I spent a year using vista as my primary OS so I could support it for others. I've now switched back to linux or XP at home. The speed difference on working with network folders alone is marked, even post SP1. I still use it at the office, but will go back to XP when I get time to rebuild my own desktop. I'm even planning on switching out my vista MCE tv box, the last holdout; it's just too flaky on video playback.
We also supplied some dozen vista laptops to users at work after it became virtually impossible not to buy OEM vista, and they wouldn't support XP (soundcard). All but one have come back to be retrofitted with XP, even without sound. We now make a point of buying laptops that have driver support in XP, and have the 'downgrade to previous version' option. Toshiba's are especially good for this.
We do have one laptop user who loves vista, and I think another who like the extra video bling and don't have any significant issues. They are very much in the minority.
Personally, I don't care. I use what works, and XP is simply faster on file handling and lauching apps, more stable, more supported and still kicks vista's ass on app support. I've yet to find anybody that prefers vista's start menu. "How do I turn it off?" is a common question. If we can, we'll skip vista at the office altogether from now on, and go straight to windows 7 probably.
Vista is prettier, and has more driver support, and directx 10 which isn't noticeable even on games that do support it. If you like it good for you. Each to their own. But most people who've used it dislike it or actively hate it, in comparison to XP. Considering the reaction when XP came out over 2000, that's quite a sea-change!
Compare also say, OSX. I don't know ANY mac user hankering for OS9, and things like leopard are still eagerly snatched up even with teething troubles, so it's not just new OS shock - I think vista really is a step backwards for most users.
I bet I know why that works. When you eat at 6 with your pre-prepared meal it's of a proper size and probably reasonably balanced nutrition.
If you wait to eat until you get home, when it's late and you're tired and cranky you're far more likely to 1) snack while cooking 2) cook a larger meal because you're really hungry 3) cook something easy and quick, which is likely to be lower in nutrition and higher in calories
Very easy to do without realising it, and even when you do it's easy to rationalise as 'just this once'.
Eating 4-5 small meals a day as opposed to 2-3 large ones actually tends to lead to lower weight, as people actually eat less in total when they're not ravenously hungry.
He *was* given a summons by the police at the demonstration. The CPS haven't decided whether to go ahead with the case yet, as you say, and no date has been set for the court case. I too hope that it will be quietly dropped by the CPS, but I'm not at all 100% sure.
That the police even went so far as to issue a summons is a scary indictment of the level of anti-speech legislation on the books and used against peaceful demonstrators. As someone said above, I wonder when they'll decide to ban 'war-criminal' and 'tax' protest signs.
Well, there are downsides for EU nationals. My fiancee, being french, and a qualified teacher in france, and a teacher of english and french as a foreign language isn't qualified to teach bugger all in the UK.
she's currently jumping through the same hoops as any other graduate to teach basic french, despite being a french teacher and a teacher of french. In france.
Getting funding to go through the beaurocratic hoops was a huge struggle too, despite being resident here for years. We've pretty much decided to emigrate, but don't know where yet. France is going to down the same route as the UK now, as is germany. Canada looks attractive, but it's so damn cold. I've some family in oz, but it's a long way from the rest of our friends and family.
Previous examples of 'reasonable belief' in UK laws have been incredibly broad. Possession of an encrypted file is likely to pass this barrier, in fact just having it somewhere on the premises where you live or work is probably enough to pass the test of reasonable belief that you also have the key.
Denying that you do so is not a defence. The whole point of this law is to be able to prosecute suspicious people who don't hand over their security keys, on the basis that someone hiding something with a threat of 2-5 years jail over their head is hiding something very bad indeed.
That innocent people might encrypt things for privacy is not considered a problem - they can just hand over their keys and let the police rifle their files. That they might not have the key or never had the key - well, sucks to be you. You should have deleted that file you couldn't open.
You need to have British Citizenship for that i.e. an association with Great Britain proper --- not just an association with a British colony.
Not strictly true. Any national of an EU country has the right to settle and work in the UK, with almost all of the rights of a naturalized british citizen including social security and NHS care (a few things like student loans are restricted). No UK passport required.
As you say though, ex and current british colonies are more restricted on access than EU nationals these days, which seems pretty rediculous. Then again, why would you want to come to police-state britain these days anyway?
Every office I've ever working in in the UK - including my current one - has a water cooler next to the coffee machine. We have 4 that I can think of, in various kitchens. Admittedly, quite a few of them get their water from the mains rather than a top-bottle, but it's still a water cooler!
European legislation has already been passed that requires all european ISPs to login email headers and websites visited, and VOIP calls connected, similar to the phone call logs created for telephones and mobiles. It's just awaiting implementation into UK law, which must take place within the next couple of years - I believe the plan is to pass it in the next lesgislative session.
Taking all those ISP stored databases, and replicating them into a central government one for easier data-mining is the next logical step - the national ID card scheme is a similar plan already going ahead to tie in the passport office, driving licences etc into one central ID database.
Don't poo-poo it as 'just a proposal' - these types of proposals have a nasty habit of becoming laws.
I agree entirely. The problem is that of distraction; when finances are tight people are a lot more worried about how they're going to pay their mortgage and fuel bills, and their conversations around the water-cooler revolve around TV, sports and house prices.
You and I can see the building of the panopticon society being built, in the UK, and all the tools being put in place for totalitarian control if a government decides to use them that way. But all they have to say is 'we respect civil liberties of course, but what about the rights of people to walk down the street safely without being harrassed by hoodies, or their car broken into, or attacked by terrorist extremists' and most people will nod, accept it, and carry on.
You try to explain the risks and implications of it, and they honestly don't care - the government would never use these things against *them*, they'll only be used against those 'nasty youngsters hanging around the corner shop' (black or otherwise), or those 'horrid muslim suicide bombers'.
To put it bluntly, most people just don't care about privacy rights, because they're certain as 'good people' they have nothing to fear. They care about their wallets and their families and their comfort, and indstinct privacy rights are well down on that list.
Expansys in the UK is doing pre-orders for the MSI wind; from what I can see the linux version is identical to the windows xp home one in hardware spec (same ram, HD, 3 cell battery, BT included) but £30 cheaper.
Enigma was indeed broken by the poles in 1932 through the use of german sloppy procedures ( giving known cribs), and their work caused the inital breaks of enigma - full credit to them. The automation was british, as was the day-to-day testing of the cribs and proposed solutions from the bombes during the war. The naval introduction of a 4th rotor to enigma caused a shut-out of bletchley for 10 months before they found another way 'in' (the short weather reports were sent using only three rotors, thus allowing the existing bombes to work on the cribs from the weather and short signal books)
Enigma was the field unit cipher system.
Lorenz was the german headquarters and fixed station cipher system for teleprinters, with high-level communications. That was broken by the use of Colossus, the first programmable digital, electronic, computing device in december 1943, again at Bletchley.
The poles did the initial crucial work on enigma, Bletchley broke many new versions of engima and lorenz and carried the load of allied decryption for years, with the americans stepping in near the end of the war with a much bigger budget and faster machines.
However you slice it, the intel work at Bletchley was crucial for the war effort - it's often estimated to have shortened the war by at least two years, and saved many allied ships.
That the British government appears happy to let it and the rebuilt equipment fade away is disgusting.
Basic - and not so basic - routers can sometimes fall over under the load of P2P all on their own. Specifically, they come with very small amounts of RAM, and building large NAT tables to keep track of all your connections to potentially hundreds of others simultaneously can be too much for them, and sometimes upnp is the culprit.
The thing I object to most of the installation restrictions as stands at the moment is a lifetime install limit. On mass effect, this is 3 installs before you have to make an expensive phone call to EA tech support to plead on a 'case-by-case basis' to be allowed to install your game for a 4th time. Yes, uninstalling and reinstalling into the same copy of windows on the same pc will be 'free' but upgrade the hardware or reinstall windows, and it's another activation gone forever.
Far, far too low. I'm not going to buy a game that will still working in a few months or a year because I've upgraded my gaming rig once too often, and I'm at the mercy of tech support as to whether I'll be allowed to play my own property.
Vicarious copyright infringement is actually a specific offence of indirect copyright infringement in the US. It's where someone has a direct financial interest in the infringing actions being committed by another and has the ability to control it, even if they do not know that the infringement is taking place and do not directly take part in it.
The other form of indirect infringement, contributory infringement, requires (1) knowledge of the infringing activity and (2) a material contribution -- actual assistance or inducement -- to the alleged piracy.
These are the laws that were used to bring down napster. In the US, because of these laws, running a tracker is actually pretty illegal. It's assisting others to breach copyright even if you yourself don't, and the tracker itself has no copyrighted material.
And yes, google should be worried. By indexing the content of sites such as torrentspy, they potentially open themselves up to the same charges. They bought youtube specifically to get in on the lawsuit by viacom, so they could help affect the judgement.
Note, one of the big differences with the piratebay is that sweden does not have offences of contributary or vicarious copyright infringement, so running a tracker is legal there.
The best advantage of a gaming mouse, in addition to extra buttons over a standard mouse is a higher resolution in hardware. I turn the game sensitivity down, and the mouse sensitivity up, and it's simply more precise than whacking up the pixel jump count that increasing the mouse speed in game does. That really does make a difference when say, sniping, or tank fights in BF2. Plus adjusting the resolution on the fly, with buttons on the mouse makes switching from sniper to soldier on tf2 a lot easier. I will adjust my dpi in a range from 800 to 2000 in-game easily depending on class. Try doing that with a cheap mouse.
I personally use a lachesis because 1) i'm left-handed, and razer are the only ones who actually make gaming mice for lefties 2) it's more comfortable than a copperhead 3) I know how to program the buttons, including turning off ones on the grip side that I hit accidentally (left for me, right for the reviewer)
I use a logitech G15 keyboard because my saitek died, and the logitech seems nice and robust, while also allowing multiple keypresses at once (cheap keyboards suck at chording). I have a steelseries 5L mousepad at home and work because it combines the comfort of cloth with the smoothness of a hard pad, which keeps my micefeet alive longer and is more comfortable.
I have the same cheap logitech headset the reviewer does when I want a light headset, and the steelseries 5h when i want something more enclosed and meaty.
The reviewer is still using gaming gear, he's just using older gaming gear rather than the very latest. An mx518 is still a high-res gaming mouse, it's just a bit older. Yes, the "latest and greatest" won't make much of a difference to your frag count compared to older gaming gear, but it makes a hell of a difference over a $5 2 button wheelmouse and $10 cherry plastic keyboard when you try to press three buttons at once. (stafe, backwards, reload or turn,brake,handbrake)
I just cancelled my pre-order for mass effect PC in the UK. I went through the new securom nightmare with Bioshock, and ended up returning my game for a refund. I'm not going through this again.
Here's the problems: Bioshock didn't ship with a complete game on disc, leading to hours waiting for overloaded servers to connect and deliver up the missing parts on launch day. EA servers are well known for struggling when there's heavy load so I expect there to be similar problems.
Bioshock securom shipped with two lifetime activations. Reinstall windows? New activation. Replace motherboard? New activation. New user account? New activation. Every time after that, ring up tech support, spend a while on hold, then proving you own a legitimate copy by sending a digital photo of disc plus serial number to tech support in the US, while from the UK. Expensive, slow and very very frustrating, especially since the techs initially wouldn't even help for the first few days. It tooks months in the end for the 'release an activation' tool to come out, and that's a nightmare in itself.
3 activations? Given the amount I upgrade my gaming PC and reinstall windows, I'll be out of those in months if not weeks. I'm *not* jumping through hoops on the phone every time to reinstall my legitimate owned game because I've upgraded hardware and reinstalled windows more than 3 times in the lifetime of owning the game. And before you ask, my legit copy of windows is VLK licenced, and doesn't require activation.
Now the new and worse activation nightmare. Activation every 10 days? So I decide to install on a gaming laptop. If that laptop doesn't have an internet connection at the time I want to play, I won't be able to, because it's been sat unpowered in the bag for a fortnight, and I don't have an internet connection. Heaven forbid I want to play mass effect on the train, or on holiday.
Putting 'internet required' on the box does not excuse this rediculous scheme. They're going to massively inconvenience thousands of legitimate gamers wanting to play their own property when they choose, and they simply won't be able to. I won't buy a single player game that's deliberately crippled to stop me playing it unless I check in with the licence servers before I play. I've better ways to spend my money.
Pirates, on the other hand, will be playing a completely unencumbered game without any problems. It took less than 9 days for the bioshock DRM to be patched out and the cracked version to hit the internet. Legitimate paying customers are still massively inconvenienced by the DRM and stupid hoop-jumping, while pirates get a simple and easy experience.
I can't think of a better way to kill sales of the game and drive people to piracy than this new even worse version of securom than Bioshock.
And spore? I was really looking forward to that game, even more than mass effect. But I'm not going through the frustration I had with securom on bioshock again. No damn way.
You swear under penalty of perjury that you own the copyright material you're posting the DMCA takedown about. There's no penalty if it turns out your copyright has nothing to with the material on the website.
The perjury section is to stop people sending out fake notices pretending they own Disney's material, and thus getting websites taken down in Disney's name. Disney can send out notices all day long about their own material, regardless of whether the DMCA target is a valid one or not.
This is theoretically the plan with windows 7. A new, clean minimal and modular OS based on the server line, without binary compatibility for old apps, with a new API for the new OS. Instead, there will be a separate backwards compatible API for a set of monolithic libraries providing all the old functions - same principle as Classic on OSX. Old apps will run as before, but through a compatibility layer to the new OS, while apps can be recompiled to talk directly to the new API, and presumably take advantage.
IE's rendering engine can go in the legacy libraries for old apps, for example, while being a modular component that's fully removable in the new OS (thus keeping the EU competition comissioner happy)
That's the theory anyway. Whether MS manage to pull it off is another question.
You misunderstand. Search for say, 'lastminute.com travel' on uk google and you will get paid sponsor links for competitors to lastminute.com. Assuming google allowed those competiting businesses to add lastminute.com as a keyword for *their* link to show up for, then google is selling competitors the ability to get search results off a trademark that doesn't belong to them.
Imagine if a supermarket put up a big advertising board at the front of the store with pepsi branding and trademarks, but underneath it was just coke cans for sale, with the whole thing paid for by coke. Pepsi would be pissed at coke and the supermarket, and probably institute a trademark lawsuit. The whole point of a trademark is that it allows you to distinguish your brand, that products sold under the brand are from you.
Trademarks are there to protect customers, so that when they buy something under a particular trademark, they know who it came from - and thus can infer other likely qualities about the product from that, without some shite third-party pretending to be a quality brand through fake branding when in fact, it's shite.
Most tv and films (outside the US anyway) are broadcast in 16:9 or scope. There's a lot more media watchers than there are programmers, so widescreen makes a lot more sense for the average user.
That said, there should still be some 4:3 form factors for diehards. The reason there aren't is almost all the users want widescreen, and I say this as someone who gives people a choice when ordering them new PCs.
Most media codecs are covered by US patents. That means that fedora cannot legally distribute them for free - as a US company, they have to obey US law. Most places outside the US do not allow the patenting of codecs, so places are available to download those codecs legally and easily for free - as long as you're also outside the US.
On this basis, the 'vast number of techno numpties' won't use windows either, as the set of modern codecs you get to start with are a rubbish mp3 decoder and WMA/WMV support. No x264, no AAC, no xvid, no FLV etc etc out of the box.
Paid for distros usually have the licenced codecs included, as part of the cost, so they're even better than windows. But until the US gets sane laws with regards patenting mathematics, free (as in beer) distros based or heavily distributed in the US cannot include patented codecs without taking a huge risk of being sued.
That's mainly because the utility companies demand is increasing slower.
Specifically, electricity - just compare the number of plug sockets in a house built today compared to a house built in your grandparents day, the number of ring mains, and the size of the breaker board.
The demand for electricity in the home has soared since it was first implemented. It has plateau'd now somewhat in the west, but that's due to the cost of making it going up steeply, and more wareness of energy efficiency.
Most people were pretty happy with basic broadband compared to dialup. Now streaming HD video is becoming commonplace, faster broadband is needed. I think 50Mb - 100Mb will be a decent plateau spot for a while. At least until the next bandwidth hungry app comes along.
If you're only designing a page that's going to be seen by your grandmother and friends, who cares whether it's accessible?
If you're designing the page for a bank or major retailer or new site, you should be thinking about accessibility as part of the design. Good designs degrade gracefully, and are still usable without all the javascript, flash and css, ideally with the bulk navigation links at the bottom.
The whole brilliance of separating content from layout with css is that you can have a setup that works for a full-fat all-singing browser, and one that works well for a screen-reader, or a mobile browser with minimal extra effort.
SMBFS is where you're effectively pretending to be a windows 98 client to the windows host. The code is very old and barely maintained for the last few years.
CIFS is the protocol that effectively replaced SMB in windows, and the CIFS module means you're pretending to be a windows 2000/XP client to the windows host.
mount -t cifs//[windows machine name]/[share]/[mount] -o "username="
is all you need for a manual mount, or use "mount.cifs", assuming cifs is compiled into the kernel or loaded as a module.
Changing "smbfs" to "cifs" in fstab is pretty much all you need to do to migrate across (and swap username for user, IIRC)
CUPS should not be affected, it's supported CIFS for a good long time.
Yes, yes it is. userS, plural. Most senior IT guys are wearing some form of network or sysadmin hat, which means their work is important to 10's or hundreds of individual users. You're expecting a senior IT guy to drop everything, stop working on his other priorities that support many others users in order to pander to one prima donna who expects his machine to be given top priority despite the fact he broke it in the first place with unsupported software.
On top of that, you expect a senior guy to fawn over you and treat you like you're super-special - holding his own and pointing out that he has other important things to be doing that support many other users instead of major effort to recover a self-inflicted injury mean you accuse him of an attitude problem.
IT time is precious and limited, there's never enough to go round. Despite what you may think, you and your 'IT department avoiding' attitude are the problem here.
You try and pull such a hissy fit in my department, me and the director would tell you where to take a hike. IT are a whole company support department, not your personal carpet department. You know what you sound like?
"I pay my taxes, I pay your salary. How dare you give me a parking ticket, I'm your boss I am!"
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I spent a year using vista as my primary OS so I could support it for others. I've now switched back to linux or XP at home. The speed difference on working with network folders alone is marked, even post SP1. I still use it at the office, but will go back to XP when I get time to rebuild my own desktop. I'm even planning on switching out my vista MCE tv box, the last holdout; it's just too flaky on video playback.
We also supplied some dozen vista laptops to users at work after it became virtually impossible not to buy OEM vista, and they wouldn't support XP (soundcard). All but one have come back to be retrofitted with XP, even without sound. We now make a point of buying laptops that have driver support in XP, and have the 'downgrade to previous version' option. Toshiba's are especially good for this.
We do have one laptop user who loves vista, and I think another who like the extra video bling and don't have any significant issues. They are very much in the minority.
Personally, I don't care. I use what works, and XP is simply faster on file handling and lauching apps, more stable, more supported and still kicks vista's ass on app support. I've yet to find anybody that prefers vista's start menu. "How do I turn it off?" is a common question. If we can, we'll skip vista at the office altogether from now on, and go straight to windows 7 probably.
Vista is prettier, and has more driver support, and directx 10 which isn't noticeable even on games that do support it. If you like it good for you. Each to their own. But most people who've used it dislike it or actively hate it, in comparison to XP. Considering the reaction when XP came out over 2000, that's quite a sea-change!
Compare also say, OSX. I don't know ANY mac user hankering for OS9, and things like leopard are still eagerly snatched up even with teething troubles, so it's not just new OS shock - I think vista really is a step backwards for most users.
I bet I know why that works. When you eat at 6 with your pre-prepared meal it's of a proper size and probably reasonably balanced nutrition.
If you wait to eat until you get home, when it's late and you're tired and cranky you're far more likely to
1) snack while cooking
2) cook a larger meal because you're really hungry
3) cook something easy and quick, which is likely to be lower in nutrition and higher in calories
Very easy to do without realising it, and even when you do it's easy to rationalise as 'just this once'.
Eating 4-5 small meals a day as opposed to 2-3 large ones actually tends to lead to lower weight, as people actually eat less in total when they're not ravenously hungry.
He *was* given a summons by the police at the demonstration. The CPS haven't decided whether to go ahead with the case yet, as you say, and no date has been set for the court case. I too hope that it will be quietly dropped by the CPS, but I'm not at all 100% sure.
That the police even went so far as to issue a summons is a scary indictment of the level of anti-speech legislation on the books and used against peaceful demonstrators. As someone said above, I wonder when they'll decide to ban 'war-criminal' and 'tax' protest signs.
Well, there are downsides for EU nationals. My fiancee, being french, and a qualified teacher in france, and a teacher of english and french as a foreign language isn't qualified to teach bugger all in the UK.
she's currently jumping through the same hoops as any other graduate to teach basic french, despite being a french teacher and a teacher of french. In france.
Getting funding to go through the beaurocratic hoops was a huge struggle too, despite being resident here for years. We've pretty much decided to emigrate, but don't know where yet. France is going to down the same route as the UK now, as is germany. Canada looks attractive, but it's so damn cold. I've some family in oz, but it's a long way from the rest of our friends and family.
Previous examples of 'reasonable belief' in UK laws have been incredibly broad. Possession of an encrypted file is likely to pass this barrier, in fact just having it somewhere on the premises where you live or work is probably enough to pass the test of reasonable belief that you also have the key.
Denying that you do so is not a defence. The whole point of this law is to be able to prosecute suspicious people who don't hand over their security keys, on the basis that someone hiding something with a threat of 2-5 years jail over their head is hiding something very bad indeed.
That innocent people might encrypt things for privacy is not considered a problem - they can just hand over their keys and let the police rifle their files. That they might not have the key or never had the key - well, sucks to be you. You should have deleted that file you couldn't open.
You need to have British Citizenship for that i.e. an association with Great Britain proper --- not just an association with a British colony.
Not strictly true. Any national of an EU country has the right to settle and work in the UK, with almost all of the rights of a naturalized british citizen including social security and NHS care (a few things like student loans are restricted). No UK passport required.
As you say though, ex and current british colonies are more restricted on access than EU nationals these days, which seems pretty rediculous. Then again, why would you want to come to police-state britain these days anyway?
Every office I've ever working in in the UK - including my current one - has a water cooler next to the coffee machine. We have 4 that I can think of, in various kitchens. Admittedly, quite a few of them get their water from the mains rather than a top-bottle, but it's still a water cooler!
European legislation has already been passed that requires all european ISPs to login email headers and websites visited, and VOIP calls connected, similar to the phone call logs created for telephones and mobiles. It's just awaiting implementation into UK law, which must take place within the next couple of years - I believe the plan is to pass it in the next lesgislative session.
Taking all those ISP stored databases, and replicating them into a central government one for easier data-mining is the next logical step - the national ID card scheme is a similar plan already going ahead to tie in the passport office, driving licences etc into one central ID database.
Don't poo-poo it as 'just a proposal' - these types of proposals have a nasty habit of becoming laws.
I agree entirely. The problem is that of distraction; when finances are tight people are a lot more worried about how they're going to pay their mortgage and fuel bills, and their conversations around the water-cooler revolve around TV, sports and house prices.
You and I can see the building of the panopticon society being built, in the UK, and all the tools being put in place for totalitarian control if a government decides to use them that way. But all they have to say is 'we respect civil liberties of course, but what about the rights of people to walk down the street safely without being harrassed by hoodies, or their car broken into, or attacked by terrorist extremists' and most people will nod, accept it, and carry on.
You try to explain the risks and implications of it, and they honestly don't care - the government would never use these things against *them*, they'll only be used against those 'nasty youngsters hanging around the corner shop' (black or otherwise), or those 'horrid muslim suicide bombers'.
To put it bluntly, most people just don't care about privacy rights, because they're certain as 'good people' they have nothing to fear. They care about their wallets and their families and their comfort, and indstinct privacy rights are well down on that list.
Expansys in the UK is doing pre-orders for the MSI wind; from what I can see the linux version is identical to the windows xp home one in hardware spec (same ram, HD, 3 cell battery, BT included) but £30 cheaper.
Enigma was indeed broken by the poles in 1932 through the use of german sloppy procedures ( giving known cribs), and their work caused the inital breaks of enigma - full credit to them. The automation was british, as was the day-to-day testing of the cribs and proposed solutions from the bombes during the war. The naval introduction of a 4th rotor to enigma caused a shut-out of bletchley for 10 months before they found another way 'in' (the short weather reports were sent using only three rotors, thus allowing the existing bombes to work on the cribs from the weather and short signal books)
Enigma was the field unit cipher system.
Lorenz was the german headquarters and fixed station cipher system for teleprinters, with high-level communications. That was broken by the use of Colossus, the first programmable digital, electronic, computing device in december 1943, again at Bletchley.
The poles did the initial crucial work on enigma, Bletchley broke many new versions of engima and lorenz and carried the load of allied decryption for years, with the americans stepping in near the end of the war with a much bigger budget and faster machines.
However you slice it, the intel work at Bletchley was crucial for the war effort - it's often estimated to have shortened the war by at least two years, and saved many allied ships.
That the British government appears happy to let it and the rebuilt equipment fade away is disgusting.
Basic - and not so basic - routers can sometimes fall over under the load of P2P all on their own. Specifically, they come with very small amounts of RAM, and building large NAT tables to keep track of all your connections to potentially hundreds of others simultaneously can be too much for them, and sometimes upnp is the culprit.
http://www.azureuswiki.com/index.php/Bad_routers
is a good place to start to find out if yours is known problematic.
The thing I object to most of the installation restrictions as stands at the moment is a lifetime install limit. On mass effect, this is 3 installs before you have to make an expensive phone call to EA tech support to plead on a 'case-by-case basis' to be allowed to install your game for a 4th time. Yes, uninstalling and reinstalling into the same copy of windows on the same pc will be 'free' but upgrade the hardware or reinstall windows, and it's another activation gone forever.
Far, far too low. I'm not going to buy a game that will still working in a few months or a year because I've upgraded my gaming rig once too often, and I'm at the mercy of tech support as to whether I'll be allowed to play my own property.
Vicarious copyright infringement is actually a specific offence of indirect copyright infringement in the US. It's where someone has a direct financial interest in the infringing actions being committed by another and has the ability to control it, even if they do not know that the infringement is taking place and do not directly take part in it.
The other form of indirect infringement, contributory infringement, requires (1) knowledge of the infringing activity and (2) a material contribution -- actual assistance or inducement -- to the alleged piracy.
These are the laws that were used to bring down napster. In the US, because of these laws, running a tracker is actually pretty illegal. It's assisting others to breach copyright even if you yourself don't, and the tracker itself has no copyrighted material.
And yes, google should be worried. By indexing the content of sites such as torrentspy, they potentially open themselves up to the same charges. They bought youtube specifically to get in on the lawsuit by viacom, so they could help affect the judgement.
Note, one of the big differences with the piratebay is that sweden does not have offences of contributary or vicarious copyright infringement, so running a tracker is legal there.
The best advantage of a gaming mouse, in addition to extra buttons over a standard mouse is a higher resolution in hardware. I turn the game sensitivity down, and the mouse sensitivity up, and it's simply more precise than whacking up the pixel jump count that increasing the mouse speed in game does. That really does make a difference when say, sniping, or tank fights in BF2. Plus adjusting the resolution on the fly, with buttons on the mouse makes switching from sniper to soldier on tf2 a lot easier. I will adjust my dpi in a range from 800 to 2000 in-game easily depending on class. Try doing that with a cheap mouse.
I personally use a lachesis because
1) i'm left-handed, and razer are the only ones who actually make gaming mice for lefties
2) it's more comfortable than a copperhead
3) I know how to program the buttons, including turning off ones on the grip side that I hit accidentally (left for me, right for the reviewer)
I use a logitech G15 keyboard because my saitek died, and the logitech seems nice and robust, while also allowing multiple keypresses at once (cheap keyboards suck at chording). I have a steelseries 5L mousepad at home and work because it combines the comfort of cloth with the smoothness of a hard pad, which keeps my micefeet alive longer and is more comfortable.
I have the same cheap logitech headset the reviewer does when I want a light headset, and the steelseries 5h when i want something more enclosed and meaty.
The reviewer is still using gaming gear, he's just using older gaming gear rather than the very latest. An mx518 is still a high-res gaming mouse, it's just a bit older. Yes, the "latest and greatest" won't make much of a difference to your frag count compared to older gaming gear, but it makes a hell of a difference over a $5 2 button wheelmouse and $10 cherry plastic keyboard when you try to press three buttons at once. (stafe, backwards, reload or turn,brake,handbrake)
I just cancelled my pre-order for mass effect PC in the UK. I went through the new securom nightmare with Bioshock, and ended up returning my game for a refund. I'm not going through this again.
Here's the problems:
Bioshock didn't ship with a complete game on disc, leading to hours waiting for overloaded servers to connect and deliver up the missing parts on launch day. EA servers are well known for struggling when there's heavy load so I expect there to be similar problems.
Bioshock securom shipped with two lifetime activations. Reinstall windows? New activation. Replace motherboard? New activation. New user account? New activation. Every time after that, ring up tech support, spend a while on hold, then proving you own a legitimate copy by sending a digital photo of disc plus serial number to tech support in the US, while from the UK. Expensive, slow and very very frustrating, especially since the techs initially wouldn't even help for the first few days. It tooks months in the end for the 'release an activation' tool to come out, and that's a nightmare in itself.
3 activations? Given the amount I upgrade my gaming PC and reinstall windows, I'll be out of those in months if not weeks. I'm *not* jumping through hoops on the phone every time to reinstall my legitimate owned game because I've upgraded hardware and reinstalled windows more than 3 times in the lifetime of owning the game. And before you ask, my legit copy of windows is VLK licenced, and doesn't require activation.
Now the new and worse activation nightmare. Activation every 10 days? So I decide to install on a gaming laptop. If that laptop doesn't have an internet connection at the time I want to play, I won't be able to, because it's been sat unpowered in the bag for a fortnight, and I don't have an internet connection. Heaven forbid I want to play mass effect on the train, or on holiday.
Putting 'internet required' on the box does not excuse this rediculous scheme. They're going to massively inconvenience thousands of legitimate gamers wanting to play their own property when they choose, and they simply won't be able to. I won't buy a single player game that's deliberately crippled to stop me playing it unless I check in with the licence servers before I play. I've better ways to spend my money.
Pirates, on the other hand, will be playing a completely unencumbered game without any problems. It took less than 9 days for the bioshock DRM to be patched out and the cracked version to hit the internet. Legitimate paying customers are still massively inconvenienced by the DRM and stupid hoop-jumping, while pirates get a simple and easy experience.
I can't think of a better way to kill sales of the game and drive people to piracy than this new even worse version of securom than Bioshock.
And spore? I was really looking forward to that game, even more than mass effect. But I'm not going through the frustration I had with securom on bioshock again. No damn way.
You swear under penalty of perjury that you own the copyright material you're posting the DMCA takedown about. There's no penalty if it turns out your copyright has nothing to with the material on the website.
The perjury section is to stop people sending out fake notices pretending they own Disney's material, and thus getting websites taken down in Disney's name. Disney can send out notices all day long about their own material, regardless of whether the DMCA target is a valid one or not.
This is theoretically the plan with windows 7. A new, clean minimal and modular OS based on the server line, without binary compatibility for old apps, with a new API for the new OS. Instead, there will be a separate backwards compatible API for a set of monolithic libraries providing all the old functions - same principle as Classic on OSX. Old apps will run as before, but through a compatibility layer to the new OS, while apps can be recompiled to talk directly to the new API, and presumably take advantage.
IE's rendering engine can go in the legacy libraries for old apps, for example, while being a modular component that's fully removable in the new OS (thus keeping the EU competition comissioner happy)
That's the theory anyway. Whether MS manage to pull it off is another question.
You misunderstand. Search for say, 'lastminute.com travel' on uk google and you will get paid sponsor links for competitors to lastminute.com. Assuming google allowed those competiting businesses to add lastminute.com as a keyword for *their* link to show up for, then google is selling competitors the ability to get search results off a trademark that doesn't belong to them.
Imagine if a supermarket put up a big advertising board at the front of the store with pepsi branding and trademarks, but underneath it was just coke cans for sale, with the whole thing paid for by coke. Pepsi would be pissed at coke and the supermarket, and probably institute a trademark lawsuit. The whole point of a trademark is that it allows you to distinguish your brand, that products sold under the brand are from you.
Trademarks are there to protect customers, so that when they buy something under a particular trademark, they know who it came from - and thus can infer other likely qualities about the product from that, without some shite third-party pretending to be a quality brand through fake branding when in fact, it's shite.
Most tv and films (outside the US anyway) are broadcast in 16:9 or scope. There's a lot more media watchers than there are programmers, so widescreen makes a lot more sense for the average user.
That said, there should still be some 4:3 form factors for diehards. The reason there aren't is almost all the users want widescreen, and I say this as someone who gives people a choice when ordering them new PCs.
Most media codecs are covered by US patents. That means that fedora cannot legally distribute them for free - as a US company, they have to obey US law. Most places outside the US do not allow the patenting of codecs, so places are available to download those codecs legally and easily for free - as long as you're also outside the US.
On this basis, the 'vast number of techno numpties' won't use windows either, as the set of modern codecs you get to start with are a rubbish mp3 decoder and WMA/WMV support. No x264, no AAC, no xvid, no FLV etc etc out of the box.
Paid for distros usually have the licenced codecs included, as part of the cost, so they're even better than windows.
But until the US gets sane laws with regards patenting mathematics, free (as in beer) distros based or heavily distributed in the US cannot include patented codecs without taking a huge risk of being sued.
That's mainly because the utility companies demand is increasing slower.
Specifically, electricity - just compare the number of plug sockets in a house built today compared to a house built in your grandparents day, the number of ring mains, and the size of the breaker board.
The demand for electricity in the home has soared since it was first implemented. It has plateau'd now somewhat in the west, but that's due to the cost of making it going up steeply, and more wareness of energy efficiency.
Most people were pretty happy with basic broadband compared to dialup. Now streaming HD video is becoming commonplace, faster broadband is needed. I think 50Mb - 100Mb will be a decent plateau spot for a while. At least until the next bandwidth hungry app comes along.
If you're only designing a page that's going to be seen by your grandmother and friends, who cares whether it's accessible?
If you're designing the page for a bank or major retailer or new site, you should be thinking about accessibility as part of the design. Good designs degrade gracefully, and are still usable without all the javascript, flash and css, ideally with the bulk navigation links at the bottom.
The whole brilliance of separating content from layout with css is that you can have a setup that works for a full-fat all-singing browser, and one that works well for a screen-reader, or a mobile browser with minimal extra effort.
SMBFS is where you're effectively pretending to be a windows 98 client to the windows host. The code is very old and barely maintained for the last few years.
//[windows machine name]/[share] /[mount] -o "username="
CIFS is the protocol that effectively replaced SMB in windows, and the CIFS module means you're pretending to be a windows 2000/XP client to the windows host.
mount -t cifs
is all you need for a manual mount, or use "mount.cifs", assuming cifs is compiled into the kernel or loaded as a module.
Changing "smbfs" to "cifs" in fstab is pretty much all you need to do to migrate across (and swap username for user, IIRC)
CUPS should not be affected, it's supported CIFS for a good long time.
Your job as an IT guys is to support users.
Yes, yes it is. userS, plural. Most senior IT guys are wearing some form of network or sysadmin hat, which means their work is important to 10's or hundreds of individual users. You're expecting a senior IT guy to drop everything, stop working on his other priorities that support many others users in order to pander to one prima donna who expects his machine to be given top priority despite the fact he broke it in the first place with unsupported software.
On top of that, you expect a senior guy to fawn over you and treat you like you're super-special - holding his own and pointing out that he has other important things to be doing that support many other users instead of major effort to recover a self-inflicted injury mean you accuse him of an attitude problem.
IT time is precious and limited, there's never enough to go round. Despite what you may think, you and your 'IT department avoiding' attitude are the problem here.
You try and pull such a hissy fit in my department, me and the director would tell you where to take a hike. IT are a whole company support department, not your personal carpet department. You know what you sound like?
"I pay my taxes, I pay your salary. How dare you give me a parking ticket, I'm your boss I am!"