I must concur - I've used many different operating systems and flavours thereof and the best I'd always felt towards them was either tolerance or a sense of achievement.
I hated Win98, it was buggy, crash prone and really not all that easy to use. 2K's stability was a breath of fresh air but it still took a fair bit of messing around to make hardware play nicely or install 'obscure program X'. XP was better with support for hardware and software as well as being pretty stable although nothing to get excited about (uptime measured in days before memory hogging caused a reboot) but the annoying 'helpers' and a habit of hiding what was under the hood meant the initially shallow learning curve hit a brick wall - when the system ran I tolerated it as something to run my programs, when it didn't run it was fixable although frustrating.
Of the various Linux distros I tried Mandrake was my favourite, but software installation had a habit of breaking things for unknown reasons and although the command line gave me a nice fine grained control over fixing these issues, relief was all I felt after spending hours hunting down that stray symbol breaking the entire shell script. The GUI tools for administration all worked but I often found myself turning back to CLI for more control which would then confuse the options in the GUI panels. Once the machine was working it was very fast and very stable, but I always dreaded the next problem and thinking of how long it might take to fix, and lets face it, Linux isn't known for it's looks - the GUI was inconsistent at best and unusable at worst.
Recently I purchased a Mac - Panther is extremely quick, software installs perfectly every time simply by dragging and dropping, the configuration GUIs are perfectly and logically laid out, the CLI is still fully featured and perfectly integrated and above all that it's blazingly fast, solid as a rock and amazing looking. Even the third party software seems more polished than Windows nagware or functional but half-finished Linux projects.
Each OS has it's place, but for day-to-day desktop use I know what I'll be using for the forseeable future.
No, it's RC aka Release Candidate - that means this is a candidate that is intended to be representative of the final release, and it's being put out there for public testing of the candidate before it's polished into the final. Or that's the idea anyway. An alpha or beta could be forgiven a 60% failure rate, an RC should never be like this.
While BT may only be blocking pictures of people under 16, it is still illegal to view pictures of people under 18 despite the age of consent being 16, so your original post applies here too.
The grandparent clearly said they're neighbours not wardrivers and that they're hacking the (presumably WEP) encryption. This is quite believable, especially if you're in a techie neighbourhood and the people in the next house can't afford to get 3Mbit broadband like you have - it only takes a day or so of capturing and cracking frames to gain access, a quite reasonable feat if you're stationed near the access point and have the knowledge of how to run a simple cracking program.
Cyberdog has been selling T-shirts with working animated graphic equalisers for a few years now, and it appears to be using the same flexible circuitry as these things so the only bit that's really new is transmitting from a phone. Since Nokia already sells jewelery that shows pictures sent from a phone and Cyberdog already sells animated display clothing, I wouldn't think it'll be too long until there's a production model combining the two.
I'd also take exception with the statement that "The myth that Mac OS X is secure, for example, has been exposed.". Reading the article it seems to show that OSX was infact the most secure, even by their criteria. Why does the fact it is apparently more secure than the competition lead them to say it is not secure? (or have I missed something important here?)
When said content producers alter the law in order to make it impossible for open source software to be used in PVRs and make decent homebrew PVRs all but impossible to make, then they are telling me what I can do with my own hardware.
I quite agree - it's not even as if Orkut was commisioned by Google, the employee in question did it in his free time in which Google allows employees to persue personal projects.
Firstly, I only said XFCE since it's my Linux WM of choice - feel free to substitute whatever you feel like.
Secondly, while I know that one man's feature is another man's bloat, I'd say this could actually be a useful addition. What I want out of a Windowing system is quick, clean and innovative methods to view and organise the data on my monitor - anything that makes that data visualisation easier (such as the ability to peel one window away to view the one behind, and then have it snap back when I've seen whatever I needed) is IMO a useful feature even in a 'light' window manager - if you classify anything new as bloat then you end up killing innovation and driving people away to products that truly are bloated. Bloat is 200MB of screensavers or animations that make my windows take more than half a second to do what I want them to.
I'm not big on the whole 3D spatial desktop idea, but the 'peel' function looks very innovative and actually useful - I know I'd prefer it to minimise alot of the time if it were integrated into XFCE:-)
Or you could use the bookmarklet here. Whenever you see the NYT "Please register" page, hit the bookmark and it rewrites the URL into a reg-free link which you are free to use for Slashdot karma whoring.
It's not solid evidence, but the bank was Abbey National and there's an old mailing list archive from November 2000 mentioning it here.
A better source I've Googled up from way back in June 2000 (18 months before this patent) is here. It talks about Abbey planning to open banks containing franchised cafes and internet banking kiosks as well as clearly showing a picture of a children's play area. I think that pretty much covers the washington patnet.
There are some excerpts here from 2000 too, if you scroll down a bit.
Can you give me the URL of your article, I'd be interested to read it - if you need any more links I can do some more digging but I think that BBC article is fairly comprehensive.
I do all my banking online - it wasn't the chain I use that introduced this anyway, I just remember seeing the adverts. As such, I've never actually been in one of these types of bank, I just know they were designed before this patent and it should, therefore, not have been approved.
There's prior art on the bank layout - we've had these kind of banks (coffee, stuff to occupy kids, particular layout) in the UK for a while. I think the first time I recall seeing them advertised was at least 2 years back.
"The copy protection system used for all EMI/Capitol releases including "To the 5 Boroughs" is Macrovision's CDS-200, which sets up an audio player into the users RAM" seems to contradict the statement that "CDS-200 does not install software applications of ANY KIND on a user's PC. All the copy protection in CDS-200 is hardware based, meaning that it is dependent on the physical properties and the format of the CD. None of the copy protection in CDS-200 requires software applications to be loaded onto a computer."
If none of the copy protection requires software applications to be loaded, why does the very same article say that it sets up an audio player in RAM?
It's price, in my experience at least. There are standard PC component manufacturers who come close to (although not quite as good as, IMO) Apple but to build a system using absolute top quality bits you'll be paying a similar premium to buying an Apple. Apple don't just invest money in design, they put it into making their hardware from the best materials - you won't find liquid cooling in a Dell, Toshiba notebooks don't come in titanium/aluminium cases. Equally though, Dell and Toshiba machines don't cost anything like Apples.
I'm not sure - my post was purely based on what I know simply from living in England and watching TV. My assumption would be that since Americans don't pay a license fee BBC America has to resort to commercial funding (they aren't gonna give you guys something for nothing) whereas here in the UK we pay them a fee and therefore they don't need the extra advertising revenue to stay running.
Correct (almost). The BBC which comprises 2 analogue terrestrial channels, ~5 digital channels (I think) and a whole load of radio stations has absolutely no commercial advertising. The other channels, which see no cut from the license fee, do have commercial ads which is IMO quite understandable.
Steal one of those "Meter out of service" bags they put on broken ones. Keep it in your car and put it over the meter when you park near it. Problem solved:-)
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I must concur - I've used many different operating systems and flavours thereof and the best I'd always felt towards them was either tolerance or a sense of achievement.
I hated Win98, it was buggy, crash prone and really not all that easy to use. 2K's stability was a breath of fresh air but it still took a fair bit of messing around to make hardware play nicely or install 'obscure program X'. XP was better with support for hardware and software as well as being pretty stable although nothing to get excited about (uptime measured in days before memory hogging caused a reboot) but the annoying 'helpers' and a habit of hiding what was under the hood meant the initially shallow learning curve hit a brick wall - when the system ran I tolerated it as something to run my programs, when it didn't run it was fixable although frustrating.
Of the various Linux distros I tried Mandrake was my favourite, but software installation had a habit of breaking things for unknown reasons and although the command line gave me a nice fine grained control over fixing these issues, relief was all I felt after spending hours hunting down that stray symbol breaking the entire shell script. The GUI tools for administration all worked but I often found myself turning back to CLI for more control which would then confuse the options in the GUI panels. Once the machine was working it was very fast and very stable, but I always dreaded the next problem and thinking of how long it might take to fix, and lets face it, Linux isn't known for it's looks - the GUI was inconsistent at best and unusable at worst.
Recently I purchased a Mac - Panther is extremely quick, software installs perfectly every time simply by dragging and dropping, the configuration GUIs are perfectly and logically laid out, the CLI is still fully featured and perfectly integrated and above all that it's blazingly fast, solid as a rock and amazing looking. Even the third party software seems more polished than Windows nagware or functional but half-finished Linux projects.
Each OS has it's place, but for day-to-day desktop use I know what I'll be using for the forseeable future.
No, it's RC aka Release Candidate - that means this is a candidate that is intended to be representative of the final release, and it's being put out there for public testing of the candidate before it's polished into the final. Or that's the idea anyway. An alpha or beta could be forgiven a 60% failure rate, an RC should never be like this.
Don't give us Brits too much credit ;-)
While BT may only be blocking pictures of people under 16, it is still illegal to view pictures of people under 18 despite the age of consent being 16, so your original post applies here too.
Because hostage takers who don't mind killing people will have a problem with cutting out the device or even just microwaving the soldier's hand?
The grandparent clearly said they're neighbours not wardrivers and that they're hacking the (presumably WEP) encryption. This is quite believable, especially if you're in a techie neighbourhood and the people in the next house can't afford to get 3Mbit broadband like you have - it only takes a day or so of capturing and cracking frames to gain access, a quite reasonable feat if you're stationed near the access point and have the knowledge of how to run a simple cracking program.
Cyberdog has been selling T-shirts with working animated graphic equalisers for a few years now, and it appears to be using the same flexible circuitry as these things so the only bit that's really new is transmitting from a phone. Since Nokia already sells jewelery that shows pictures sent from a phone and Cyberdog already sells animated display clothing, I wouldn't think it'll be too long until there's a production model combining the two.
I see Darwin Awards soon after the release of these:
Hey look Bob, I can shoot myself and this shirt protects me.
*bang*
Ouch. This isn't my nanotube shirt.
How about a few thousand tiny ones, complete with relative gravitational calculations and maybe even pretty reflective effects?
I'd also take exception with the statement that "The myth that Mac OS X is secure, for example, has been exposed.". Reading the article it seems to show that OSX was infact the most secure, even by their criteria. Why does the fact it is apparently more secure than the competition lead them to say it is not secure? (or have I missed something important here?)
When said content producers alter the law in order to make it impossible for open source software to be used in PVRs and make decent homebrew PVRs all but impossible to make, then they are telling me what I can do with my own hardware.
I quite agree - it's not even as if Orkut was commisioned by Google, the employee in question did it in his free time in which Google allows employees to persue personal projects.
Firstly, I only said XFCE since it's my Linux WM of choice - feel free to substitute whatever you feel like.
Secondly, while I know that one man's feature is another man's bloat, I'd say this could actually be a useful addition. What I want out of a Windowing system is quick, clean and innovative methods to view and organise the data on my monitor - anything that makes that data visualisation easier (such as the ability to peel one window away to view the one behind, and then have it snap back when I've seen whatever I needed) is IMO a useful feature even in a 'light' window manager - if you classify anything new as bloat then you end up killing innovation and driving people away to products that truly are bloated. Bloat is 200MB of screensavers or animations that make my windows take more than half a second to do what I want them to.
I'm not big on the whole 3D spatial desktop idea, but the 'peel' function looks very innovative and actually useful - I know I'd prefer it to minimise alot of the time if it were integrated into XFCE :-)
I know someone from Guyana, which makes me feel even dumber for never having heard of the other 3.
Or you could use the bookmarklet here. Whenever you see the NYT "Please register" page, hit the bookmark and it rewrites the URL into a reg-free link which you are free to use for Slashdot karma whoring.
It's not solid evidence, but the bank was Abbey National and there's an old mailing list archive from November 2000 mentioning it here.
A better source I've Googled up from way back in June 2000 (18 months before this patent) is here. It talks about Abbey planning to open banks containing franchised cafes and internet banking kiosks as well as clearly showing a picture of a children's play area. I think that pretty much covers the washington patnet.
There are some excerpts here from 2000 too, if you scroll down a bit.
Can you give me the URL of your article, I'd be interested to read it - if you need any more links I can do some more digging but I think that BBC article is fairly comprehensive.
I do all my banking online - it wasn't the chain I use that introduced this anyway, I just remember seeing the adverts. As such, I've never actually been in one of these types of bank, I just know they were designed before this patent and it should, therefore, not have been approved.
There's prior art on the bank layout - we've had these kind of banks (coffee, stuff to occupy kids, particular layout) in the UK for a while. I think the first time I recall seeing them advertised was at least 2 years back.
"The copy protection system used for all EMI/Capitol releases including "To the 5 Boroughs" is Macrovision's CDS-200, which sets up an audio player into the users RAM" seems to contradict the statement that "CDS-200 does not install software applications of ANY KIND on a user's PC. All the copy protection in CDS-200 is hardware based, meaning that it is dependent on the physical properties and the format of the CD. None of the copy protection in CDS-200 requires software applications to be loaded onto a computer."
If none of the copy protection requires software applications to be loaded, why does the very same article say that it sets up an audio player in RAM?
It's price, in my experience at least. There are standard PC component manufacturers who come close to (although not quite as good as, IMO) Apple but to build a system using absolute top quality bits you'll be paying a similar premium to buying an Apple. Apple don't just invest money in design, they put it into making their hardware from the best materials - you won't find liquid cooling in a Dell, Toshiba notebooks don't come in titanium/aluminium cases. Equally though, Dell and Toshiba machines don't cost anything like Apples.
I'm not sure - my post was purely based on what I know simply from living in England and watching TV. My assumption would be that since Americans don't pay a license fee BBC America has to resort to commercial funding (they aren't gonna give you guys something for nothing) whereas here in the UK we pay them a fee and therefore they don't need the extra advertising revenue to stay running.
Correct (almost). The BBC which comprises 2 analogue terrestrial channels, ~5 digital channels (I think) and a whole load of radio stations has absolutely no commercial advertising. The other channels, which see no cut from the license fee, do have commercial ads which is IMO quite understandable.
Not only Slashdotted, but showing the IIS error screen. I didn't think you could run that server on Linux.
Steal one of those "Meter out of service" bags they put on broken ones. Keep it in your car and put it over the meter when you park near it. Problem solved :-)