I doubt that these guys are obtaining and distributing files that couldn't be obtained for free using a good BitTorrent client (albeit also illegally). I mean, sure, most managerial types agree that you shouldn't do that stuff at work, but aside from the misuse of on-the-clock time, is it much different than a bunch of college roommates using a shared network directory for their downloads?
Stealing homemade sex videos and that sort of thing from customers' computers is another matter. That would be a pretty major invasion of privacy and should be grounds for substantial, per-case lawsuits. I suppose it would be hard for a corporate overseer to distinguish between "legit" and privately owned media in that situation.
Home videos? Private diaries? Love letters? Stay out, Geek. But "media" . . . as a customer, what have I lost, exactly? To be honest, I'd rather have a competent technician solve my configuration problems and help himself to my MP3 directory than have to waste time with ignorant first-level servicepeople in a tightly overseen, "theft-free" big-box environment.
Get the fuck over yourself. This has nothing to do with piracy or DRM here; it has absolutely nothing to do with "what I've lost as a customer". This is about my privacy, which you don't have a problem violating, it seems.
Don't. Go through. My shit. If you don't have a problem with someone "helping himself to your MP3 directory", that's your choice. It isn't your right to remove that choice of privacy from other people.
Note: The following comments are made without any knowledge of French DRM, privacy, or consumer laws. As a result, this post isn't commentary on legalities. Just idiocy.
Privatunes is aimed at guaranteeing the privacy of users but also their rights as consumers to freely share and trade the songs they have purchased.
Apple finally gives nerds what they've been shouting for--higher-quality DRM-free songs--and this is how the community responds? By anonymizing purchased music so people can pirate it? These guys are class-A asshats.
Last month's revelations that the DRM-free files on iTunes Plus came with user's full name and account e-mail embedded in them had raised serious privacy concerns.
How is someone supposed to steal the name and e-mail address from songs you aren't passing around to all of your buddies and the Internet? Oh, wait. Hasn't the Apple ID info been inside iTunes tracks since the beginning of the iTMS, anyway?
Take a music CD for example. It's expensive, impractical to purchase, often DRM:ed and includes maybe two, three or four songs that you like. This is why iTunes and other comparable services are slowly taking over that "lost" segment that chose piracy over unthoughtful music labels.
I don't believe that piracy is a bigger problem than armed bank robbery, but I'm tired of this argument. I can't remember the last time I bought an album and didn't like the whole damned thing. What kind of crap are people listening to if they only like two or three songs on a given record? It's the shittiest argument I've heard of against CDs, honestly, because it indicates a problem with the content of what you're buying, not the format you're buying.
Instead of outright banning them why don't they send them to their own server? That way they can still keep track of who they are and perhaps not clue the modders in to the fact that MS knows that they've modded their box. MS could even run some well written bots to populate the server and totally kick the modders' asses. It could be a fun side project for the game developers (:
You have never worked on a game before, I take it. Especially not a console game. I'm working on an Xbox 360 title at the moment, and I can say that this would be a complete and utter waste of development resources.
What's better, spending some of your resources (either as Microsoft or the game developer) to help accomodate cheaters, or focusing all of your efforts on making honest players get the best possible experience?
Fastmac has beaten Apple to the Blu-Ray punch and has a new slimline Blu-Ray drive that works in PowerBooks, iBooks, Mac Minis, the MacBook Pro 17", and a few other systems. [. ..] Fastmac says that playing Blu-Ray movies isn't currently supported since there is no software player.
Yeah, they totally beat Apple to the punch of selling a product that the OS doesn't support at all. Hurp. It's not that Apple can't get hardware from vendors, it's that they have to implement the software side as well, which isn't very likely until the next big OS update. I mean, we're kinda at the end of the Tiger line, here, after all.
How is it idiocy to raise alarms over a bunch of mysterious symbol-coded boxes appearing without warning throughout major population areas? If you leave a bulging paper sack on the floor in the middle of a crowded mall, people will get concerned. The advertisers should have known better.
If the boxes really were part of an organized campaign of planted explosives, the government would be cheered for its foresight and training. When it's nothing, people like you shrug it off because it didn't turn out tragic this time. That's the price the authorities pay for protecting the people as the people demand.
So tell me, have you actually seen any of the "boxes"? They weren't boxes at all; they were flat boards with lights. Batteries were attached to the bottom. That's right: the fattest part was the clearly visible power source.
Is Microsoft just running down a list of crappy things to do that make me dislike Vista even less? I mean, aside from having 20 different versions with separate 32-bit and 64-bit editions (apparently Apple's engineers are much smarter than Microsoft's since they've packaged it all in one version)?
I think it's an issue of Apple management being smarter their Microsoft counterparts. In a company as large and high-profile as Microsoft, it's folly to assume that they don't have some good engineers . . . but it's quite apparent that their management tree could use some pruning.
So I say let someone with a lighter touch try to capture the spirit of Tolkien on film for The Hobbit.
What does this have to do with the notion that New Line may be screwing the production teams involved in making three feature-length films that have generated $3bn in revenue for the people potentially doing the screwing?
If you work for stupid managers, you can get away with this. If they're sharp, they're going to know that you're being opaque on purpose, and this will come back to bite you in the ass.
You are assuming you know the classification level of the information in the Intelliwiki, when you do not. All that is known is that the system is classified to the extent that the public is not allowed to see it.
Without evidence to the contrary, there is no reason to assume that SCI or SSBI-level information is there for anyone with "confidential" clearance to see.
own in New Yawk, lightweight conversations between strangers are not terribly uncommon.
This statement, coupled with "New Yawk", suggests to me that you don't actually live here. I take the MTA to and from work every day, and I almost never see strangers starting up conversation. The only people engaged in conversation already know each other before stepping foot in the train. We'd really rather just put on our headphones (or read a book or the paper) and ignore the noise and crowds, rather than chat up everyone with a music player and ask them if we can send them our music.
AND what I say in class is my intellectual property.
You'd better stop your students from, uh, using your "intellectual property" in real life, then. That's valuable money you're losing by teaching students your knowledge.
Are your students not allowed to talk to people about what you say, as well?
You should make them license this special "intellectual property" when they go to work and use what you've taught them. I mean, it's not like there are other people teaching the same things out of the same reference material or anything.
For fuck's sake, are teachers really starting to call their lessons "intellectual property"?
If device manufacturers (APPLE, cell phone companies, and even car stereo makers) would bother to design buttons that are TACTILE (recognizable by touch) we wouldn't have this problem (well, not as big). There's nothing worse than reaching for that device, only to find that every button feels the same under your thumb... Is it so hard to add a triangle shape to the Play button? Square to the stop?
If I put my thumb on my iPod wheel, I know where everything is. With my eyes closed. I know:
1. The wheel is at the bottom. Why? Because I've looked at my iPod at least once. I can feel that the bottom of the iPod is in a certain place in relation to my hand, as a result.
2. The center of the wheel must be under my thumb, because it's smooth, and the wheel is not smooth.
3. Because I know where my thumb is in relation to the wheel, even if it's not directly center, I know where all the buttons are. There are only four, and they're north-east-south-west in orientation. I don't need to know where the "volume up/down" is, because I am an adult and know clockwise from counter-clockwise.
iPod is/easily/ usable with your eyes shut tight. It's different than a cell phone because a cell phone has many rows of buttons in comparison, so you have to feel it out by counting rows if you don't have a little orientation nub. iPod doesn't need it because it's just a circle at the bottom of the device. You pick it up and put your thumb on it, and you instantly know where everything is.
I find that no matter how grusome, synthesized imagery has absolutely no affect on me. However, if I watch someone pull their toenail out [ebaumsworld.com], I cringe and shudder. The moral of the story is: people need to work harder at distinguishing reality and fantasy.
He didn't say it offended him. The imagery struck something in his head and he (jokingly) suspects that it will give him nightmares. There's nothing stupid about this at all.
The video is full of rather nightmarish, dark imagery. Something doesn't need to offend or actually scare us to trigger a nightmare. After all, even if you decide what you find offensive, you don't decide what your subconscious chooses to turn into ghoulish demons in your sleep.
"In the early days of flat HTML, Internet Explorer rendered pages differently from Netscape. Those problems were fixed, but when support for CSS was added, new compatibility issues arose. Now most of the CSS issues have been solved, but JavaScript compatibility issues have cropped up."
CSS compatibility issues have been worked around; they have not been "solved", and any quick trip through Position is Everything or A List Apart will show you that. JavaScript compatibility issues have also been around since the first days of JavaScript implementation in browsers.
Neither are going to "be solved", especially if Microsoft have anything to say about it. Right now, as in the past, implementation differences equal a certain degree of lock-in. The truth is that no rendering engine provides a complete, perfect-for-intents-and-purposes CSS2 implementation, and IE is easily at the bottom of that pack. Combined with its field dominance, it is largely responsible for "CSS compatibility issues".
IE 7 isn't going to provide a better rendering engine than Gecko, KHTML/WebCore, or whatever Opera's engine is called; it will simply address a list of the most important problems, such as the infamous box model fuck-ups. There will not be a "kickass" rendering engine in IE 7, and as much as I hate to say it, that's going to keep us in compatibility hack hell for the near future.
Now, if you ask me--and obviously you did, right, lol internet_rant--Microsoft have had more than ample time, people, and resources to produce a rendering engine on-par with Gecko and its peers. But that's not going to be the case. Only one reason for that.
CSS compatibility issues mostly solved? Not even close.
I can't compete with someone who only has to pay thirty bucks a month for rent, and who can feed his family in a nice restaraunt for a dollar.
I'm happy for these people, to be honest. I have a privileged fucking head-start on life, just being born in the United States. Add to that the fact that I'm white, and suddenly I have a leg up on a lot of people, even though it shouldn't be that way. I'm glad to hear other people in the world are living well, instead of suffering--and I don't care how that happens, whether it's cheaper than me or not.
I don't get upset when other people are doing better, if they're getting better perks, or if their lives are easier. I left that whiny, woe-is-me bullshit behind when I left high school.
You can compete, if you want to. If you don't, you'll whine that you can't.
When my neighbor's daughter launches iTunes, her library shows up in my iTunes, and I can play them. Note that my network is WEP-enabled and MAC filtered, and I'm not part of her network
You might be WEP-enabled and MAC-filtered, but that doesn't mean you aren't on the same network. (WEP and MAC filtering have nothing to do with Bonjour services specifically.) Bonjour works on a subnet, not over a WAN; getting it to work across separate subnets requires special configuration.
Slashdot Mirror
It's hard for me to get worked up about this.
I doubt that these guys are obtaining and distributing files that couldn't be obtained for free using a good BitTorrent client (albeit also illegally). I mean, sure, most managerial types agree that you shouldn't do that stuff at work, but aside from the misuse of on-the-clock time, is it much different than a bunch of college roommates using a shared network directory for their downloads?
Stealing homemade sex videos and that sort of thing from customers' computers is another matter. That would be a pretty major invasion of privacy and should be grounds for substantial, per-case lawsuits. I suppose it would be hard for a corporate overseer to distinguish between "legit" and privately owned media in that situation.
Home videos? Private diaries? Love letters? Stay out, Geek. But "media" . . . as a customer, what have I lost, exactly? To be honest, I'd rather have a competent technician solve my configuration problems and help himself to my MP3 directory than have to waste time with ignorant first-level servicepeople in a tightly overseen, "theft-free" big-box environment.
Get the fuck over yourself. This has nothing to do with piracy or DRM here; it has absolutely nothing to do with "what I've lost as a customer". This is about my privacy, which you don't have a problem violating, it seems.
Don't. Go through. My shit. If you don't have a problem with someone "helping himself to your MP3 directory", that's your choice. It isn't your right to remove that choice of privacy from other people.
Note: The following comments are made without any knowledge of French DRM, privacy, or consumer laws. As a result, this post isn't commentary on legalities. Just idiocy.
Privatunes is aimed at guaranteeing the privacy of users but also their rights as consumers to freely share and trade the songs they have purchased.
Apple finally gives nerds what they've been shouting for--higher-quality DRM-free songs--and this is how the community responds? By anonymizing purchased music so people can pirate it? These guys are class-A asshats.
Last month's revelations that the DRM-free files on iTunes Plus came with user's full name and account e-mail embedded in them had raised serious privacy concerns.
How is someone supposed to steal the name and e-mail address from songs you aren't passing around to all of your buddies and the Internet? Oh, wait. Hasn't the Apple ID info been inside iTunes tracks since the beginning of the iTMS, anyway?
Take a music CD for example. It's expensive, impractical to purchase, often DRM:ed and includes maybe two, three or four songs that you like. This is why iTunes and other comparable services are slowly taking over that "lost" segment that chose piracy over unthoughtful music labels.
I don't believe that piracy is a bigger problem than armed bank robbery, but I'm tired of this argument. I can't remember the last time I bought an album and didn't like the whole damned thing. What kind of crap are people listening to if they only like two or three songs on a given record? It's the shittiest argument I've heard of against CDs, honestly, because it indicates a problem with the content of what you're buying, not the format you're buying.
Instead of outright banning them why don't they send them to their own server? That way they can still keep track of who they are and perhaps not clue the modders in to the fact that MS knows that they've modded their box. MS could even run some well written bots to populate the server and totally kick the modders' asses. It could be a fun side project for the game developers (:
You have never worked on a game before, I take it. Especially not a console game. I'm working on an Xbox 360 title at the moment, and I can say that this would be a complete and utter waste of development resources.
What's better, spending some of your resources (either as Microsoft or the game developer) to help accomodate cheaters, or focusing all of your efforts on making honest players get the best possible experience?
Fastmac has beaten Apple to the Blu-Ray punch and has a new slimline Blu-Ray drive that works in PowerBooks, iBooks, Mac Minis, the MacBook Pro 17", and a few other systems. [. . .] Fastmac says that playing Blu-Ray movies isn't currently supported since there is no software player.
Yeah, they totally beat Apple to the punch of selling a product that the OS doesn't support at all. Hurp. It's not that Apple can't get hardware from vendors, it's that they have to implement the software side as well, which isn't very likely until the next big OS update. I mean, we're kinda at the end of the Tiger line, here, after all.
How is it idiocy to raise alarms over a bunch of mysterious symbol-coded boxes appearing without warning throughout major population areas? If you leave a bulging paper sack on the floor in the middle of a crowded mall, people will get concerned. The advertisers should have known better.
S uspicious_Devices_NY204_612959731012007.jpg
If the boxes really were part of an organized campaign of planted explosives, the government would be cheered for its foresight and training. When it's nothing, people like you shrug it off because it didn't turn out tragic this time. That's the price the authorities pay for protecting the people as the people demand.
So tell me, have you actually seen any of the "boxes"? They weren't boxes at all; they were flat boards with lights. Batteries were attached to the bottom. That's right: the fattest part was the clearly visible power source.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/dayart/20070131/226
Note that this is lying flat on a table. WHERE DO YOU PUT THE BOMB?
Is Microsoft just running down a list of crappy things to do that make me dislike Vista even less? I mean, aside from having 20 different versions with separate 32-bit and 64-bit editions (apparently Apple's engineers are much smarter than Microsoft's since they've packaged it all in one version)?
I think it's an issue of Apple management being smarter their Microsoft counterparts. In a company as large and high-profile as Microsoft, it's folly to assume that they don't have some good engineers . . . but it's quite apparent that their management tree could use some pruning.
http://daringfireball.net/2006/04/repair_permissio ns
o ns_voodoo
http://daringfireball.net/2006/04/repair_permissi
http://www.unsanity.org/archives/000410.php
Why do Mac users not listen to these guys?
So I say let someone with a lighter touch try to capture the spirit of Tolkien on film for The Hobbit.
What does this have to do with the notion that New Line may be screwing the production teams involved in making three feature-length films that have generated $3bn in revenue for the people potentially doing the screwing?
If you work for stupid managers, you can get away with this. If they're sharp, they're going to know that you're being opaque on purpose, and this will come back to bite you in the ass.
h ow_to_lose_your_job_part_1.html
http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2004/12/14/
You are assuming you know the classification level of the information in the Intelliwiki, when you do not. All that is known is that the system is classified to the extent that the public is not allowed to see it.
Without evidence to the contrary, there is no reason to assume that SCI or SSBI-level information is there for anyone with "confidential" clearance to see.
own in New Yawk, lightweight conversations between strangers are not terribly uncommon.
This statement, coupled with "New Yawk", suggests to me that you don't actually live here. I take the MTA to and from work every day, and I almost never see strangers starting up conversation. The only people engaged in conversation already know each other before stepping foot in the train. We'd really rather just put on our headphones (or read a book or the paper) and ignore the noise and crowds, rather than chat up everyone with a music player and ask them if we can send them our music.
On a slightly less serious note, is it really a good idea to teach potentially hostile aliens about how we work (and by extension how to kill us)?
Don't you know that security through obscurity always fails?
AND what I say in class is my intellectual property.
You'd better stop your students from, uh, using your "intellectual property" in real life, then. That's valuable money you're losing by teaching students your knowledge.
Are your students not allowed to talk to people about what you say, as well?
You should make them license this special "intellectual property" when they go to work and use what you've taught them. I mean, it's not like there are other people teaching the same things out of the same reference material or anything.
For fuck's sake, are teachers really starting to call their lessons "intellectual property"?
They're cheap, basic, simple electronic commodities at this point.
And this mindset, ladies and gentlemen, is why no one has been able to beat the iPod.
If device manufacturers (APPLE, cell phone companies, and even car stereo makers) would bother to design buttons that are TACTILE (recognizable by touch) we wouldn't have this problem (well, not as big). There's nothing worse than reaching for that device, only to find that every button feels the same under your thumb... Is it so hard to add a triangle shape to the Play button? Square to the stop?
/easily/ usable with your eyes shut tight. It's different than a cell phone because a cell phone has many rows of buttons in comparison, so you have to feel it out by counting rows if you don't have a little orientation nub. iPod doesn't need it because it's just a circle at the bottom of the device. You pick it up and put your thumb on it, and you instantly know where everything is.
If I put my thumb on my iPod wheel, I know where everything is. With my eyes closed. I know:
1. The wheel is at the bottom. Why? Because I've looked at my iPod at least once. I can feel that the bottom of the iPod is in a certain place in relation to my hand, as a result.
2. The center of the wheel must be under my thumb, because it's smooth, and the wheel is not smooth.
3. Because I know where my thumb is in relation to the wheel, even if it's not directly center, I know where all the buttons are. There are only four, and they're north-east-south-west in orientation. I don't need to know where the "volume up/down" is, because I am an adult and know clockwise from counter-clockwise.
iPod is
Daikatana 2 is still not out.
And this alone is proof that God exists.
Yeah, because not wanting to get fucked by the industry you [the artist in general] are driving is really greedy, right?
I find that no matter how grusome, synthesized imagery has absolutely no affect on me. However, if I watch someone pull their toenail out [ebaumsworld.com], I cringe and shudder. The moral of the story is: people need to work harder at distinguishing reality and fantasy.
He didn't say it offended him. The imagery struck something in his head and he (jokingly) suspects that it will give him nightmares. There's nothing stupid about this at all.
The video is full of rather nightmarish, dark imagery. Something doesn't need to offend or actually scare us to trigger a nightmare. After all, even if you decide what you find offensive, you don't decide what your subconscious chooses to turn into ghoulish demons in your sleep.
Has anyone got the patent for the on-off switch?
Microsoft Patents Ones, Zeroes
"In the early days of flat HTML, Internet Explorer rendered pages differently from Netscape. Those problems were fixed, but when support for CSS was added, new compatibility issues arose. Now most of the CSS issues have been solved, but JavaScript compatibility issues have cropped up."
CSS compatibility issues have been worked around; they have not been "solved", and any quick trip through Position is Everything or A List Apart will show you that. JavaScript compatibility issues have also been around since the first days of JavaScript implementation in browsers.
Neither are going to "be solved", especially if Microsoft have anything to say about it. Right now, as in the past, implementation differences equal a certain degree of lock-in. The truth is that no rendering engine provides a complete, perfect-for-intents-and-purposes CSS2 implementation, and IE is easily at the bottom of that pack. Combined with its field dominance, it is largely responsible for "CSS compatibility issues".
IE 7 isn't going to provide a better rendering engine than Gecko, KHTML/WebCore, or whatever Opera's engine is called; it will simply address a list of the most important problems, such as the infamous box model fuck-ups. There will not be a "kickass" rendering engine in IE 7, and as much as I hate to say it, that's going to keep us in compatibility hack hell for the near future.
Now, if you ask me--and obviously you did, right, lol internet_rant--Microsoft have had more than ample time, people, and resources to produce a rendering engine on-par with Gecko and its peers. But that's not going to be the case. Only one reason for that.
CSS compatibility issues mostly solved? Not even close.
I can't compete with someone who only has to pay thirty bucks a month for rent, and who can feed his family in a nice restaraunt for a dollar.
I'm happy for these people, to be honest. I have a privileged fucking head-start on life, just being born in the United States. Add to that the fact that I'm white, and suddenly I have a leg up on a lot of people, even though it shouldn't be that way. I'm glad to hear other people in the world are living well, instead of suffering--and I don't care how that happens, whether it's cheaper than me or not.
I don't get upset when other people are doing better, if they're getting better perks, or if their lives are easier. I left that whiny, woe-is-me bullshit behind when I left high school.
You can compete, if you want to. If you don't, you'll whine that you can't.
Having a nifty rainbow-hued sticker on the front of my computer is half the fun!
What are you, a Mac user?
When my neighbor's daughter launches iTunes, her library shows up in my iTunes, and I can play them. Note that my network is WEP-enabled and MAC filtered, and I'm not part of her network
You might be WEP-enabled and MAC-filtered, but that doesn't mean you aren't on the same network. (WEP and MAC filtering have nothing to do with Bonjour services specifically.) Bonjour works on a subnet, not over a WAN; getting it to work across separate subnets requires special configuration.
You two are on the same network.
I doubt that this kid's creation is half as hackable.
When you were 17, what did you have to show for yourself?
Stop being a prick and give the kid a compliment or two. At least he produces something instead of just bitching about others' creations.