My biggest beef is that a lot of the good shows get canceled, because they don't appeal to a large enough audience. I showed my dad an episode of Big Bang Theory, and he thought it was hilarious, extremely funny, and yet the next thing he said was that it wouldn't last. How many people do you think actually get most of the jokes on that show? The doppler effect costume is ironic in this effect. Nobody at the party got his costume, even when it was explained to them. I think the same could be said about the whole joke. I bet that a whole lot of people didn't get that joke, and don't get a lot of the jokes, and either don't find the show funny, and therefore don't watch, or just stare blankly trying to understand what's going on. Other shows that I really liked that were canceled include Invasion and Jericho.
Why not have writers paid what their work is worth, rather than paying people when their work is terrible. I think this promotes the wrong thing. If your writing is really good and ends up creating a popular show, then you should get paid a lot. However, if your writing sucks, and the people don't watch your show, you should get paid less. Maybe if writers got paid based on the value of their work, there would be less crappy writers. If you know you are a crappy writer, but that you are being paid well for it anyway, then you might as well keep on producing bad work. However, if you don't get paid well, you either learn how to write well, or stop writing, and do something more profitable with your time. All it does it promote a larger population of writers, not a larger population of good writers. It would be like paying a programmer a good wage, even when the code they produce is terrible.
I was under the impression that modems and other analog data transfer methods like fax machines didn't work over cell phones, or other digital networks. When the analog signal is converted to digital, it loses some information, and the modem at the other end can't decipher the signal. Unless you're trying to do something completely different, in which case I misunderstood you.
Parrots speaking is more related to mimicry than them actually understand what they are saying. From what I've heard in the case with apes and sign language, is that they no only use the signs they are taught to communicate the ideas that they want to communicate, but have also been known to create their own signs to communicate their intentions.
Exactly, it takes alot of paper books to make the cost of the electronic book reader worth the price. Not only that, but the price of books is actually a reflection of how much people are willing to pay for them, not how much it actually costs to produce a copy of the book. I think the same would hold true for eBooks. eBooks wouldn't be any cheaper than paper books, and you still have to buy the reader. With paper books, you can resell them easily. You don't have to worry about backing them up. If you lose them in a fire or your house gets robbed, your insurance will cover their loss.You don't have to buy a new reader every 5 years because your old one broke down. There are many problems about the eBook that have not been solved yet. And I think it's going to be a long time, probably over 100 years, before paper books ever go away.
Sounds like something I heard about human intelligence. People want to keep on thinking that we are different from the rest of the animals, so they come up with stuff that they think only humans can do, and therefore makes us different from the other animals. Many things have been struck down, such as use of tools, self awareness, emotions such as love and sympathy, high level communcation, and many other ideas that have been shown to exist in animals.
You are right. I've seen many people who are smart in most situations become inexplicably dumb when sitting in front of a computer. People seem to have some thought that the computer should just do everything for them, and therefore their brain shuts off. I'm not sure if that's the exact reason, but it does seem like that is what's happening. Also I wouldn't expect to be able to walk up to a bunch of woodworking tools, and a pile of wood and be able to build a set of furniture for my bedroom, with having to learn anything. I don't know why people have this attitude computers, where they should be able to use it without any knowledge.
And am I the only one who finds this feature completely annoying. I like things to be the way I left them. You don't come back to your keyboard to find the letters rearranged (or even missing) each day based on the keys you use most often. Why should menu items do this? It's much easier to just have things stay where they are, so you can find them when you need them.
However, having a computer that doesn't bother it's user and just takes care of itself goes against the main directive of computers. Computers are supposed to do whatever the user tells it to do. If the user instructs it to run a virus, it will run the virus. If the user instructs it to go to a phishing site, and submit their banking credentials to the server, then the computer will do that. In many instances we've set up alot of programs to ask the user when they try to do something stupid, but often they click yes, even if the computer advises against it. Maybe what we really need is AI, so that the computer will be able to tell the user "I can't let you do that , Dave", and then all our problems will be gone.
Exactly. We could have replaced paper books by now with a small e-reader device, but really, books work a lot better than computer screens for reading in a lot of ways. Even with everyone carrying around a laptop, you'll still see people reading paper books, because its the best way to do it.
Since the French tend to reverse everything when translating from English, wouldn't Office Open XML become Open Office XML (or possibly XML Open Office)? Am I the only one who things MS had a major case of trademark infringement on this one calling their format Office Open XML? Every Time I see OOXML, I have to stop and think and then remember that it's not related to OpenOffice.
Seems like it was only broken because the identity of the people was posted somewhere else, along with the ratings. My only question is how they connected the rankings on Netflix, to the rankings on IMDB. Does Netflix take the liberty of submitting all the users rankings to IMDB for them, and also include their name with this data? If you just have anonymous dataset A, with anonymous dataset B, you could match up users from both and figure out which person in A is the same person in B, but you still wouldn't know who the person is. However, if you now have dataset B be not anonymous, then it's not too difficult to compare movie ratings and find out who the people are.
Since we're talking about copyright infringement, which is a civil matter, rather than ownership of physical goods, which if the items in your possession weren't yours, would be a criminal matter. In civil court, there is no innocent until proven guilty clause, or beyond a reasonable doubt clause. They only have to show probably cause. Or something like that, IANAL.
Why not let the computer put all your documents in some folder, organized in whatever manner someone else felt was best. You're being anal if you need to have your documents sorted into specific folders that make sense to you. I think the same logic should hold for the start menu, especially with the amount of programs that are located there. Personally, I don't care that much, because I put a panel along the right hand edge of my screen with about 30 icons which contain just about every program I ever use. I only have to go in the start menu about once a week, tops. All the programs that I access on a daily basis are accessible with just 1 click.
It would be for KDE, because I'm a KDE fan. Although I could possibly make it desktop environment agnostic, by creating a backend that could work with multiple systems. For instance on KDE it could act as an applet for the kicker. I'm pretty sure that Gnome has similar functionality. I think the hardest part would be to get the application and distro distributors to support it. When I install something in Mandriva, it automatically shows up in the start menu. I'm not sure how difficult (without any research mind you) it would be to get those entries to also show up in my menu.
I envisioned something a little more complicated for the start menu that would probably make things a little bit easier for managing the shortcuts. Basically it could work off a small database. Every shortcut just gets put into a table (Table A), where the shortcut has an ID, and the attributes such as the program that the shortcut is linked to. There's another table (Table B), with the user ID (with null or some other predefined ID for the system default), and the ID of each Item in Table A. In Table B, there's a column that has the users' prefered folder location for the entry, with a bit field so that a user could hide a certain entry. The absence of the entry in the user settings would mean that the entry would show up under the default system location. This would work great because a user to move stuff around, without affecting anybody else. They would also see new stuff added to the start menu. Another great feature is that when a program is uninstalled, it would just remove the entries in Table A, and corresponding entries in Table B, and we wouldn't have the situation we have now with all the left over dead links in the start menu due to items being moved from where the program uninstaller expects them to be. You could also just mark entries as remove in Table A, so that the user can see a message stating that the entry was removed, instead of searching for it forever before discovering that it's actually not there at all.
My first question has to be, what's a valid receipt? There's some pretty small shops that sell Windows. Some of them just use Excel or some other spreadsheet to print out invoices and receipts. What happens when the shop you bought it from closes, and all you have is some receipt that is printed from an Excel spreadsheet? Would the BSA just argue at that point that it's a fake receipt? According to the information from Microsoft, there's a lot of places that will sell you a non-genuine copy of Windows, and give you a receipt. What is it about the receipt that makes the license any more valid? I get spam in my email daily offering to sell me software for well below what it would cost normally. I imagine that the software isn't licensed, but it probably comes with a receipt. All the receipts in the world can't prove that you are legally entitle to run a certain piece of software.
The earth would get hit by meteors quite often too, if it wasn't for our atmosphere. Most stuff travelling towards the earth burns up in our atmosphere. Every time you see a shooting star, that's a meteor.
The biggest problem at that temperature wouldn't be the cold, but condensation. If you have any techs in the room, just breathing is going to make the air quite moist.
Seems to me that operating in those conditions would be better than operating in California. Where it's 30 degrees in the summer, and 15 degrees in the winter. They would need cooling pretty much year round. Whereas in Edmonton or Siberia, they would only need cooling for half of the year.
I find that this is the biggest problem. Not that it asks for permission, but that it asks multiple times for one action. I was trying to rename an item in my start menu, and it asked 3 times for permission. It shouldn't even have to give permission to change an entry in my start menu. In Mandriva, I only get prompted for the admin password when I'm installing new software, or messing with system settings. Windows Vista seems to present me with prompts for just about every action I have to do.
No software maker except Microsoft. How long until MS puts out some hit game that requires Vista to run? Or how long until they put out a new version of Office that requires Vista? How long until Visual Studio only runs on Vista? MS has enough of their own products that people can't live without that they could push almost everyone to use Vista without any help from anybody else.
Exactly. I wouldn't mind watching ads on TV if every other ad wasn't another stupid tampon commercial, or wasn't completely terrible. If they actually put thought into advertisements, made them interesting to watch, and actually informed you about the product, instead of just trying to con you into buying their products, there would be a lot less people trying to not watch the commercials.
Last I checked, I could still invite all my friends over to my house to watch a movie, without putting up with sold out movies, long lineups, bad seating, hundreds of other people who have no regard for people watching the movie, sitting through commercials, and starting the movie on someone elses schedule.
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My biggest beef is that a lot of the good shows get canceled, because they don't appeal to a large enough audience. I showed my dad an episode of Big Bang Theory, and he thought it was hilarious, extremely funny, and yet the next thing he said was that it wouldn't last. How many people do you think actually get most of the jokes on that show? The doppler effect costume is ironic in this effect. Nobody at the party got his costume, even when it was explained to them. I think the same could be said about the whole joke. I bet that a whole lot of people didn't get that joke, and don't get a lot of the jokes, and either don't find the show funny, and therefore don't watch, or just stare blankly trying to understand what's going on. Other shows that I really liked that were canceled include Invasion and Jericho.
Why not have writers paid what their work is worth, rather than paying people when their work is terrible. I think this promotes the wrong thing. If your writing is really good and ends up creating a popular show, then you should get paid a lot. However, if your writing sucks, and the people don't watch your show, you should get paid less. Maybe if writers got paid based on the value of their work, there would be less crappy writers. If you know you are a crappy writer, but that you are being paid well for it anyway, then you might as well keep on producing bad work. However, if you don't get paid well, you either learn how to write well, or stop writing, and do something more profitable with your time. All it does it promote a larger population of writers, not a larger population of good writers. It would be like paying a programmer a good wage, even when the code they produce is terrible.
I was under the impression that modems and other analog data transfer methods like fax machines didn't work over cell phones, or other digital networks. When the analog signal is converted to digital, it loses some information, and the modem at the other end can't decipher the signal. Unless you're trying to do something completely different, in which case I misunderstood you.
Parrots speaking is more related to mimicry than them actually understand what they are saying. From what I've heard in the case with apes and sign language, is that they no only use the signs they are taught to communicate the ideas that they want to communicate, but have also been known to create their own signs to communicate their intentions.
Exactly, it takes alot of paper books to make the cost of the electronic book reader worth the price. Not only that, but the price of books is actually a reflection of how much people are willing to pay for them, not how much it actually costs to produce a copy of the book. I think the same would hold true for eBooks. eBooks wouldn't be any cheaper than paper books, and you still have to buy the reader. With paper books, you can resell them easily. You don't have to worry about backing them up. If you lose them in a fire or your house gets robbed, your insurance will cover their loss.You don't have to buy a new reader every 5 years because your old one broke down. There are many problems about the eBook that have not been solved yet. And I think it's going to be a long time, probably over 100 years, before paper books ever go away.
Sounds like something I heard about human intelligence. People want to keep on thinking that we are different from the rest of the animals, so they come up with stuff that they think only humans can do, and therefore makes us different from the other animals. Many things have been struck down, such as use of tools, self awareness, emotions such as love and sympathy, high level communcation, and many other ideas that have been shown to exist in animals.
You are right. I've seen many people who are smart in most situations become inexplicably dumb when sitting in front of a computer. People seem to have some thought that the computer should just do everything for them, and therefore their brain shuts off. I'm not sure if that's the exact reason, but it does seem like that is what's happening. Also I wouldn't expect to be able to walk up to a bunch of woodworking tools, and a pile of wood and be able to build a set of furniture for my bedroom, with having to learn anything. I don't know why people have this attitude computers, where they should be able to use it without any knowledge.
And am I the only one who finds this feature completely annoying. I like things to be the way I left them. You don't come back to your keyboard to find the letters rearranged (or even missing) each day based on the keys you use most often. Why should menu items do this? It's much easier to just have things stay where they are, so you can find them when you need them.
However, having a computer that doesn't bother it's user and just takes care of itself goes against the main directive of computers. Computers are supposed to do whatever the user tells it to do. If the user instructs it to run a virus, it will run the virus. If the user instructs it to go to a phishing site, and submit their banking credentials to the server, then the computer will do that. In many instances we've set up alot of programs to ask the user when they try to do something stupid, but often they click yes, even if the computer advises against it. Maybe what we really need is AI, so that the computer will be able to tell the user "I can't let you do that , Dave", and then all our problems will be gone.
Exactly. We could have replaced paper books by now with a small e-reader device, but really, books work a lot better than computer screens for reading in a lot of ways. Even with everyone carrying around a laptop, you'll still see people reading paper books, because its the best way to do it.
Since the French tend to reverse everything when translating from English, wouldn't Office Open XML become Open Office XML (or possibly XML Open Office)? Am I the only one who things MS had a major case of trademark infringement on this one calling their format Office Open XML? Every Time I see OOXML, I have to stop and think and then remember that it's not related to OpenOffice.
Seems like it was only broken because the identity of the people was posted somewhere else, along with the ratings. My only question is how they connected the rankings on Netflix, to the rankings on IMDB. Does Netflix take the liberty of submitting all the users rankings to IMDB for them, and also include their name with this data? If you just have anonymous dataset A, with anonymous dataset B, you could match up users from both and figure out which person in A is the same person in B, but you still wouldn't know who the person is. However, if you now have dataset B be not anonymous, then it's not too difficult to compare movie ratings and find out who the people are.
Since we're talking about copyright infringement, which is a civil matter, rather than ownership of physical goods, which if the items in your possession weren't yours, would be a criminal matter. In civil court, there is no innocent until proven guilty clause, or beyond a reasonable doubt clause. They only have to show probably cause. Or something like that, IANAL.
Why not let the computer put all your documents in some folder, organized in whatever manner someone else felt was best. You're being anal if you need to have your documents sorted into specific folders that make sense to you. I think the same logic should hold for the start menu, especially with the amount of programs that are located there. Personally, I don't care that much, because I put a panel along the right hand edge of my screen with about 30 icons which contain just about every program I ever use. I only have to go in the start menu about once a week, tops. All the programs that I access on a daily basis are accessible with just 1 click.
It would be for KDE, because I'm a KDE fan. Although I could possibly make it desktop environment agnostic, by creating a backend that could work with multiple systems. For instance on KDE it could act as an applet for the kicker. I'm pretty sure that Gnome has similar functionality. I think the hardest part would be to get the application and distro distributors to support it. When I install something in Mandriva, it automatically shows up in the start menu. I'm not sure how difficult (without any research mind you) it would be to get those entries to also show up in my menu.
I envisioned something a little more complicated for the start menu that would probably make things a little bit easier for managing the shortcuts. Basically it could work off a small database. Every shortcut just gets put into a table (Table A), where the shortcut has an ID, and the attributes such as the program that the shortcut is linked to. There's another table (Table B), with the user ID (with null or some other predefined ID for the system default), and the ID of each Item in Table A. In Table B, there's a column that has the users' prefered folder location for the entry, with a bit field so that a user could hide a certain entry. The absence of the entry in the user settings would mean that the entry would show up under the default system location. This would work great because a user to move stuff around, without affecting anybody else. They would also see new stuff added to the start menu. Another great feature is that when a program is uninstalled, it would just remove the entries in Table A, and corresponding entries in Table B, and we wouldn't have the situation we have now with all the left over dead links in the start menu due to items being moved from where the program uninstaller expects them to be. You could also just mark entries as remove in Table A, so that the user can see a message stating that the entry was removed, instead of searching for it forever before discovering that it's actually not there at all.
My first question has to be, what's a valid receipt? There's some pretty small shops that sell Windows. Some of them just use Excel or some other spreadsheet to print out invoices and receipts. What happens when the shop you bought it from closes, and all you have is some receipt that is printed from an Excel spreadsheet? Would the BSA just argue at that point that it's a fake receipt? According to the information from Microsoft, there's a lot of places that will sell you a non-genuine copy of Windows, and give you a receipt. What is it about the receipt that makes the license any more valid? I get spam in my email daily offering to sell me software for well below what it would cost normally. I imagine that the software isn't licensed, but it probably comes with a receipt. All the receipts in the world can't prove that you are legally entitle to run a certain piece of software.
The earth would get hit by meteors quite often too, if it wasn't for our atmosphere. Most stuff travelling towards the earth burns up in our atmosphere. Every time you see a shooting star, that's a meteor.
That was quite a while ago. It was probably blown away by the wind. Who knows where it is now.
The biggest problem at that temperature wouldn't be the cold, but condensation. If you have any techs in the room, just breathing is going to make the air quite moist.
Seems to me that operating in those conditions would be better than operating in California. Where it's 30 degrees in the summer, and 15 degrees in the winter. They would need cooling pretty much year round. Whereas in Edmonton or Siberia, they would only need cooling for half of the year.
I find that this is the biggest problem. Not that it asks for permission, but that it asks multiple times for one action. I was trying to rename an item in my start menu, and it asked 3 times for permission. It shouldn't even have to give permission to change an entry in my start menu. In Mandriva, I only get prompted for the admin password when I'm installing new software, or messing with system settings. Windows Vista seems to present me with prompts for just about every action I have to do.
No software maker except Microsoft. How long until MS puts out some hit game that requires Vista to run? Or how long until they put out a new version of Office that requires Vista? How long until Visual Studio only runs on Vista? MS has enough of their own products that people can't live without that they could push almost everyone to use Vista without any help from anybody else.
Exactly. I wouldn't mind watching ads on TV if every other ad wasn't another stupid tampon commercial, or wasn't completely terrible. If they actually put thought into advertisements, made them interesting to watch, and actually informed you about the product, instead of just trying to con you into buying their products, there would be a lot less people trying to not watch the commercials.
Last I checked, I could still invite all my friends over to my house to watch a movie, without putting up with sold out movies, long lineups, bad seating, hundreds of other people who have no regard for people watching the movie, sitting through commercials, and starting the movie on someone elses schedule.