Makes you wonder if global warming had anything to do with the lake forming in the first place.
What's that they say - if the only tool you have is a hammer... Why is it global warming fanatics feel the need to associate everything that happens with global warming - oh, right, they're fanatics.
You have just nailed one of the greatest flaws in typical human reasoning. Humans attempt to judge the source rather than information. Hitler could have written the most profound poetry, work that gives the reader a beneficial life altering insight into their soul. Only a few historians would ever read it and even they may not read it with an open mind.
There is too much information to give everything equal consideration. We apply a higher level filter to determine which sources of information we should spend our time on. The filter is not perfect, but without it you can not focus on anything specific. We miss some gems because of this, we think within a box, we value people who can think outside the box - but consider that if you are so far outside the box that you can't find the box you are no longer "clever" you are just "crazy".
Seriously, I don't think I'd have much trouble explaining to my son (6, just finishing Kindergarten) that Pluto may or may not be a planet and that there are a variety of reasons that it's official definition has changed. In fact, I'm pretty sure I've had that conversation with him at some point. Give your kids a chance - sure, half the time it goes over their head (at 6 anyway) but it's amazing how hard they *try* to understand and I'm often suprised at how much they do get.
And also entertained when they play it back in a completely different manner.
Yes, but what would have happened if online sales of music were dominated by WMA. Microsoft would effectively control the paid online distribution of music. Ask yourself how much that would suck. People disliked that Apple had to use a proprietary format to sell music online, but we now know that they didn't want to. I don't think I would say the same about Microsoft. If the format is not proprietary to them, then its not in the interest of Microsoft to promote.
How do we "now know apple didn't want to use a proprietary format"? Because Jobs now says so? Now that it doesn't really matter anymore because iPod is the defacto standard? Apple *did* take control of the majority of the online music sales market while owning the only device capable of playing said music and refusing to license the format to anyone else. These are the facts that we "know".
Microsoft would not have "controlled the paid online distribution of music" if WMA took off - take a look at any of the several music selling sites that use protected WMA, microsoft is not controlling them. WMA's DRM system is a flexible way to define and enforce content rights (and to that end they seriously overdesigned it and missed the point, but I digress). It is not a way for microsoft to control music sales by any stretch - given that anyone can sell WMA DRM files, anyone can set the rights limits however they want (or, in reality, however the RIAA lets them). Anyone can build a player that supports playing the content back.
The problem is that they aren't admitting there are issues with the Xbox360. They're claiming there are no issues and installing "perfectly normal" hardware updates that, mysteriously, are directly related to these nonexistent issues. They're trying to do just enough to not get sued.
They don't have to admit anything. They just need to meet the warranty contrat that they provided and go the extra mile as needed to ensure a positive overall relationship with their customers. Given that they *retroactively* changed their warranty from 90 days to 1yr it's hard to say they aren't going the extra mile.
Sure, the 90 day warranty was unreasonably short, but it was what it was and no one was told they would have a 1yr warranty and then only given a 90 day warranty, instead millions of people were told they were getting 90 day warranties and were later given 1yr warranties.
They are trying to improve the product to decrease servicing costs and improve end user experience without getting sued. It may sound the same but it isn't. The 360 hardware design isn't perfect - nothing is! Just because they are improving it does not mean that they should be obligated to improve every single unit sold so far. There are plenty of customers, the vast majority of customers, who are experiencing no issues with their original hardware.
Going with the whole monopoly thing, if your money is coming from a monopoly in one area, are you allow to start paying people out in other areas to exclude the competition?
Anyone know the legal issues around this, or is it acceptable?
You simply could not compete at all in the console marketplace if you were not allowed to buy exclusivity. Every console maker does it, has done it for a long time, and will continue to do it.
Personally, I find it a disturbing trend that Microsoft is throwing money at developers to make them develop custom content for the 360.
Do you find it disturbing that your employer pays you to do work for them and expects you to not sell that work to others independently? Really that's basically what's going on here - Microsoft is either paying for these expansion packs or they are funding the creation of them - whatever. This happens all the time.
Would you eat pigs, slaughtered industrially for meat? Would you eat dogs/cats, slaughtered industrially for meat? Would you eat dolphins, slaughtered industrially for meat? Would you eat lemurs, slaughtered industrially for meat? Would you eat organutangs, slaughtered industrially for meat? Would you eat chimpanzees, slaughtered industrially for meat?
Yes to all of the above if they are healthy, tasty, and safe.
Would you eat genetically 50/50 human/chimpanzee crosses, slaughtered industrially for meat? Would you eat 90/10 human/chimpanzee crosses, slaughtered industrially for meat?
These don't even exist, so I'm not going to bother responding.
Would you eat 100% humans, slaughtered industrially for meat?
No one slaughters humans industrially for food and no one will since there are known bioligical problems with consuming your own species (in most cases, some animals may benefit from this, but we don't). The "ethical" history against canabalism is probably no different from Jews not wanting to consume pork - it is (or was for pork) a bad idea for reasons too complex to explain to everyone so people are simply taught from birth that it is taboo.
Some people are vegetarians just to be "healthy" - though these people are usually smart enough to consume a few normal animal protien sources, eggs for example. The fact is that fat, sugar, and protien laden foods are so abundent now in the first world that it is simply not necessary to consume meat as often as we can financially afford to. Over the top vegan types basically are out of touch with nature - their sense of self-importance is so great they fail to understand how biologically similar we are to every other living thing and that there is nothing wrong with eating normally.
Of course there is no system in place for paying taxes on your alternative-source fuel, nor, to my knowledge, any actual law in place saying that you can't use an alternative fuel (other than farm gas) on a public road.
If the system of taxing based on gas is broken, fix it - though at this stage of the game the number of people driving with something other than normal fuel is so low it's hardly worth worrying about.
It would cost more to pass and enforce the law, make a system for recieving funds from the fuel etc than they would make on it. If the number became high enough there would be a distribution system in place (vegetable oil at the pump) which could effectively tax it.
Nevermind that growing crops to create fuel oil has so many environmental problems that it shouldn't even be considered at this point.
There are CableCard TV tuners for PC's as mentioned in this article. They can both receive AND decrypt digital cable. They will not work in anything but Vista (if at all), and the software is designed to allow you to view, but not record premium digital content.
That's not true.
They let you record everything (sans things marked no record, which is next to nothing, and is the same with analog). They also encrypt *everything*, even the non-premium stuff, when using a cable card. This is law laid down by cable labs, not Microsoft. You can blame Microsoft for caving, but really they had no leg to stand on - if they didn't do it this way then cable wouldn't agree to them doing it at all.
Cable companies hate cable card. It takes away their control over the recieving device. They are doing everything they can possibly get away with to prevent cable card from succeeding. Thus far in my observations of Sattelite they are not behaving in the same way and if we're lucky the more open attitude of the sattelite companies will eventually serve as leverage forcing the cable companies to open up.
Actually, I believe that what they're talking about is closer to NTFS's Volume Copy Shadow Service.
We are both right. System Restore is built on top of the Volume Shadow Copy Service. System restore is a user-visible feature (pervious versions tab on files in Vista, and the actual system restore checkpoint UI in both Vista and XP), Volume Shadow Copy is a technology used for this and other things (live backups of large server systems for example).
Thanks, I was under the impression going from HFS to ZFS was not so trivial. I thought it was more like going from fat32 to ntfs and not like going from ext2 to ext3.
Windows has long included tools to convert fat/fat32 volumes to ntfs in-place (both during upgrade and after the fact). I'm sure Apple can pull this off if they want to.
Now, with ZFS, Apple can advertise having a next-generation omega filesystem to replace the long-in-the-tooth Journaled HFS+, which was significantly better than NTFS.
NTFS versus ZFS is a joke;-)
Care to back that up? I don't know the pros and cons of HFS, but it sounds like if they needed to change filesystems to support what is basically the same idea as Windows's system restore feature (time machine) then HFS wasn't "significantly better than NTFS. As to ZFS, can you elaborate on what makes it any better than NTFS (I'm not saying it isn't...)
I am(not officially) a subject for memory studies having to do with alcholol. The wierd thing is that when I am completely sober I cannot remember many things from when I was previously drunk off my ass, but, if that drunk off my ass state is re-introduced, I can remember everthing.
It's called state dependent learning and it's a widely known concept.
I believe you can, in fact, learn to be a better drunk driver.
Re:Data aggregation
on
Photosynth Demo
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· Score: 2, Insightful
So, if you think that this photosynth thing is fine, then I think you've got to grant that the TIA project is fine.
Technology is a tool. It is great to use hammers to build houses. It is not great to use hammers to bludgeon people's skulls. In no way does thinking photosynth is fine imply that TIA is fine - the fact that they (may) require the same technology to be possible does not in any way make them morally equivalent.
PDF printing shows how slow and greedy M$ is and that's a good reason to ditch them.
Actually, you can thank Adobe for this. Adobe wouldn't even allow MS to ship PDF support inbox in Office 2007, that's why it is a seperate download. Adobe is afraid that if everyone knows they can save PDF files with Office 2007 there will be no reason to buy anything from Adobe.
It has taken M$ till 2007 to get pdf printing and, despite what you say, people are going to have to upgrade to get Office 2007 working.
Why should I give any weight to this unfounded accusation? No previous version of Office required a PC upgrade and my present PC is running Office 2007 just fine. Office just doesn't have the history of requiring more resources with each new version that Windows has.
Also... were these systems ran all the way default, as in, boots up as Administrator with no password? (again, not sure how much that matters in a test like this)
By default the Administrator account in Vista is disabled and you can not log in as Administrator. You need to go to mmc to change this, it isn't visible in the normal "users" control panel applet (and you shouldn't change this, if for no other reason than because MS did not spend a significant amount time testing Vista running as Admin and there are discrepancies since Admin is a magic account and the only interactive account with no UAC.)
In a letter to Jobs, Gates even layed out his strategy and suggested Steve adopt it as well. Make your OS run on as many platforms as possible, and team with hardware manufacturures to make it pre-installed. Then leverage your OS to make big money on the applications. Bill followed his own advice, Steve didn't. Now Bill's a deca-billionaire, and Steve's just a billionaire. C'est L'vie
If they had both used this strategy then one of them would have won and the other would be gone. Because they have different strategies they both can exist and be profitable today.
I've found that Ogg Vorbis offers noticeably better fidelity than mp3 at comparable comression. It's not something that you can easily hear with a portable player and cheap headphones, but on quality gear the difference is obvious.
This is widely known fact; you really don't need to back it up. OGG, WMA, and AAC all use concepts that were unavailable or impractical when MP3 was created and they all have far better fidelity:bitrate ratios. As to whether one is noticably better than another among these you could argue all day and never agree.
This is not unlike comparing DivX, WMV, and H.264 to MPEG2. They are all far better than MPEG2, for many of the same reasons (and are all far more costly to encode and decode). None of them is enough better than the others that you could find widespread agreement on which is the best.
What is absolutely amazing is that the Onion article predates the product (and it was hilarious at the time, the fact that Gilette actually did it is... mind boggling). Oh, and I have one.:)
Before you type in your login/bank information, check to make sure that the URL in the URL toolbar is the URL of your bank. If it isn't, then this is most likely a phishing scam, and you shouldn't enter any information.
Then you get companies like citibank which insists on putting their online credit card access under "citicards.com". How about educating the banks themselves? Get it through their head that they need ONE site with ONE name which is their OFFICIAL name that their customers know.
Then build a setup where a given domain can be "locked down" to be https only, have browsers not even allow sites on this list to be accessed via http. Gobble up all reasonable variants (.com,.org,.net etc) by either having them all registered or blocking all but the official one.
That is what I hate with MS/closed source. People who know what is best for you.
Yes, that's just what we need. People with different opinions of acceptable gameplay quality causing lag in everyone else's games because they want to have 'private chat' with four people at once. I agree that I don't like the limitation, but I also know that the games and the platform are tested with known boundary conditions to make them behave as well as possible for as many people as possible. Consoles are all about simplicity and consistency, if you start modding the console, even if it's not to cheat, you will break that. Of course, if you can mod the console in one way you can also mod it to cheat, and unless they take a strong stance on "no modded consoles on live" they can not prevent cheaters.
Slashdot Mirror
What's that they say - if the only tool you have is a hammer
There is too much information to give everything equal consideration. We apply a higher level filter to determine which sources of information we should spend our time on. The filter is not perfect, but without it you can not focus on anything specific. We miss some gems because of this, we think within a box, we value people who can think outside the box - but consider that if you are so far outside the box that you can't find the box you are no longer "clever" you are just "crazy".
Seriously, I don't think I'd have much trouble explaining to my son (6, just finishing Kindergarten) that Pluto may or may not be a planet and that there are a variety of reasons that it's official definition has changed. In fact, I'm pretty sure I've had that conversation with him at some point. Give your kids a chance - sure, half the time it goes over their head (at 6 anyway) but it's amazing how hard they *try* to understand and I'm often suprised at how much they do get.
And also entertained when they play it back in a completely different manner.
How do we "now know apple didn't want to use a proprietary format"? Because Jobs now says so? Now that it doesn't really matter anymore because iPod is the defacto standard? Apple *did* take control of the majority of the online music sales market while owning the only device capable of playing said music and refusing to license the format to anyone else. These are the facts that we "know".
Microsoft would not have "controlled the paid online distribution of music" if WMA took off - take a look at any of the several music selling sites that use protected WMA, microsoft is not controlling them. WMA's DRM system is a flexible way to define and enforce content rights (and to that end they seriously overdesigned it and missed the point, but I digress). It is not a way for microsoft to control music sales by any stretch - given that anyone can sell WMA DRM files, anyone can set the rights limits however they want (or, in reality, however the RIAA lets them). Anyone can build a player that supports playing the content back.
They don't have to admit anything. They just need to meet the warranty contrat that they provided and go the extra mile as needed to ensure a positive overall relationship with their customers. Given that they *retroactively* changed their warranty from 90 days to 1yr it's hard to say they aren't going the extra mile.
Sure, the 90 day warranty was unreasonably short, but it was what it was and no one was told they would have a 1yr warranty and then only given a 90 day warranty, instead millions of people were told they were getting 90 day warranties and were later given 1yr warranties.
They are trying to improve the product to decrease servicing costs and improve end user experience without getting sued. It may sound the same but it isn't. The 360 hardware design isn't perfect - nothing is! Just because they are improving it does not mean that they should be obligated to improve every single unit sold so far. There are plenty of customers, the vast majority of customers, who are experiencing no issues with their original hardware.
You simply could not compete at all in the console marketplace if you were not allowed to buy exclusivity. Every console maker does it, has done it for a long time, and will continue to do it.
Do you find it disturbing that your employer pays you to do work for them and expects you to not sell that work to others independently? Really that's basically what's going on here - Microsoft is either paying for these expansion packs or they are funding the creation of them - whatever. This happens all the time.
Some people are vegetarians just to be "healthy" - though these people are usually smart enough to consume a few normal animal protien sources, eggs for example. The fact is that fat, sugar, and protien laden foods are so abundent now in the first world that it is simply not necessary to consume meat as often as we can financially afford to. Over the top vegan types basically are out of touch with nature - their sense of self-importance is so great they fail to understand how biologically similar we are to every other living thing and that there is nothing wrong with eating normally.
Of course there is no system in place for paying taxes on your alternative-source fuel, nor, to my knowledge, any actual law in place saying that you can't use an alternative fuel (other than farm gas) on a public road.
If the system of taxing based on gas is broken, fix it - though at this stage of the game the number of people driving with something other than normal fuel is so low it's hardly worth worrying about.
It would cost more to pass and enforce the law, make a system for recieving funds from the fuel etc than they would make on it. If the number became high enough there would be a distribution system in place (vegetable oil at the pump) which could effectively tax it.
Nevermind that growing crops to create fuel oil has so many environmental problems that it shouldn't even be considered at this point.
That's not true.
They let you record everything (sans things marked no record, which is next to nothing, and is the same with analog). They also encrypt *everything*, even the non-premium stuff, when using a cable card. This is law laid down by cable labs, not Microsoft. You can blame Microsoft for caving, but really they had no leg to stand on - if they didn't do it this way then cable wouldn't agree to them doing it at all.
Cable companies hate cable card. It takes away their control over the recieving device. They are doing everything they can possibly get away with to prevent cable card from succeeding. Thus far in my observations of Sattelite they are not behaving in the same way and if we're lucky the more open attitude of the sattelite companies will eventually serve as leverage forcing the cable companies to open up.
We are both right. System Restore is built on top of the Volume Shadow Copy Service. System restore is a user-visible feature (pervious versions tab on files in Vista, and the actual system restore checkpoint UI in both Vista and XP), Volume Shadow Copy is a technology used for this and other things (live backups of large server systems for example).
Windows has long included tools to convert fat/fat32 volumes to ntfs in-place (both during upgrade and after the fact). I'm sure Apple can pull this off if they want to.
Care to back that up? I don't know the pros and cons of HFS, but it sounds like if they needed to change filesystems to support what is basically the same idea as Windows's system restore feature (time machine) then HFS wasn't "significantly better than NTFS. As to ZFS, can you elaborate on what makes it any better than NTFS (I'm not saying it isn't...)
It's called state dependent learning and it's a widely known concept.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-dependent_lear
I believe you can, in fact, learn to be a better drunk driver.
Technology is a tool. It is great to use hammers to build houses. It is not great to use hammers to bludgeon people's skulls. In no way does thinking photosynth is fine imply that TIA is fine - the fact that they (may) require the same technology to be possible does not in any way make them morally equivalent.
So was Picasa. And Google Earth (keyhole). What's your point?
You needed the value of the index column, then you were able to retrieve the entire row. Simple as that.
Actually, you can thank Adobe for this. Adobe wouldn't even allow MS to ship PDF support inbox in Office 2007, that's why it is a seperate download. Adobe is afraid that if everyone knows they can save PDF files with Office 2007 there will be no reason to buy anything from Adobe.
Why should I give any weight to this unfounded accusation? No previous version of Office required a PC upgrade and my present PC is running Office 2007 just fine. Office just doesn't have the history of requiring more resources with each new version that Windows has.
By default the Administrator account in Vista is disabled and you can not log in as Administrator. You need to go to mmc to change this, it isn't visible in the normal "users" control panel applet (and you shouldn't change this, if for no other reason than because MS did not spend a significant amount time testing Vista running as Admin and there are discrepancies since Admin is a magic account and the only interactive account with no UAC.)
That doesn't make it any less funny.
If they had both used this strategy then one of them would have won and the other would be gone. Because they have different strategies they both can exist and be profitable today.
This is widely known fact; you really don't need to back it up. OGG, WMA, and AAC all use concepts that were unavailable or impractical when MP3 was created and they all have far better fidelity:bitrate ratios. As to whether one is noticably better than another among these you could argue all day and never agree.
This is not unlike comparing DivX, WMV, and H.264 to MPEG2. They are all far better than MPEG2, for many of the same reasons (and are all far more costly to encode and decode). None of them is enough better than the others that you could find widespread agreement on which is the best.
What is absolutely amazing is that the Onion article predates the product (and it was hilarious at the time, the fact that Gilette actually did it is ... mind boggling). Oh, and I have one. :)
Then you get companies like citibank which insists on putting their online credit card access under "citicards.com". How about educating the banks themselves? Get it through their head that they need ONE site with ONE name which is their OFFICIAL name that their customers know.
Then build a setup where a given domain can be "locked down" to be https only, have browsers not even allow sites on this list to be accessed via http. Gobble up all reasonable variants (.com,
Yes, that's just what we need. People with different opinions of acceptable gameplay quality causing lag in everyone else's games because they want to have 'private chat' with four people at once. I agree that I don't like the limitation, but I also know that the games and the platform are tested with known boundary conditions to make them behave as well as possible for as many people as possible. Consoles are all about simplicity and consistency, if you start modding the console, even if it's not to cheat, you will break that. Of course, if you can mod the console in one way you can also mod it to cheat, and unless they take a strong stance on "no modded consoles on live" they can not prevent cheaters.