Every pc user... should have a firewall and anti virus sofware running.
(sarcasm) I'm sure that's the first thing Joe Sixpack thinks of when he buys his hp Pavillion at CompUSA. (/sarcasm)
If they havent learned yet they deserve to be infected.
If everyone were introduced to personal computing with broad technical knowledge of the possible expolits, your statement might have been valid. Most consumers think of computers as VCRs.
Heres the extremly complicated solution: Auto update everyday.
Maybe Joe Sixpack prefers to not have his phone line tied up for hours? Maybe Joe Sixpack doesn't want/need broadband Internet access for faster patching?
I agree the problem is the lack of consumer education, but chastising/blaming the consumers isn't going to get anything done. Companies like Microsoft need to ship their products securely, with ports closed, firewalls on, and with desktop shortcuts/documents telling users why it's important to patch.
Thankfully, Microsoft hopes to accomplish much of this with XP Service Pack 2, hence why the Service Pack is taking so long to be released.
If you are away from your custom home gaming rig and want to frag in your hotel room, in-laws, airplane, Starbucks, or what have you, you can at least get a laptop with decent enough hardware to get the job done.
Nothing will replace or duplicate the gaming desktop PC experience, but if you must frag on the go, these high-end laptops work great (albeit with a USB mouse plugged in).
I guess the bottle availablity has more to do with your local distributor than Pepsi.
I live up in the North Country in New York. I'd consider my city to be pretty darn far from a major population center, yet strangely enough we had iTunes Pepsi's available by the second week of the promotion.
Fearing diabetes in my late 20s, I have long-since switched to Diet Pepsi, so collecting caps wasn't a problem -- I've amassed 47 winning songs thus far...
I wonder if they have a special escape pod attached to the space station, so if some critical system goes, they can escape.
There is always a Soyuz spacecraft docked to the station, usually the one that deposited the exisiting crew to the station at the start of their expedition.
The Expedition 8 crew will be returning to Earth on the very Soyuz that brought them up in October 2003.
The Expedition 9 crew's Soyuz will be the new ISS "lifeboat".
...and run a bit-for-bit check on the archive after burning with Nero....
This often necessary in the Windows world, as even XP's built-in CD-burning software does not verify the data after the burn.
When burning CDs and DVDs on a Macintosh using the built-in Disc Burner software, your Mac automatically performs a verification process after the burn is complete.
Sure, it takes longer, but it's one less step to perform and without the aid of third-party software.
The original and best version of Tetris was none other than the one that shipped with the original Gameboy model in 1989. You can pick it up at most used game shops for USD$1.
Microsoft is settling as many court cases as possible so they have more resources available to market their upcoming technologies, such as Windows XP SP2, Windows Server 2003 SP1, Windows 2000 SP5, the new WMP upgrade with MS's music store, Microsoft's video iPod-like device, and the usual "any time now" Longhorn beta 1 stuff.
The thing I always recommend to people wanting to install Linux on an existing machine or one they plan on buying from a store is to preflight the thing with a live distro CD, be it Knoppix or what you will.
Within minutes, you'll see if your hardware is compatible.
I don't think Apple sees Linux as a threat. The Linux marketshare (2%) simply isn't big enough to pay attention to yet. Apple wants a grand slice of the Windows marketshare (95+%).
TV use is inversely proportional to Internet use
on
National TV Turn Off Week
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Among the people I know and work with, it seems that those who spend lots of time on the Internet (or working/gaming on their computers) spend much less time watching TV than they did 10 years ago (pre-mainstream Internet).
Among the people who still see computing/the_Internet as an appliance, are the ones still watching TV, an age group whose average age is increasing as more and more youths leave television to embrace the Internet and Internet-connected devices.
Personally, the only time I watch TV now is the few minutes it takes in the morning to catch the weather on the news.
A lot of the language in the letter was "press release" material. I'm sure Apple knew that the letter would be posted on web sites worldwide, so they probably figured "why not take the opportunity to remind people how nice iTunes, iPod, and the iTMS are!"
It seems to me that many of the copy-protection-circumvention programs that have come out in recent years (DeCSS, PlayFair) are not meant for piracy as much as they are to enable users of Linux and Unix to play DRM'd/locked content because they don't want to use the media on a Windows or Macintosh computer.
If Apple developed iTunes (and iPod drivers) for Linux and Unix, perhaps the number of people trying to circumvent the DRM would decrease.
As it stands, you can only buy online music if you use Windows or Mac OS X --a set up that accounts for 98% of computer users, maybe, but obviously the remaining 2% (Unix/Linux users) know how to code.
C'mon Apple, OS X is "based on Unix", so how hard could it be to port iTunes over to Linux and Unix? If you really want to set an online music standard (and possibly reduce OSS-attempts at circumvention), you gotta give Linux some love.
I think SATA-based optical drives will be a huge boon to people who build their own PCs, especially those who use AMD processors and/or overclock various elements of their systems.
The reduced cable clutter alone will improve airflow over RAM and around the drives themselves.
What I do see being a huge problem is that Windows XP setup doesn't seem to support SATA devices without using a driver floppy to allow it to recognize SATA ports as a Mass Storage Controller. -- an annoyance for people who have discarded their floppy drives long ago.
But, as with all new technology, we'll see how things turn out in the coming months. Hopefully, this will make an official appearance on the first x86-compatible mobos with PCI-Express slots.
1. A movie will have made money at the box office; DVD sales are just gravy on top of that. Music isn't sold to you twice this way, you buy it on CD and that's it.
Apparently you haven't seen the double-, triple-, quadruple-dipping many movie studios do with re-releasing DVDs with a few added features to take advantage of their franchise's fanbase.
Lord of the Rings (New Line Cinema), probably being the worst culprit.
As for online music: My wife and I each own an iPod and we enjoy shopping for music at the iTMS, mostly due to the low, 99 price per song.
If that price were to rise anytime soon, they had better add more content to the music downloads, such as complete liner notes (an embedded PDF is fine) or printable images that can be used to print my own CD Jewel Case front and back cover.
Inflation is one thing. Raising the price just to raise the price is just gluttony.
Of course the sale of "Compact Disc Audio" discs are down. They're rarely manufactured anymore.
Since 2002, the big music labels have switched from "Compact Disc Audio" discs to CD-ROMs (i.e. "enhanced CDs", or discs with copy protection).
Quite coincidentially, it's only expected that people who can't play/rip the album disc they purchased (because the CD-ROM is unrippable, doesn't play, or crashes the user's computer) would seek the music in a digital format elsewhere.
And that's because Windows 2003 Server doesn't use visual styles like XP.:-)
Actually, Windows Server 2003 has all the same visual styles as Windows XP, only it has the Themes service turned off by default. Turn it on and you have XP's Luna Theme.
There's a reason why we don't have personal flying vehicles: there are just way too many underqualified people, including myself.
Granted, there would need to be training, etc, like with driving schools, but personal flight would single handedly start the "random house crash" epidemic.
Not to mention the potential terrorism uses of flying cars by malcontents.
Hydrogen fuel (or any oil-substitute means of vehicle-powering energy) won't happen anytime soon because OPEC has too heavy of an influence on many of the world's governments, including the United States.
Flying cars and alternative fuels have already been invented, it's just the society or government isn't ready/able to adopt them.
My wife and I both have an iPod (I have the 10GB model, she has the newer 15GB model).
We don't think of them as status symbols. We think of them as a way to take our music (organized via iTunes, our favorite music app) on the go. Not being fans of the WMA format also helped.
We are by no means well-off financially. We just choose to spend our overtime money in fun ways.
We also don't have the added expense of kids.
When you're out of college, married, and doing the 8-5 thing, you gotta let yourself have a little fun before buying a house and settling down.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree the problem is the lack of consumer education, but chastising/blaming the consumers isn't going to get anything done. Companies like Microsoft need to ship their products securely, with ports closed, firewalls on, and with desktop shortcuts/documents telling users why it's important to patch.
Thankfully, Microsoft hopes to accomplish much of this with XP Service Pack 2, hence why the Service Pack is taking so long to be released.
If you are away from your custom home gaming rig and want to frag in your hotel room, in-laws, airplane, Starbucks, or what have you, you can at least get a laptop with decent enough hardware to get the job done.
Nothing will replace or duplicate the gaming desktop PC experience, but if you must frag on the go, these high-end laptops work great (albeit with a USB mouse plugged in).
I guess the bottle availablity has more to do with your local distributor than Pepsi.
I live up in the North Country in New York. I'd consider my city to be pretty darn far from a major population center, yet strangely enough we had iTunes Pepsi's available by the second week of the promotion.
Fearing diabetes in my late 20s, I have long-since switched to Diet Pepsi, so collecting caps wasn't a problem -- I've amassed 47 winning songs thus far...
The Expedition 8 crew will be returning to Earth on the very Soyuz that brought them up in October 2003.
The Expedition 9 crew's Soyuz will be the new ISS "lifeboat".
When burning CDs and DVDs on a Macintosh using the built-in Disc Burner software, your Mac automatically performs a verification process after the burn is complete.
Sure, it takes longer, but it's one less step to perform and without the aid of third-party software.
This situation is analagous to watching Broadcast TV over Cable or Satellite TV.
If all you watch is the local news and the local affiliates of NBC, CBS, ABC, UPN, and WB, then Cable or Satellite TV is probably not worth the cost.
Cable and DSL are not available in remote areas of the country. I think CowboyNeal is in this situation and, thus, uses dial-up.
Slap it into a GBA and it plays in color.
Microsoft is settling as many court cases as possible so they have more resources available to market their upcoming technologies, such as Windows XP SP2, Windows Server 2003 SP1, Windows 2000 SP5, the new WMP upgrade with MS's music store, Microsoft's video iPod-like device, and the usual "any time now" Longhorn beta 1 stuff.
The thing I always recommend to people wanting to install Linux on an existing machine or one they plan on buying from a store is to preflight the thing with a live distro CD, be it Knoppix or what you will.
Within minutes, you'll see if your hardware is compatible.
I don't think Apple sees Linux as a threat. The Linux marketshare (2%) simply isn't big enough to pay attention to yet. Apple wants a grand slice of the Windows marketshare (95+%).
Among the people I know and work with, it seems that those who spend lots of time on the Internet (or working/gaming on their computers) spend much less time watching TV than they did 10 years ago (pre-mainstream Internet).
Among the people who still see computing/the_Internet as an appliance, are the ones still watching TV, an age group whose average age is increasing as more and more youths leave television to embrace the Internet and Internet-connected devices.
Personally, the only time I watch TV now is the few minutes it takes in the morning to catch the weather on the news.
Coffee, weather, Slashdot.
A lot of the language in the letter was "press release" material. I'm sure Apple knew that the letter would be posted on web sites worldwide, so they probably figured "why not take the opportunity to remind people how nice iTunes, iPod, and the iTMS are!"
Free advertising at its best.
It seems to me that many of the copy-protection-circumvention programs that have come out in recent years (DeCSS, PlayFair) are not meant for piracy as much as they are to enable users of Linux and Unix to play DRM'd/locked content because they don't want to use the media on a Windows or Macintosh computer.
If Apple developed iTunes (and iPod drivers) for Linux and Unix, perhaps the number of people trying to circumvent the DRM would decrease.
As it stands, you can only buy online music if you use Windows or Mac OS X --a set up that accounts for 98% of computer users, maybe, but obviously the remaining 2% (Unix/Linux users) know how to code.
C'mon Apple, OS X is "based on Unix", so how hard could it be to port iTunes over to Linux and Unix? If you really want to set an online music standard (and possibly reduce OSS-attempts at circumvention), you gotta give Linux some love.
I think SATA-based optical drives will be a huge boon to people who build their own PCs, especially those who use AMD processors and/or overclock various elements of their systems.
The reduced cable clutter alone will improve airflow over RAM and around the drives themselves.
What I do see being a huge problem is that Windows XP setup doesn't seem to support SATA devices without using a driver floppy to allow it to recognize SATA ports as a Mass Storage Controller. -- an annoyance for people who have discarded their floppy drives long ago.
But, as with all new technology, we'll see how things turn out in the coming months. Hopefully, this will make an official appearance on the first x86-compatible mobos with PCI-Express slots.
Now my geek lady can give me "wood" in a different sense.
Windows XP sets up its users with full administrator privileges by default and without a password.
The simple Control Panel even hides the management interface to make granular security possible.
The truth is, in order for NT to work in consumer homes, it had to behave just like DOS versions of Windows did.
Joe Sixpack may be computer illiterate, but his dollar is what ultimately fills Microsoft's coffers.
Lord of the Rings (New Line Cinema), probably being the worst culprit.
As for online music: My wife and I each own an iPod and we enjoy shopping for music at the iTMS, mostly due to the low, 99 price per song.
If that price were to rise anytime soon, they had better add more content to the music downloads, such as complete liner notes (an embedded PDF is fine) or printable images that can be used to print my own CD Jewel Case front and back cover.
Inflation is one thing. Raising the price just to raise the price is just gluttony.
"Jesus!"
I feel sorry for any IT professionals walking around with a pager, NEXtel, and a PDA in their pockets/belts. Ouch!
Of course the sale of "Compact Disc Audio" discs are down. They're rarely manufactured anymore.
Since 2002, the big music labels have switched from "Compact Disc Audio" discs to CD-ROMs (i.e. "enhanced CDs", or discs with copy protection).
Quite coincidentially, it's only expected that people who can't play/rip the album disc they purchased (because the CD-ROM is unrippable, doesn't play, or crashes the user's computer) would seek the music in a digital format elsewhere.
Spreadsheet programs are also quite handy for creating forms and checklists.
It's certainly faster than trying to create them in word processors.
There's a reason why we don't have personal flying vehicles: there are just way too many underqualified people, including myself.
Granted, there would need to be training, etc, like with driving schools, but personal flight would single handedly start the "random house crash" epidemic.
Not to mention the potential terrorism uses of flying cars by malcontents.
Hydrogen fuel (or any oil-substitute means of vehicle-powering energy) won't happen anytime soon because OPEC has too heavy of an influence on many of the world's governments, including the United States.
Flying cars and alternative fuels have already been invented, it's just the society or government isn't ready/able to adopt them.
My wife and I both have an iPod (I have the 10GB model, she has the newer 15GB model).
We don't think of them as status symbols. We think of them as a way to take our music (organized via iTunes, our favorite music app) on the go. Not being fans of the WMA format also helped.
We are by no means well-off financially. We just choose to spend our overtime money in fun ways.
We also don't have the added expense of kids.
When you're out of college, married, and doing the 8-5 thing, you gotta let yourself have a little fun before buying a house and settling down.
Because Microsoft Publisher 2003 crashed.
Then Windows XP crashed because of the "tight" integration between Office and Windows.
Then the company computer guy "Gravity" stopped by, opened the file back up in Publisher and saved the page as an EPS.
He then copied the EPS file to a network share, opened it into a blank Quark document on a Mac, paginated it properly, and exported it to Distiller.