I understand your frustration, but until an airplane comes crashing into Parliament or you lose 3000 lives, I don't know that you can fully appreciate our situation.
Oh, groan, go away. Your country has killed over 15,000 innocent people in Iraq in the past couple of years. What makes your 3,000 worth more?
generous - both in the public and private sector, long before charity came under the world microscope.
America contributes very little to charity, proof here. However, your state department considers loans to be charity for some fucked-up reason; the rest of the world is trying to stop rich countries lending money to corrupt governments as it's the people who pay and the money gets squandered. Google for "third world debt".
Oh, and when, exactly, did other countries suffer 3,000 dead to terrorists in one day?
So, it's the death's per day that count? The US has co-ordinated and funded terrorism (war-by-proxy during the cold war) that killed many many many times more people than that. The group that carried out 9-11 was born from that, as was the Talliban that protected them.
For fucks sake, the INNOCENT (non-combatant) death tool in Iraq is 15,000. That's 10 tower-blocks worth if we are talking numbers here.
So you can take your 3,000 dead and stick them where the sun doesn't shine. Your acting like a bully who cried when some little kid hit back. Get over it and stop allowing people to use 9-11 to manipulate you. It used to be "think of the children", now it's "what about the terrorists".
It would seem to me that if "all men are created equal", it would be arrogant and improper to aggressively deny others those "inalienable" rights we hold four ourselves.
The people that wrote that had slaves, so it's pretty meaningless really. They just didn't view them as "men", probably the same thing that's going on with "the terrorists". After all, they eat babies and are evildoers...
They're scary enough without having all the worlds nukes and a president that can't string his words together.
George Bush also believes in the rapture and judgement day. He believes that the world will end in in a rain of fire and brimstone, but that he and his fellow Christians will be teleported to heaven before it all starts.
In basic wireless security, you should change the SSID, and use wep.
I had to change my SSID through other reasons. The default on Cisco kit is "tsunami", and seeing as I set it up just after Christmas it seemed neccessary to change it...
Obviously you didn't fall for it, and it only takes one juror to straighten things out for the other eleven during juror deliberations
I didn't fall for it because I have an inherent mistrust for the media, something that made the quote I posted above seem all the more relevant for me when I first read it. Most people don't have this mistrust and they take all that they read/watch as fact. I've learned to be critical of everything I am told.
I think we are mostly agreeing here, however I do think you are underestimating the power of subcoucious association. Even being aware of your own bias doesn't stop it from being present. As critical as I can be on many issues, there are ones I won't mentally critise because I want to agree with them. I am not aware of this happening, but I know it does. This is how the mind works. It's like "proving" religion to those who are religious, basically that's like shooting fish in a barrel.
The only advantage Google has that I can see is a higher free resolution - if you want high res photos on Multimap, you have to pay.
Nah, on Google I zoomed in on New York. It stopped when long island took up the whole screen, no further zooming was possible. So, you can't see to the street level it would seem, which you get on Multimap for free.
Eh, no. Multimap had aerial imagery at least three years ago and they still do. Not satellite, but as far as the end-user is concerned, the effect is identical.
But in the courtroom, doesn't one side go before the other? Is the side to go first more likely to win?
No, because the jurors get that information in the context of the court, and critically analyse it. It's the external info that they don't know where they got it that's bad.
Also, courtrooms have "objection; sustained" when someone talks bullshit, e.g. bending the truth to make a false point. That's bread and butter stuff for newpapers, go look at your local rags front page.
Example, here, last week "Joyriders race at 80mph down city street", front page headline. The source of the "80mph" figure? Second last paragraph of a whole page article: "An anonymous resident said it seemed as though the cars were driving up to 80 mph". That's enough "proof" to make front page? Or is it the fact it sold more copy that day?
I never buy by brand. I give not a fuck for "brand" nor "label" nor "designer" (lets face it, if it doesn't grow by itself it's been designed).
Balls. You never by bleach and cleaning products? Do you not bother with shaving apparel?? I'm not talking about big screen TVs & Gucci here (vulgar handbags), "brand" recognition stretches well beyond designer stuff. You gotta eat buddy! And 9 out of 10 in your fridge you'll have heard about through advertising.
Familiarity is a funny one. Advertisers have been tapping into that sub-concious drive for a long time.
Heinz 57 Uber Alles
Perhaps I missed the irony, but you just posted information about a link that advertising has placed in your mind...the relationship between Heinz and the number 57. When you hear "42", you likely think of HHGTG. What put that link there in your mind? And who else has put links in your mind? Do you control that process? No.
Keep on thinking advertising doesn't affect you; you belong to a large market that the advertisers have a lot of success with.:-)
You're suggesting that it's impossible for a defendant (or plaintiff) to disprove/discredit a newspaper's reports. This would only happen with evidence that was suppressed (for whatever reason).
No, I'm suggesting that reports do bias people, and newspapers aren't known for their lack of bias themselves. Take the Michael Jackson trial. Those who thought he was guilty first time round think he is this time, and those who don't still believe the same. Not many folk have shifted positions. You'd need a psychiatrist to explain how it all works, but I'm not one. Suffice to say, you base your opinions on your knowledge, subconsiously and consiously. It that knowledge is polluted, so is your bias. Not many people can be truly objective and step back & view from an independent standpoint. Slashdot itself is proof-positive of this, people post stupid incendary comments without reading the article. What if they were on a jury? It's going to be harder to sway them, and that's not fair on the accused.
But hey, don't shoot the messenger. Both sides of the argument are flawed!
on the other we believe that allowing them to read a newspaper makes them unable to be objective in court.
"Everything you read in newspapers is absolutely true, except for that rare story of which you happen to have first-hand knowledge" - Erwin Knoll
How often do you find IT stories badly reported in the media? Sensationalized because it sells more copy? First impressions count.
On the other hand, these bans are pretty much irrelevant with the internet available. Might make being an "internet user" reason to be dismissed from a jury selection process...
But ultimately my message to advertisers etc. is simple. [snip] Bother me with your crap and you'll get a simple reply "Fuck off and die".
Ah, but their advertising is still getting to you. Brand recognition. When was the last time you choose a brand you'd heard of over one you'd never heard of? That's advertising. Otherwise, you'd have heard of neither.
What really pisses me off is embedded video that you cannot simply resize. My monitor is running at 1600x1200 (like many here I'm sure) and I don't want to watch video that is the size of a penny piece. WMV's can sometimes be saved if you are willing to dig into the source, but Apple are usually worse. When you click on a link (usually obsucating the actual media link), it opens in a new tab, a tiny little video on a huge white empty space! You have to almost squint as to see what's going on. It's almost like watching your home movies back through the more traditional viewfinder half the time!
Now that Flash has started to become a popular way of showing video, they threaten quicktime as THE MOST ANNOYING online video format ever. Their player has next to zero controls. I have a great player here that can play ANY open format, with the audio going out the correct soundcard (I have a couple). It can send the video to my second display or TV. It can freeze-frame and frame-advance. It didn't cost me a penny, and there are dozens of other free (beer) players like it. On the other hand, none of these shitty embedded things come close to being usable for anyone that's not the lowest common denominator in the browsing stakes i.e. IE running in 800x600.
Absolutely agreed, I've done that myself many times, though I'll usually fire back the changes if they are relevant to others. I was under the (mis)impression that you were talking about companies releasing their own homebrew efforts as OSS for "profit". As I said, all that gives you is some sense of wellbeing...;-)
I may have misread TFA, but the author appears to have missed the strategic value that is to be gained from investing staff and company hours into F/OSS projects for internal use.
This is why/.'ers should not run businesses. It's the classic "1. Write app, 2. OSS App, 3..., 4 profit" number again.
So, where is the payoff in this "strategic value"? Where is the return on time/money invested? What do you mean by strategic value? Industry exposure? Slashdot Karma? Nothing that will translate to anything tangable at the end of the day. Sure, sales droids might have one more neat thing to say about your company, but client ABC isn't going to give a shit about OSS. The folk making the decisions have probably never even heard of it. It is not going to clinch that deal for you.
If you invent something that goes on to be a global standard, then yeah, you might get a little exposure. But the company that introduces something isn't always the most successful long term.
2. You have an obvious way to spin off merchandise.
3. ????
4. Profit!!!!
And how was Transformers any different? Cartoons have been selling toys for a lot longer than you think. And the stories ain't exactly original!
Anyone remember the Flintstones selling cigarettes? Those were the days! None of these Politically Correct spinning tops...we want drugs, rock&roll & violence in our cartoons!
My phone is more portable than a book, plus I've always got it with me. I think there are 3/4 books on it right now. Handy for 10 min killing waiting for a taxi/bus etc.
c) made out of recyclable materials
That phrase always makes me laugh. So what if something is recyclable? How is that any good for anyone? Toilet paper is recyclable, but you don't see folk putting it in a special coloured bin. Books should be passed on and not disposed of anyway, though perhaps that's what you meant.
Plus, as I've said in a few other comments, eBook readers on mobiles are about 3/4 years old. This new thing looks like the Jamster of eBooks, someones attempt to cash in and make it popular.
But yeah, books are books and always will be books. I think that won't change until that flexible paper comes out then someone produces an eBook reader that actually looks and feels like a real book.
Yah, this article is a few years out of date. There have been eBook readers available on mobiles for several years. I've read maybe 10 different books cover to cover on mine.
Re:Firefox installation wierdness
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Firefox Hacks
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· Score: 1
Sorry, but that's just not feasible, especially on Windows NT 4, where partitioning a large drive is almost a necessity, due to the 8 GB boot bug.
Enterprise apps shouldn't have these problems, but for freeware/OSS and anything else that doesn't have a dedicated test team it's almost expected.
It sounds like QA isn't living up to their end of the deal. (I should know as I have worked for them.)
Oh they are, entering a bug is easy. Getting it fixed is another thing altogether!
Re:Firefox installation wierdness
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Firefox Hacks
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· Score: 1
I like to install my win32 applications to the d drive, or more specifically "d:\program files." The installation for most apps give me a opportunity to simply change "c:\program files\ to d:\etc, etc.
Hmmm. Most software testers would advice against changing default directories.
Why? Because it is the FIRST thing that is done in QA to try and break the app, a non-default install. And it breaks EVERY SINGLE PRODUCT when it first comes out. Developers use hard-coded paths when protyping; usually one or two of these make it through to the final product.
For trouble free computing; stick with the default! I'd bet a whole slew of Firefox Extensions won't work for you either.
However, do not use this sort of thing for backups!!
If files get deleted by accident and you don't notice until after the backup, BOTH copies of the data will be bad. This is just replication, which itself is very good for somethings. Not backups though.
I use a tool called RIBS. It uses rsync to create incremental backups across the network. You get hourly.0, hourly.1 etc directories, each with a hard-linked snapshot of the backup as it was at that time. These pan off into weekly, then monthly. Personally I dropped the hourly entirely, I just do daily. I do this off an IDE disk onto an IDE disk, no RAID or anything fancy required. Sure, it's a little extra work should one of the drives pack in (no RAID redundancy, maybe one day perhaps), but it's worth it for the cronological snapshots. I even backup files like MS Outlook *.pst on my Windows box, so should it get corrupted, I don't care.
Oh, did I say I'm backing up 120GB of data onto a P90 with 16meg of ram? Not bad for old junk!
Only the deltas are transmitted with it being rsync. Highly recommended, knowing you can restore ANY file means I haven't renamed to *.bak in a very long time!
I don't think anyone will shed *any* tears when there is no more wmvs, movs or any other proprietary BS out there either...
You are right, because it's not going to happen. People like Atomfilms (great site) require it for licensing reasons. In another post, someone suggests that Lucas doesn't allow people to release fan films publicly for the initial period.
The thing is, Atomfilms sort of lose out. On my media store at home, I have Duality and "Troopers" (if new to you, get it now!!) and I show them to people through my streaming video onto my TV. I can't show Atomfilms to a friend without firing up the laptop, and that ain't gonna happen when I have friends around. Less eyeballs seeing the Atomfilms logo ultimately, less exposure for them.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, groan, go away. Your country has killed over 15,000 innocent people in Iraq in the past couple of years. What makes your 3,000 worth more?
generous - both in the public and private sector, long before charity came under the world microscope.
America contributes very little to charity, proof here. However, your state department considers loans to be charity for some fucked-up reason; the rest of the world is trying to stop rich countries lending money to corrupt governments as it's the people who pay and the money gets squandered. Google for "third world debt".
Yes. Point a gun at someone, they lose all their freedom.
So, it's the death's per day that count? The US has co-ordinated and funded terrorism (war-by-proxy during the cold war) that killed many many many times more people than that. The group that carried out 9-11 was born from that, as was the Talliban that protected them.
For fucks sake, the INNOCENT (non-combatant) death tool in Iraq is 15,000. That's 10 tower-blocks worth if we are talking numbers here.
So you can take your 3,000 dead and stick them where the sun doesn't shine. Your acting like a bully who cried when some little kid hit back. Get over it and stop allowing people to use 9-11 to manipulate you. It used to be "think of the children", now it's "what about the terrorists".
The people that wrote that had slaves, so it's pretty meaningless really. They just didn't view them as "men", probably the same thing that's going on with "the terrorists". After all, they eat babies and are evildoers...
George Bush also believes in the rapture and judgement day. He believes that the world will end in in a rain of fire and brimstone, but that he and his fellow Christians will be teleported to heaven before it all starts.
And he has the means to bring this all about...
THAT is the definition of scary.
I had to change my SSID through other reasons. The default on Cisco kit is "tsunami", and seeing as I set it up just after Christmas it seemed neccessary to change it...
I didn't fall for it because I have an inherent mistrust for the media, something that made the quote I posted above seem all the more relevant for me when I first read it. Most people don't have this mistrust and they take all that they read/watch as fact. I've learned to be critical of everything I am told.
I think we are mostly agreeing here, however I do think you are underestimating the power of subcoucious association. Even being aware of your own bias doesn't stop it from being present. As critical as I can be on many issues, there are ones I won't mentally critise because I want to agree with them. I am not aware of this happening, but I know it does. This is how the mind works. It's like "proving" religion to those who are religious, basically that's like shooting fish in a barrel.
Nah, on Google I zoomed in on New York. It stopped when long island took up the whole screen, no further zooming was possible. So, you can't see to the street level it would seem, which you get on Multimap for free.
Eh, no. Multimap had aerial imagery at least three years ago and they still do. Not satellite, but as far as the end-user is concerned, the effect is identical.
No, because the jurors get that information in the context of the court, and critically analyse it. It's the external info that they don't know where they got it that's bad.
Also, courtrooms have "objection; sustained" when someone talks bullshit, e.g. bending the truth to make a false point. That's bread and butter stuff for newpapers, go look at your local rags front page.
Example, here, last week "Joyriders race at 80mph down city street", front page headline. The source of the "80mph" figure? Second last paragraph of a whole page article: "An anonymous resident said it seemed as though the cars were driving up to 80 mph". That's enough "proof" to make front page? Or is it the fact it sold more copy that day?
Balls. You never by bleach and cleaning products? Do you not bother with shaving apparel?? I'm not talking about big screen TVs & Gucci here (vulgar handbags), "brand" recognition stretches well beyond designer stuff. You gotta eat buddy! And 9 out of 10 in your fridge you'll have heard about through advertising.
Familiarity is a funny one. Advertisers have been tapping into that sub-concious drive for a long time.
Heinz 57 Uber Alles
Perhaps I missed the irony, but you just posted information about a link that advertising has placed in your mind...the relationship between Heinz and the number 57. When you hear "42", you likely think of HHGTG. What put that link there in your mind? And who else has put links in your mind? Do you control that process? No.
Keep on thinking advertising doesn't affect you; you belong to a large market that the advertisers have a lot of success with. :-)
No, I'm suggesting that reports do bias people, and newspapers aren't known for their lack of bias themselves. Take the Michael Jackson trial. Those who thought he was guilty first time round think he is this time, and those who don't still believe the same. Not many folk have shifted positions. You'd need a psychiatrist to explain how it all works, but I'm not one. Suffice to say, you base your opinions on your knowledge, subconsiously and consiously. It that knowledge is polluted, so is your bias. Not many people can be truly objective and step back & view from an independent standpoint. Slashdot itself is proof-positive of this, people post stupid incendary comments without reading the article. What if they were on a jury? It's going to be harder to sway them, and that's not fair on the accused.
But hey, don't shoot the messenger. Both sides of the argument are flawed!
"Everything you read in newspapers is absolutely true, except for that rare story of which you happen to have first-hand knowledge" - Erwin Knoll
How often do you find IT stories badly reported in the media? Sensationalized because it sells more copy? First impressions count.
On the other hand, these bans are pretty much irrelevant with the internet available. Might make being an "internet user" reason to be dismissed from a jury selection process...
Ah, but their advertising is still getting to you. Brand recognition. When was the last time you choose a brand you'd heard of over one you'd never heard of? That's advertising. Otherwise, you'd have heard of neither.
Oh, which Cola do you drink? ;-)
Now that Flash has started to become a popular way of showing video, they threaten quicktime as THE MOST ANNOYING online video format ever. Their player has next to zero controls. I have a great player here that can play ANY open format, with the audio going out the correct soundcard (I have a couple). It can send the video to my second display or TV. It can freeze-frame and frame-advance. It didn't cost me a penny, and there are dozens of other free (beer) players like it. On the other hand, none of these shitty embedded things come close to being usable for anyone that's not the lowest common denominator in the browsing stakes i.e. IE running in 800x600.
Absolutely agreed, I've done that myself many times, though I'll usually fire back the changes if they are relevant to others. I was under the (mis)impression that you were talking about companies releasing their own homebrew efforts as OSS for "profit". As I said, all that gives you is some sense of wellbeing... ;-)
This is why /.'ers should not run businesses. It's the classic "1. Write app, 2. OSS App, 3 ..., 4 profit" number again.
So, where is the payoff in this "strategic value"? Where is the return on time/money invested? What do you mean by strategic value? Industry exposure? Slashdot Karma? Nothing that will translate to anything tangable at the end of the day. Sure, sales droids might have one more neat thing to say about your company, but client ABC isn't going to give a shit about OSS. The folk making the decisions have probably never even heard of it. It is not going to clinch that deal for you.
If you invent something that goes on to be a global standard, then yeah, you might get a little exposure. But the company that introduces something isn't always the most successful long term.
1 You don't need to come up with plots.
2. You have an obvious way to spin off merchandise.
3. ????
4. Profit!!!!
And how was Transformers any different? Cartoons have been selling toys for a lot longer than you think. And the stories ain't exactly original!
Anyone remember the Flintstones selling cigarettes? Those were the days! None of these Politically Correct spinning tops...we want drugs, rock&roll & violence in our cartoons!
My phone is more portable than a book, plus I've always got it with me. I think there are 3/4 books on it right now. Handy for 10 min killing waiting for a taxi/bus etc.
c) made out of recyclable materials
That phrase always makes me laugh. So what if something is recyclable? How is that any good for anyone? Toilet paper is recyclable, but you don't see folk putting it in a special coloured bin. Books should be passed on and not disposed of anyway, though perhaps that's what you meant.
Plus, as I've said in a few other comments, eBook readers on mobiles are about 3/4 years old. This new thing looks like the Jamster of eBooks, someones attempt to cash in and make it popular.
But yeah, books are books and always will be books. I think that won't change until that flexible paper comes out then someone produces an eBook reader that actually looks and feels like a real book.
Yah, this article is a few years out of date. There have been eBook readers available on mobiles for several years. I've read maybe 10 different books cover to cover on mine.
Sorry, but that's just not feasible, especially on Windows NT 4, where partitioning a large drive is almost a necessity, due to the 8 GB boot bug.
Enterprise apps shouldn't have these problems, but for freeware/OSS and anything else that doesn't have a dedicated test team it's almost expected.
It sounds like QA isn't living up to their end of the deal. (I should know as I have worked for them.)
Oh they are, entering a bug is easy. Getting it fixed is another thing altogether!
Hmmm. Most software testers would advice against changing default directories.
Why? Because it is the FIRST thing that is done in QA to try and break the app, a non-default install. And it breaks EVERY SINGLE PRODUCT when it first comes out. Developers use hard-coded paths when protyping; usually one or two of these make it through to the final product.
For trouble free computing; stick with the default! I'd bet a whole slew of Firefox Extensions won't work for you either.
However, do not use this sort of thing for backups!!
If files get deleted by accident and you don't notice until after the backup, BOTH copies of the data will be bad. This is just replication, which itself is very good for somethings. Not backups though.
I use a tool called RIBS. It uses rsync to create incremental backups across the network. You get hourly.0, hourly.1 etc directories, each with a hard-linked snapshot of the backup as it was at that time. These pan off into weekly, then monthly. Personally I dropped the hourly entirely, I just do daily. I do this off an IDE disk onto an IDE disk, no RAID or anything fancy required. Sure, it's a little extra work should one of the drives pack in (no RAID redundancy, maybe one day perhaps), but it's worth it for the cronological snapshots. I even backup files like MS Outlook *.pst on my Windows box, so should it get corrupted, I don't care.
Oh, did I say I'm backing up 120GB of data onto a P90 with 16meg of ram? Not bad for old junk!
Only the deltas are transmitted with it being rsync. Highly recommended, knowing you can restore ANY file means I haven't renamed to *.bak in a very long time!
I'd have accepted "off-topic" or the ever-ambigous "overrated" without question if you'd really felt the need to knock it down.
You are right, because it's not going to happen. People like Atomfilms (great site) require it for licensing reasons. In another post, someone suggests that Lucas doesn't allow people to release fan films publicly for the initial period.
The thing is, Atomfilms sort of lose out. On my media store at home, I have Duality and "Troopers" (if new to you, get it now!!) and I show them to people through my streaming video onto my TV. I can't show Atomfilms to a friend without firing up the laptop, and that ain't gonna happen when I have friends around. Less eyeballs seeing the Atomfilms logo ultimately, less exposure for them.