There was a good reason to buy Windows XP - it is great. It's by far the best version of Windows since 95, and for people that were stuck with 98, or God forbid ME, there was a clear reason to upgrade.
I know it's late in the discussion but I'll add an idea that we kicked around a while back.
Basically, on the back of a pc you have a shelf, with five or so docking sockets on it. These sockets should be rounded, friendly, damage proof, and easy to attach something to. Think sitting your kettle on it's little power dock.
There is a standardised form for the things which attach to these sockets. Say, a small cuboid like a cigarette packet. Make them hotpluggable and have some shit-hot firmware solution so that drivers can be loaded from hardware and upgraded there if need be.
And there you have a modular, friendly device for expanding PCs. Throw away IDE sockets, PCI, AGP, even USB to a certain extent. Stop opening up your PC for upgrades. Complete portability of these devices between PCs.
Impractical? Maybe. But it's the way that it should be.
Yeah. But it would be nice to think that even though we didn't care about the photos that were out there we would have had the opportunity to stop them being distributed...
Those "certain activities" are still of the same level of right/wrongness - so this is somewhat similar to lowering the penalty for robbing banks to a 50p fine.
Somewhat.
I'm sure you take my point though - the accessibility levels have changed but the acceptibility of the action has not.
See, the thing I always wonder when people bring up this topic is this - the technology to record people without their permission has been here for a while. Be it photographic, video, or audio, there have been accessible means to invade someone's privacy for quite a number of years.
What devices like this represent are a proliferation of this technology. And the uses to which it is put is not a problem of the technology, it's a problem of society.
Take a look here for a handheld camera which can be upgraded to use 128mb SD cards. In it's standard 8mb form, it can take 2 minutes of low res footage at 15fps.
Just a comparison. We got one, it's really pretty good for the price.
I can't remember exactly - it was at least 18 months ago. But basically, we spotted money off codes on a website - there were 20 and 10 ones I think. Basically it was as simple as redeeming loads of these with loads of different accounts. There's not really a lot of detail to give - I don't see how it's unbelievable that a company gives money off vouchers...
I didn't post this to boast about our brilliance in doing this, I did it to highlight the stupidity of buy.com. This was a simple loophole in their accounts system, and a little more checking would have put paid to our little scam.
Except, it's not a choice. If you want the best version of Mozilla, download it from moz.org. How hard can it be? All this stuff is transparent to end-users, it's only techies that see the branch/trunk discussions.
ASP.net has something called user controls. These use custom tags combined with controlling code to make for an incredibly easy basic separation of presentation from content.
I learned PHP to a moderate level, and now ASP.net to a moderate level, and ASP.net is the first language I have ever felt is truly for the web.
It's not perfect, no. And yes it's Microsoft. But C# is an open spec don't you know. And if MS was ever going to redeem itself, it had to start somewhere. ASP.net on the web is part of that.
We took advantage of a voucher offer that buy.com were running here in the UK to rip them off to the tune of a few hundred pounds. A few simple security checks would have prevented it but they obviously weren't organised enough for that.
Having seen that masterpiece of commercial stupidity I'm not surprised that this venture is failing.
It's a shame that incidents such as this have contributed to the overall bad image of nuclear power. There is still a lot of potential which will probably never be revealed because the public at large are scared of what could happen if something went wrong.
The truth is that modern techniques could probably make nuclear power an extremely safe alternative.
And to all the people below me trying to be high and mighty - analogy or not, it's a fucking disgraceful comparison. Was he making a valid point or was he deliberately using that example to try and make MS out to be some corporation of death?
There was a reason he used that example you naive wankers.
One thing I've found that it runs fairly slowly. I'm running 800x600 on a P4 1.7 with a Geforce Ti500 and 512mb of RAM and on some of the new maps there is slowdown - there really shouldn't be.
Seems like all the posts here are offtopic or by people who haven't bought the game, so here's my impression.
I bought it over Steam using a credit card, and it downloaded it in the background before it was released. Then the game was unlocked this morning. Apart from a little bit of network slowness when I first ordered it, this was totally seamless and I'd buy all of my games this way with confidence.
The game itself shouldn't be a disappointment if you've read any previews. It's a Tony Hawks style "complete these objectives" game fit into the traditional Counter-Mtrike match format. Essentially you and your team of AI bots fight against another AI team in a normal match, but you'll have to make 5 kills with the Scout or something like that.
There's also the single player missions that Ritual did - this is a kind of storyline section, like their Elite Force 2. In other words, it's a generic shooter.
I'm enjoying it. It's nothing amazing, but it's challenging and all the maps have been re-done and look really good. The thing that makes it cool is the AI - the bots are truly amazing, very lifelike. I saw one knife another when it ran out of ammo, it was a shock to see a skill like that transferred to a computer opponent.
All in all, it's "ok". Don't expect a revelation and you'll be fine. And Valve are offering it at a cut down price for a few more days.
Knew I'd seen mention of this recently - I don't follow suite development that closely but this is very interesting and I'm sure there's more info on the associated bugzilla bugs.
That's fine. But I bet it looks like ass. The web - not the Internet as a while - the web - is a visual medium. Sites like www.mezzoblue.com or those featured at www.webstandardsawards.com are accessible and stylish. You can still view them if you want to disable images, CSS and JS, but for those of us in the modern, broadband enabled age, we can have an interesting visual experience and still be entertained by good content.
You're letting your visitors down by not making the effort.
I think Mozilla has reached the point where it can't really get much more advanced feature-wise until other issues are addressed - such as size and performance. There is so much crammed into the suite that reorganisation is going to take a while, and I think that influence from Firefox has made some people sit up and take notice.
Seeing as Firefox is getting most of the press these days it's important to realise that the full suite is still moving along nicely. They are addressing criticisms well - a redesign of the cookie manager and speed increases are reflective of the fight against bloat and complexity.
And don't forget, changes to the suite are picked up by Firefox since FF is based off the same source tree. So a lot of work here will affect the mini-moz too....
We were talking about this the other day, and it really seems like some kind of alternative interface is necessary.
Consider a device which can project images onto your retina and also track the movements of your hands. Something like that would have no trouble taking input from a "virtual" projected keyboard...
To be honest, my phone is pretty much as small as it can get, and I wouldn't want to do any serious data entry on it. There needs to be some kind of interface revolution before we can do anything really cool.
I see it's got MPEG playback built in, but what's the real-world performance of these systems going to be? This is significantly smaller than anything that's gone before and it could be a pretty sweet device to sit under my TV... if it performs right.
Agreed. In fact it is more likely that this increasing obsession with making stuff clean is going to contribute towards increased allergies and decreased immune efficiency.
Sometimes it's best to be exposed to some grime to let your body build up some defense.
This is probably something that about 17 people in the entire world would want and that about 1 IE > FF converts would want. They are never ever going to implement a dialog for this.
Slashdot Mirror
There was a good reason to buy Windows XP - it is great. It's by far the best version of Windows since 95, and for people that were stuck with 98, or God forbid ME, there was a clear reason to upgrade.
I know it's late in the discussion but I'll add an idea that we kicked around a while back.
Basically, on the back of a pc you have a shelf, with five or so docking sockets on it. These sockets should be rounded, friendly, damage proof, and easy to attach something to. Think sitting your kettle on it's little power dock.
There is a standardised form for the things which attach to these sockets. Say, a small cuboid like a cigarette packet. Make them hotpluggable and have some shit-hot firmware solution so that drivers can be loaded from hardware and upgraded there if need be. And there you have a modular, friendly device for expanding PCs. Throw away IDE sockets, PCI, AGP, even USB to a certain extent. Stop opening up your PC for upgrades. Complete portability of these devices between PCs.
Impractical? Maybe. But it's the way that it should be.
Yeah. But it would be nice to think that even though we didn't care about the photos that were out there we would have had the opportunity to stop them being distributed...
Good point, I agree.
Those "certain activities" are still of the same level of right/wrongness - so this is somewhat similar to lowering the penalty for robbing banks to a 50p fine.
Somewhat.
I'm sure you take my point though - the accessibility levels have changed but the acceptibility of the action has not.
See, the thing I always wonder when people bring up this topic is this - the technology to record people without their permission has been here for a while. Be it photographic, video, or audio, there have been accessible means to invade someone's privacy for quite a number of years.
What devices like this represent are a proliferation of this technology. And the uses to which it is put is not a problem of the technology, it's a problem of society.
Take a look here for a handheld camera which can be upgraded to use 128mb SD cards. In it's standard 8mb form, it can take 2 minutes of low res footage at 15fps.
Just a comparison. We got one, it's really pretty good for the price.
I can't remember exactly - it was at least 18 months ago. But basically, we spotted money off codes on a website - there were 20 and 10 ones I think. Basically it was as simple as redeeming loads of these with loads of different accounts. There's not really a lot of detail to give - I don't see how it's unbelievable that a company gives money off vouchers...
I didn't post this to boast about our brilliance in doing this, I did it to highlight the stupidity of buy.com. This was a simple loophole in their accounts system, and a little more checking would have put paid to our little scam.
Except, it's not a choice. If you want the best version of Mozilla, download it from moz.org. How hard can it be? All this stuff is transparent to end-users, it's only techies that see the branch/trunk discussions.
"Raises some serious privacy questions."
My God, does this sort of thing really have to be stuffed in everywhere? Technology has nothing to do with privacy - it is it's use.
A comment like this has no more place here than saying "oh yeah, eyes? and memory? serious privacy concerns there".
ASP.net has something called user controls. These use custom tags combined with controlling code to make for an incredibly easy basic separation of presentation from content.
I learned PHP to a moderate level, and now ASP.net to a moderate level, and ASP.net is the first language I have ever felt is truly for the web.
It's not perfect, no. And yes it's Microsoft. But C# is an open spec don't you know. And if MS was ever going to redeem itself, it had to start somewhere. ASP.net on the web is part of that.
We took advantage of a voucher offer that buy.com were running here in the UK to rip them off to the tune of a few hundred pounds. A few simple security checks would have prevented it but they obviously weren't organised enough for that.
Having seen that masterpiece of commercial stupidity I'm not surprised that this venture is failing.
It's a shame that incidents such as this have contributed to the overall bad image of nuclear power. There is still a lot of potential which will probably never be revealed because the public at large are scared of what could happen if something went wrong.
The truth is that modern techniques could probably make nuclear power an extremely safe alternative.
And to all the people below me trying to be high and mighty - analogy or not, it's a fucking disgraceful comparison. Was he making a valid point or was he deliberately using that example to try and make MS out to be some corporation of death?
There was a reason he used that example you naive wankers.
You have a very serious case of mixed up priorities if you think that there's a comparison between taking a life and shoving your way into a market.
The word "evil" does not apply here - get a grip.
One thing I've found that it runs fairly slowly. I'm running 800x600 on a P4 1.7 with a Geforce Ti500 and 512mb of RAM and on some of the new maps there is slowdown - there really shouldn't be.
Seems like all the posts here are offtopic or by people who haven't bought the game, so here's my impression.
I bought it over Steam using a credit card, and it downloaded it in the background before it was released. Then the game was unlocked this morning. Apart from a little bit of network slowness when I first ordered it, this was totally seamless and I'd buy all of my games this way with confidence.
The game itself shouldn't be a disappointment if you've read any previews. It's a Tony Hawks style "complete these objectives" game fit into the traditional Counter-Mtrike match format. Essentially you and your team of AI bots fight against another AI team in a normal match, but you'll have to make 5 kills with the Scout or something like that.
There's also the single player missions that Ritual did - this is a kind of storyline section, like their Elite Force 2. In other words, it's a generic shooter.
I'm enjoying it. It's nothing amazing, but it's challenging and all the maps have been re-done and look really good. The thing that makes it cool is the AI - the bots are truly amazing, very lifelike. I saw one knife another when it ran out of ammo, it was a shock to see a skill like that transferred to a computer opponent.
All in all, it's "ok". Don't expect a revelation and you'll be fine. And Valve are offering it at a cut down price for a few more days.
It's not. I play it regularly over Steam, and it's just as popular as ever.
This would certainly be cool:
Bugzilla
Mozillazine
Knew I'd seen mention of this recently - I don't follow suite development that closely but this is very interesting and I'm sure there's more info on the associated bugzilla bugs.
That's fine. But I bet it looks like ass. The web - not the Internet as a while - the web - is a visual medium. Sites like www.mezzoblue.com or those featured at www.webstandardsawards.com are accessible and stylish. You can still view them if you want to disable images, CSS and JS, but for those of us in the modern, broadband enabled age, we can have an interesting visual experience and still be entertained by good content.
You're letting your visitors down by not making the effort.
I think Mozilla has reached the point where it can't really get much more advanced feature-wise until other issues are addressed - such as size and performance. There is so much crammed into the suite that reorganisation is going to take a while, and I think that influence from Firefox has made some people sit up and take notice.
Seeing as Firefox is getting most of the press these days it's important to realise that the full suite is still moving along nicely. They are addressing criticisms well - a redesign of the cookie manager and speed increases are reflective of the fight against bloat and complexity.
And don't forget, changes to the suite are picked up by Firefox since FF is based off the same source tree. So a lot of work here will affect the mini-moz too....
We were talking about this the other day, and it really seems like some kind of alternative interface is necessary.
Consider a device which can project images onto your retina and also track the movements of your hands. Something like that would have no trouble taking input from a "virtual" projected keyboard...
To be honest, my phone is pretty much as small as it can get, and I wouldn't want to do any serious data entry on it. There needs to be some kind of interface revolution before we can do anything really cool.
I see it's got MPEG playback built in, but what's the real-world performance of these systems going to be? This is significantly smaller than anything that's gone before and it could be a pretty sweet device to sit under my TV... if it performs right.
Agreed. In fact it is more likely that this increasing obsession with making stuff clean is going to contribute towards increased allergies and decreased immune efficiency.
Sometimes it's best to be exposed to some grime to let your body build up some defense.
This is probably something that about 17 people in the entire world would want and that about 1 IE > FF converts would want. They are never ever going to implement a dialog for this.