The tech industry in america is floundering. Oh sure there are some success stories just check Apple, an all american product. Wich state is China in anyway?
But I got a suggestion for any eu citizen who thinks the US is heaven on earth. Emigrate. It is actually fairly easy provided you got some half decent job skills and money. No you are not allowed to say anything bad about US immigration policy, remember, your a US fanboy.
1. Pff, I link to it once and that is it. I can always google for it
2. I rather they spend it on this then on a war.
3. Perhaps a search engine that does not bow to the Chinese goverment in the name of the almighty dollar?
4. Yeah, because the top cellphone company is european and all your pc's are made in the US. No I rather we keep our model. So do the majority of EU voters. EU socialist, US capatalist. Move to location of your choice.
Why did Nasa go into space when the russians had already done it? Why do anything if somebody else has already done it.
The following bit of info may shock some people so please, little kids leave the room, adults brace youreselve.
GOOGLE SUCKS AS A SEARCH ENGINE
Anyone still around? Good, we judge google by its peers and its peers are the totall crappers so by comparison google looks pretty good. BUT imagine that the people at google had thought "Oh, there already is a search engine no need to make another." We would still be using altavista or something.
Google is fairly good at returning pages regarding obscure linux error messages. When however your search should include words in common usage or possible of a retail product or god forbid be associated in anyway with the adult industry then you are floundering in page after page of crap results.
There is an even worse problem. Despite all what the fanboys will tell you Google is a business. A business that now not just provides search and ads but is becoming a content broker itself.
Could google one day prefer its own pages over others? For now the opposite it seems, I can't get google to return its own videos that it sells BUT some goverments might feel that internet search has become such an important tool that there is some importance to having an alternative to just depending on the US.
America is a funny country, ever since WW2 america has been complaining that it has to do foot the bill for the entire world defence. Europe thinks of creating a european army and the US gets upset. US taxpayer pay for the free GPS of the entire world and they complain. EU makes it own version and americans get upset.
Here is a suggestion for americans, you run your country your way and we run ours our way.
What you are missing is that not every goverment has the same motives. Perhaps some feel that not being a slave to america is a good thing. Since you aren't paying for it with your taxes what business is it of yours?
It ain't the money, MS is filthy fucking rich and will continue to be so for a long time. It is that their absolute control of the desktop is crumbling.
There are some nasty people who have suggested that MS has benefitted greatly from pre-XP version of its software being so easy to copy. OS/2 was harder and copying Apples OS is pointless since it is tied to the hardware. How many people had MS Office at home because that was the CD they could borrow from work?
MS has neatly ensured that IT is the desktop and if that changes its whole business must change. You can see this with IE. All of sudden it is being upgraded and copying all the features that exist in Firefox and Opera. Why? Not because MS is loosing money, they do not sell IE so why should they care? Because Firefox/Opera/Safari is costing them the control of the desktop.
MS only started caring about everyone paying for their license when they thought they had the market controlled. If you give MS the choice between taiwan going 25% non-ms or giving taiwain all MS software it wants free of charge then the answer is clear. MS has already done that in the past. Google for Munich, when MS learned it was not the only bidder it lowered its price and offerted so much freebies that it was basically giving the install away. All to stop its dominance from crumbling. MS can afford to loose a few billion, it cannot afford competition.
Your argument seems wrong, you defend changing your name because it never killed a company before. Hmmm, eh so why change? Has any company ever been killed when it kept a successfull name?
Eating shit probably won't kill me either but that is hardly a reason to do it.
The real economy should be, it will cost us X to change names will it gives us Y in increased income where Y > X?
This is rarely the case. Instead name changes and companies re-inventing themselves are either there to hide the real problems or because some ad company has been extremely successfull at its main business, sell ads.
This is "wasted" money that could have been spent on research but research departments tell you things like, "give us 10 billion and we might have some nice tech in 10 years time". Ad companies tell you things like "give us 10 billion and everyone will love your product". That you won't have a product and that love does not equal a sale is ofcourse not mentioned.
Will this hurt Intel? Not likely but you do not spent billions just hoping not to be hurt.
Cars. While car safety is going up the number of accidents is not going down as expected. Deaths are but that could easily be caused by improved healthcare. So what is happening? Well while cars have become safer and safer they also become easier to drive, or rather they haven't become easier to drive at all but they are seen as easier to drive.
Nobody would take a T-Ford to 180 km per hour at night. The latest BMW? No problem. Usually it ain't a problem. Except when it does wrong and modern tech is asked to keep the human body safe when 2 tons of metal loose traction and meet a bridge support.
There are some road safety expert who suggests that one of the dangerous developments is quiet cars. In old cars you know your speed because the roar of the engine and the whistleing wind grow intollerable. The latest cars however remain very quiet and can really distort your sense of speed. If you ever been on a highspeed train or worse an aircraft you know the feeling.
So how does this relate to computers? Simple, a lot of the bugs, activeX on windows and that widget thing from the article that affected OS-X are there to hide the difficulty of driving. Just as a modern car reduces the feedback so do solutions that allow software to be installed with no or minimum interaction.
That whistle of the wind, the roar of the engine, the wheels almost loosing traction are the feedback signals to tell me I am going to fast, slow down before you loose control.
Same with install screens. The more invasive an install is the more warnings it should throw up (just as driving to fast on a bad road will feel worse then driving to fast on a good road). You want to install a program that only runs for you, installs no hooks and does not modify anything or communicate with anything? Just 1 screen. It installs for you and allows writing to any file owned by you? 2 screens. It installs it self for you and allows writing to any file and runs in the background? 3 screens.
It is like those signs in bugs bunny comedies that tell him to turn back now, we mean it, really mean it, don't do it.
Computers ain't easy to use and if you get it wrong there is a pool of 6 billion people who are out to get you. Now like cars you can make computers very easy to use but then you better make sure you do not exceed the recommendanded maximum usage. You can drive a car with total lack of feedback perfectly safely. At about 5 miles per hour. You can have a computer with 0 click install software perfectly safely, just limited to microsoft.com/apple.com
As long as software makers keep making things easy and users keep accepting it we will have people getting it wrong. Just like every day somebody gets it wrong with their car and crashes for no other reason then that they misjudged the ease of use.
I have only once been affected by a virus and that is a machine I was given pre-installed and I discovered it and was given the task of cleaning up after figuring that all the machines in the office had been affected.
Am I brilliant? No. Am I social outcast who doesn't get the latest virusses in his email box? Yes. But mostly I do not accept an easy to use computer. I want to speed (download porn/warez) and know that the price for that is that I gotta be in complete control of my computer. Just like F1 drivers are in control of their car (except they get chicks and money for it).
Oh sure it won't cause MS to go bankrupt. Not directly anyway. However I would say that a reduction of your share of the desktop market from almost 100% to 75% would cause a bit of a panic in any sensible company.
The worst bit is that someone apparently broke the connection Computer == Windows. This is bad. Kinda like thinking in america Democracy == Capatalism. They got a place in Cuba for people like that.
To many people even the suggestion of running another OS runs into a brick wall as computers is Windows. An alternative OS to them is XP or 98 or 2000. This example is even clearer when it comes to office software. Just try sending your CV to anyone in a non MS word format. Like eh RTF? A MS format? Documents == MS Word.
This is very handy. It causes a kinda loop, because everyone runs windows everything only works with windows so people buy windows so that their stuff will work and because nobody buys anything else then windows nothing else is supported. Cue endless loop.
UNTIL someone throws a spanner into the works and decides that they are going to run another OS. Oh one doesn't matter, he/she will just have to adapt or die. "Very nice OS you written their Mister Torvalds but what you going to do with eh? All software available is for Windows and won't run on your OS."
Luckily Mister Stallman had been working on lots of pieces of software and it met up and spawned Linux (or to keep Mr Stallman happy GNU/Linux).
Slowly the almost complete dominance of MS on the desktop started to crumble. Oh sure, a fraction of a percentage at first but remember, the biggest avalance starts with a single snowflake. Except that MS doesn't fear an avalance. It fear a snowball.
Why? As long as it has/had 99% of the market it could dictate its standards on the rest of the world. Internet Explorer is a clear example. Your website MUST work on IE. MS doesn't feel like supporting all the features of PNG image format? Then it isn't usable. Oh sure Mozilla can show some nice demos of what is possible but what is the use? IE doesn't support it.
Throw in a lot of unique features into IE and you will create that loop again. If you want to view 100% of websites you better be running IE and because everyone uses IE websites can use the unique features that handily force everyone to run IE. And so on.
The Linux freaks, BSD zombies and Mac faggots on their own are bad enough neatly reducing MS dominance by easily 5%. Oh wow, 5%, MS must be quaking in its boots, somebody setup a collection fund for Bill Gates kids so they can buy some shoes.
Very funny BUT it does matter, not because MS is going to go bankrupt but because the loop is being broken. IF 5% of you potential web customers do not run IE at any cost do you still code your website to make use of IE only features? This is a bit like asking, if 5% of your supermarket customers are in wheelchair or use a rollator do you build an extra wide entrance to allow them entry or do you let them go to the competitor who does?
It is becoming easier and easier to surf the net without IE.
And this is just with a tiny percentage changing. Now 25% of all goverment desktops switching? Yikes. You know this might mean that goverment sites actually become mandatory visible in non-ie browsers. Shock HORROR! It could mean that ideas like using MS passport for identification with your local goverment (actually proposed) would be impossible.
MS has survived a long time because if you wanted to do IT you had to do windows. IF this changes and MS will really face competition where a person can go in a store and choose his OS on preference NOT because his software on runs on one of them that would force MS to compete on quality.
Is this the china that is behind Red Flag Linux or is this the China that buy from international companies soft/hardware and services to help keep their citizens inline?
China's politics on their own are already screwed up enough. Frankly it seems to suffer from an advanced case of split personality. This is nothing unusual, many "goverments" do things that seem to be at odds with each other but china just does it to the extreme. How can you really combine capatlism and communism in one country? By not looking to closely at policies that seem to contradict each other. Instead you just go with the flow and hope it all works out. Sorta like most of human history. So they shot some protesting students when it went a bit out of control. Name one country in the world that has not killed peacefull protestors since the end of WW2.
Taiwan is a point of pride but for the immidiate future it is like what cuba is to america. Exactly why does America still boycot cuba? By now it should be clear it ain't working in fact it only shows to the world exactly how america thinks of anyone that does not do exactly as it tells them. Bad PR but giving in will make the americans loose face.
Same with China and Taiwan. It makes China look bad constantly as no discussion about China is complete without someone bringing up taiwan but China giving in would cause to much loss of face.
So your suggestion of anything happening is absurd. if anything considerings china push of red flag linux this could be seen by the insane as a move by taiwan to please China.
The dutch version is "De druppel die de emmer deed overlopen" or translated "The drop that caused the bucket to overflow".
The dutch saying however is superior, naturally being dutch, as it neatly combines with the other saying "a drop in a bucket". Wich is used often to show something having little to no effect. True or not, enough drops and the bucket still overflows. I think the english version is a crack in the armor? One crack doesn't matter but they add up until your standing naked on a battlefield.
Anyway all the crap about Fair Trade should tell you the opposition is really grasping at straws. Fair Trade Regulations are for enforcing against your enemies NEVER for restricting yourselve. Airbus VS Boeing. Europe and America both heavily subsidize the respective companies and both call foul when the other does it. Same with farm subsidies.
This is just another tiny wakening up as the world realises that having all IT tied up by one company is perhaps not the smartest move ever made.
Oh and all the people crying that MS will just do X or the US goverment will stop it or it will never happen. Straws on camels and drops in buckets remember. It all adds up.
It is a billion dollar company refusing to clean up a clear mistake it made with a product people paid for. Oh sure product live, cost of support, not wanting to create a backlog of programs to have to update.
Blah blah blah.
The 9X series of windows is still in wide use ESPECIALLY by paying customer, pirates can afford to have the latest, and MS is telling them that it can't be bothered to fix it.
Sure it costs them some money. Are they running out?
It is not about security, it is a not about cost it is about MS greatest failure. Extremely bad marketing department. It just isn't good PR to tell your paying customers to piss off. MS spends large fortunes on ad campaigns and then ruins it in an effort to save it a few bucks rather then just say "Yes there is a bug in windows that people are very alarmed about and we got the fix for all the windows versions affected right here".
I do some charity work. Do you know how many of them work off donated computers? Computers that can't run xp? Or even afford to?
When country after country, company after company is thinking of either not upgrading or even worse switching and when Apple is getting sexier by the day and Linux becomes easier and easier to run do you really want to go to your customers and say, "Upgrade or die". They might just do that. Just not to another piece of software about to become unsupported. Windows XP Home edition anyone?
The feeling you might get with the first movie that you landed in the middle of something bigger is a plot device. The real story, what is live or however you want to phrase it, sits within the movie BUT the conspiracy and the agents fighting it sit outside it.
This is just a way to tell a story. The other way is to introduce a story from the very beginning to the very end, but this means you can spend far less time on the middle. Sci-Fi like this wich at least pretends to want to ask a moral question without force feeding you the answer doesn't really have an "ending" anyway. It just puts a situation to you and then asks you to consider it.
So don't worry about feeling there are things happening outside the picture (as in motion picture clever pun ne?... though crowd) there are. They just don't matter. Well UNTIL the movie became very popular and they could be used to make sequels and prequels out of it.
Should you read the manga? Well perhaps, is a bit like asking wether you should watch the animatrix before watching the matrix movies. If your a fan then sure, gobble it all up. If not, well you started with the movie. That is a nice introduction BUT it was based on a manga (strip/comic). You might want to start here. The manga spawned a sequel with the imaginative name Ghost in the Shell 2 (yeah those crazy japanese). This in turn spawned a tv series. And finally a movie.
If you really want to know the story, read the manga. It is what everything else is based on. Just be warned that it has a different style.
Oh and if you decide to plunge in to the seedy underbelly of the net that is the anime/manga forum please do not proudly boast that you watched ghost in the shell. It is kinda of like going to a sci-fi con having only seen Star Wars. Or like posting on/. using windows XP.
What worries me is what will happen when I turn my back on my linux kernel and the NSA code will start fighting with Red China code. Do I want Korea part 2 on my HD?
HELL YES! I can be impartial and sell weapons to both of them.
I don't own a credit card as in Holland we got a different system. You get from your bank where you have a debit account (possibly with a credit option) a card with a magnectic strip. You can withdraw cash from ATM like machines OR pay with it by having your card read and typing in a 4 digit code to verify it belongs to you.
This would seem to stop a lot of the problems. There is no attempt to verify that the card belongs to you EXCEPT if you wish to withdraw money without knowing the pin code (what the password is called). This can only be done for my bank at head branches and with valid ID and they do really check it and make note of it.
If credit cards do not have this check it seems like a bloody big security risk to me.
ATM machines must surely have something like this so why don't shops? Is the tech to old (america had credit cards long before holland got the current system) are americans to lazy/stupid to remember a pincode or is there another reason?
The simplest way to perhaps prevent theft would be something like this. The card asks for your fingerprint, then you swipe it sending the combined details of the card and your fingerprint and then you enter a passcode on the reader. This neatly combines the keys of verification, what you have (card), who/what you are (fingerprint) and what you know (pincode).
Maybe the current system is secure enough. Pincodes are currently stolen by observing them being entered at ATM's via all sorts of methods and either stealing the card OR having a fake front to the reader that actually allows the card to be copied. Ways could be introduced to prevent this like standarizing all the machines to make fake readers stand out and lengthy codes with multiple keys (sorta like not 1234 but CTRL-1 ALT-2 SHIFT-3 ALT-4) to make it harder to read it over someones shoulder. But that would perhaps make it to complex to use.
The credit card shown seems a lot like those special keys that you can buy to generate a unique password to login to your computer. Very nice systems even if they are bloody expensive.
Turns out people wanted to just play something different from endless [Insert Title] [Insert Year|$i++] style games where nothing new is added.
You can't blame game companies. When tomb raider sold a gazillion installments game execs must have thought they had found the golden goose. (I do not want you to fantasize about Lara Croft lying golden eggs you sick pervert)
Now games do not have to be innovative, many GBA DS games are not really THAT innovative BUT you have to add something new or a really big improvement for the gaming public to warm up.
Oh well seems all the doom stories one way or another were overrated. Again. So games are dying stories are out for the rest of the month. What can we use instead. BSD old buddy, how is that cough? Sun you look a bit under the weather.
When I was a little kid an uncle used to collect miniature trains. Do you know what these tiny pieces of cast iron a bit of plastic and a crap electric motor go for? AMD/Intel would be ashamed.
A co-worker bought a new boat. Or rather bought a not so new boat that he spend the entire summer stripping and painting. Super healthy stuff that standing in a shed sanding of marine paint and applying it in one of the warmest summers we have had in holland.
A friend likes to dive. In water with sharks. He spends all year saving up for a long holiday submerging his body exposing it to pressures it is not designed for breathing air under pressure surrounded by critters that think "Yummy, a hairless seal".
As for the people who party hardy shooting themselves full of drugs to dance throughout the weekend. Wohoo! Cheap chemicals, sign me up.
Oh and what to think of that image next to the article. That ever sane person who takes up fishing as a hobby. Standing with your balls in freezing water with a 1000 dollar carbon fibre rod to get a diseased posion laden half death fish. If your lucky.
Nah, gamers are the sane one. I have had this conversation more then once "Boss: You spend your christmas bonus on a vidcard?" "Me: yes thank you should last me all year." "Boss: insane Oh, you seen the new rubbers for the windows on my classic porche" "Me: yeah".
Life is short, enjoy it anyway you can. If it is gaming, well who cares how much it costs, is not like you have a girl to waste it on.
Just been reading about some american judge who send a repeat child rapist to a mere 2 months in jail and a guy who deletes a single account gets 3 months. Yeah yeah apples and oranges but something is very very wrong here. IF society is not served by sending the child rapist (who is claimed to be severely retarded) to jail then how is society served by sending this idiot to jail? Force him to communinity work for half a year for no pay or something.
Ah well, amazing you can hire an IBM'er for 50 bucks an hour. 3rd month in IT and I was already generating more. The bubble really burst.
It used to be 5.5m units and MS revised it down by a full million. So with less then a million sold they already reduced their projected sales by more then they sold.
Of course so far it is pure production problems that is limiting sales in the west BUT it is hardly like they are on track.
This article would be better if it mentioned this, now it seems a bit to much like a press release.
The PS3 is still going to have a GPU. This had me amazed as I thought the Cell itself was going to do the graphics as well. For the young ones, there was a time when your PC only had a single CPU that did all the hardwork and the video card was nothing more then a tiny piece of electronics that converted the digital image delivered by the cpu into an analog signal.
What the hell are they going to the 7 cores for? If the graphics are all going to be done by an external chip this leaves an awfull lot of power for doing the rest of the game. Super advanced and massive amounts of AI? Fear with a hundred soldiers? Sure sure you will still be limited to a dozen lights but who cares. It is the AI that has been sorely lacking in recent games.
Oh well, we will just have to see what Sony will deliver in the end. As for people commenting about Sony DRM rootkits. Only Windows users are affected. Amazing that you blame the guy shoving his dick up your ass, not the guy who strapped you down and spread your cheeks wide open for the last 20 years.
Come on it has to be a joke. If the PS3 OR the 360 OR the Revolution wins then IBM will be the one selling the chip that is inside it. The various game companies may have to subsidise the hardware or sell it at cost but you can rest assured that IBM is doing no such thing. They sell the chips for hard profit.
If the new consoles are going to sell in the same numbers as the existing ones then they will outsell Apples by a degree that just ain't funny.
One of the reasons Apple is switching to Intel is that IBM just didn't give a fuck about Apple. Not nearly enough chips in it. It has been Apples problem all along, it never could convince its chip makers to focus on the features its wanted since the real money was in embedded versions of the chips. Were power is less important and running without a fan is super important.
ALL succesfull IT companies do this. Companies that don't do this do not succeed.
Some tricks.
Agree on a project on a per hour basis: Cool because now the hired company has absolutly no motivation to finish quickly.
Agree on a fixed price for a project: Cool because as soon as the project goes out of control you take all the good people of it and replace them with the cheapest staff you got preferably people who need the work experience.
Make a detailed requirement list: Cool because the smallest change now becomes a new item to be negiotated.
Draw up a broad general requirement: Cool because now you can't actually demand X is implemented since you never had it on paper.
Demand all project work is done internally to assure you have control and supervision: Cool, any problems or delays caused by your staff will be used to explain ALL the problems and delays.
Outsource the entire project and only accept the finished product: Cool, you will have absolutly no idea what the fuck is going on and the only thing you will ever see is faked demos until finally you get a few pieces that are A the product B the installation documentation C the techinal docs. None of wich are related and your own people ain't got a clue how to deal with it.
Outsource production, do internal quality control and hire a 3rd party for extra work like porting: Even cooler, nobody will accept responsibility for anything and all will demand increased budgets to make up for the others failing.
Buy an off the shelve solution: Cool, it won't ever work as you expected and the costs of workarounds will be 10x higer then if you had it custom build.
Have it developed completly internally by people loyal to your own company: Cool, you now have programmers running loose in the building. Rentokill charges extra for that.
Don't do IT. Do it the way you have done if for decades and make a fat profit: Cool, shareholders will dump your stock since companies that make a profit without buzzwords are just not the way you do business.
I find that an awfull lot of game sites nowadays come with flash trailers with sound. This is perfectly acceptable up to a point. They are trying to sell me a full 3D surround sound feast for the eye and ear and well doing that in pure HTML is apparently to difficult.
So completly blocking flash or just disable all sound is not worth it to me.
So gee, what other option do I have to disable sound from ads. Hmmm. Though one.
Oh wait maybe I can block ads? Nah, I am not skilled enough for this and I am sure nobody else has bothered to code something like this.
What the fuck is this question about?Ads annoy me, what can I do about it? BLOCK THE FUCKING FUCKERS! Find the server for the offending ad and block it in whatever adblocker you have installed.
But blocking ads hurts sites who depend on them for their revenue. THOUGH SHIT! Nobody started out blocking ads. When the first few banners appeared people were more or less willing to accept them.
However ad companies faced a problem, sites with millions of visitors generated only a handfull of click throughs. Could it be that they had the wrong ads, that people just ain't all the intrested in what is being sold? That people period do not read ads? Remember that before with TV/radio and magazine ads there was no real way to measure how many people were affected by ads. With click throughs the total failure of ads to attract is very apparent.
Ad companies could of course have told their employers that consumers just ain't intrested in their products OR they can make the ads even more annoying and in your face because surely that is the way to get people intrested.
So static images became animated, animated images came to surround all the text, the text was chopped up to maximize the amount of ads displayed, content became hidden by ad pages that had to be viewed and now sound to make sure your attention is diverted.
Ads are totally out of control on the net as companies desperatly seek a way to get as many eyeballs to their product as possible. If your not intrested well then of course the only way to change that is by making the ad even more intrusive since nobody in the business can make money by simply accepting that you are not going to buy product X.
The only recourse you have is to block them. So do so. Yes some idiots will claim it is stealing, these are probably the same people that dutyfully examine each ad in the news paper and sit upright in their chair during the commericial break while us thieves are taking a toilet break or stocking up on snacks.
Ads are not in themselves offensive to me. But I grew up in holland where amazing as it may sound to americans we had NO ADS on sundays on tv. Now the ad blocks are 5 minutes and growing and frankly I have had enough. If you give the ad industry a finger they will rip of your arm and rape your ass with it. AND charge you for it.
Block them, it your only hope for sanity. Of course the ad industry response will be to make ads even more annoying for the poor people who don't block them but well, who gives a fuck.
All those who do not block ads, thank you for paying for my ad free internet. I appreciate it.
Arrrh matey shiver me timber and all that. I off course installed iTunes and looked at the store. It has nothing I like. My music tastes are not sated. Not because I have such elite tastes that the mainstream is not good enough for me. Just because I am in the wrong continent for my tastes.
Or put another way my music tastes isn't so much out there as more "You listen to that crap?". Japanese idol music. Really old country western, old dutch music. None of wich iTunes sells.
Napster was a dream come true, finally you could find the oddest pieces of music and if you found it just get the users complete listing for odder crap that might be fun. The more kitch and socially unacceptable the better. Not out of any eltist motives. I just got crap tastes.
Ages ago a dutch artist did a sorta off musical fantasy story called Zilverdael. I had an LP of it as a kid and since then it has been impossible to buy. The moment that album becomes available via an online music store is the moment I start paying for music again. Until then, steal them blind.
If musicians are starving because of me. Good. Get a fucking real job you hippy! Artist are supposed to suffer, it attracts the muses or something. Or fleas possibly.
Getting better all the time as well. The DRM? Eh yeah, that is terrible, ehm because I itching to buy a credit card and pay for content NBA games or other crap stuff.
No I am talking about the "free" content Google has put online and is even hosting. Oh it probably won't last but for now I can download an awfull lot of japanese music videos for free and without some poor fan having his website raped.
The only oddity is that opera under linux refuses to load the movie file while firefox does work. Then again Google always has had something against Opera.
Bitching about yet another DRM standard is a bit silly. There is no DRM standard so how can there be another one. All you got is a lot of DRM crap all of wich hopes to become the standard.
And google can't support other platforms if the other platform is linux. How the hell can you have opensource DRM? I always been led to believe that DRM itself is silly (because you give people the message, the key and the cipher wich means they got everything they need to crack it) and opensource DRM is even sillier. You give them message, the key, the cipher AND tell them how it all works. Would take about 1 second to hack an opensource DRM, CheckDRMIsSecure() { return true;/* rest of code */}
For now video google has given me a lot of new stuff to watch for future. The pay system? Well we will see, the only thing I seen that it might be a whole lot easier for individuals to get google to sell their own vids. You can actually upload your own stuff and google will either hosts it for free or sell it for you. That alone makes Google a very intresting new player in the field.
Windows only? Pah, if we slam every company who releases windows only software in this world we be awfully busy.
Is this just because game journalists have the IQ of a diseased rodent or is this really the limit of the game?
Brain teasers can be a lot of fun but answering 5x5 is a bit ehm. Well lets just say that if you get that wrong the game better come with GPS so the caretakers from your mental home can find you.
The age old problem of needing a credit card. I made this very clear in my post. SOE for all it does wrong just understands that in order to get peoples money you must make it easy to for them give you their money.
UO didn't get this. try signing up for it without a credit card.
Slashdot Mirror
But I got a suggestion for any eu citizen who thinks the US is heaven on earth. Emigrate. It is actually fairly easy provided you got some half decent job skills and money. No you are not allowed to say anything bad about US immigration policy, remember, your a US fanboy.
1. Pff, I link to it once and that is it. I can always google for it
2. I rather they spend it on this then on a war.
3. Perhaps a search engine that does not bow to the Chinese goverment in the name of the almighty dollar?
4. Yeah, because the top cellphone company is european and all your pc's are made in the US. No I rather we keep our model. So do the majority of EU voters. EU socialist, US capatalist. Move to location of your choice.
The following bit of info may shock some people so please, little kids leave the room, adults brace youreselve.
GOOGLE SUCKS AS A SEARCH ENGINE
Anyone still around? Good, we judge google by its peers and its peers are the totall crappers so by comparison google looks pretty good. BUT imagine that the people at google had thought "Oh, there already is a search engine no need to make another." We would still be using altavista or something.
Google is fairly good at returning pages regarding obscure linux error messages. When however your search should include words in common usage or possible of a retail product or god forbid be associated in anyway with the adult industry then you are floundering in page after page of crap results.
There is an even worse problem. Despite all what the fanboys will tell you Google is a business. A business that now not just provides search and ads but is becoming a content broker itself.
Could google one day prefer its own pages over others? For now the opposite it seems, I can't get google to return its own videos that it sells BUT some goverments might feel that internet search has become such an important tool that there is some importance to having an alternative to just depending on the US.
America is a funny country, ever since WW2 america has been complaining that it has to do foot the bill for the entire world defence. Europe thinks of creating a european army and the US gets upset. US taxpayer pay for the free GPS of the entire world and they complain. EU makes it own version and americans get upset.
Here is a suggestion for americans, you run your country your way and we run ours our way.
What you are missing is that not every goverment has the same motives. Perhaps some feel that not being a slave to america is a good thing. Since you aren't paying for it with your taxes what business is it of yours?
What does it actually take to stop RFID from reading a card. What materials, what thickness, goes it need to enclose completly or not.
Is there a way to generate interference so I could have a constant empty field around my wallet? A card that constantly broadcasts fake info?
Would such a thing be legal? Is the spectrum this works in free?
Oh okay, why should you want to? BECAUSE!
There are some nasty people who have suggested that MS has benefitted greatly from pre-XP version of its software being so easy to copy. OS/2 was harder and copying Apples OS is pointless since it is tied to the hardware. How many people had MS Office at home because that was the CD they could borrow from work?
MS has neatly ensured that IT is the desktop and if that changes its whole business must change. You can see this with IE. All of sudden it is being upgraded and copying all the features that exist in Firefox and Opera. Why? Not because MS is loosing money, they do not sell IE so why should they care? Because Firefox/Opera/Safari is costing them the control of the desktop.
MS only started caring about everyone paying for their license when they thought they had the market controlled. If you give MS the choice between taiwan going 25% non-ms or giving taiwain all MS software it wants free of charge then the answer is clear. MS has already done that in the past. Google for Munich, when MS learned it was not the only bidder it lowered its price and offerted so much freebies that it was basically giving the install away. All to stop its dominance from crumbling. MS can afford to loose a few billion, it cannot afford competition.
Eating shit probably won't kill me either but that is hardly a reason to do it.
The real economy should be, it will cost us X to change names will it gives us Y in increased income where Y > X?
This is rarely the case. Instead name changes and companies re-inventing themselves are either there to hide the real problems or because some ad company has been extremely successfull at its main business, sell ads.
This is "wasted" money that could have been spent on research but research departments tell you things like, "give us 10 billion and we might have some nice tech in 10 years time". Ad companies tell you things like "give us 10 billion and everyone will love your product". That you won't have a product and that love does not equal a sale is ofcourse not mentioned.
Will this hurt Intel? Not likely but you do not spent billions just hoping not to be hurt.
Cars. While car safety is going up the number of accidents is not going down as expected. Deaths are but that could easily be caused by improved healthcare. So what is happening? Well while cars have become safer and safer they also become easier to drive, or rather they haven't become easier to drive at all but they are seen as easier to drive.
Nobody would take a T-Ford to 180 km per hour at night. The latest BMW? No problem. Usually it ain't a problem. Except when it does wrong and modern tech is asked to keep the human body safe when 2 tons of metal loose traction and meet a bridge support.
There are some road safety expert who suggests that one of the dangerous developments is quiet cars. In old cars you know your speed because the roar of the engine and the whistleing wind grow intollerable. The latest cars however remain very quiet and can really distort your sense of speed. If you ever been on a highspeed train or worse an aircraft you know the feeling.
So how does this relate to computers? Simple, a lot of the bugs, activeX on windows and that widget thing from the article that affected OS-X are there to hide the difficulty of driving. Just as a modern car reduces the feedback so do solutions that allow software to be installed with no or minimum interaction.
That whistle of the wind, the roar of the engine, the wheels almost loosing traction are the feedback signals to tell me I am going to fast, slow down before you loose control.
Same with install screens. The more invasive an install is the more warnings it should throw up (just as driving to fast on a bad road will feel worse then driving to fast on a good road). You want to install a program that only runs for you, installs no hooks and does not modify anything or communicate with anything? Just 1 screen. It installs for you and allows writing to any file owned by you? 2 screens. It installs it self for you and allows writing to any file and runs in the background? 3 screens.
It is like those signs in bugs bunny comedies that tell him to turn back now, we mean it, really mean it, don't do it.
Computers ain't easy to use and if you get it wrong there is a pool of 6 billion people who are out to get you. Now like cars you can make computers very easy to use but then you better make sure you do not exceed the recommendanded maximum usage. You can drive a car with total lack of feedback perfectly safely. At about 5 miles per hour. You can have a computer with 0 click install software perfectly safely, just limited to microsoft.com/apple.com
As long as software makers keep making things easy and users keep accepting it we will have people getting it wrong. Just like every day somebody gets it wrong with their car and crashes for no other reason then that they misjudged the ease of use.
I have only once been affected by a virus and that is a machine I was given pre-installed and I discovered it and was given the task of cleaning up after figuring that all the machines in the office had been affected.
Am I brilliant? No. Am I social outcast who doesn't get the latest virusses in his email box? Yes. But mostly I do not accept an easy to use computer. I want to speed (download porn/warez) and know that the price for that is that I gotta be in complete control of my computer. Just like F1 drivers are in control of their car (except they get chicks and money for it).
The worst bit is that someone apparently broke the connection Computer == Windows. This is bad. Kinda like thinking in america Democracy == Capatalism. They got a place in Cuba for people like that.
To many people even the suggestion of running another OS runs into a brick wall as computers is Windows. An alternative OS to them is XP or 98 or 2000. This example is even clearer when it comes to office software. Just try sending your CV to anyone in a non MS word format. Like eh RTF? A MS format? Documents == MS Word.
This is very handy. It causes a kinda loop, because everyone runs windows everything only works with windows so people buy windows so that their stuff will work and because nobody buys anything else then windows nothing else is supported. Cue endless loop.
UNTIL someone throws a spanner into the works and decides that they are going to run another OS. Oh one doesn't matter, he/she will just have to adapt or die. "Very nice OS you written their Mister Torvalds but what you going to do with eh? All software available is for Windows and won't run on your OS."
Luckily Mister Stallman had been working on lots of pieces of software and it met up and spawned Linux (or to keep Mr Stallman happy GNU/Linux).
Slowly the almost complete dominance of MS on the desktop started to crumble. Oh sure, a fraction of a percentage at first but remember, the biggest avalance starts with a single snowflake. Except that MS doesn't fear an avalance. It fear a snowball.
Why? As long as it has/had 99% of the market it could dictate its standards on the rest of the world. Internet Explorer is a clear example. Your website MUST work on IE. MS doesn't feel like supporting all the features of PNG image format? Then it isn't usable. Oh sure Mozilla can show some nice demos of what is possible but what is the use? IE doesn't support it.
Throw in a lot of unique features into IE and you will create that loop again. If you want to view 100% of websites you better be running IE and because everyone uses IE websites can use the unique features that handily force everyone to run IE. And so on.
The Linux freaks, BSD zombies and Mac faggots on their own are bad enough neatly reducing MS dominance by easily 5%. Oh wow, 5%, MS must be quaking in its boots, somebody setup a collection fund for Bill Gates kids so they can buy some shoes.
Very funny BUT it does matter, not because MS is going to go bankrupt but because the loop is being broken. IF 5% of you potential web customers do not run IE at any cost do you still code your website to make use of IE only features? This is a bit like asking, if 5% of your supermarket customers are in wheelchair or use a rollator do you build an extra wide entrance to allow them entry or do you let them go to the competitor who does?
It is becoming easier and easier to surf the net without IE.
And this is just with a tiny percentage changing. Now 25% of all goverment desktops switching? Yikes. You know this might mean that goverment sites actually become mandatory visible in non-ie browsers. Shock HORROR! It could mean that ideas like using MS passport for identification with your local goverment (actually proposed) would be impossible.
MS has survived a long time because if you wanted to do IT you had to do windows. IF this changes and MS will really face competition where a person can go in a store and choose his OS on preference NOT because his software on runs on one of them that would force MS to compete on quality.
That has MS very worried indeed.
China's politics on their own are already screwed up enough. Frankly it seems to suffer from an advanced case of split personality. This is nothing unusual, many "goverments" do things that seem to be at odds with each other but china just does it to the extreme. How can you really combine capatlism and communism in one country? By not looking to closely at policies that seem to contradict each other. Instead you just go with the flow and hope it all works out. Sorta like most of human history. So they shot some protesting students when it went a bit out of control. Name one country in the world that has not killed peacefull protestors since the end of WW2.
Taiwan is a point of pride but for the immidiate future it is like what cuba is to america. Exactly why does America still boycot cuba? By now it should be clear it ain't working in fact it only shows to the world exactly how america thinks of anyone that does not do exactly as it tells them. Bad PR but giving in will make the americans loose face.
Same with China and Taiwan. It makes China look bad constantly as no discussion about China is complete without someone bringing up taiwan but China giving in would cause to much loss of face.
So your suggestion of anything happening is absurd. if anything considerings china push of red flag linux this could be seen by the insane as a move by taiwan to please China.
The dutch saying however is superior, naturally being dutch, as it neatly combines with the other saying "a drop in a bucket". Wich is used often to show something having little to no effect. True or not, enough drops and the bucket still overflows. I think the english version is a crack in the armor? One crack doesn't matter but they add up until your standing naked on a battlefield.
Anyway all the crap about Fair Trade should tell you the opposition is really grasping at straws. Fair Trade Regulations are for enforcing against your enemies NEVER for restricting yourselve. Airbus VS Boeing. Europe and America both heavily subsidize the respective companies and both call foul when the other does it. Same with farm subsidies.
This is just another tiny wakening up as the world realises that having all IT tied up by one company is perhaps not the smartest move ever made.
Oh and all the people crying that MS will just do X or the US goverment will stop it or it will never happen. Straws on camels and drops in buckets remember. It all adds up.
Blah blah blah.
The 9X series of windows is still in wide use ESPECIALLY by paying customer, pirates can afford to have the latest, and MS is telling them that it can't be bothered to fix it.
Sure it costs them some money. Are they running out?
It is not about security, it is a not about cost it is about MS greatest failure. Extremely bad marketing department. It just isn't good PR to tell your paying customers to piss off. MS spends large fortunes on ad campaigns and then ruins it in an effort to save it a few bucks rather then just say "Yes there is a bug in windows that people are very alarmed about and we got the fix for all the windows versions affected right here".
I do some charity work. Do you know how many of them work off donated computers? Computers that can't run xp? Or even afford to?
When country after country, company after company is thinking of either not upgrading or even worse switching and when Apple is getting sexier by the day and Linux becomes easier and easier to run do you really want to go to your customers and say, "Upgrade or die". They might just do that. Just not to another piece of software about to become unsupported. Windows XP Home edition anyone?
This is just a way to tell a story. The other way is to introduce a story from the very beginning to the very end, but this means you can spend far less time on the middle. Sci-Fi like this wich at least pretends to want to ask a moral question without force feeding you the answer doesn't really have an "ending" anyway. It just puts a situation to you and then asks you to consider it.
So don't worry about feeling there are things happening outside the picture (as in motion picture clever pun ne?... though crowd) there are. They just don't matter. Well UNTIL the movie became very popular and they could be used to make sequels and prequels out of it.
Should you read the manga? Well perhaps, is a bit like asking wether you should watch the animatrix before watching the matrix movies. If your a fan then sure, gobble it all up. If not, well you started with the movie. That is a nice introduction BUT it was based on a manga (strip/comic). You might want to start here. The manga spawned a sequel with the imaginative name Ghost in the Shell 2 (yeah those crazy japanese). This in turn spawned a tv series. And finally a movie.
If you really want to know the story, read the manga. It is what everything else is based on. Just be warned that it has a different style.
Oh and if you decide to plunge in to the seedy underbelly of the net that is the anime/manga forum please do not proudly boast that you watched ghost in the shell. It is kinda of like going to a sci-fi con having only seen Star Wars. Or like posting on /. using windows XP.
HELL YES! I can be impartial and sell weapons to both of them.
I don't own a credit card as in Holland we got a different system. You get from your bank where you have a debit account (possibly with a credit option) a card with a magnectic strip. You can withdraw cash from ATM like machines OR pay with it by having your card read and typing in a 4 digit code to verify it belongs to you.
This would seem to stop a lot of the problems. There is no attempt to verify that the card belongs to you EXCEPT if you wish to withdraw money without knowing the pin code (what the password is called). This can only be done for my bank at head branches and with valid ID and they do really check it and make note of it.
If credit cards do not have this check it seems like a bloody big security risk to me.
ATM machines must surely have something like this so why don't shops? Is the tech to old (america had credit cards long before holland got the current system) are americans to lazy/stupid to remember a pincode or is there another reason?
The simplest way to perhaps prevent theft would be something like this. The card asks for your fingerprint, then you swipe it sending the combined details of the card and your fingerprint and then you enter a passcode on the reader. This neatly combines the keys of verification, what you have (card), who/what you are (fingerprint) and what you know (pincode).
Maybe the current system is secure enough. Pincodes are currently stolen by observing them being entered at ATM's via all sorts of methods and either stealing the card OR having a fake front to the reader that actually allows the card to be copied. Ways could be introduced to prevent this like standarizing all the machines to make fake readers stand out and lengthy codes with multiple keys (sorta like not 1234 but CTRL-1 ALT-2 SHIFT-3 ALT-4) to make it harder to read it over someones shoulder. But that would perhaps make it to complex to use.
The credit card shown seems a lot like those special keys that you can buy to generate a unique password to login to your computer. Very nice systems even if they are bloody expensive.
You can't blame game companies. When tomb raider sold a gazillion installments game execs must have thought they had found the golden goose. (I do not want you to fantasize about Lara Croft lying golden eggs you sick pervert)
Now games do not have to be innovative, many GBA DS games are not really THAT innovative BUT you have to add something new or a really big improvement for the gaming public to warm up.
Oh well seems all the doom stories one way or another were overrated. Again. So games are dying stories are out for the rest of the month. What can we use instead. BSD old buddy, how is that cough? Sun you look a bit under the weather.
A co-worker bought a new boat. Or rather bought a not so new boat that he spend the entire summer stripping and painting. Super healthy stuff that standing in a shed sanding of marine paint and applying it in one of the warmest summers we have had in holland.
A friend likes to dive. In water with sharks. He spends all year saving up for a long holiday submerging his body exposing it to pressures it is not designed for breathing air under pressure surrounded by critters that think "Yummy, a hairless seal".
As for the people who party hardy shooting themselves full of drugs to dance throughout the weekend. Wohoo! Cheap chemicals, sign me up.
Oh and what to think of that image next to the article. That ever sane person who takes up fishing as a hobby. Standing with your balls in freezing water with a 1000 dollar carbon fibre rod to get a diseased posion laden half death fish. If your lucky.
Nah, gamers are the sane one. I have had this conversation more then once "Boss: You spend your christmas bonus on a vidcard?" "Me: yes thank you should last me all year." "Boss: insane Oh, you seen the new rubbers for the windows on my classic porche" "Me: yeah".
Life is short, enjoy it anyway you can. If it is gaming, well who cares how much it costs, is not like you have a girl to waste it on.
Ah well, amazing you can hire an IBM'er for 50 bucks an hour. 3rd month in IT and I was already generating more. The bubble really burst.
Of course so far it is pure production problems that is limiting sales in the west BUT it is hardly like they are on track.
This article would be better if it mentioned this, now it seems a bit to much like a press release.
What the hell are they going to the 7 cores for? If the graphics are all going to be done by an external chip this leaves an awfull lot of power for doing the rest of the game. Super advanced and massive amounts of AI? Fear with a hundred soldiers? Sure sure you will still be limited to a dozen lights but who cares. It is the AI that has been sorely lacking in recent games.
Oh well, we will just have to see what Sony will deliver in the end. As for people commenting about Sony DRM rootkits. Only Windows users are affected. Amazing that you blame the guy shoving his dick up your ass, not the guy who strapped you down and spread your cheeks wide open for the last 20 years.
If the new consoles are going to sell in the same numbers as the existing ones then they will outsell Apples by a degree that just ain't funny.
One of the reasons Apple is switching to Intel is that IBM just didn't give a fuck about Apple. Not nearly enough chips in it. It has been Apples problem all along, it never could convince its chip makers to focus on the features its wanted since the real money was in embedded versions of the chips. Were power is less important and running without a fan is super important.
Some tricks.
IT is the weirdest industry around.
So completly blocking flash or just disable all sound is not worth it to me.
So gee, what other option do I have to disable sound from ads. Hmmm. Though one.
Oh wait maybe I can block ads? Nah, I am not skilled enough for this and I am sure nobody else has bothered to code something like this.
What the fuck is this question about?Ads annoy me, what can I do about it? BLOCK THE FUCKING FUCKERS! Find the server for the offending ad and block it in whatever adblocker you have installed.
But blocking ads hurts sites who depend on them for their revenue. THOUGH SHIT! Nobody started out blocking ads. When the first few banners appeared people were more or less willing to accept them.
However ad companies faced a problem, sites with millions of visitors generated only a handfull of click throughs. Could it be that they had the wrong ads, that people just ain't all the intrested in what is being sold? That people period do not read ads? Remember that before with TV/radio and magazine ads there was no real way to measure how many people were affected by ads. With click throughs the total failure of ads to attract is very apparent.
Ad companies could of course have told their employers that consumers just ain't intrested in their products OR they can make the ads even more annoying and in your face because surely that is the way to get people intrested.
So static images became animated, animated images came to surround all the text, the text was chopped up to maximize the amount of ads displayed, content became hidden by ad pages that had to be viewed and now sound to make sure your attention is diverted.
Ads are totally out of control on the net as companies desperatly seek a way to get as many eyeballs to their product as possible. If your not intrested well then of course the only way to change that is by making the ad even more intrusive since nobody in the business can make money by simply accepting that you are not going to buy product X.
The only recourse you have is to block them. So do so. Yes some idiots will claim it is stealing, these are probably the same people that dutyfully examine each ad in the news paper and sit upright in their chair during the commericial break while us thieves are taking a toilet break or stocking up on snacks.
Ads are not in themselves offensive to me. But I grew up in holland where amazing as it may sound to americans we had NO ADS on sundays on tv. Now the ad blocks are 5 minutes and growing and frankly I have had enough. If you give the ad industry a finger they will rip of your arm and rape your ass with it. AND charge you for it.
Block them, it your only hope for sanity. Of course the ad industry response will be to make ads even more annoying for the poor people who don't block them but well, who gives a fuck.
All those who do not block ads, thank you for paying for my ad free internet. I appreciate it.
Or put another way my music tastes isn't so much out there as more "You listen to that crap?". Japanese idol music. Really old country western, old dutch music. None of wich iTunes sells.
Napster was a dream come true, finally you could find the oddest pieces of music and if you found it just get the users complete listing for odder crap that might be fun. The more kitch and socially unacceptable the better. Not out of any eltist motives. I just got crap tastes.
Ages ago a dutch artist did a sorta off musical fantasy story called Zilverdael. I had an LP of it as a kid and since then it has been impossible to buy. The moment that album becomes available via an online music store is the moment I start paying for music again. Until then, steal them blind.
If musicians are starving because of me. Good. Get a fucking real job you hippy! Artist are supposed to suffer, it attracts the muses or something. Or fleas possibly.
No I am talking about the "free" content Google has put online and is even hosting. Oh it probably won't last but for now I can download an awfull lot of japanese music videos for free and without some poor fan having his website raped.
The only oddity is that opera under linux refuses to load the movie file while firefox does work. Then again Google always has had something against Opera.
Bitching about yet another DRM standard is a bit silly. There is no DRM standard so how can there be another one. All you got is a lot of DRM crap all of wich hopes to become the standard.
And google can't support other platforms if the other platform is linux. How the hell can you have opensource DRM? I always been led to believe that DRM itself is silly (because you give people the message, the key and the cipher wich means they got everything they need to crack it) and opensource DRM is even sillier. You give them message, the key, the cipher AND tell them how it all works. Would take about 1 second to hack an opensource DRM, CheckDRMIsSecure() { return true; /* rest of code */}
For now video google has given me a lot of new stuff to watch for future. The pay system? Well we will see, the only thing I seen that it might be a whole lot easier for individuals to get google to sell their own vids. You can actually upload your own stuff and google will either hosts it for free or sell it for you. That alone makes Google a very intresting new player in the field.
Windows only? Pah, if we slam every company who releases windows only software in this world we be awfully busy.
Is this just because game journalists have the IQ of a diseased rodent or is this really the limit of the game?
Brain teasers can be a lot of fun but answering 5x5 is a bit ehm. Well lets just say that if you get that wrong the game better come with GPS so the caretakers from your mental home can find you.
The age old problem of needing a credit card. I made this very clear in my post. SOE for all it does wrong just understands that in order to get peoples money you must make it easy to for them give you their money.
UO didn't get this. try signing up for it without a credit card.