As soon as your wife threw the application in the trash, she made it public knowledge.
You have got to be kidding. Although the only truly safe way of disposing of paper-base dinformation is to physically destroy the paper, I still count stuff thrown in the garbage as not-public. Especially anything I've placed in my own trash!
Besides, even if this isn't illegal I'd defitniely class it as an extremely shifty practice!
Plus I'd say that without a signature, it can't be assumed as permission being given. So there's quite liekly a good chance of suing.
Codemasters are wankers. ANY company that rattles it's sabre and threatens sites with legal action for hosting copies of their 8-bit titles from the 80's needs to be bankrupted NOW. (Of course, preventing people from playing the godawful Dizzy series is actual a public service I think.)
And the amusing thing?
I seem to remember that it was CodeMasters who came up with one of the early ways of getting around the old NES game-chip problem.
So what's the real solution that people want to this whole thing that will make both sides happy?
I don't think there is one.
The sad truth is that both sides have fundamentally different requirements from the Music Industry. Much as I'd like to see a fast and mutually advantageous resolution to this whole situation, i can't see it hapenning any time soon.
he whole point of the lawsuits is that no matter how many people the RIAA pisses off, scaring people away from filesharing networks means a hell of a lot more record sales in the long run.
Bullshit!
A lot of people who download wouldn't buy legit versions anyway. And a lot of the others buy as well as sharing.
...they aren't- they just allow people to search for and downloading music they already want, thus cutting out profits for the music companies.
This isn't always true.
So many times I (and others) have used it to try out artists i've heard of from friends. Or to check out the whole album of a single song I heard on the radio. And I've then gone on to buy the entire album.
Besides, in this day and age what do the record companies do to deserve those profits?
Bring us the latest in new music?
Well, the latest in sound-alike shite.
Encourage musical diversity? ...with yet another fucking cover version.
Provide a distribution network that's not available in the current technological climate?
Once, yes. And that's how they grew. but technology just rendered there old methods obsolete, and instead of going with the flow they're trying to stamp out the advantages.
That doesn't sound like actions worthy of earning profit.
I'm a customer. I have probably a good few hundred CDs - both singles and albums.
I'm also a downloader.
I buy CDs. mainly I buy good CDs. I also use WinMX to track down songs that are old, and that you can't get anymore. (Except on compilations of miscellaneous shite) I use it to get the latest songs I hear on the radio (and quite often then buy the single or album the week it comes out).
True, I also use it to get one decent song of an album which is mainly crap.
But I'm still a customer. But the harder the Industry uses these bully-boy tactics, the less I give a toss about what they think. Also the harder it is to play legitimately purchased music oin my chopice os setup, the less I'm going to care about their opinions.
Besides, I have very little sympathy for a system which grew around the technological contraints of the time - which no longer exist. And when, rather than embracing the new innovations, they try to throttle them.
Anything I add at this stage is going to be redundant by this point, but here goes anyway:
Broswer. Mozilla. I do almost all of by browsing in it. And since finding a Googlebar-equivalent on Mozdev, I've never looked back. In fact, the only things I use IE for these days are the occasional page that Moz won't render, and for checking that my own website works under multiple browsers.
E-mail/Usenet. I can't realyl say anything about email. I'm still using OE myself. But only 'cos I have a lot of saved mails I haven't got around to importing to Moz yet. Next re-install of 2K, though... Newsgroups-wise, I'd swear by FreeAgent. Even though I tolerate OE as a mail-client, there's no way I'd use it for Usenet!
Multimedia. Like others, I'd recommend WinAmp Classic for audio. Video-wise I use WMP, but I know some people would prefer to steer clear of it. But really, anything which can pick up the system-wide Codecs will do.
Other gubbins. OpenOffice.org is pretty good as an office suite. Does pretty much everything MS Office can do, except for the inevitable proprietary gumph. And especially useful when so many bundles these days include MS Works. It's nice to have a free non-Warez alternative that's as full-featured as Office!
Like many others, I use AVG for anti-virus. It's a great free AV product. (So good I might even go for the commecrial version next paycheck) I realy like that a company put a legit free version of what's probably THE essential application these days. If people don't like it, they can't complain 'cos it's free. And if they do, it's great free publicity for Grisoft!
Ad-Aware. Natch!
Actually, one last thing on OpenOffice. It's presentation program works pretty damn well for creating PowerPoint presentations. And seeing that MS makes a free PP Viewer available, you can even test your presentations to work with "Powerpoint Proper" without having to either pay money, or go Warez.
First of all it's not "defaulted" to meaning 1000. Kilo MEANS 1000 and that's all there is to it, it's a decimal system prefix.
Well, (rightly or wrongly) meanings change over the years. And through polonged use over time, how a word/prefix is used becomes it's meaning - at least in that context.
>But a kiloBYTE has always been 1024.
But that's the point right there. A kiloByte has always been 1024, and has always been wrong
And that's missing the point.
It might be wrong, but it's consistantly wrong. The kilo-/mega-/giga- prefixes have been used incorrectly, but you knew that the number associated with them was consistent.
A 1MB file might not be one million bytes, but at least you know that fifty of them would fit in 50MB of storage. (Give or take OS/FS overheads)
The manufacturers might be using the "correct" notation, but the fact that it means they're using megabytes and gigabytes that aren't the same as used in [a] RAM and [b] reported by the OS.
And right or not, that's needlessly confusing.
Besides, unless someone comes up with a method of notation that's easier to pronounce, I can't see to catching on. Kibibytes and Gibibytes are just too clumsy to easily say quickly and easily.
I'm a Brit. And I still don't like the manufacturer's way of stating drive sizes.
Yes, kilo's always defaulted to meaning 1000. But a kiloBYTE has always been 1024.
And within the context of computers, standard notation has to be used - one way or another. Even if it's technically an incorrect use of the kilo-/mega-prefixes, they have to stay consistant. Otherwise it's us techies who end up trying to explain to normal users why "1 gig RAM isn't the same as 1gig drive capacity".
And I know how people think They'll just go "why don't they use consistant terms." And, in this case, it's the drive-manufacturers who have proken with the consistant notation.
Oh sorry, but what was I thinking? It's the hard drive manufacturers who are stupid.... (sarcasm). Did you ever think that one of the reasons they use the standard definition of "giga-" to calculate drive sizes is that most NORMAL PEOPLE (i.e. the majority of computer users) don't know that giga means 1024^3? More to the point, how many ordinary people care to calculate (or memorize) the exact value of a gigabyte? (Of course, I'm sure another reason is that they get to "inflate" their hard drive sizes).
True, most "normal people" don't know that in comptuer terms gigafoo means 1024^3. But the simple fact remains that the Operating System will report in "binary megabytes".
And manufacturers flagging their products in "decimal megabytes" is going to confuse the end-user. It's the geek-types who know that there's a difference, and can figure out why it's there. "Normal users" are just going to wonder why their drives aren't as big as they thought they were.
At the very least, manufacturers should (even if only in tiny print) put "equivalent to X.YZ base2 gigabytes" or something.
With storage prices falling through the floor, does it matter to anyone except whiny nerds whether the byte counts are done in base 10 or base 2?
The are two major reasons why it would (and should) matter.
RAM and HDD both call their storage capacity megabytes (or gigabytes). If they're using different "types" of megabytes eventuially it will start pissing off the non-techies.
Non-geeks probably don't care exactly what calculation is used, as long as it's the same calculation for different stuff.
Start moving up through terabytes into petabytes and exabytes and the base10-to-base2 difference overhead becomes pretty damned significant.
Besides, as long as the OSs themselves use base2 calculations, then storage should use the same calculations. You shouldn't need to reach for a calculator[*] everytime you want to work out whether your collection of files will fit on a certain media device.
Interesting, so they are so desparate to do things against piracy that they are willing to lower the quality of their films,
They've been doing it for years, though.
Between Macrovision and digital watermarking they keep introducing ways of purposefully making playback sub-optimal.
OK, you usually can't see the effect, but anything which apparently "cannot be removed wihtout altering the quality of the product" is basically putting osmething into a production that should not be there.
And "normal viewers" can go hang, but I can't think of a geek or techie in existance who will ever stand for this...
..except, perhaps, whoever markets these watermarking schemes and profits from them.
But people know what WinCE has to offer, and they already know whether they like it or not. Plus, more importantly, people know what the EPOC/Symbian OS Ohas/had to offer. There are bound to be people out there who prefered Psion's way of doing things to WinCE - or even PalmOS.
Chances are that even if Psion had come back with something running PalmOS then people would bitch. Or Sony releasing a Clie using WinCE instead of PalmOS.
People tend to have their favourite hardware/software combos, and bringing back an "old friend" but with a "new face" is always going to get people's backs up. But in this case the "new face" is somehting that many people already have their own opinions about. And many of those opinions are liekly to be through prioer experience of WinCE, not just the normal (but sometimes justified) anti-Microsoft vitriol.
Not necessarily. HTTP URIs identify resources; it's true that HTTP resources usually are web pages, but that's not the rule. With http://loc.gov/lccn/2002022641 one can identify the thing; with one representation of it being readily available at the same address.
I still say that an HTTP URL is a pointer to that specific copy of the page, rather than an expicit refence to the information on it[*].
From one point of view an HTTP URL and an INFO URI wouldn't seem at all different, as they give the same result. But it seems to me like the difference between an actual copy of a book in a library, and it's Dewey number.
Tiggs
[*] - Although if the webpage is the only copy of the information, then it will act as a reference to it.
Sales taxes need to be abolished, and the federal government should implement a national sales tax (hereafter abbreviated "NST"), akin to the UK's VAT or Canada's GST. When a remote purchase is made, the state to which the purchase is billed gets that portion of the NST. The state can then let the local governments do their own fighting over whatever scraps are left. I can't say as I particularly like local taxes anyway, and VAT and GST work extremely well in the UK, Canada, Australia, etc., so perhaps these folks are trying to solve a problem by reinventing the wheel...
Yeah, i guess it works really well. But I'd advise making sure that it's a small number.
Here in the UK, VAT is 17.5%. That's almost one-fifth of the total cost going straight to the Government. And as soon as you start dealing with computers and stuff, that amount soon adds up.
And let me just say that when I was a student/unemployed I was technically exempt from tax. No income so no tax there, and my savings weren't taxed, but the Government still got 17.5% of most of my spends (about 80% of petrol purchases).
Tiggs
Re:My best one dates back a few years, but...
on
How Were You Fired?
·
· Score: 1
irony ( P ) Pronunciation Key (r-n, r-)
n. pl. ironies
1.
1. The use of words to express something different from and often opposite to their literal meaning.
2. An expression or utterance marked by a deliberate contrast between apparent and intended meaning.
3. A literary style employing such contrasts for humorous or rhetorical effect. See Synonyms at wit1.
2.
1. Incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs: "Hyde noted the irony of Ireland's copying the nation she most hated" (Richard Kain).
2. An occurrence, result, or circumstance notable for such incongruity. See Usage Note at ironic.
Well it looks like it fits. Especially the whole "Value of Trust" thing when appied to VeriSign - especially when applied to a site you're viewing 'cos of a general lack of trust in said company.
What is the difference between, say, http://loc.gov/lccn/2002022641 and info:lccn/2002022641?
The latter requires a new URI scheme (deployment of new URI schemes is expensive)
The latter requires a new registry
From reading through the gist of the article and the/. replies here, it's the difference between a URI (idintifier) and a URL (location).
http://loc.gov/lccn/2002022641 might tell you where to find a copy of the information, but info:lccn/2002022641 would tell you what it was.
Tiggs
So a mirror site, slashdot article, or official "hardcopy" document would still be info:lccn/2002022641, regardless of what/where it was. But only the specific page would be http://loc.gov/lccn/2002022641.
But it seems to me mroe than just an extention/replacement to "Meta tags". These URIs look like they won't have to be tied to merely internet-based things. Just a standardised way of referring to certain things.
Sure, punching info:foo/bar into a search-engine might well end up reachign some tosser's pr0n website with invalid metadata. But someone could do that anyway with any existing info. (e.g. Putting "RFC2234" in the META tags on your pr0n page, or Warez site.)
But it would (or at leasy should...) allow for a standard way of referencing certain pieces of information.
For example when looking for an RFC or MS Knowledgebase article, or anything similarly arranged, it can take a few attempts at searching depending on exactly how they reference it.
But a simple info:rfc/2234 or info:mskb/826955 would provide a standard method of searching that you could at least (heopefully) trust to be implemented correctly in official sites. Or in libraries, magazines, publications, etc.
1% of attacks succeeding is preferable to the full 100%.
True, it's not good enough, but that doesn't sotp it being a good start.
Putting all of your reliance on just the one method is rarely a good idea anyway. So whether your primary filter is bayesian or not, you should probably have at least one more layer in place.
Slashdot Mirror
Strangely enough, I don't give a damn about what kind of person I am according to US law.
OK, as a Brit I should give a damn about what British law says I am, but that's another argument entirely...
TiggsYou have got to be kidding. Although the only truly safe way of disposing of paper-base dinformation is to physically destroy the paper, I still count stuff thrown in the garbage as not-public. Especially anything I've placed in my own trash!
Besides, even if this isn't illegal I'd defitniely class it as an extremely shifty practice!
TiggsPlus I'd say that without a signature, it can't be assumed as permission being given. So there's quite liekly a good chance of suing.
And the amusing thing?
I seem to remember that it was CodeMasters who came up with one of the early ways of getting around the old NES game-chip problem.
What's going to stop someone then cracking the main executable to bypass the degradation?
After all, cracks are the mainstay of copied games anyway.
(Never mind the mainstay of legit games when you don't want to have to fish out the play-disk each time...)
I don't think there is one.
TiggsThe sad truth is that both sides have fundamentally different requirements from the Music Industry. Much as I'd like to see a fast and mutually advantageous resolution to this whole situation, i can't see it hapenning any time soon.
Bullshit!
A lot of people who download wouldn't buy legit versions anyway. And a lot of the others buy as well as sharing.
This isn't always true.
So many times I (and others) have used it to try out artists i've heard of from friends. Or to check out the whole album of a single song I heard on the radio. And I've then gone on to buy the entire album.
Besides, in this day and age what do the record companies do to deserve those profits?
Bring us the latest in new music?
Well, the latest in sound-alike shite.
Encourage musical diversity?
...with yet another fucking cover version.
Provide a distribution network that's not available in the current technological climate?
Once, yes. And that's how they grew. but technology just rendered there old methods obsolete, and instead of going with the flow they're trying to stamp out the advantages.
That doesn't sound like actions worthy of earning profit.
I'm a customer. I have probably a good few hundred CDs - both singles and albums.
I'm also a downloader.
I buy CDs. mainly I buy good CDs. I also use WinMX to track down songs that are old, and that you can't get anymore. (Except on compilations of miscellaneous shite) I use it to get the latest songs I hear on the radio (and quite often then buy the single or album the week it comes out).
True, I also use it to get one decent song of an album which is mainly crap.
But I'm still a customer. But the harder the Industry uses these bully-boy tactics, the less I give a toss about what they think. Also the harder it is to play legitimately purchased music oin my chopice os setup, the less I'm going to care about their opinions.
Besides, I have very little sympathy for a system which grew around the technological contraints of the time - which no longer exist. And when, rather than embracing the new innovations, they try to throttle them.
TiggsAnything I add at this stage is going to be redundant by this point, but here goes anyway:
Broswer.
Mozilla. I do almost all of by browsing in it. And since finding a Googlebar-equivalent on Mozdev, I've never looked back.
In fact, the only things I use IE for these days are the occasional page that Moz won't render, and for checking that my own website works under multiple browsers.
E-mail/Usenet.
I can't realyl say anything about email. I'm still using OE myself. But only 'cos I have a lot of saved mails I haven't got around to importing to Moz yet. Next re-install of 2K, though...
Newsgroups-wise, I'd swear by FreeAgent. Even though I tolerate OE as a mail-client, there's no way I'd use it for Usenet!
Multimedia.
Like others, I'd recommend WinAmp Classic for audio.
Video-wise I use WMP, but I know some people would prefer to steer clear of it. But really, anything which can pick up the system-wide Codecs will do.
Other gubbins.
OpenOffice.org is pretty good as an office suite. Does pretty much everything MS Office can do, except for the inevitable proprietary gumph.
And especially useful when so many bundles these days include MS Works. It's nice to have a free non-Warez alternative that's as full-featured as Office!
Like many others, I use AVG for anti-virus. It's a great free AV product. (So good I might even go for the commecrial version next paycheck)
I realy like that a company put a legit free version of what's probably THE essential application these days. If people don't like it, they can't complain 'cos it's free. And if they do, it's great free publicity for Grisoft!
Ad-Aware. Natch!
Actually, one last thing on OpenOffice. It's presentation program works pretty damn well for creating PowerPoint presentations. And seeing that MS makes a free PP Viewer available, you can even test your presentations to work with "Powerpoint Proper" without having to either pay money, or go Warez.
Tiggs
I'd still rather the small print said how much it's equivalent to in the way that the OS calculates it.
Well, (rightly or wrongly) meanings change over the years. And through polonged use over time, how a word/prefix is used becomes it's meaning - at least in that context.
And that's missing the point.
It might be wrong, but it's consistantly wrong. The kilo-/mega-/giga- prefixes have been used incorrectly, but you knew that the number associated with them was consistent.
A 1MB file might not be one million bytes, but at least you know that fifty of them would fit in 50MB of storage. (Give or take OS/FS overheads)
The manufacturers might be using the "correct" notation, but the fact that it means they're using megabytes and gigabytes that aren't the same as used in [a] RAM and [b] reported by the OS.
And right or not, that's needlessly confusing.
Besides, unless someone comes up with a method of notation that's easier to pronounce, I can't see to catching on. Kibibytes and Gibibytes are just too clumsy to easily say quickly and easily.
TiggsAnd RAM manufacturers...
I'm a Brit. And I still don't like the manufacturer's way of stating drive sizes.
Yes, kilo's always defaulted to meaning 1000. But a kiloBYTE has always been 1024.
And within the context of computers, standard notation has to be used - one way or another. Even if it's technically an incorrect use of the kilo-/mega-prefixes, they have to stay consistant. Otherwise it's us techies who end up trying to explain to normal users why "1 gig RAM isn't the same as 1gig drive capacity".
And I know how people think They'll just go "why don't they use consistant terms." And, in this case, it's the drive-manufacturers who have proken with the consistant notation.
True, most "normal people" don't know that in comptuer terms gigafoo means 1024^3. But the simple fact remains that the Operating System will report in "binary megabytes".
And manufacturers flagging their products in "decimal megabytes" is going to confuse the end-user. It's the geek-types who know that there's a difference, and can figure out why it's there. "Normal users" are just going to wonder why their drives aren't as big as they thought they were.
At the very least, manufacturers should (even if only in tiny print) put "equivalent to X.YZ base2 gigabytes" or something.
The are two major reasons why it would (and should) matter.
Non-geeks probably don't care exactly what calculation is used, as long as it's the same calculation for different stuff.
Besides, as long as the OSs themselves use base2 calculations, then storage should use the same calculations. You shouldn't need to reach for a calculator[*] everytime you want to work out whether your collection of files will fit on a certain media device.
[*] - or paper & pen, or maths-website
TiggsThey've been doing it for years, though.
Between Macrovision and digital watermarking they keep introducing ways of purposefully making playback sub-optimal.
OK, you usually can't see the effect, but anything which apparently "cannot be removed wihtout altering the quality of the product" is basically putting osmething into a production that should not be there.
And "normal viewers" can go hang, but I can't think of a geek or techie in existance who will ever stand for this...
But people know what WinCE has to offer, and they already know whether they like it or not. Plus, more importantly, people know what the EPOC/Symbian OS Ohas/had to offer. There are bound to be people out there who prefered Psion's way of doing things to WinCE - or even PalmOS.
Chances are that even if Psion had come back with something running PalmOS then people would bitch. Or Sony releasing a Clie using WinCE instead of PalmOS.
People tend to have their favourite hardware/software combos, and bringing back an "old friend" but with a "new face" is always going to get people's backs up. But in this case the "new face" is somehting that many people already have their own opinions about.
And many of those opinions are liekly to be through prioer experience of WinCE, not just the normal (but sometimes justified) anti-Microsoft vitriol.
I still say that an HTTP URL is a pointer to that specific copy of the page, rather than an expicit refence to the information on it[*].
From one point of view an HTTP URL and an INFO URI wouldn't seem at all different, as they give the same result. But it seems to me like the difference between an actual copy of a book in a library, and it's Dewey number.
Tiggs
[*] - Although if the webpage is the only copy of the information, then it will act as a reference to it.
Yeah, i guess it works really well. But I'd advise making sure that it's a small number.
Here in the UK, VAT is 17.5%. That's almost one-fifth of the total cost going straight to the Government. And as soon as you start dealing with computers and stuff, that amount soon adds up.
TiggsAnd let me just say that when I was a student/unemployed I was technically exempt from tax. No income so no tax there, and my savings weren't taxed, but the Government still got 17.5% of most of my spends (about 80% of petrol purchases).
"Pointy Haired Boss" (read: "Clueless Management Type")
:)
See Dilbert.
Tiggs
Well it looks like it fits. Especially the whole "Value of Trust" thing when appied to VeriSign - especially when applied to a site you're viewing 'cos of a general lack of trust in said company.
TiggsFrom reading through the gist of the article and the /. replies here, it's the difference between a URI (idintifier) and a URL (location).
http://loc.gov/lccn/2002022641 might tell you where to find a copy of the information, but info:lccn/2002022641 would tell you what it was.
TiggsSo a mirror site, slashdot article, or official "hardcopy" document would still be info:lccn/2002022641, regardless of what/where it was. But only the specific page would be http://loc.gov/lccn/2002022641.
But it seems to me mroe than just an extention/replacement to "Meta tags". These URIs look like they won't have to be tied to merely internet-based things. Just a standardised way of referring to certain things.
Sure, punching info:foo/bar into a search-engine might well end up reachign some tosser's pr0n website with invalid metadata. But someone could do that anyway with any existing info.
(e.g. Putting "RFC2234" in the META tags on your pr0n page, or Warez site.)
But it would (or at leasy should...) allow for a standard way of referencing certain pieces of information.
For example when looking for an RFC or MS Knowledgebase article, or anything similarly arranged, it can take a few attempts at searching depending on exactly how they reference it.
But a simple info:rfc/2234 or info:mskb/826955 would provide a standard method of searching that you could at least (heopefully) trust to be implemented correctly in official sites. Or in libraries, magazines, publications, etc.
1% of attacks succeeding is preferable to the full 100%.
True, it's not good enough, but that doesn't sotp it being a good start.
Putting all of your reliance on just the one method is rarely a good idea anyway. So whether your primary filter is bayesian or not, you should probably have at least one more layer in place.
Education? In a University? That's not gonna work!
Tiggs