So what would change? They already hardly show any good shows over the air, and when they do, they usually cancel it after one or two seasons, tops... hell, it's hard enough to find good programming on cable.
--Ender
Re:Integrated pointing stick-keyboard not reviewed
on
Top Mice Compared
·
· Score: 1
They've got a range of interesting models, including IBM Type M keyboards. I've been considering getting the mini-keyboard with integrated pointing stick. Major drawback: Their products are very expensive, $40 to $100 or more for some models. (The "value" model is $7 and essentially a generic keyboard.)
You've always been able to turn it off in Excel. Tools -> Options -> top row of View tab has "Show Windows in Taskbar". Uncheck it to get all your Excel files into a single workbook. M$ decided *not* to include this in Word 2000, but (supposedly) brought it back in Word XP, but I don't have a copy to check.
You get this because, at this point, virtually every new computer comes with Windows XP and some version of Office pre-installed. If it didn't, you'd get a lot of stuff in whatever format OpenOffice.org saves in by default - simply due to the fact that most people would rather not pay money for additional software. It's also because of the vast majority of people might as well be brain-dead when in front of a computer. Or, for that matter, any electronics. (Come on, how many of us had to help to help someone "set up" something (VCR, DVD, etc) that was just a matter of figuring out which wire went where...with a maximum of two or three choices per wire?) When Microsoft gets the XBox 360 as a built-in component to a TV, or in a box marketed as a DVD player that also happens to play video games, or as part of a cable company's set-top box, they'll have won the battle for the living room. Until then...well, video-on-demand through cable isn't bad; DVR capability is even better; and DVDs will be king of the hill for a while simply because they're so damn cheap (both the media and the player, but especially the player) and they don't require a subscription to anything.
No, then you're just making a possessive out of a word that's already pluralized. If the original word ends in "s", you add "es" to the end to pluralize it, except in cases where there is a different accept pluralization. For example, "pass" (the noun, like a mountain pass) becomes "passes", but "ellipsis" becomes "ellipses"....Sorry, this is one of my grammar pet peeves, along with the difference between less and fewer, as well as the its/it's and they're/their/there confusion.
Isn't it just that you're an idiot? (People who disagree with me should look at this guy's prior posts.) AIM is just about absolutely freaking everywhere these days. Official clients exist for PC, Mac, and a supposedly run-anywhere Java applet; there's a number of cell phone and PDA versions; and there's even SMS gateways from most major US cellular carriers. So no, you don't need to have AOL on your PC to use AIM.
It's even a relatively small download! 10MB or so, I think. Kind of a pain in the butt on dial-up, but not too unreasonable.
I don't think that you could tell the AOL installer to not install RealPlayer, but once it was installed you could uninstall it. I used to do that when I worked for AOL Tech Support....and AOL is moving into the broadband arena through partnerships with cable providers, so it's unlikely to die. The thing that seems really strange to me is: There are people on AOL who actually *like* it! How dumb do you have to be to actually like AOL?
Oh, and can someone point us to some statistics on overall Internet penetration and broadband penetration that are relatively recent? (A quick Google search turned up something from March 2004, I'd like to see something more recent.)
...my internet connection at home is down, and I don't have administrative priveleges on this box (I'm at work). Oh well, maybe I can download it a few times anyway, if they don't have the site blocked...
The same thing will likely happen to Google, though the term 'evil' may a bit overused. Google is a public company now, and like all public companies, they have a responsibility to maximize shareholder value. If the directors of the company will not do this, the board has a responsibility to put in place people who will.
The philosophy behind "maximize shareholder value" is one that I have never been able to understand. A corporation will certainly want its stock to maintain some value - otherwise they will not be able get new capital through issuing new stock - but in the end it's not the stockholders that keep the company in business. It's the customers who keep the company in business. (And in the case of Google, the "customers" I'm referring to aren't the people giving Google money, they're the people using Google to search - although in Google's case some concessions must be made to advertisers.) A company that has customers who are happy with its products will probably maintain or increase the value of its stock (not to mention customer loyalty and word-of-mouth's affect on profit margins). A company that is increasing the value of its stock artificially (by stock buy-backs, for example), is probably not a company that is keeping its customers happy.
I'm not trying to say companies that are trying to maximize shareholder value are evil. I'm trying to say that I think the belief that maximizing shareholder value is a good business practice is misguided, as it's something that will happen naturally if the company is being run properly.
I know I'm probably talking out my ass and will be flamed for it, but that's the way I feel.
and downgraded every connection to 0.2kbyte/s in order to be able to comply
I think you got a k in there by accident. Didn't you mean "downgraded every connection to 0.2 bytes/s" ?...its about what they'd need in order to not have a couple of dozen terabytes of data to store per month.
RFTU? You mean RTFA, right? I did...and I think the reviewer is right; the movie will be bad. Not because they deviated from the original Guide, but because where they changed things, they replaced funny things with unfunny things, or simply chopped out the bits that made it funny in the first place. Which is a shame, as they *could* have done a really good job with it. They probably should have just ganked the scripts from the BBC TV series and made it into a single movie with modern special effects. They would have, at the very least, ended up with a movie that didn't manage to be so outstandingly bad that it makes the idea of having Lucas remake "Manos: The Hands of Fate" seem like a good idea.
--Ender...who definitely won't be going to see Revenge of the Sith but may give Hitchhiker's Guide a chance, since I've got some movie gift certificates around here somewhere.
I haven't RTFA yet (wanted to get this posted immediately), but I wanted to say that I don't think it will be bad because it doesn't include everything from the books, the radio versions, etc. It may be bad because it's *bad*; but that's a completely different from being bad because it deviates from the source material. Deviation from source material isn't necessarily bad - though it often is - and may be a necessary evil. (Or, in the case of Battlefield Earth, might have been a necessary good.)
I think you mean MS Visual Test, which was (surprisingly) sold off to Rational Software. Rational has, I believe, in turn been sold to IBM. (At least, the first result of a Google search for "Rational Visual Test" is now an ibm.com page.) It was a Rational product when I first encountered it; I thought that it was pretty decent. However, it was based on Visual Basic; I would have preferred something based on C or C++ as those were the languages I was used to writing in at the time. There was a 30-day demo available; I'm sure with some digging you could turn up a copy of it. (Provided, of course, that you've got a Windows box sitting around; which is never a safe assumption on slashdot.)
Your rant on why RSS sucks - while interesting - is, in my opinion, off base. (Although I totally agree with your opinion of XML.) RSS is missing two things: A max-new-headlines-to-get parameter and a this-RSS-feed-was-last-checked parameter. (These are data fields sent from the client to the server in the request.) Both should be optional, and max-headlines should have a server-side default. That way, if you checked this RSS feed this morning at 03:43 because you couldn't sleep, when you looked at it again, you'd only get headlines since then. The max-new-headlines parameter is for people who can't handle or don't want the seventeen hundred headlines since they checked this feed three months ago; and the server-side default is to reduce load on websites (very useful if your website is database-intensive).
Considering that the quote in the summary was actually about an animation that the shooter posted, not about how he actually went about shooting people......c'mon, guys. I mean, what the fuck? Really, take the time to read the whole article before misrepresenting it on Slashdot. In the end, it isn't entertainment media that's blamed, but the isolation of the small towns.
I was gonna stay out this one, but my head will explode if I don't comment on this.
* you don't OWN all rights on the content on that disc, only those rights copyright holder grants to you.
WRONG!!! I have all rights that the copyright system of my country allows me, as well as any additional rights that the copyright holder may grant me. That's what "fair use" is, and, here in the U.S.A. at least, it specifically states that I can make copies for personal use or my personal "archive" of music (which happens to sitting on the floor beside me at the moment, I bring it with me on long trips so as not to risk losing/breaking the originals).
Chances of the local bookstore being equipped to handle PIN-based transaction is quite small. Thus using a debit card with them as the exact oppossite of your intended effect.
You can rent a PIN-capable for, I believe, under a hundred bucks a month; or buy it outright for a couple thousand. If your business can't afford that, maybe you should come up with a new business plan.
The ONLY people who should EVER use them are people who are unable (typically for reasons of bad credit history) to get a credit card.
Except that cash advances on a credit card generally have a higher interest rate and no grace period; so getting cash off a credit card is a bad idea. It's best to have both a credit and a debit/ATM card: Use the credit card for all transactions except getting cash; and the debit/ATM card only to get cash, preferably at your own bank's ATM to avoid the fees.
So there's a single exception to what you said...yeah, I'm nitpicking, but I work in credit card processing so I should be allowed.
I don't think there's an accepted division between spam and advertising. If I had to come up with one, here's what I'd say: Spam comes to you over an electronic, digital medium; while advertising uses physical media or analog media. Why is spam an invasion of privacy? Because they have to have specific information about you (mobile phone number, e-mail address, IM account name, whatever); whereas "advertising" is generally directed toward the "general public" rather than a specific subset of people. So things like billboards, TV/radio commercials, and billboards are "advertising", unsolicited commercial e-mail advertising FR33 V11AGRA is spam.
And junk mail should probably be considered "spam", but I couldn't come up with a definition that would include it without also including things like billboards or television/radio commercials.
No, it isn't what you think. It's just a Linux version of the Nero software, made by the same people who made Nero for Windows. You probably missed it because there weren't very many dupes of it.
--Ender
Re:I've had this in my office for years
on
Sunlight in a Tube
·
· Score: 1
Yes, but I beleive that glass reflects (or absorbs a significant amount of) UV while being transparent to visible light. So don't worry about losing the pasty-white complection that makes your "chicks dig nerds" so effective.
I don't know if it was The Green Mile or not; but thanks to four or five of Slashdot's annoyingly less-than-useful search, here's the link to the original article: Big Publishing's worst nightmare
Turns out not to have been quite the way I remembered it; more towards testing the Street Performers Protocol (where donations are given for performance to continue) than the idea of selling episodic stories online.
What you see as problems may not be problems. Fragment your audience across demographic lines is actually a *good* thing - more precise targeting of demographics means more effective ads, so the advertising rates stay the same but there are different ads for different demographics.
As for local affiliates - have the episodes available via affiliates' websites rather than corporate. Provide a forwarding service on the network web site where the user enters their ZIP code and they're automatically forwarded to the appropriate affiliate. Verify location through the address information that you need to give anyway for e-commerce credit card billing. You could also embed both network and affiliate bugs in the lower right corner of the downloaded movie file.
This has been tried, although for books (I think it may have been Stephen King who was the author). Whatever the goal for releasing in dead-tree, rather than e-book, form was; it was missed by nearly 50%. IMO, it was missed because there was no way to even get a sample without paying. In order for this type of thing to work, you'd have to do it as a four-episode miniseries; air the first two on television, then sell the final two episodes at, say, three bucks a peice. You'd also want to create a BitTorrent-like application that used a one-time key to start the download but distributed the bandwidth of transmitting over many computers for distribution; otherwise the servers hosting the file would experience a new form of the Slashdot Effect.
It's not a bad idea; it's just that, so far, no one has implemented it in a way that would allow it to be successful.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe that was Unicomp - see their website at pckeyboard.com to get one.
--Ender
Google cache
So what would change? They already hardly show any good shows over the air, and when they do, they usually cancel it after one or two seasons, tops... hell, it's hard enough to find good programming on cable.
--Ender
Okay, here you go: PCKeyboard.com
They've got a range of interesting models, including IBM Type M keyboards. I've been considering getting the mini-keyboard with integrated pointing stick. Major drawback: Their products are very expensive, $40 to $100 or more for some models. (The "value" model is $7 and essentially a generic keyboard.)
--Ender
You could get a K-Byte ZipIt Wireless Instant Messenger and flash it to run a customized version of Linux. Probably slightly more work than you were looking for, but it would be a great little toy. (Retaining the instant messenging ability would be cool, too.)
--Ender
You've always been able to turn it off in Excel. Tools -> Options -> top row of View tab has "Show Windows in Taskbar". Uncheck it to get all your Excel files into a single workbook. M$ decided *not* to include this in Word 2000, but (supposedly) brought it back in Word XP, but I don't have a copy to check.
--Ender
You get this because, at this point, virtually every new computer comes with Windows XP and some version of Office pre-installed. If it didn't, you'd get a lot of stuff in whatever format OpenOffice.org saves in by default - simply due to the fact that most people would rather not pay money for additional software. It's also because of the vast majority of people might as well be brain-dead when in front of a computer. Or, for that matter, any electronics. (Come on, how many of us had to help to help someone "set up" something (VCR, DVD, etc) that was just a matter of figuring out which wire went where...with a maximum of two or three choices per wire?) When Microsoft gets the XBox 360 as a built-in component to a TV, or in a box marketed as a DVD player that also happens to play video games, or as part of a cable company's set-top box, they'll have won the battle for the living room. Until then...well, video-on-demand through cable isn't bad; DVR capability is even better; and DVDs will be king of the hill for a while simply because they're so damn cheap (both the media and the player, but especially the player) and they don't require a subscription to anything.
--Ender
No, then you're just making a possessive out of a word that's already pluralized. If the original word ends in "s", you add "es" to the end to pluralize it, except in cases where there is a different accept pluralization. For example, "pass" (the noun, like a mountain pass) becomes "passes", but "ellipsis" becomes "ellipses". ...Sorry, this is one of my grammar pet peeves, along with the difference between less and fewer, as well as the its/it's and they're/their/there confusion.
--Ender
Isn't it just that you're an idiot? (People who disagree with me should look at this guy's prior posts.) AIM is just about absolutely freaking everywhere these days. Official clients exist for PC, Mac, and a supposedly run-anywhere Java applet; there's a number of cell phone and PDA versions; and there's even SMS gateways from most major US cellular carriers. So no, you don't need to have AOL on your PC to use AIM.
...and AOL is moving into the broadband arena through partnerships with cable providers, so it's unlikely to die. The thing that seems really strange to me is: There are people on AOL who actually *like* it! How dumb do you have to be to actually like AOL?
It's even a relatively small download! 10MB or so, I think. Kind of a pain in the butt on dial-up, but not too unreasonable.
I don't think that you could tell the AOL installer to not install RealPlayer, but once it was installed you could uninstall it. I used to do that when I worked for AOL Tech Support.
Oh, and can someone point us to some statistics on overall Internet penetration and broadband penetration that are relatively recent? (A quick Google search turned up something from March 2004, I'd like to see something more recent.)
--Ender
...my internet connection at home is down, and I don't have administrative priveleges on this box (I'm at work). Oh well, maybe I can download it a few times anyway, if they don't have the site blocked...
--Ender
The philosophy behind "maximize shareholder value" is one that I have never been able to understand. A corporation will certainly want its stock to maintain some value - otherwise they will not be able get new capital through issuing new stock - but in the end it's not the stockholders that keep the company in business. It's the customers who keep the company in business. (And in the case of Google, the "customers" I'm referring to aren't the people giving Google money, they're the people using Google to search - although in Google's case some concessions must be made to advertisers.) A company that has customers who are happy with its products will probably maintain or increase the value of its stock (not to mention customer loyalty and word-of-mouth's affect on profit margins). A company that is increasing the value of its stock artificially (by stock buy-backs, for example), is probably not a company that is keeping its customers happy.
I'm not trying to say companies that are trying to maximize shareholder value are evil. I'm trying to say that I think the belief that maximizing shareholder value is a good business practice is misguided, as it's something that will happen naturally if the company is being run properly.
I know I'm probably talking out my ass and will be flamed for it, but that's the way I feel.
--Ender
I think you got a k in there by accident. Didn't you mean "downgraded every connection to 0.2 bytes/s" ?
--Ender
RFTU? You mean RTFA, right? I did...and I think the reviewer is right; the movie will be bad. Not because they deviated from the original Guide, but because where they changed things, they replaced funny things with unfunny things, or simply chopped out the bits that made it funny in the first place. Which is a shame, as they *could* have done a really good job with it. They probably should have just ganked the scripts from the BBC TV series and made it into a single movie with modern special effects. They would have, at the very least, ended up with a movie that didn't manage to be so outstandingly bad that it makes the idea of having Lucas remake "Manos: The Hands of Fate" seem like a good idea.
...who definitely won't be going to see Revenge of the Sith but may give Hitchhiker's Guide a chance, since I've got some movie gift certificates around here somewhere.
--Ender
I haven't RTFA yet (wanted to get this posted immediately), but I wanted to say that I don't think it will be bad because it doesn't include everything from the books, the radio versions, etc. It may be bad because it's *bad*; but that's a completely different from being bad because it deviates from the source material. Deviation from source material isn't necessarily bad - though it often is - and may be a necessary evil. (Or, in the case of Battlefield Earth, might have been a necessary good.)
--Ender
Off to RTFA now.
I think you mean MS Visual Test, which was (surprisingly) sold off to Rational Software. Rational has, I believe, in turn been sold to IBM. (At least, the first result of a Google search for "Rational Visual Test" is now an ibm.com page.) It was a Rational product when I first encountered it; I thought that it was pretty decent. However, it was based on Visual Basic; I would have preferred something based on C or C++ as those were the languages I was used to writing in at the time. There was a 30-day demo available; I'm sure with some digging you could turn up a copy of it. (Provided, of course, that you've got a Windows box sitting around; which is never a safe assumption on slashdot.)
--Ender
Your rant on why RSS sucks - while interesting - is, in my opinion, off base. (Although I totally agree with your opinion of XML.) RSS is missing two things: A max-new-headlines-to-get parameter and a this-RSS-feed-was-last-checked parameter. (These are data fields sent from the client to the server in the request.) Both should be optional, and max-headlines should have a server-side default. That way, if you checked this RSS feed this morning at 03:43 because you couldn't sleep, when you looked at it again, you'd only get headlines since then. The max-new-headlines parameter is for people who can't handle or don't want the seventeen hundred headlines since they checked this feed three months ago; and the server-side default is to reduce load on websites (very useful if your website is database-intensive).
Did I miss anything important?
--Ender
Considering that the quote in the summary was actually about an animation that the shooter posted, not about how he actually went about shooting people... ...c'mon, guys. I mean, what the fuck? Really, take the time to read the whole article before misrepresenting it on Slashdot. In the end, it isn't entertainment media that's blamed, but the isolation of the small towns.
--Ender
I was gonna stay out this one, but my head will explode if I don't comment on this.
* you don't OWN all rights on the content on that disc, only those rights copyright holder grants to you.
WRONG!!! I have all rights that the copyright system of my country allows me, as well as any additional rights that the copyright holder may grant me. That's what "fair use" is, and, here in the U.S.A. at least, it specifically states that I can make copies for personal use or my personal "archive" of music (which happens to sitting on the floor beside me at the moment, I bring it with me on long trips so as not to risk losing/breaking the originals).
--Ender
You can rent a PIN-capable for, I believe, under a hundred bucks a month; or buy it outright for a couple thousand. If your business can't afford that, maybe you should come up with a new business plan.
Except that cash advances on a credit card generally have a higher interest rate and no grace period; so getting cash off a credit card is a bad idea. It's best to have both a credit and a debit/ATM card: Use the credit card for all transactions except getting cash; and the debit/ATM card only to get cash, preferably at your own bank's ATM to avoid the fees.
So there's a single exception to what you said...yeah, I'm nitpicking, but I work in credit card processing so I should be allowed.
--Ender
I don't think there's an accepted division between spam and advertising. If I had to come up with one, here's what I'd say: Spam comes to you over an electronic, digital medium; while advertising uses physical media or analog media. Why is spam an invasion of privacy? Because they have to have specific information about you (mobile phone number, e-mail address, IM account name, whatever); whereas "advertising" is generally directed toward the "general public" rather than a specific subset of people. So things like billboards, TV/radio commercials, and billboards are "advertising", unsolicited commercial e-mail advertising FR33 V11AGRA is spam.
And junk mail should probably be considered "spam", but I couldn't come up with a definition that would include it without also including things like billboards or television/radio commercials.
--Ender
No, it isn't what you think. It's just a Linux version of the Nero software, made by the same people who made Nero for Windows. You probably missed it because there weren't very many dupes of it.
--Ender
Yes, but I beleive that glass reflects (or absorbs a significant amount of) UV while being transparent to visible light. So don't worry about losing the pasty-white complection that makes your "chicks dig nerds" so effective.
--Ender
I don't know if it was The Green Mile or not; but thanks to four or five of Slashdot's annoyingly less-than-useful search, here's the link to the original article: Big Publishing's worst nightmare
Turns out not to have been quite the way I remembered it; more towards testing the Street Performers Protocol (where donations are given for performance to continue) than the idea of selling episodic stories online.
--Ender
What you see as problems may not be problems. Fragment your audience across demographic lines is actually a *good* thing - more precise targeting of demographics means more effective ads, so the advertising rates stay the same but there are different ads for different demographics.
As for local affiliates - have the episodes available via affiliates' websites rather than corporate. Provide a forwarding service on the network web site where the user enters their ZIP code and they're automatically forwarded to the appropriate affiliate. Verify location through the address information that you need to give anyway for e-commerce credit card billing. You could also embed both network and affiliate bugs in the lower right corner of the downloaded movie file.
This has been tried, although for books (I think it may have been Stephen King who was the author). Whatever the goal for releasing in dead-tree, rather than e-book, form was; it was missed by nearly 50%. IMO, it was missed because there was no way to even get a sample without paying. In order for this type of thing to work, you'd have to do it as a four-episode miniseries; air the first two on television, then sell the final two episodes at, say, three bucks a peice. You'd also want to create a BitTorrent-like application that used a one-time key to start the download but distributed the bandwidth of transmitting over many computers for distribution; otherwise the servers hosting the file would experience a new form of the Slashdot Effect.
It's not a bad idea; it's just that, so far, no one has implemented it in a way that would allow it to be successful.
--Ender