Amazon's an interesting one. I find the UK flavour of Amazon to be a complete ripoff anyway, compared to the US Amazon.com, which I always order from and have my stuff shipped from the US. If it's a DVD, my firmware-hacked DVD player will play it. Region encoding sucks, and I'll happily break the law to fight it.
Any particular reason why people buy from Amazon UK rather than Amazon US? The US Amazon's products typically have more bonuses included (eg. bonus CD), at a cheaper price (even with shipping included!) and they're usually released there before they are over here! Gotta love international trade.
I hope not. Creeping featuritis has been the death of too many fine pieces of software that were fine just the way they were.
I, however, hope somebody gets round to coding in a fix for this *major* missing feature which is stopping many people, including me, switching from Outlook Express to Thunderbird. *sigh*
No, your other posts make it quite clear that you're a Blairite troll. You seem to support the socialist control-freakery that the UK government practices all the time, yet that reeks of exactly what you're criticising the US of. Labour: Say what the people want, do what Blair and Blunkett want.
We ever had that right?:-) Ya know, until maybe 5 years ago, the US's respect for its citizens privacy and freedom was legendary. It might be hard to remember, but they're the values the USA was founded upon! They lasted quite a long time, and it's very telling that there is constant criticism of the government over there for infinging too many citizen's rights, whilst over here all the media can say is 'how lucky we are that our government cares so much about our security!'
What's this? I read your entire article and offer some constructive criticism, and you can do nothing but call me full of shit. People might listen to you a bit more if you tried to argue your points with less vulgarity.
But, seeing as the discussion's been dragged down to this level: Fuck you, moron.
2) I just don't see anything here to get excited about.
Um, quite. I read the review... it says, at the top, "operating system with one of the most intuitive graphical user interfaces ever. Gone are misconceptions about conformance. SkyOS serves as a reminder to GUI developers that the current status quo will only suffice for so long." This heavily implies that SkyOS has loads of new, revolutionary features, and a totally new UI from previous OSes.
So I looked at the review and screenshots. It's got a desktop, a start menu, a menu-driven settings dialog, dialogs that look virtually identical to Linux dialogs, a shell (incredible!), and some basic hardware support. And, don't tell anyone, but I think it can do anti-aliased fonts too!
The article also states that "SkyOS definitely leads the alternative scene right now." I don't wish to detract from the work the SkyOS team has apparently put in, but... leads the alternative scene for what? Nicest looking default desktop OS? Best closed-source Linux clone? There is nothing at all revolutionary about this OS, and just about anyone would be better off installing MacOS X, Linux or Windows XP.
Your writeup seems to be rather over-obsessed on the privacy factor of e-mail, and how it can help those in wartorn countries or who are oppressed to communicate anonymously. You then charmingly tell those who don't want their inbox to be full of crap to 'get bent'. I think you should try and consider the other side's argument for a while.
Although I think your idea of filtering based on spammers links is a good one, I'll turn the question on you: why does e-mail need to be anonymous? It's by no means the only form of internet communication, and if oppressed people need a way of communicating anonymously over the internet (they didn't have that until maybe 10 years ago, and how many genuinely impoverished people have internet access anyway?), they can use another means of communication. Instant messaging, IRC, etc.
E-mail doesn't *need* to be anonymous, and the fact that it is just means that when it was invented, people didn't forsee asshole spammers ruining it for genuine users. Filtering links is a good method of catching spam, but a really guaranteed way of ending it would be to disallow forged headers. I get quite a bit of spam with *NO* commercial links in at all, it's amazing how many people are prepared to send out total useless crap to millions of people. Think about it. And if people needed to communicate anonymously, they could use a protocol other than SMTP.
here's a summary from the crap I submitted to spamcop this morning.. ".il,.it,.fr,.pi". Hmmmm... I don't even know what backwards country those tlds are from
Israel, Italy, France. Yup, really backward countries, I can see!:-)
As for.pi, it doesn't appear to exist. Maybe you got an e-mail from a particularly overzealous mathematician.
There's also Telewest, for people in the Telewest cable franchise areas, and a whole host of other ADSL providers that use infrastucture that was formally BT's, and the last mile of phone cable that BT has to offer tham a good deal on reselling.
Although someone said we get shafted on transfer speeds compared to America (which is somewhat true), none of our decent ADSL resellers implement monthly data transfer caps. I'd far rather have a 512k/256k ADSL service with unlimited transfer and no worrying about going over the limit than a 2mbit service with a measly 10 gigs per month.
I personally go with Zen Internet, who are a damn reliable ISP and give me 512k/256k ADSL for around 25GBP per month.
I'd specifically recomment *against* going with BTopenworld... they incorrectly closed my account, and then had the audacity to charge me an early account closure fee, because of the fact that they have a ludicrous 12 month minimum term contract for their ADSL service, where nearly every other ADSL provider has 1 month minimum term. It was settled with them paying 300GBP to me in compensation. I've also heard other nasties about BTopenworld, ie. they might be implementing monthly data caps (yuk!) and blocking ports. Americans might be used to this kind of BS from their monopolistic cable companies, but that doesn't mean it's something people should have to put up with.
Listings and reviews of other BT ADSL providers can be found at ADSLguide.
Really? The trouble is, *so many* big websites offer their content (not even live, but archived content) in Real streaming video format only. Try getting video news reports from news.bbc.co.uk, cnn.com, euronews.net, and just about any other online news source in a different format. An e-mail to these sites complaining about this fact usually results in silence.
1) Investigate how to control just what goes in your startup with tools such as Startup Control Panel and StartupMonitor 2) Just click 'Edit | Preferences | QuickTime Preferences | Browser Plug-in', and uncheck 'QuickTime system tray icon'.:-\
My lecturer in Distributed Communications said that "increasin bandwith will just result in software makers letting their software use more bandwith", which off course brings us back to where we started.
Perhaps... however, you can't deny that it's pretty mandatory for DVD movies to use a lot more space than most pieces software, which is the reason for the enormous size of the rip.
The race between 'software makers' and media capacity/data transfer speed is one that the latter will ultimately win, unless software manufacturers literally start including files with gigabytes of random noise in just to fill up the space:-)
I'm not even sure the federal government could legally do such a thing...
No, that's the problem. I would indeed suggest a US nationwide sales tax set by the federal government, but the constitution probably prevents it. Then prices could include sales tax and all be the same.
Honestly, I don't see how either system is superior as long as you stay consistent within a given country
I see our system as significantly superior. When I see an advertised price, I *know* how much I am gonna have to pay for that product or service, before I get to the checkout. In the US, not only would the onus be on me to calculate the tax on whatever was being sold, but that wouldn't be easy because the tax would *vary* depending on where I was buying from! Yuk.
By the way, if a chain of stores in the UK wants to print up a newspaper advertisement that includes prices, how do they handle that when the same newspaper might have a distribution that spans multiple nearby cities and thus would have different tax rates?
The entire country has the same VAT rate (our equivalent to sales tax) and it's set by central government.
You might think it's a pain to add sales tax
Yes it does sound like a major pain and when I visited America it was a major pain for me:-)
Isn't it sad that somebody totally clueless about consumer electronics can get the title of 'sales clerk' nowadays? What's the bloody point in them being there if they can't help you with your purchase? I think there should be some kind of mandatory training / exam they should have to pass before they can get that title.
Slashdot Mirror
Amazon's an interesting one. I find the UK flavour of Amazon to be a complete ripoff anyway, compared to the US Amazon.com, which I always order from and have my stuff shipped from the US. If it's a DVD, my firmware-hacked DVD player will play it. Region encoding sucks, and I'll happily break the law to fight it.
Any particular reason why people buy from Amazon UK rather than Amazon US? The US Amazon's products typically have more bonuses included (eg. bonus CD), at a cheaper price (even with shipping included!) and they're usually released there before they are over here! Gotta love international trade.
There was no reply (and IIRC, their web form didn't work at all at the time)
And ya don't think those two facts are somehow related?
I hope not. Creeping featuritis has been the death of too many fine pieces of software that were fine just the way they were.
I, however, hope somebody gets round to coding in a fix for this *major* missing feature which is stopping many people, including me, switching from Outlook Express to Thunderbird. *sigh*
need I go on?
No, your other posts make it quite clear that you're a Blairite troll. You seem to support the socialist control-freakery that the UK government practices all the time, yet that reeks of exactly what you're criticising the US of. Labour: Say what the people want, do what Blair and Blunkett want.
We ever had that right? :-) Ya know, until maybe 5 years ago, the US's respect for its citizens privacy and freedom was legendary. It might be hard to remember, but they're the values the USA was founded upon! They lasted quite a long time, and it's very telling that there is constant criticism of the government over there for infinging too many citizen's rights, whilst over here all the media can say is 'how lucky we are that our government cares so much about our security!'
What's this? I read your entire article and offer some constructive criticism, and you can do nothing but call me full of shit. People might listen to you a bit more if you tried to argue your points with less vulgarity.
But, seeing as the discussion's been dragged down to this level: Fuck you, moron.
2) I just don't see anything here to get excited about.
Um, quite. I read the review... it says, at the top, "operating system with one of the most intuitive graphical user interfaces ever. Gone are misconceptions about conformance. SkyOS serves as a reminder to GUI developers that the current status quo will only suffice for so long." This heavily implies that SkyOS has loads of new, revolutionary features, and a totally new UI from previous OSes.
So I looked at the review and screenshots. It's got a desktop, a start menu, a menu-driven settings dialog, dialogs that look virtually identical to Linux dialogs, a shell (incredible!), and some basic hardware support. And, don't tell anyone, but I think it can do anti-aliased fonts too!
The article also states that "SkyOS definitely leads the alternative scene right now." I don't wish to detract from the work the SkyOS team has apparently put in, but... leads the alternative scene for what? Nicest looking default desktop OS? Best closed-source Linux clone? There is nothing at all revolutionary about this OS, and just about anyone would be better off installing MacOS X, Linux or Windows XP.
eBay Without The Fees [pricetag.com]
Not even a success fee? How do they make money? I don't see ads on the site and I don't use ad blockers.
Napalm is Not the Answer
Your writeup seems to be rather over-obsessed on the privacy factor of e-mail, and how it can help those in wartorn countries or who are oppressed to communicate anonymously. You then charmingly tell those who don't want their inbox to be full of crap to 'get bent'. I think you should try and consider the other side's argument for a while.
Although I think your idea of filtering based on spammers links is a good one, I'll turn the question on you: why does e-mail need to be anonymous? It's by no means the only form of internet communication, and if oppressed people need a way of communicating anonymously over the internet (they didn't have that until maybe 10 years ago, and how many genuinely impoverished people have internet access anyway?), they can use another means of communication. Instant messaging, IRC, etc.
E-mail doesn't *need* to be anonymous, and the fact that it is just means that when it was invented, people didn't forsee asshole spammers ruining it for genuine users. Filtering links is a good method of catching spam, but a really guaranteed way of ending it would be to disallow forged headers. I get quite a bit of spam with *NO* commercial links in at all, it's amazing how many people are prepared to send out total useless crap to millions of people. Think about it. And if people needed to communicate anonymously, they could use a protocol other than SMTP.
Ha ha! You said nuclear. Its nucular dummy, the S is silent!
- Peter Griffin
I wonder what it takes to get citizenship or a work permit.
Minimum of $50 million cash. Willingness to build own house.
here's a summary from the crap I submitted to spamcop this morning.. ".il, .it, .fr, .pi". Hmmmm... I don't even know what backwards country those tlds are from
:-)
.pi, it doesn't appear to exist. Maybe you got an e-mail from a particularly overzealous mathematician.
Israel, Italy, France. Yup, really backward countries, I can see!
As for
There's also Telewest, for people in the Telewest cable franchise areas, and a whole host of other ADSL providers that use infrastucture that was formally BT's, and the last mile of phone cable that BT has to offer tham a good deal on reselling.
Although someone said we get shafted on transfer speeds compared to America (which is somewhat true), none of our decent ADSL resellers implement monthly data transfer caps. I'd far rather have a 512k/256k ADSL service with unlimited transfer and no worrying about going over the limit than a 2mbit service with a measly 10 gigs per month.
I personally go with Zen Internet, who are a damn reliable ISP and give me 512k/256k ADSL for around 25GBP per month.
I'd specifically recomment *against* going with BTopenworld... they incorrectly closed my account, and then had the audacity to charge me an early account closure fee, because of the fact that they have a ludicrous 12 month minimum term contract for their ADSL service, where nearly every other ADSL provider has 1 month minimum term. It was settled with them paying 300GBP to me in compensation. I've also heard other nasties about BTopenworld, ie. they might be implementing monthly data caps (yuk!) and blocking ports. Americans might be used to this kind of BS from their monopolistic cable companies, but that doesn't mean it's something people should have to put up with.
Listings and reviews of other BT ADSL providers can be found at ADSLguide.
Microsoft said that ... it would offer a premium service for $9.95 a month ... to provide ... advanced information services like photo editing
Will it let you edit pictures of bank notes?
You're suggesting that there's a 'cumshot' website that isn't garbage?
DOSbox link :-)
Really? The trouble is, *so many* big websites offer their content (not even live, but archived content) in Real streaming video format only. Try getting video news reports from news.bbc.co.uk, cnn.com, euronews.net, and just about any other online news source in a different format. An e-mail to these sites complaining about this fact usually results in silence.
Uh, you might wanna:
:-\
1) Investigate how to control just what goes in your startup with tools such as Startup Control Panel and StartupMonitor
2) Just click 'Edit | Preferences | QuickTime Preferences | Browser Plug-in', and uncheck 'QuickTime system tray icon'.
Though I cant say that many other windows-based media players are better.
Try Winamp 5.01.
My lecturer in Distributed Communications said that "increasin bandwith will just result in software makers letting their software use more bandwith", which off course brings us back to where we started.
:-)
Perhaps... however, you can't deny that it's pretty mandatory for DVD movies to use a lot more space than most pieces software, which is the reason for the enormous size of the rip.
The race between 'software makers' and media capacity/data transfer speed is one that the latter will ultimately win, unless software manufacturers literally start including files with gigabytes of random noise in just to fill up the space
I'm not even sure the federal government could legally do such a thing...
No, that's the problem. I would indeed suggest a US nationwide sales tax set by the federal government, but the constitution probably prevents it. Then prices could include sales tax and all be the same.
And I think the US has sufficient labour laws (and lawyers ;-) to make sure that worker exploitation is minimal.
Then how is it that Wal-Mart can get away with employing vast quantities of people for ridiculously low wages?
Honestly, I don't see how either system is superior as long as you stay consistent within a given country
:-)
I see our system as significantly superior. When I see an advertised price, I *know* how much I am gonna have to pay for that product or service, before I get to the checkout. In the US, not only would the onus be on me to calculate the tax on whatever was being sold, but that wouldn't be easy because the tax would *vary* depending on where I was buying from! Yuk.
By the way, if a chain of stores in the UK wants to print up a newspaper advertisement that includes prices, how do they handle that when the same newspaper might have a distribution that spans multiple nearby cities and thus would have different tax rates?
The entire country has the same VAT rate (our equivalent to sales tax) and it's set by central government.
You might think it's a pain to add sales tax
Yes it does sound like a major pain and when I visited America it was a major pain for me
With everything included, most people don't realize how much they are paying in taxes per gallon (over 25%).
:-) You're talking to a resident of the country with the highest level of tax per gallon/litre on 'gas' in the world (over 600%).
Hehe
Isn't it sad that somebody totally clueless about consumer electronics can get the title of 'sales clerk' nowadays? What's the bloody point in them being there if they can't help you with your purchase? I think there should be some kind of mandatory training / exam they should have to pass before they can get that title.