But the iPhone does "real" internet WORSE than existing phones. The iPhone doesn't support the modern standard for mobile internet, 3G, which is already near-universal in developed markets such as Europe and Asia. I brought up this issue previously, and it turns out that Apple are supposedly planning on a 3G version of the iPhone. Which they'll have to if they want the all-essential network operators' support in Europe.
A lot of windows users downloaded iTunes because they bundled it with Quicktime Even if you didn't install iTunes with Quicktime, the latter tries to get you to install iTunes whenever it notifies you of an upgrade anyway. (The window includes a ticked-by-default "install iTunes" option.)
I can't be the only one that finds classic/vintage cars beautiful. And I can't be the only one who thinks recent car designs are insipid. Call me sacrilegious, but I was never (and still amn't) a big fan of 50s "Americana" style cars. Tail fins- overdecorative and contrived space-age kitsch. Too much chrome. Too reliant on their association with "rock-n'-roll and diners" nostalgia for their appeal.
Even though it was only 25 to 30 years old when I was growing up in the 80s, that whole 50s/early-60s style looked ancient and as cheesy as hell.
You're free to disagree with that, but it kind of annoys me that everyone is assumed to love that sort of stuff. Personally, I don't.
And for what it's worth I never really "got" Elvis Presley either.:-/
The British kids' TV show, Blue Peter had the same thing happen with one of the "time capsules" they buried on TV. When they dug it up again with great ceremony 16 years later, water had got in and it was a soggy mess.
Not sure what the point of it was anyway; 16 years isn't that long unless you're like 6 years old when it's being dug up- seems pretty contrived and pointless to me.
WhyTF is the Kodak press release showing a disc of random colors instead of the sensor layout? Because it looks pretty and fills up space, and they probably don't have any "pretty" photos of the actual sensor.
Same reason as people use cheesy stock photography. Even newspaper articles do this; they include an irrelevant or generic image beside a story because it takes up space, makes it more attractive and headline stories are "meant" to have photos.
Seeing as how Sony is from Japan (land of the hentai), all they have to do is come up with an incredibly good-looking 3D real-time hentai game of some sort. Yes, the Japanese *can* come up with Hentai games, but hopefully you didn't have one in mind like "Rapelay", then. Not its graphics are "incredibly good-looking" anyway.
It took this long for them to figure out how to secretly modify the hard disk boot sector under Linux? Ah, so Intuit *are* the assholes who tried to pull that one off? I couldn't remember.
Their arrogance defies belief. I wouldn't touch software produced by those tossers with a bargepole; seriously, screwing around with someone's system, possibly damaging its integrity and very likely messing up any "non-standard" (e.g. Linux bootloader) bootsector installation is beyond the pale.
It's the computer equivalent of a cable company messing around with your house's electrical wiring in dubious ways when they're only supposed to be installing cable TV. Why the f*** anyone who knows enough to run Linux would want anything to do with Intuit's products is beyond me.
Personally, I think all coding should be done using a hex editor and in machine language (none of that fancy assembly - it rots the brain!). Real Programmers use dip switches.
I wouldn't give Wired the time of day, either. Wired had promise in the last century, but is nothing more than a hybrid of Ars Technica and People Magazine. In spite of what the people at Wired think of themselves, they're not the New York Times [..] They're just a garish tech fanboi rag, and not even a good one of those. Wired is rubbish. I could post why here, but I'd just be repeating myself since I've already done this on more than one occasion.
Apart from the PS1/PS2 though, Europe has *NEVER* picked the winning console, it was nigh-pathological. My understanding is that the Sega Master System outsold the original NES in Europe because (a) It had a good marketing campaign and (b) Nintendo didn't (and still don't?) take the European market seriously.
Mind you, that oft-quoted Master System example is also slightly misleading; yes, it outsold the NES here, but it's all relative. Unlike the US, the UK market in the late-1980s was far more dominated by home computers. The SMS/NES sold well but were never dominant formats. It wasn't until the launch of the Mega Drive (Genesis) in the early 1990s that consoles took over the low-end gaming market.
And we went for the Mega Drive/SNES, which I believe is pretty similar to what the US went for too.
It's called "Uncle Festers house of fun", it involves chair throwing, imitating everyone else and making childish threats over unspecified "IP". It'll be fun for all the family, children of all ages can now learn to emulate Microsoft's psychopathic behavior. Don't you mean "Super Monkey Ballmer"?
(Disclaimer: This is about abuse of the moderation system, it is not an endorsement of XChristX's views).
Regarding the "funny" moderation of the parent. There is nothing obviously funny to me about it; can we assume that:
The mod thinks that talk of "OMG!! COMMIES!!!!" is funny, despite the fact that for a long time India was run along very left-wing (if not quite communist) principles? It's not America, and I'm sure communism *is* still a valid factor in politics there.
It's an intended piss-take because they disagree with what XchristX is saying? (i.e. deliberately abusive modding)
They're exploiting the "Funny doesn't give karma" loophole so that if and when XchristX is modded down to -1, it'll damage his karma more than it would otherwise? (Again, deliberately abusive modding)
You misunderstood me. I meant the spammers would just send emails to the addresses which look the most promising instead of carpet bombing every one they find. No, I didn't misunderstand you. I meant how would they know which ones are the most promising?
Fact is that many spammers can afford 1/4 cent per email. They just need to be a bit more selective about their address lists. Yes, but on what basis should they filter their lists?
Anyway, whilst spam may generally be defined as any unsolicited email, I believe the use of the term (and the implied problem) here relates to largely untargeted bulk spam. Anything more than trivial list filtering really alters the nature of the game.
It also kills too many innocent bystanders. Non-profits, legit mailing lists, etc... Yes, but the OP already said that, and I made clear in my reply that this wasn't the part I disagreed with.
Oh wait, there already is an alternate internet. Sorry, I cannot disclose the location. Wait, wait.... awww, I know this one, it's..... a DNS server running on an old Pentium II at your school's computer club, and seven or eight nerds pointing their computers at it?
I'm not saying that this is wrong:
It would definitely bring e-mail communications out of reach for thousands - millions - of legitimate organizations. Nor am I saying that the plan as a whole is necessarily a good idea. However, *this* point is flawed:
But spammers spam because their communications are profitable. The reason they're profitable with such a low return rate is (as has been said before) that the cost of each email is tiny. Even a nominal fraction-of-a-cent charge upsets the balance here.
Sid probably didn't like the Nazis, he just wanted to trigger a debate on their alleged crimes. Unlikely; from what I've heard, Sid Vicious wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer and probably just wanted to annoy people.
The fact that you get those from some private companies, while they got them from state-owned companies, isn't necessarily some sinister conspiracy. It's just the way a state-owned economy is supposed to work: it essentially does the same things, but via companies owned by the state. That may be the intent, but I can assure you that only a true capitalist economy could come up with "Chocolate Chip" variety Pancakes and Sausage on a stick.
And what's worse is that if the Soviets had ever seen anything like that under communism, they'd have wanted it too. It takes the sheer evil of capitalism to create such crap *and* make people want it.:-/
Surely [the U.S. has] some consumer protection laws like that people can use ? U.S. consumer protection law is generally much weaker than the UK's. I think the latter was pretty decent to start off with, and has since been strengthened further by the EU.
I'm not claiming that this justifies all the complained-about price differentials between the UK and the US. However, aside from the issue of VAT/Sales tax (normally listed UK prices include it, US ones don't), this may be another reason for the differences. In the US, Playstations and the like normally come with a 90 day warranty. I've heard of new laptops coming with a paltry *30* days. It doesn't take a genius to imagine that if you don't have to replace faulty stuff after 90- or 30- days, instead of 1-3 years, you're going to be able to sell it a bit cheaper. And possibly get away with selling less reliable stuff in the first place.
Of course, there are price vs. guarantee trade-offs. You pays your money and you takes your choice- I know which system I prefer, but since I don't live in the US, it doesn't bother me if the Americans prefer a system that saves them a few pennies in the short term.
The legal technicality that is used by software is that copying the program from the install media to your disk and then to RAM requires extra rights (not valid in all jurisdictions). (Disclaimer: I am neither an American nor a lawyer; it shouldn't be construed as even an attempt at legal advice.)
I don't know what the US legal position is, but I've said this before and I'll say this again; If a piece of software *requires* to be copied to disk and/or RAM in order to be functional, then isn't it reasonable- and legal- to assume that those rights would be automatically granted anyway and- at worst- wouldn't it likely be clarified by any reasonable court that the user had such rights since the product would not be fit for the purpose it was sold for otherwise?
Put another way, it would be pretty messed up if the courts didn't come to the conclusion that such rights were implicit by some route or another, since the purpose for which the product was sold required them.
Nintendo was hardly impressed by the Pokemon sales, since they could take a dump in a box, slap a Pokemon label on it, and it would sell millions of units. Wrong; they tried that with "Pokemon Brown", but it only sold 850,000 units.
To be fair, they *would* have sold more, but they couldn't keep up with demand, even after downing heroic quantities of laxative tablets.
Slashdot Mirror
Even though it was only 25 to 30 years old when I was growing up in the 80s, that whole 50s/early-60s style looked ancient and as cheesy as hell.
You're free to disagree with that, but it kind of annoys me that everyone is assumed to love that sort of stuff. Personally, I don't.
And for what it's worth I never really "got" Elvis Presley either.
The British kids' TV show, Blue Peter had the same thing happen with one of the "time capsules" they buried on TV. When they dug it up again with great ceremony 16 years later, water had got in and it was a soggy mess.
Not sure what the point of it was anyway; 16 years isn't that long unless you're like 6 years old when it's being dug up- seems pretty contrived and pointless to me.
Do a Google search on "Commission on Presidential Debates"; you might be interested in what you find. Or you might not. :-/
Same reason as people use cheesy stock photography. Even newspaper articles do this; they include an irrelevant or generic image beside a story because it takes up space, makes it more attractive and headline stories are "meant" to have photos.
(Above link is almost certainly NSFW, BTW.)
Their arrogance defies belief. I wouldn't touch software produced by those tossers with a bargepole; seriously, screwing around with someone's system, possibly damaging its integrity and very likely messing up any "non-standard" (e.g. Linux bootloader) bootsector installation is beyond the pale.
It's the computer equivalent of a cable company messing around with your house's electrical wiring in dubious ways when they're only supposed to be installing cable TV. Why the f*** anyone who knows enough to run Linux would want anything to do with Intuit's products is beyond me.
Mind you, that oft-quoted Master System example is also slightly misleading; yes, it outsold the NES here, but it's all relative. Unlike the US, the UK market in the late-1980s was far more dominated by home computers. The SMS/NES sold well but were never dominant formats. It wasn't until the launch of the Mega Drive (Genesis) in the early 1990s that consoles took over the low-end gaming market.
And we went for the Mega Drive/SNES, which I believe is pretty similar to what the US went for too.
Regarding the "funny" moderation of the parent. There is nothing obviously funny to me about it; can we assume that:
- The mod thinks that talk of "OMG!! COMMIES!!!!" is funny, despite the fact that for a long time India was run along very left-wing (if not quite communist) principles? It's not America, and I'm sure communism *is* still a valid factor in politics there.
- It's an intended piss-take because they disagree with what XchristX is saying? (i.e. deliberately abusive modding)
- They're exploiting the "Funny doesn't give karma" loophole so that if and when XchristX is modded down to -1, it'll damage his karma more than it would otherwise? (Again, deliberately abusive modding)
I suspect it's the second and/or third.Anyway, whilst spam may generally be defined as any unsolicited email, I believe the use of the term (and the implied problem) here relates to largely untargeted bulk spam. Anything more than trivial list filtering really alters the nature of the game. It also kills too many innocent bystanders. Non-profits, legit mailing lists, etc... Yes, but the OP already said that, and I made clear in my reply that this wasn't the part I disagreed with.
And what's worse is that if the Soviets had ever seen anything like that under communism, they'd have wanted it too. It takes the sheer evil of capitalism to create such crap *and* make people want it.
I'm not claiming that this justifies all the complained-about price differentials between the UK and the US. However, aside from the issue of VAT/Sales tax (normally listed UK prices include it, US ones don't), this may be another reason for the differences. In the US, Playstations and the like normally come with a 90 day warranty. I've heard of new laptops coming with a paltry *30* days. It doesn't take a genius to imagine that if you don't have to replace faulty stuff after 90- or 30- days, instead of 1-3 years, you're going to be able to sell it a bit cheaper. And possibly get away with selling less reliable stuff in the first place.
Of course, there are price vs. guarantee trade-offs. You pays your money and you takes your choice- I know which system I prefer, but since I don't live in the US, it doesn't bother me if the Americans prefer a system that saves them a few pennies in the short term.
I don't know what the US legal position is, but I've said this before and I'll say this again; If a piece of software *requires* to be copied to disk and/or RAM in order to be functional, then isn't it reasonable- and legal- to assume that those rights would be automatically granted anyway and- at worst- wouldn't it likely be clarified by any reasonable court that the user had such rights since the product would not be fit for the purpose it was sold for otherwise?
Put another way, it would be pretty messed up if the courts didn't come to the conclusion that such rights were implicit by some route or another, since the purpose for which the product was sold required them.
To be fair, they *would* have sold more, but they couldn't keep up with demand, even after downing heroic quantities of laxative tablets.