need to fire people (as you do.. you know.. let go of 15% of the workforce to keep 'within budget'). Strangely.. we released more Java programmers than COBOL programmers. Why? We need the COBOL programmers. We can always get more Java programmers very easily.. but replacing the COBOL programmers is harder. What University still offers COBOL courses? A lot of our processing is currently done in COBOL, but we are slowly moving everything we can to Java.
I hope that this is a joke...?
Seriously.. because.. I've heard similar things said in 'focus meetings' here at work. It's terrible when people have no clue what they are saying.
Where do you rank COBOL in those groups?
While you're answering.. can you think of a better language in which the major actions are:
READ DATA SOURCE
PERFORM CALCULATIONS
WRITE DATA SOURCE.
With data source being.. DB2 (table sizes in the 10M rows+ range), VSAM files (equiv to those DB2 tables) and flat files (text files) of similar size. (Comments comparing VSAM vs Flatfile will be ignored).
I work with mainframes. We use COBOL. If you know of something better to use.. I'm listening. I'll even pass on the suggestion to Management (I'm not kidding. They are looking for alternatives).
We have Java for midrange.. but it does not perform (by cost analysis CPU/Environment costs used and incurred) better against the mainframe running COBOL/Delta/etc.
You beat the final boss and rescue the girl?
No. Don't tell me. The princess is in another castle.
Do you think that people would pay $50 for a 2D game?
Maybe.
Right now, however, they can't even release all of those excellent 2D games on the current consoles or PC. They've tried to package some up.. but we're still waiting for the classics.
There is a video clip of Death asking a Seer about 'what is the meaning of life'. It's right out of the books and done in the same style of Soul Music. Any idea where it is from? I'm guessing one of the DVDs?
Are Mac users more secure now that this article has been posted twice? :)
Is someone trying to cheer MS on here?
Could this be a conspiracy against IE.. on slashdot! of all places? Could people be trying to indicate that IE is so bad that MS can't even be bothered to try and force it down Mac users throats like the do with every other user they get their claws into?
Who knows. Who cares. Go Zonk Go! DUPE!
Aldi sells a device which will lock your compurer when you move 5 feet away. Prior art?
Yeah, we know. Nothing good out there at all
Have you tried Triptych?
d /triptych.htm
It's really cool.
http://www.download-free-games.com/tetris_downloa
The chinese are attempting to wipe out all the Tibetan people and culture. They have been trying to do so for a long time.
It would appear that their usual method of 'send in the army, kill all of the men except children and elderly, rape all of the woman and watch the next generation grow up as chinese' is taking too long.
This is far faster. With this railroad they can ship thousands of people into Tibet. They can also ship thousands of people out.
Price some of the professional video software sometime. AVID is way out of reach. (it even has it's own hardware :) Or did... not sure if it still does)
Yes.. okay.. but how do they know which X window manager to use?
I went for ages using Enlightenment (on FreeBSD in 2000) by flipping a coin to choose a window manager.
I did look at the other window managers.. but Enlightenment seemed to be the best at the time. I now use KDE.
Perhaps there could be a fact sheet for window managers (and other programs) so that people can rate programs of similar function.
Knoppix is great in that you can reload the desktop to all of the window managers easily.
1) The networked drives (E through to Z) on XP have different names.
.doc files accessed' and '20 recent .xls files accessed' option for Start > Documents.
/.
:-) ) and I would like it to just *work*.
Before XP: O:\ NAME
XP: FolderName on 'This File Server blah blah blah (servername) (O:)
What the heck? This is my work machine. Most of my documents are on O: H: or L drive. Every single time I go into Explorer (or worse! an applet that's pretending to be explorer) I can't easily see the part which I NEED: O:
This drives me nuts.
2) Shortcuts
Why, in the highly advanced world of XP, is there not an easily way to always get to the five folders I use every day when opening and saving documents?
Now.. those people in the crowd who use windows shortcuts will probably say 'Make a shortcut on your desktop or similar to O:\Projects\This\That\Over\There and you'll be ok. Sure. This works. Until you need want to go to O:\Projects\This\That folder to save/open something. It goes 'back' to where the shortcut was made from. Argl.
3) Recently used files
I've given up. The START > DOCUEMNTS folder *is* a good idea. However.. I ask these questions:
Q1) There are only 15 files in there. How can I expand this to 20, 30 ot 40?
Q2) I access 10 common files every day. Is there a better way to open these files than my current method of 'Drag a shortcut to a folder that is in the Startbar'. This manual method gets around the 'It's not in Recent Docuemnts, and I can't wait to go folder diving again to try and find it'.
Another solution here is to have explorer shortcuts to the folders you use regularily. However, you need to know how to change the explorer shortcut to do this. Where's the drag and drop open? Nope. Doesn't exist. No applet either for creating one.
A solution here could be to have a nice docking window/bar where you can create virutal folders and shortcuts quickly and easily. Just drag the file from an Explorer window onto the dock, create folders for holding them, assign shortcuts to open them, etc. The windows taskbar and START menus do this.. but it is clunky (ever tried creating a folder or putting something in the START menu?).
What would be good is if there was a '20 recent
Yes. I do know that you can create toolbars.
Yes, I do know how the windows Start menu system works.
3) Finding files
This has been covered before on
4) The inability to change bad defaults
5) Look&Feel
There's lots here.. but the easiest one is;
'Microsoft upgraded the whole OS, including Explorer. So, why do chooser boxes (open file, save as, etc) still have tiny non-resizable windows that use the windows 3.11/95 applet?
Is there ever a need to lock the size of a file open/save box? (of example)
6) Invisable System Resource Hogging
Nasty item here.
I have been using windows for over a decade. *I* get frustrated and annoyed when the machine locks up and is 'busy' and I cannot do anything at all until it stops. Try moving over 1GB of files around (drive to drive is good). Windows locks up and shows CPU usage of 100%.. but on the Task Manager no process is using near 100%. Most using less than 2%. Windows loves strangling the processor in the background. How about a nice way of informing the user that the system is currently tying up the processor?
7) Program crashes
What ever happened to NT isolating memory and programs from everything else that runs so that a crashing program does not crash your computer? I still have yet to find a way to explain nicely to my parents 'yes, IE is integrated into the OS - it's not a seperate program. You crash it and you will probably need to reboot'. *sigh*. Explained many times. They still use IE. They still hate it.
---
I'm sure everyone else here has pet peeves and horror stories. What it comes down to for me is that I have to use windows at work (I got a new one ripped for me when I used Knoppix for a while
In the mainframe world they have several ways of costing:
Per LPAR (virtual machine) capacity
Per CPU seconds used (rationalised for costing)
Per access - With some programs you pay for the number of times the program is run.
We recently had to negotiate with CA because we upgraded a mainframe (nearly doubled its capacity) and CA argued that we owed them more due to the LPAR having greater capacity.
This is akin to Windows Server Edition costing more because you are running it on a 3.4Ghz machine rather than a 3.0Ghz machine.
After dealing with mainframes for four years I have come to this concolusion when it comes to money: Companies will charge every cent they can, in every way they can up to the point of the customer not using their product.
The ending to the story above is quite nice. One of our managers nicely told CA that since we have not increased our usage of their product they can either submit a better offer than a $300,000 increase (we're halfway through a contract btw) or we will migrate to another product. We are talking about CA AllFusion Endevor here. There are alternatives. CA knows it. We know it. A better deal was done. (No, we are not privy to the details, only that it was more than what we are currently paying, far less than what they demanded, and we are continuing to use CA Endevor. I think someone tipped them off that we could be expanding to use more CA products in the future and that alienating us could cost them a lot of money).
http://www3.ca.com/Solutions/Product.asp?ID=259
However: For what we pay for the mainframe to run is nothing compared to what it costs to do the same transactions on Midrange. Ever looked up the price of using webMethods?
What about Stargate then?
And it's split into two seperate shows now.
I saw that previous too when I saw Serenity last week.
What can I say? Wow. I'm impressed. Yet another 'let's show the whole movie in under three minutes'.
This preview showed the story plot setup, action sequences, one of the turning points (kiss on the glass the girl made) and the main star 'solving' the issue (blowing stuff up, using her knowledge of the plane to her advantage). The only thing we don't know is the ending. Having seen most of the movie already - I don't care. It's not worth paying to now see that last 20 minutes.
Let's try this again: The Island.
Remember this one? Once again: The preview shows the plot setup (earth has been destroyed, humanity is rebuilding inside advanced shelters) and the main characters. The preview then went on to show the entire movie in split seconds: even the ending!
However.. at this point I thought that too many negative thoughts had been brought forward on this topic: I went to see the movie.
What happened was a real shock. I was drawn in for the entire movie. It was GOOD. No, really. Even though I spent the entire movie waiting for scenes from the preview to appear it was captivating (for me anyway).
After I left the cinema I was extremely annoyed. I would have far preferred to have not seen the preview and just seen the movie. It was then that I figure out the movie exec strategy: show most of the movie in the preview and bet on people needing to see the ending.
Let's add to this list: Hellboy.
Once again the preview showed most of the movie. No, I didn't see it at the cinema. I saw it later on TV. I'm dissapointed: It would have been far better on the big screen.
Go another one: Fantastic Four
Was it absolutely required for them to show all the good bits in the preview? Yes, I went to the flicks to see it.. I figure that it wouldn't be as good on the small screen.
Yet again: Sky High
Nope, not seeing it. It's all in the preview.
Why don't cinemas allow people to vote on a 'spare' cinema and show previously released movies? I'd love to see The Fifth Element on the big screen.
You have to make them first.
Good point though. Same goes for Farscape.