The Chrome source code is actually a great set of documentation for GTK, since it uses a lot of advanced functionality and it is very well-indexed and easy to search.
It was indispensable when I needed to add basic Unicode screen I/O to my application. By contrast, the gtk.org manuals were good for very little beyond identifying the functions to search for.
and yet you're the only one who is making such an absurd and asinine claim.
Really?
In a lawsuit filed in August 2009, BREIN claimed that "80 to 90 percent of all torrents... [link] to copyrighted material." (citation)
All that remains is to take the number of torrents on LegalTorrents.com, estimate the number of torrents available through other sites, compare the two numbers, then revise upward the estimate of illegal torrents.
Absurd and asinine it may be, but such claims are already being made.
Admittedly, it's overstating the importance of LegalTorrents.com by quite a lot. This is a site that has tried and failed to reinvent itself a number of times over the last six years, and seems destined to fail again.
But in response to the claim that it will someday support the argument that torrents have substantially non-infringing uses, it's fair to point out that it is far more likely to damage such arguments.
Exactly, a site and set of trackers dedicated to legal material will facilitate the argument that there are, in fact, legal uses for torrents.
The name of this particular service - LegalTorrents.com - serves to focus undue attention on the ubiquity of torrents providing access to infringing content.
Moreover, it comes down squarely on the wrong side of an important issue: torrents themselves are arguably never illegal, in that they only provide a means of finding content, and leave the actual distribution up to participating clients. Google indexes plenty of content that is either illegal or infringing, and though they deal with plenty of copyright-related complaints, they have not seen the need to establish an explicitly "legal" search service.
The company would also do a tremendous disservice to those advocating legitimate uses of torrents, if the number of torrents it tracks becomes a convenient shorthand for the number of legal torrents available. It might be good for business to publicize those numbers, to the extent they aren't readily visible, even if it is very bad for other legitimate users of the protocol. For instance, it would be trivial to assert that only 5% of torrents are available through LegalTorrents.com, and to imply that the other 95% are somehow illegal or questionable.
Frankly, it would be better for everyone if they had simply picked a name they could brand and advertise effectively. I can't see "LegalTorrents.com" getting the same sort of traction with Fortune 100 businesses as Akamai has, and it draws an inordinate amount of attention to the fact that the legality of the underlying protocol is controversial.
FatELF binaries don't avoid this issue any better than any other solution, seriously. You still have to build/bundle custom, vetted runtimes that reside in a similar bundle on the install- and for each architecture you support.
Well, it seems to me that this is the straightforward part - if it's not exactly easy, it's at least fully under your control as the publisher.
What you can't control is what happens when the user tries to install or run your game. How do you know they have picked the right installer or executable binary to double click?
Unfortunately, you have to do the same effort for FatELF binaries as you would for the other way- and with no better assurances of "getting it right" with it as with the other means.
Getting it right is what QA testing is for. The benefit of FatELF is that the end user only has a single program to run. By eliminating the choice between binaries, you eliminate the possibility that he will somehow make the wrong choice.
Exactly. Take Blizzard, who ships Windows and Mac versions of their games on the same media. Fat chance of getting an official Linux release in the absence of a universal binary solution. Blizzard tends to ignore platform-specific package formats in favor of their own installers, the better to control and customize the installation experience. By avoiding the standard MSI format on Windows, for instance, they avoid introducing a lot of unrelated dependencies and vastly simplify the post-release patching process.
If you don't mind hacking around on the command line to get a game to work, the current state of affairs probably suits you just fine. But there's no business reason for Blizzard to support Linux users with an official release, if the best they could provide is a different set of command line inputs to type in. This of course assumes they would not develop installers for every Linux distribution on every compatible architecture, along with the necessary documentation and technical support for each. I think that's a fair assumption.
Any FORMER mormon who leaves the church will be prevented from seeing his family and friends again. Anyone current mormon who breaks the rules and speaks to a FORMER mormon risks the same. When you get done watching Religulous, go work on your reading comprehension.
Speaking as a former Mormon, I can confirm that you are spewing nonsense. I haven't watched the "documentary" in question but I am going to visit my parents for Thanksgiving. I left the church 15 years ago and never experienced any of the ostracism you suggest is commonplace. Quite the reverse; from time to time, the missionaries will stop by my house to offer to help out with yard work, or to invite my family to a church event. The interactions are always cordial, if a little awkward.
Possibly it's different if you are excommunicated, but consider what you have to do to get excommunicated; in practice it doesn't happen unless you kill someone or start spreading a lot of anti-Mormon hate. In which case it's hardly surprising that friends and loved ones would disown you. It's possible there is an official policy of no contact in such cases, but the worst that would happen if you ignored it is a discussion with your local church leader.
Frankly you sound like someone who has done a lot of research into these questions and I commend you for that. But you might want to consider your sources a bit more carefully, and talk to more people in the real world. Most people are not backstabbing SOBs who will turn on you in an instant if you step out of line. There are a few nutcases out there, but you don't have to be a Christian to be a jerk.
I agree. I would've loved a class like this in high school but I was reading most of the suggested SF authors already. Students at that age lack the requisite judgment and maturity to distinguish important literary works from self-aggrandizing escapist fiction. Ideally that's where the teacher would come in, but the submitter's biases are rather transparent. He seems more interested in justifying the inclusion of fan favorites than in imparting useful analytical skills to the "flunkies."
Any list of fantasy authors for a literature course that does not include Borges is immediately suspect. His stories are short, and his ideas are profound and influential. Tolkien is equally significant, but more properly considered within the tradition of classics and folklore. Studying him in a literary context is fruitless and arguably even harmful.
A more productive avenue would be to look to favorite authors and see who they cite as significant influences, then assemble a list of stories by those authors. Or one could simply pick award-winning stories from the last few decades that have held up well in popular and critical esteem, e.g. "Flowers for Algernon." An interesting approach would be to group stories not by author but by place of first publication, to identify commercial and editorial influences on the fiction.
Or he could simply plug the class as a chance to read "Ender's Game" for school credit, and not bother arguing the academic merits of the curriculum, which will be slight. There's a reason that high school English classes do not survey works by Dan Brown, John Grisham, or JK Rowling. It's the same reason that the list as proposed is ill-conceived and fundamentally misguided.
The trouble with Warcraft "lore" is that it's an inconsistent grab bag of tropes from popular fantasy, science fiction, and horror. Chris Metzen at least has the good sense to borrow from better authors, but the end result is still derivative well beyond the standard in video games. It's a very good template for Blizzard, which essentially does the same thing with the games as a whole: polish off all the rough edges off original, groundbreaking games, then digest the essence down to mass market pablum.
In the Warcraft 2 era, the result was still somewhat inspired. Over a decade and three World of Warcraft releases later, the cracks are beginning to show. The lore in Wrath of the Lich King reads like bad fan fiction, with only a thin veneer of fantasy lite spackled over sources as inconsistent as Tolkien's Mordor, Norse mythology, and Lovecraft's Elder Gods. Plot continuity is achieved through item progression rather than narrative cohesion, and if the game wasn't a relentless treadmill of unthinking advancement, players would quickly notice that the story makes no sense. As it stands, there's little incentive on either side to care.
It's a shame these sort of interactive fictions passed away after the advent of the CD-ROM and Myst.
You should look into some of the newer, highly rated works at IFDB. There is a small but active community still developing these games, and each year sees one or two new gems that rival or surpass the most popular efforts of the Infocom era. The best days of the format may well be ahead of us.
OEM installs can be quite problematic with Vista. The mass imaging process underwent some significant changes between XP and Vista, and a lot of early Vista laptops were prepared improperly by manufacturers.
For example, my friend had a Sony Vaio from June 2007 where key system files and folders were symlinked to a (non-existent) Y: drive. Her laptop worked OK out of the box but slowly destroyed itself as Windows updates were applied incorrectly or in an unanticipated way. Eventually it lost the ability to rename files and folders, and to apply new patches.
Windows itself is very stable but if it gets installed or deployed in an incompetent way, the results are obviously not going to be consistent or stable.
The fact that a Mac comes with everything you need to edit movies and photos and turn the result into DVDs distinguishes it from every other computer, and hence is noteworthy.
Vista ships with "Windows Movie Maker" and "Windows DVD Maker", which together provide everything you need to turn videos and photos into DVDs. These capabilities are not nearly as distinctive as you seem to believe.
in the vast majority of those examples - careful analysis of what the applications need to access can ensure security can be locked down. Security can be allowed to certain files/folders/registry keys, applications can be locked down using software restriction policies in group policy, and for the truly paranoid, logging can be enabled on areas at risk so that activity in the vulnerable areas is understood.
Granted that this is the typical solution. However, when I have inherited or walked into an environment where policy has been routinely violated for years, there's often a great deal of this to be done. A user has a set of many applications, all of which need to be audited and adjusted to work in a limited rights environment. You have to schedule time for testing around the user's other activities (paid job duties).
The greater part of the challenge is getting out ahead of the curve while you deal with specific application issues. If new applications are meanwhile being purchased from outside vendors; if internal projects are developed along historical assumptions about what's OK; then you can easily find yourself in a completely reactive role as new issues accumulate as fast as you fix the old ones.
I agree that solutions abound, but time and money can conspire to delay the implementation of the necessary fixes. Such administrators could naturally be expected to vocalize their distress at Microsoft's poorly-executed release of a new Windows component that only adds to the burden of managing Windows clients.
By shifting the blame for Microsoft's retraction to these administrators, I felt the OP was essentially making the argument that it is practical to immediately restrict all users in all enterprise environments, and that failure to accomplish this was a sign of incompetence. I hoped to at least suggest that a more nuanced view of Windows administration is appropriate.
Sounds like the administrator's fault - they can't keep their users from installing unauthorized software? Encrypted folders should be the LEAST of their worries.
I understand the temptation to blame this all on incompetent Windows administrators, but depending on how the company is structured, IT may have little clout in enforcing policies on limited user rights. And sometimes the economic costs of such policies is difficult for the company to swallow. Take the following somewhat fictionalized examples.
Dozens legacy Windows applications developed in-house by a team of lackluster programmers. These applications, targetting some godawful blend of Oracle 7.34, Visual Basic 4, and sundry third-party OCXs, require (naturally) administrative rights to run. Now not only do those users need elevated rights, the developers do too (under the convenient fiction of needing to maintain those applications).
Or take the new payroll package that HR has just dropped a cool half million on (without first consulting IT to verify that it meets standards). Hey, it requires administrative rights to function. I guess all of Human Resources gets full control over their PC after all.
Take the conveyor belt system software, where the vendor has mercifully updated their code and the new version even supports running with limited user rights. Fantastic! Wait, what's that? The business doesn't want to spend $300,000 for an upgrade they don't need? Bummer. So hey, those operators still need administrative rights.
Not to mention that in many corporations there's a select group of people (not infrequently executives and administrative assistants) whose lack of computer skills is matched only by their demands for special perks and privileges completely outside of written policy.
You want to talk about patching? Say you have an ActiveX-based document retrieval system that's absolutely vital to the business. Now Microsoft thoughtfully releases a patch that wreaks havoc on the ActiveX user experience. OK, so corporate adoption is nonexistent. They must've been kidding. What kind of novice admin would deploy something like that to his network?
What's Microsoft's solution? Roll it into the cumulative IE security updates from now until eternity. Now the document system's vendor comes along and says, hey, don't apply this patch until we come out with a fix. No ETA. So now you, our erstwhile Windows Administrator, are faced with a decision: either take a vital component of your business offline, or leave known Internet Explorer vulnerabilities unpatched. At least Microsoft's monthly cycle leaves a faint glimmer of hope that you can resolve the inevitable conflicts in time for next month's set of patch-related problems.
There are environments where IT policy can be consistent, sane and rational. Is this the norm? I don't know. Not on any site where I've ever worked. Usually the company ties itself to the mast of at least one policy-destroying application, and always there's the endless parade of winks and nods and concessions to those with decision-making power.
But feel free to continue to blame "incompetent" Windows administrators. In between putting out fires and dealing with the sneering bluster of developers and the delusional expectations of business managers, they truly deserve your contempt for taking that vacation.
Don't get me wrong; it's a fun game and the pay can be nearly as good as you are. The fact that you can't win makes it so much more satisfying when you do.
In this case, the college student agreed not to distribute and he did it anyway. Apple identified him and sued him.
I'm not suggesting that the guy should have been let off the hook. Apple clearly has a vested interest in making sure their NDAs have teeth, the same way that the RIAA have a vested interest in curbing rampant piracy of members' intellectual property.
The point I was trying to make is that it is possible to accept that the individual is guilty of wrongdoing without turning into cheerleaders for companies that maximize the punitive aspects of a settlement.
It is even possible to fully recognize the legal merits of Apple's position but yet be so disgusted by their actions as to want to boycott them in the future. It might be excessive but it's not entirely unreasonable.
When the RIAA exercise their legal rights and haul pirates into court, they receive no end of criticism here on Slashdot for abusing grandmothers, children, poor college kids etc.
When Apple does the same thing to a student, the Apple apologists trip over themselves in their haste to pillory the poor college kid that dared to provoke Apple's wrath. Then it seems the ones with mod points rush out to label any dissenting views as flamebait.
I agree with the original poster. A financial settlement is way out of line. His admission of guilt is damning enough in terms of reducing future employment options. Demanding cash on top of that -- regardless of the amount -- is just abusing someone in an indefensible position.
It's so aggrivating to have 3000+ double bounce messages a day to the postmaster account, and no way to stop them.
Why are you accepting email for delivery to users that are not defined on your system? Just have your MTA reject delivery to unknown users, and you won't have any bounces to deal with.
When you loan an amount on INTEREST, you always make a profit. The more money you have the more profit you can make. The rich get richer - faster.
This line of reasoning is absolutely misleading. With any loan there is a significant possibility of default. Profit is not guaranteed, and the interest provides economic motivation for people with surplus cash (the "rich") to loan money to people who need it.
Furthermore, this completely ignores the benefits that the borrower obtains from loaned capital. The ability to leverage money not your own is incredibly powerful, though not without significant risk. You can borrow funds to invest in a business or real estate, and done properly you have a good chance of making yourself quite a bit more wealthy. In many cases your return will far outstrip that of your lender.
When you invest that same amount in a business, you can loose that money. You cannot sit on your ass all day and hope to make money.
By any measure, buying stock in a company is investing in its future growth potential. The average shareholder can do very little to guarantee this return except sit around all day. Further complicating this worldview is the notion of "investing" in the bond market, which essentially involves purchasing shares in interest-bearing loans.
Delve deep enough, and you get to the core concepts of capital, investment, and return on investment. What you are essentially suggesting is that one kind of ROI is "bad" (interest) while others are "good" (dividends earned through hard work). While this is an intriguing premise, there is no logical method of obtaining this conclusion.
It should be noted that much of the utility of wealth lies in its ability to let you choose to work hard only for the things you want to. There is no great benefit in suggesting that hard work itself is moral; people can and do work very hard for extremely selfish or malicious purposes.
Sorry, I don't buy it. If the only link to his site was from Google, how did Google find it in the first place?
I don't even think that Google lists a page that's not linked to elsewhere. The entire concept of PageRank is determining what people think about a site by whether or not they link to it, what they say about it when linking to it, and how important the person doing the linking is.
So basically, Google might crawl the page, but unless another site is pointing there then it will not show up in any search listings (including the site:x.com type).
And if another site is linking to it, obviously that's where MSN Search found out about it.
Specifically regarding the notion that the EULA screen on new Dell machines is not circumventable, I have to say that this is completely false.
All you have to do is press F2 when the machine starts up (to enter the BIOS). If you don't hit the key in a timely fashion, restart the machine (ctrl-alt-del works, and does not accept the license) and try again.
Then set the computer to boot from a CD or floppy disk first, insert your installation media, and let the machine boot up.
You only get that Dell EULA when the machine boots from its hard disk, and if you format the drive and remove the Dell partition you will never have to accept it (and also you will never see it again).
The person who ended up sending his machine back is a paranoid, attention-seeking idiot. If he had actually tried to install his OS (e.g. by putting the CD in the drive and starting the machine) it probably would have worked fine even without going into the BIOS.
Dell certainly has its faults but it at least supports Linux in a more or less acceptable fashion. It's certainly not in bed with Microsoft; it basically offers anything (hardware or software) for which there exists sufficient customer demand.
This is also why Dell does not (and probably never well) sell any Dell-branded new Tablet PCs Microsoft tried to convince everyone they needed last year.
Annecdotally (hmmm... dodgy speeeling?), IE5.5 use seems to be dropping away compared with IE5.01. I think 'cos Windows 2000 shipped with IE5.01 and since thats still a current OS, people still seem to run that browser. Whereas I don't think IE5.5 shipping with anything?
Microsoft has dropped support for IE 5.5, per this page.
Users with IE 5.5 installed who visit Windows Update are, as I recall, prompted to install IE 5.01 SP4 as a Critical Update, and IE 6 SP1 as a recommended update.
So usage should continue to decline at an appreciable rate.
It's great to see Firefox gaining momentum among regular computer users, but I can't help but feel that it won't fare much better, security wise.
We've already seen significant security holes in Firefox, and this is with a negligible market share. Once it gets targetted directly, exploits may be just as common as they currently are with Internet Explorer.
And if that happens, where is the security update infrastructure to ensure everyone gets patched? Microsoft won't integrate Firefox into Automatic Updates. Sure, mailing lists and/. will carry the news of new Firefox security flaws, but will the average user see those announcements?
The problem with telling users to switch to Firefox for security reasons is that it's usually sold as a permanent fix to the problem, when in all honesty it never will be.
But the user, having been told that "Firefox is secure", probably won't bother checking the Mozilla site on a regular basis, if ever. Automatic update notification is supposed to be coming in the future, but that does little for anyone who's installed Firefox in the past couple of weeks and doesn't plan to touch it again.
For those of us faced with the prospect of a mass corporate rollout at short notice, do you have any thoughts on the impact of this registry change on non-spyware apps?
In other words, is the ADODB.Stream functionality in widespread use, such that it will break many ActiveX applications, or is it mainly abused by malware and IE exploits?
I think the funniest posts on/. can be found in the poll comments.
Granted, there's a lot of garbage (redundant Cowboy Neal / insensitive clod comments), but the discussions typically veer wildly off-topic and are frequently hilarious.
Slashdot Mirror
The Chrome source code is actually a great set of documentation for GTK, since it uses a lot of advanced functionality and it is very well-indexed and easy to search.
It was indispensable when I needed to add basic Unicode screen I/O to my application. By contrast, the gtk.org manuals were good for very little beyond identifying the functions to search for.
and yet you're the only one who is making such an absurd and asinine claim.
Really?
In a lawsuit filed in August 2009, BREIN claimed that "80 to 90 percent of all torrents... [link] to copyrighted material." (citation)
All that remains is to take the number of torrents on LegalTorrents.com, estimate the number of torrents available through other sites, compare the two numbers, then revise upward the estimate of illegal torrents.
Absurd and asinine it may be, but such claims are already being made.
Admittedly, it's overstating the importance of LegalTorrents.com by quite a lot. This is a site that has tried and failed to reinvent itself a number of times over the last six years, and seems destined to fail again.
But in response to the claim that it will someday support the argument that torrents have substantially non-infringing uses, it's fair to point out that it is far more likely to damage such arguments.
Exactly, a site and set of trackers dedicated to legal material will facilitate the argument that there are, in fact, legal uses for torrents.
The name of this particular service - LegalTorrents.com - serves to focus undue attention on the ubiquity of torrents providing access to infringing content.
Moreover, it comes down squarely on the wrong side of an important issue: torrents themselves are arguably never illegal, in that they only provide a means of finding content, and leave the actual distribution up to participating clients. Google indexes plenty of content that is either illegal or infringing, and though they deal with plenty of copyright-related complaints, they have not seen the need to establish an explicitly "legal" search service.
The company would also do a tremendous disservice to those advocating legitimate uses of torrents, if the number of torrents it tracks becomes a convenient shorthand for the number of legal torrents available. It might be good for business to publicize those numbers, to the extent they aren't readily visible, even if it is very bad for other legitimate users of the protocol. For instance, it would be trivial to assert that only 5% of torrents are available through LegalTorrents.com, and to imply that the other 95% are somehow illegal or questionable.
Frankly, it would be better for everyone if they had simply picked a name they could brand and advertise effectively. I can't see "LegalTorrents.com" getting the same sort of traction with Fortune 100 businesses as Akamai has, and it draws an inordinate amount of attention to the fact that the legality of the underlying protocol is controversial.
FatELF binaries don't avoid this issue any better than any other solution, seriously. You still have to build/bundle custom, vetted runtimes that reside in a similar bundle on the install- and for each architecture you support.
Well, it seems to me that this is the straightforward part - if it's not exactly easy, it's at least fully under your control as the publisher.
What you can't control is what happens when the user tries to install or run your game. How do you know they have picked the right installer or executable binary to double click?
Unfortunately, you have to do the same effort for FatELF binaries as you would for the other way- and with no better assurances of "getting it right" with it as with the other means.
Getting it right is what QA testing is for. The benefit of FatELF is that the end user only has a single program to run. By eliminating the choice between binaries, you eliminate the possibility that he will somehow make the wrong choice.
Commercial Games. That's who.
Exactly. Take Blizzard, who ships Windows and Mac versions of their games on the same media. Fat chance of getting an official Linux release in the absence of a universal binary solution. Blizzard tends to ignore platform-specific package formats in favor of their own installers, the better to control and customize the installation experience. By avoiding the standard MSI format on Windows, for instance, they avoid introducing a lot of unrelated dependencies and vastly simplify the post-release patching process.
If you don't mind hacking around on the command line to get a game to work, the current state of affairs probably suits you just fine. But there's no business reason for Blizzard to support Linux users with an official release, if the best they could provide is a different set of command line inputs to type in. This of course assumes they would not develop installers for every Linux distribution on every compatible architecture, along with the necessary documentation and technical support for each. I think that's a fair assumption.
Speaking as a former Mormon, I can confirm that you are spewing nonsense. I haven't watched the "documentary" in question but I am going to visit my parents for Thanksgiving. I left the church 15 years ago and never experienced any of the ostracism you suggest is commonplace. Quite the reverse; from time to time, the missionaries will stop by my house to offer to help out with yard work, or to invite my family to a church event. The interactions are always cordial, if a little awkward.
Possibly it's different if you are excommunicated, but consider what you have to do to get excommunicated; in practice it doesn't happen unless you kill someone or start spreading a lot of anti-Mormon hate. In which case it's hardly surprising that friends and loved ones would disown you. It's possible there is an official policy of no contact in such cases, but the worst that would happen if you ignored it is a discussion with your local church leader.
Frankly you sound like someone who has done a lot of research into these questions and I commend you for that. But you might want to consider your sources a bit more carefully, and talk to more people in the real world. Most people are not backstabbing SOBs who will turn on you in an instant if you step out of line. There are a few nutcases out there, but you don't have to be a Christian to be a jerk.
I think we can all agree that what we need is a new federal agency to identify the true Libertarians.
I agree. I would've loved a class like this in high school but I was reading most of the suggested SF authors already. Students at that age lack the requisite judgment and maturity to distinguish important literary works from self-aggrandizing escapist fiction. Ideally that's where the teacher would come in, but the submitter's biases are rather transparent. He seems more interested in justifying the inclusion of fan favorites than in imparting useful analytical skills to the "flunkies."
Any list of fantasy authors for a literature course that does not include Borges is immediately suspect. His stories are short, and his ideas are profound and influential. Tolkien is equally significant, but more properly considered within the tradition of classics and folklore. Studying him in a literary context is fruitless and arguably even harmful.
A more productive avenue would be to look to favorite authors and see who they cite as significant influences, then assemble a list of stories by those authors. Or one could simply pick award-winning stories from the last few decades that have held up well in popular and critical esteem, e.g. "Flowers for Algernon." An interesting approach would be to group stories not by author but by place of first publication, to identify commercial and editorial influences on the fiction.
Or he could simply plug the class as a chance to read "Ender's Game" for school credit, and not bother arguing the academic merits of the curriculum, which will be slight. There's a reason that high school English classes do not survey works by Dan Brown, John Grisham, or JK Rowling. It's the same reason that the list as proposed is ill-conceived and fundamentally misguided.
The trouble with Warcraft "lore" is that it's an inconsistent grab bag of tropes from popular fantasy, science fiction, and horror. Chris Metzen at least has the good sense to borrow from better authors, but the end result is still derivative well beyond the standard in video games. It's a very good template for Blizzard, which essentially does the same thing with the games as a whole: polish off all the rough edges off original, groundbreaking games, then digest the essence down to mass market pablum.
In the Warcraft 2 era, the result was still somewhat inspired. Over a decade and three World of Warcraft releases later, the cracks are beginning to show. The lore in Wrath of the Lich King reads like bad fan fiction, with only a thin veneer of fantasy lite spackled over sources as inconsistent as Tolkien's Mordor, Norse mythology, and Lovecraft's Elder Gods. Plot continuity is achieved through item progression rather than narrative cohesion, and if the game wasn't a relentless treadmill of unthinking advancement, players would quickly notice that the story makes no sense. As it stands, there's little incentive on either side to care.
It's a shame these sort of interactive fictions passed away after the advent of the CD-ROM and Myst.
You should look into some of the newer, highly rated works at IFDB. There is a small but active community still developing these games, and each year sees one or two new gems that rival or surpass the most popular efforts of the Infocom era. The best days of the format may well be ahead of us.
OEM installs can be quite problematic with Vista. The mass imaging process underwent some significant changes between XP and Vista, and a lot of early Vista laptops were prepared improperly by manufacturers.
For example, my friend had a Sony Vaio from June 2007 where key system files and folders were symlinked to a (non-existent) Y: drive. Her laptop worked OK out of the box but slowly destroyed itself as Windows updates were applied incorrectly or in an unanticipated way. Eventually it lost the ability to rename files and folders, and to apply new patches.
Windows itself is very stable but if it gets installed or deployed in an incompetent way, the results are obviously not going to be consistent or stable.
Vista ships with "Windows Movie Maker" and "Windows DVD Maker", which together provide everything you need to turn videos and photos into DVDs. These capabilities are not nearly as distinctive as you seem to believe.
Granted that this is the typical solution. However, when I have inherited or walked into an environment where policy has been routinely violated for years, there's often a great deal of this to be done. A user has a set of many applications, all of which need to be audited and adjusted to work in a limited rights environment. You have to schedule time for testing around the user's other activities (paid job duties).
The greater part of the challenge is getting out ahead of the curve while you deal with specific application issues. If new applications are meanwhile being purchased from outside vendors; if internal projects are developed along historical assumptions about what's OK; then you can easily find yourself in a completely reactive role as new issues accumulate as fast as you fix the old ones.
I agree that solutions abound, but time and money can conspire to delay the implementation of the necessary fixes. Such administrators could naturally be expected to vocalize their distress at Microsoft's poorly-executed release of a new Windows component that only adds to the burden of managing Windows clients.
By shifting the blame for Microsoft's retraction to these administrators, I felt the OP was essentially making the argument that it is practical to immediately restrict all users in all enterprise environments, and that failure to accomplish this was a sign of incompetence. I hoped to at least suggest that a more nuanced view of Windows administration is appropriate.
I understand the temptation to blame this all on incompetent Windows administrators, but depending on how the company is structured, IT may have little clout in enforcing policies on limited user rights. And sometimes the economic costs of such policies is difficult for the company to swallow. Take the following somewhat fictionalized examples.
Dozens legacy Windows applications developed in-house by a team of lackluster programmers. These applications, targetting some godawful blend of Oracle 7.34, Visual Basic 4, and sundry third-party OCXs, require (naturally) administrative rights to run. Now not only do those users need elevated rights, the developers do too (under the convenient fiction of needing to maintain those applications).
Or take the new payroll package that HR has just dropped a cool half million on (without first consulting IT to verify that it meets standards). Hey, it requires administrative rights to function. I guess all of Human Resources gets full control over their PC after all.
Take the conveyor belt system software, where the vendor has mercifully updated their code and the new version even supports running with limited user rights. Fantastic! Wait, what's that? The business doesn't want to spend $300,000 for an upgrade they don't need? Bummer. So hey, those operators still need administrative rights.
Not to mention that in many corporations there's a select group of people (not infrequently executives and administrative assistants) whose lack of computer skills is matched only by their demands for special perks and privileges completely outside of written policy.
You want to talk about patching? Say you have an ActiveX-based document retrieval system that's absolutely vital to the business. Now Microsoft thoughtfully releases a patch that wreaks havoc on the ActiveX user experience. OK, so corporate adoption is nonexistent. They must've been kidding. What kind of novice admin would deploy something like that to his network?
What's Microsoft's solution? Roll it into the cumulative IE security updates from now until eternity. Now the document system's vendor comes along and says, hey, don't apply this patch until we come out with a fix. No ETA. So now you, our erstwhile Windows Administrator, are faced with a decision: either take a vital component of your business offline, or leave known Internet Explorer vulnerabilities unpatched. At least Microsoft's monthly cycle leaves a faint glimmer of hope that you can resolve the inevitable conflicts in time for next month's set of patch-related problems.
There are environments where IT policy can be consistent, sane and rational. Is this the norm? I don't know. Not on any site where I've ever worked. Usually the company ties itself to the mast of at least one policy-destroying application, and always there's the endless parade of winks and nods and concessions to those with decision-making power.
But feel free to continue to blame "incompetent" Windows administrators. In between putting out fires and dealing with the sneering bluster of developers and the delusional expectations of business managers, they truly deserve your contempt for taking that vacation.
Don't get me wrong; it's a fun game and the pay can be nearly as good as you are. The fact that you can't win makes it so much more satisfying when you do.
I'm not suggesting that the guy should have been let off the hook. Apple clearly has a vested interest in making sure their NDAs have teeth, the same way that the RIAA have a vested interest in curbing rampant piracy of members' intellectual property.
The point I was trying to make is that it is possible to accept that the individual is guilty of wrongdoing without turning into cheerleaders for companies that maximize the punitive aspects of a settlement.
It is even possible to fully recognize the legal merits of Apple's position but yet be so disgusted by their actions as to want to boycott them in the future. It might be excessive but it's not entirely unreasonable.
When the RIAA exercise their legal rights and haul pirates into court, they receive no end of criticism here on Slashdot for abusing grandmothers, children, poor college kids etc.
When Apple does the same thing to a student, the Apple apologists trip over themselves in their haste to pillory the poor college kid that dared to provoke Apple's wrath. Then it seems the ones with mod points rush out to label any dissenting views as flamebait.
I agree with the original poster. A financial settlement is way out of line. His admission of guilt is damning enough in terms of reducing future employment options. Demanding cash on top of that -- regardless of the amount -- is just abusing someone in an indefensible position.
Nobody likes a bully.
This line of reasoning is absolutely misleading. With any loan there is a significant possibility of default. Profit is not guaranteed, and the interest provides economic motivation for people with surplus cash (the "rich") to loan money to people who need it.
Furthermore, this completely ignores the benefits that the borrower obtains from loaned capital. The ability to leverage money not your own is incredibly powerful, though not without significant risk. You can borrow funds to invest in a business or real estate, and done properly you have a good chance of making yourself quite a bit more wealthy. In many cases your return will far outstrip that of your lender.
By any measure, buying stock in a company is investing in its future growth potential. The average shareholder can do very little to guarantee this return except sit around all day. Further complicating this worldview is the notion of "investing" in the bond market, which essentially involves purchasing shares in interest-bearing loans.
Delve deep enough, and you get to the core concepts of capital, investment, and return on investment. What you are essentially suggesting is that one kind of ROI is "bad" (interest) while others are "good" (dividends earned through hard work). While this is an intriguing premise, there is no logical method of obtaining this conclusion.
It should be noted that much of the utility of wealth lies in its ability to let you choose to work hard only for the things you want to. There is no great benefit in suggesting that hard work itself is moral; people can and do work very hard for extremely selfish or malicious purposes.
I don't even think that Google lists a page that's not linked to elsewhere. The entire concept of PageRank is determining what people think about a site by whether or not they link to it, what they say about it when linking to it, and how important the person doing the linking is.
So basically, Google might crawl the page, but unless another site is pointing there then it will not show up in any search listings (including the site:x.com type).
And if another site is linking to it, obviously that's where MSN Search found out about it.
All you have to do is press F2 when the machine starts up (to enter the BIOS). If you don't hit the key in a timely fashion, restart the machine (ctrl-alt-del works, and does not accept the license) and try again.
Then set the computer to boot from a CD or floppy disk first, insert your installation media, and let the machine boot up.
You only get that Dell EULA when the machine boots from its hard disk, and if you format the drive and remove the Dell partition you will never have to accept it (and also you will never see it again).
The person who ended up sending his machine back is a paranoid, attention-seeking idiot. If he had actually tried to install his OS (e.g. by putting the CD in the drive and starting the machine) it probably would have worked fine even without going into the BIOS.
Dell certainly has its faults but it at least supports Linux in a more or less acceptable fashion. It's certainly not in bed with Microsoft; it basically offers anything (hardware or software) for which there exists sufficient customer demand.
This is also why Dell does not (and probably never well) sell any Dell-branded new Tablet PCs Microsoft tried to convince everyone they needed last year.
Users with IE 5.5 installed who visit Windows Update are, as I recall, prompted to install IE 5.01 SP4 as a Critical Update, and IE 6 SP1 as a recommended update.
So usage should continue to decline at an appreciable rate.
We've already seen significant security holes in Firefox, and this is with a negligible market share. Once it gets targetted directly, exploits may be just as common as they currently are with Internet Explorer.
And if that happens, where is the security update infrastructure to ensure everyone gets patched? Microsoft won't integrate Firefox into Automatic Updates. Sure, mailing lists and /. will carry the news of new Firefox security flaws, but will the average user see those announcements?
The problem with telling users to switch to Firefox for security reasons is that it's usually sold as a permanent fix to the problem, when in all honesty it never will be.
But the user, having been told that "Firefox is secure", probably won't bother checking the Mozilla site on a regular basis, if ever. Automatic update notification is supposed to be coming in the future, but that does little for anyone who's installed Firefox in the past couple of weeks and doesn't plan to touch it again.
In other words, is the ADODB.Stream functionality in widespread use, such that it will break many ActiveX applications, or is it mainly abused by malware and IE exploits?
Granted, there's a lot of garbage (redundant Cowboy Neal / insensitive clod comments), but the discussions typically veer wildly off-topic and are frequently hilarious.