Don't you just hate how they are paying people to fill Wikipedia with this kind of spam? No bother, the truth will out.
Do you realise that none of the text that you quoted to support your claim was from the Wikipedia entry? It was all from the referenced MSDN blog. Surely you can't blame Microsoft from paying their "Program Manager for the Windows SDK Tools and Build Environment" to write an blog entry on their own Microsoft Developer Network website?
Your information is out of date. Modern plasma sets do not suffer from burn-in. I used to be paranoid about what I had on my TV, but now I realise that I do not have to worry.
I leave DVD menus on for hours (accidentally), play games, watch 4x3 shows galore, leave it paused for ages and there is no sign of any image retention. I have even left very bright setup menus from my PVR on overnight on several occasions. Every so often I put a few test images on screen to check that the colours are consistent across the screen. There has never been the slightest problem found.
I have a mid-range Panasonic, so can't vouch for the quality at the cheapie end of the market.
Hang on. He is lying because you don't know how he came up with that figure? And you back this up by just guessing that it is wrong and calling it reality.
He is just a blogger, so it is possible that he just made it all up, but that would only make him equally uninformed as yourself.
Every application or shared library has to have a unique, registered CreatorID. It would be easy to track which developers were still active (writing new programs) based on who was still submitting new CreatorIDs. I do not know if that is how this number was divined, but it does show that it could be accurate.
Just because you have not heard of all 160,000 developers does not mean to say that they do not exist. A lot of the development work is for in-house applications. I occassionally write some programs just for myself. Nothing ever gets published, so you would have never heard of me. That doesn't mean that I don't exist (I think).
If I am incorrect, and it turns out that I do not exist, then feel free to ignore me.
How many episodes of that were there? I caught one online and loved it, but never saw signs of any more.
There were 6 episodes (as is often the case with a TV series from Britain).
However, if you saw one episode then you saw them all. It was disappointing that it was all very template stuff. The first episode was the best, so I hope that it was the one that you saw.
In this case they left out my link to a boing boing story that might be useful for those trying to get out of America.
That wasn't a useful story, it was just an advertisement for a book. The link in the advert even has referral kickbacks from Amazon. I have no idea why this got approved by the Slashdot editors.
And advertising links aside, the whole question should have been modded as flamebait.
I access my yahoo mail on my mobile phone, and today it suddenly became absolutely useless. Now it redirects to a WAP version with significantly reduced functionality, where it previously had the usual interface that I am used to on my computer. I am currently running Opera on my Nokia 9300, which is pretty much as capable as version 8.5 that I have on my laptop (yes, I must upgrade that sometime).
Now, I can no longer access any attachments! Just because I am on a phone does not mean that I can't read documents, spreadsheets and PDFs. Also, when entering a message you only get an edit control that is 8 characters across by 4 lines down. This is complete rubbish! I have a screen width of 640 pixels, and I would rather use more than a tenth of it to see more than four words at once! I can no longer delete (or mark as spam) bulk messages. I have to open each one up to delete them. On a slow connection, this is pitiful.
I really don't mind having the option of a cut down interface because the old one did take a long time to download each page, but it should be optional if it means a reduction of features and forces us to learn a different interface to access my mail. The old version worked.
I wouldn't mind seeing a "permitted controls" list, so you could allow say javascript, xmlhttprequest, flash and java, while leaving the rest disabled
Well as you have noted, Javascript and Java already have their own configuration in the IE security settings, so you already can turn them on and off individually.
There is also a facility to allow only certain Active X controls and plug ins. In the Security->Custom Level dialog you can see "Administrator Approved" as an option for some of the Active X settings. If you select this, then you can configure which controls can be used with the IE Admin Kit.
Alternatively, a simple *.reg file can be made to add controls to the list. That is the method that I have used. I was given a registry file to add Flash to the approved list, which I used on a coworker's computer. Something like this (untested, I just found this example with Google).
By the way, I really don't know how the grandparent was moderated as Insightful whilst being so utterly wrong. Disabling Active X has been part of IE's configuration since they first introduced the feature.
I used to be a big fan of the trackpad, and I hated it when we purchased a bunch of Thinkpads that only had a clitoris (which I think more accurately describes how you use it).
But after using it a while, I was amazed at how inefficient it was when I tried the trackpad again. I like being able to move the mouse around all day without having to move my hand or finger at all. All you have to do is just twiddle the clit. It just seems like second nature now.
But then, Firefox is the best choice for Windows 2000 and earlier operating systems since Microsoft chose not to make IE7 compatable with these OS's.
Unfortunately this will change when Firefox 3.0 is release and they choose to stop supporting the Win 9x operating systems. I wonder how long after that it will be before Windows 2000 falls off the supported list too.
Unless I misunderstand the concept of UNC resources, this is not a real UNC resource, since I am using drive letter instead of server and share name. Anyway, if it works, use it. But replacing all the backslashes with slashes is still extra work which is only necessary when the path has spaces in it.
Actually he really meant to say URL and not UNC. You are correct that a UNC should contain backslashes, but a URL (which is what you are getting with the file://) should only use the forward slash separator.
The reversed slash format is the biggest problem with the Microsoft platforms. They came about because CP/M used the/ character for command line arguments (which was faithfully copied into DOS), so when they added directory support to DOS then they had to use another symbol.
They have supported forward slashes in filenames since the days of DOS 3 or 4 (I think), but you occasionally find something that does not work with it. In this case UNC format is a prime example.
Consider, when you bought your DVD player and found that you couldn't fast forward certain parts of media (like those stupid logos and copyright notices) did you take it back to the store and ask for a refund? No, you just put up with it.
Actually, I refused to buy a DVD player because I objected to the region encoding and the way that the content provider can control what buttons I can press on my remote. It was not until I could get a player with these features hacked out (and also by then you could copy a DVD too) that I got my first player.
Since then I have purchased over a hundred DVDs. It probably would have been more, but I realised that it was cheaper to hire titles many times before it comes anywhere near the price of buying a DVD. Most of the titles that I own are foreign ones that are not available in my region.
Similarly, I will not be considering any DVD replacement until I know that I retain control of my machine. I don't really care whether they have copy protection on the discs, as long as it does not restrict how I use my legal copy. Until I am sure that I will be able to buy a title anywhere in the world, skip through its trailers and be able to watch it when my Internet connection goes down then HD-DVD and Blueray can just sit on the shelf.
Not that I have any real need for a higher resolution, but I would have liked a greater bitrate and colour depth.
Nobody is forcing you to upgrade. You can quite happily live with cheap cards without having to upgrade all the time. The games system that I am currently in the process of upgrading has a 32MB TNT2 card! As you can imagine, even this 7300LE would be a dramatic upgrade for me.
I can use this low end system because I don't buy the latest games. I can load up an old game like No One Lives Forever without any problems. Now I am finally getting through my backlog of old games that I bought cheap or second hand*, I am going to upgrade my whole system to something newer. But my system has gone way beyond your three year lifespan.
I admit that surviving on old equipment might be a bit extreme for most people here, but it doesn't bother me as it was around the time of the TNT2 era when I stopped constantly playing games in favour of other activities like work, sport and downloading porn.
Ah, porn! The great leveller of all video cards!
----
* There is another saving - I don't spend a fortune on new games either! Older bargain bin games, compilations and eBay 2nd hand games work on my system and same me money. Add that to your calculations.
True dat, the competition is... wait, the competition isn't either, so maybe the point is moot and you're just *shudder* an anti-nvidia troll?
There is no need to be paranoid about this. The grandparent was simply correcting the great grandparent's assumption that this card would have "DX9/10 support".
Admittedly, I had to go re-read the original message to see why the coward said this.
I have fond memories of Bard's Tale codewheels, and laughed for a solid ten minutes when I bought a re-released package a few years back of the old games and found the publishers themselves had added codewheel hacks to these legal, purchased versions of the games to avoid having to print up new ones.
I wonder if they used a crack written by somebody else. If so, they may have infringed on some poor pirate's copywritten software!
I'd rephrase that. I'd say the Win9x operating systems were sufficiently ill-designed that they simply weren't ever capable of running that kind of software, while Linux, even new variants, can be configured in such a fashion that they will run on such hardware, utilizing it in a far more efficient fashion than MS ever bothered to.
You know, those kinds of server apps that you were talking about could just as easily be run on Windows 98 if you wanted - they are not actually part of the Linux kernel!
We have a couple of old application servers running in our office running Windows 98 on Pentium 150 with 32MB. We occasionally think that we should upgrade them but they just keep working, so why bother making more work for ourselves. They will get phased out in the next round of server upgrades that we do, but only to consolidate our boxes and not because the underlying OS in incapable of doing the job.
I was always under the impression that retailers bought the product from the producers. Wal-Mart can sell these products for cheap because they buy ALOT of them. Then, if the labels think Wal-Mart isn't giving them enough money, then they don't have to sell them cd's. Maybe I'm just old-fashioned.
You have got it backwards. Wal-Mart sell a lot of CDs, so they can force their suppliers to lower their wholesale price or they will not buy from them. When faced with the choice of lower profits vs not being available to sell through the biggest chain (which would mean absolutely no profits) the suppliers have no choice.
Large retails stores are not good for suppliers, and in the long run not good for the consumers as it can result in lower quality, limited choice and fewer manufacturing jobs as the local manufacturers find that they cannot compete with the cheaper foreign companies.
On the other hand, my house if full of cool luxuries that my parents could never have afforded in their day. I guess that I am part of the problem too.
But to return to CDs, lower prices would certainly be a factor, but I think that the biggest problem for CD labels is that there are more alternative entertainment to spend our money on. Sure CD sales are declining, but DVD sales are going through the roof. I have found far too many instances where a DVD of a film is cheaper than the CD soundtrack.
I expect every view to have had thought put into it. Just because this isn't the default view doesn't mean it's not worth bothering with.
I use details view as my default, because I like to get as much information on the screen as I can. Just because you do not like that mode does not make it invalid. Should they have just removed the details mode completely? And anyway, if it is like XP then they have a "View->Choose Details..." menu to add/remove columns in this view.
the screen you're talking about fails in that regard by not showing all of the text. It's clipped on the right hand side where there's not enough space. It's lazy design.
I think that it is a great design. You can see enough text to get the meaning, but if you want more information then you just hover the mouse over it to see an expanded tooltip (which in XP was not perfect, as it did not wrap - I hope that this is fixed in Vista).
I do not know anyone who says that they use the Category View of the Control Panel. Everyone says that they use the Classic View. Showing the Categories in the details view might get people used to the structure of the new system. I will certainly give it a try, but if I end up disliking it (which is entirely probable) then I will just remove the column. Simple.
It was a big deal. Lot's of us here worked very hard to make sure that nothing bad happened and this really gets to me when people throw around the opinion that it was all a fuss over nothing.
When I was in my early teens back in the early 80s, I filled in a printed form that had "19___" to write in the year. "That's silly", I thought, "They will have to throw out all these forms when it gets to the year 2000.
I am sure that they did throw out the forms long before then, but I never had a problem with Y2K because I always had this incident in mind when coding my own programs.
In an industry that should be filled with pedants, it always surprised me that Y2K was as much of an issue as it was. However, I think that the reason people assumed that it was not a big deal was because a lot of them had been conned by consultants. Unfortunately, there was money to be made in scaring the crap out of everyone.
We had a guy manage to convince our manager that our computers would fail when the year changed, despite our assurances to the contrary. (What a suprise, management didn't trust the IT department again). Sure enough he proved it by showing that the clocks would reset back to 1980. I calmly change the clocks to 1/1/2000 and they worked fine. And when they logged into our network, their clocks would be automatically synced to our server clock.
But if I wasn't here, we would have either purchased expensive software to "fix" the problem or purchased new computers with a later BIOS. Meanwhile, the real problems that did require fixing were being attended to by people such as yourself without great fanfare and have long been forgotten.
The Christians are just annoyed that their viewpoint is under-represented. If the theatres gave equal billing to both angles, there's not much left to complain about.
That is true, they are under-represented. It is not as if the Christians have a massive organisation with outlets in every suburb to spread their message. Apart from the churches. And their TV shows.
Maybe their grievance would be valid if they gave equal billing to both angles in their own churches.
For all the naysayers - Think Different!
on
Mac mini to PC Hack
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· Score: 1
At the risk of repeating myself, I thought that this was interesting enough to post as a thread of it's own.
There have been a great number of people belittling what this guy has done. There are two camps:
He should not desecrate a Mac (the zealots)
This is a waste of time/money - what's the point? (the non-geeks)
Slashdot Mirror
what are you, some sort of looser? i could care less about you spelling nazi's.
Did I miss anything?
My calculator just says "E" when I enter the second formula.
Do you realise that none of the text that you quoted to support your claim was from the Wikipedia entry? It was all from the referenced MSDN blog. Surely you can't blame Microsoft from paying their "Program Manager for the Windows SDK Tools and Build Environment" to write an blog entry on their own Microsoft Developer Network website?
Your information is out of date. Modern plasma sets do not suffer from burn-in. I used to be paranoid about what I had on my TV, but now I realise that I do not have to worry.
I leave DVD menus on for hours (accidentally), play games, watch 4x3 shows galore, leave it paused for ages and there is no sign of any image retention. I have even left very bright setup menus from my PVR on overnight on several occasions. Every so often I put a few test images on screen to check that the colours are consistent across the screen. There has never been the slightest problem found.
I have a mid-range Panasonic, so can't vouch for the quality at the cheapie end of the market.
Hang on. He is lying because you don't know how he came up with that figure? And you back this up by just guessing that it is wrong and calling it reality.
He is just a blogger, so it is possible that he just made it all up, but that would only make him equally uninformed as yourself.
Every application or shared library has to have a unique, registered CreatorID. It would be easy to track which developers were still active (writing new programs) based on who was still submitting new CreatorIDs. I do not know if that is how this number was divined, but it does show that it could be accurate.
Just because you have not heard of all 160,000 developers does not mean to say that they do not exist. A lot of the development work is for in-house applications. I occassionally write some programs just for myself. Nothing ever gets published, so you would have never heard of me. That doesn't mean that I don't exist (I think).
If I am incorrect, and it turns out that I do not exist, then feel free to ignore me.
There were 6 episodes (as is often the case with a TV series from Britain).
However, if you saw one episode then you saw them all. It was disappointing that it was all very template stuff. The first episode was the best, so I hope that it was the one that you saw.
That wasn't a useful story, it was just an advertisement for a book. The link in the advert even has referral kickbacks from Amazon. I have no idea why this got approved by the Slashdot editors.
And advertising links aside, the whole question should have been modded as flamebait.
So you're saying that you installed Windows 2000 over 15 years ago???
I access my yahoo mail on my mobile phone, and today it suddenly became absolutely useless. Now it redirects to a WAP version with significantly reduced functionality, where it previously had the usual interface that I am used to on my computer. I am currently running Opera on my Nokia 9300, which is pretty much as capable as version 8.5 that I have on my laptop (yes, I must upgrade that sometime).
Now, I can no longer access any attachments! Just because I am on a phone does not mean that I can't read documents, spreadsheets and PDFs. Also, when entering a message you only get an edit control that is 8 characters across by 4 lines down. This is complete rubbish! I have a screen width of 640 pixels, and I would rather use more than a tenth of it to see more than four words at once! I can no longer delete (or mark as spam) bulk messages. I have to open each one up to delete them. On a slow connection, this is pitiful.
I really don't mind having the option of a cut down interface because the old one did take a long time to download each page, but it should be optional if it means a reduction of features and forces us to learn a different interface to access my mail. The old version worked.
Well as you have noted, Javascript and Java already have their own configuration in the IE security settings, so you already can turn them on and off individually.
There is also a facility to allow only certain Active X controls and plug ins. In the Security->Custom Level dialog you can see "Administrator Approved" as an option for some of the Active X settings. If you select this, then you can configure which controls can be used with the IE Admin Kit.
Alternatively, a simple *.reg file can be made to add controls to the list. That is the method that I have used. I was given a registry file to add Flash to the approved list, which I used on a coworker's computer. Something like this (untested, I just found this example with Google).
By the way, I really don't know how the grandparent was moderated as Insightful whilst being so utterly wrong. Disabling Active X has been part of IE's configuration since they first introduced the feature.
The real question is who signed off on the Free Trade Agreement. Until this was signed, the DCMA was your problem.
Personally, I would be blaming Johnny. It would be nice to have a Prime Minister that was not the US President's buttmonkey.
I used to be a big fan of the trackpad, and I hated it when we purchased a bunch of Thinkpads that only had a clitoris (which I think more accurately describes how you use it).
But after using it a while, I was amazed at how inefficient it was when I tried the trackpad again. I like being able to move the mouse around all day without having to move my hand or finger at all. All you have to do is just twiddle the clit. It just seems like second nature now.
Unfortunately this will change when Firefox 3.0 is release and they choose to stop supporting the Win 9x operating systems. I wonder how long after that it will be before Windows 2000 falls off the supported list too.
Actually he really meant to say URL and not UNC. You are correct that a UNC should contain backslashes, but a URL (which is what you are getting with the file://) should only use the forward slash separator.
The reversed slash format is the biggest problem with the Microsoft platforms. They came about because CP/M used the / character for command line arguments (which was faithfully copied into DOS), so when they added directory support to DOS then they had to use another symbol.
They have supported forward slashes in filenames since the days of DOS 3 or 4 (I think), but you occasionally find something that does not work with it. In this case UNC format is a prime example.
Actually, I refused to buy a DVD player because I objected to the region encoding and the way that the content provider can control what buttons I can press on my remote. It was not until I could get a player with these features hacked out (and also by then you could copy a DVD too) that I got my first player.
Since then I have purchased over a hundred DVDs. It probably would have been more, but I realised that it was cheaper to hire titles many times before it comes anywhere near the price of buying a DVD. Most of the titles that I own are foreign ones that are not available in my region.
Similarly, I will not be considering any DVD replacement until I know that I retain control of my machine. I don't really care whether they have copy protection on the discs, as long as it does not restrict how I use my legal copy. Until I am sure that I will be able to buy a title anywhere in the world, skip through its trailers and be able to watch it when my Internet connection goes down then HD-DVD and Blueray can just sit on the shelf.
Not that I have any real need for a higher resolution, but I would have liked a greater bitrate and colour depth.
Nobody is forcing you to upgrade. You can quite happily live with cheap cards without having to upgrade all the time. The games system that I am currently in the process of upgrading has a 32MB TNT2 card! As you can imagine, even this 7300LE would be a dramatic upgrade for me.
I can use this low end system because I don't buy the latest games. I can load up an old game like No One Lives Forever without any problems. Now I am finally getting through my backlog of old games that I bought cheap or second hand*, I am going to upgrade my whole system to something newer. But my system has gone way beyond your three year lifespan.
I admit that surviving on old equipment might be a bit extreme for most people here, but it doesn't bother me as it was around the time of the TNT2 era when I stopped constantly playing games in favour of other activities like work, sport and downloading porn.
Ah, porn! The great leveller of all video cards!
----
* There is another saving - I don't spend a fortune on new games either! Older bargain bin games, compilations and eBay 2nd hand games work on my system and same me money. Add that to your calculations.
There is no need to be paranoid about this. The grandparent was simply correcting the great grandparent's assumption that this card would have "DX9/10 support".
Admittedly, I had to go re-read the original message to see why the coward said this.
I wonder if they used a crack written by somebody else. If so, they may have infringed on some poor pirate's copywritten software!
The bastards!
You know, those kinds of server apps that you were talking about could just as easily be run on Windows 98 if you wanted - they are not actually part of the Linux kernel!
We have a couple of old application servers running in our office running Windows 98 on Pentium 150 with 32MB. We occasionally think that we should upgrade them but they just keep working, so why bother making more work for ourselves. They will get phased out in the next round of server upgrades that we do, but only to consolidate our boxes and not because the underlying OS in incapable of doing the job.
You have got it backwards. Wal-Mart sell a lot of CDs, so they can force their suppliers to lower their wholesale price or they will not buy from them. When faced with the choice of lower profits vs not being available to sell through the biggest chain (which would mean absolutely no profits) the suppliers have no choice.
Large retails stores are not good for suppliers, and in the long run not good for the consumers as it can result in lower quality, limited choice and fewer manufacturing jobs as the local manufacturers find that they cannot compete with the cheaper foreign companies.
On the other hand, my house if full of cool luxuries that my parents could never have afforded in their day. I guess that I am part of the problem too.
But to return to CDs, lower prices would certainly be a factor, but I think that the biggest problem for CD labels is that there are more alternative entertainment to spend our money on. Sure CD sales are declining, but DVD sales are going through the roof. I have found far too many instances where a DVD of a film is cheaper than the CD soundtrack.
I use details view as my default, because I like to get as much information on the screen as I can. Just because you do not like that mode does not make it invalid. Should they have just removed the details mode completely? And anyway, if it is like XP then they have a "View->Choose Details..." menu to add/remove columns in this view.
I think that it is a great design. You can see enough text to get the meaning, but if you want more information then you just hover the mouse over it to see an expanded tooltip (which in XP was not perfect, as it did not wrap - I hope that this is fixed in Vista).
I do not know anyone who says that they use the Category View of the Control Panel. Everyone says that they use the Classic View. Showing the Categories in the details view might get people used to the structure of the new system. I will certainly give it a try, but if I end up disliking it (which is entirely probable) then I will just remove the column. Simple.
When I was in my early teens back in the early 80s, I filled in a printed form that had "19___" to write in the year. "That's silly", I thought, "They will have to throw out all these forms when it gets to the year 2000.
I am sure that they did throw out the forms long before then, but I never had a problem with Y2K because I always had this incident in mind when coding my own programs.
In an industry that should be filled with pedants, it always surprised me that Y2K was as much of an issue as it was. However, I think that the reason people assumed that it was not a big deal was because a lot of them had been conned by consultants. Unfortunately, there was money to be made in scaring the crap out of everyone.
We had a guy manage to convince our manager that our computers would fail when the year changed, despite our assurances to the contrary. (What a suprise, management didn't trust the IT department again). Sure enough he proved it by showing that the clocks would reset back to 1980. I calmly change the clocks to 1/1/2000 and they worked fine. And when they logged into our network, their clocks would be automatically synced to our server clock.
But if I wasn't here, we would have either purchased expensive software to "fix" the problem or purchased new computers with a later BIOS. Meanwhile, the real problems that did require fixing were being attended to by people such as yourself without great fanfare and have long been forgotten.
Rubbish! Are you suggesting that the works of Britney Spears are not copyrightable???
That is true, they are under-represented. It is not as if the Christians have a massive organisation with outlets in every suburb to spread their message. Apart from the churches. And their TV shows.
Maybe their grievance would be valid if they gave equal billing to both angles in their own churches.
At the risk of repeating myself, I thought that this was interesting enough to post as a thread of it's own.
There have been a great number of people belittling what this guy has done. There are two camps:
Here is what Apple thinks of this guy. Think Different.