If it wasn't one of their proscribed answers then they didn't know what to do.
I don't think that word means what you think it does.
proscribe. verb:
- forbid, esp. by law : strikes remained proscribed in the armed forces.
- denounce or condemn : certain practices which the Catholic Church proscribed, such as polygyny.
- historical outlaw (someone).
USAGE Proscribe does not have the same meaning as prescribe: see usage at prescribe.
Does anyone know what the SD card is all about?...
Is this going to be strictly for saved games or is this going to improve performance somehow? And does any SD card type work or is this going to be a Nintendo Wii only proprietary format?
SD ("secure digital") cards are a fairly standard memory card format for digital cameras. Being a type of flash-memory they're not performance-enhancing, and the Wii will likely use them for saving games.
I think that the "secure" bit means that they support some kind of encryption natively, so might potentially be used for locking downloaded games to a specific console, but Nintendo might simply have chose to use them simply because they're very common. I have one lying around on my desk from a camera I returned to the shop a year ago.; in the UK you can buy a 2gig one for about £18.
With all the payment methods available, and every PayPal-sucks/blows/eatsballs site pushing their own superior alternative, you'd think that no one would use PayPal. And yet . ..
Back in the old days, PayPal did have strong competition. This ended following the eBay merger.
When browsing eBay auctions you often used to see sellers who would charge a surcharge for accepting payment by PayPal - receiving money by PayPal incurs fees, and many sellers felt it reasonable to pass these to the buyer, should they insist on using PayPal. In fact, almost all sellers charged PayPal fees back then. Why should it cost me money if you're too lazy to write a cheque? (here in the UK, a cheque posted today by first class mail will likely arrive tomorrow, although it'll take a few days to clear, of course)
Until 2001 there were good alternatives to PayPal, companies who didn't charge fees on smaller amounts (less than £50, say) or whose fees where significantly less than PayPal's. NoChex was one of these, and when I first went on eBay and traded DVDs on Usenet, most everyone had both a PayPal & a NoChex account. Back then, everyone stated their surcharges (if applicable) in their adverts or auctions, and everyone understood the reason for it. If you didn't want to pay fees then you just used a different payment method, or if you wanted your purchase delivered in a hurry then you shrugged, paid by PayPal (or one of the alternatives) and in good grace added the appropriate percentage to cover the surcharge. The cost of using PayPal - or other electronic payment method - was fairly transparent even to buyers and frankly, I'm sure the competition did PayPal some good. Realistically, most everyone on eBay has to take electronic payments of at least some type, and now that is PayPal by default.
After eBay bought PayPal in 2001, they ended the practice of passing surcharges on to buyers, requiring sellers to accept all payment types on the same terms, and thus removed the incentive for buyers to use cheaper electronic payment methods. NoChex charges may have been cheaper, but the buyer no longer had any cause to care about that - the seller took the hit on the transaction costs, and no longer had any way of influencing which electronic payment processor the buyer preferred. Subsequently the integration of PayPal into the eBay checkout system was the death of other electronic payment brands.
It seems from their site that NoChex are focussed now on merchant transactions rather than (as they were when I used them) as a user-to-user PayPal-alternative; I'm glad they're still in business, but I feel they (and the consumer) were really stitched-up on that one - if eBay were an operating-systems company we'd describe this behaviour as leveraging their monopoly to extend into other areas, or something.
Looking at my PayPal account, I see that PayPal fees cost me 3.8% on a £45 transaction - a sum that quite frankly I find ridiculous for moving a few bits around a database. How come credit card companies can do the same thing for 1% or 2%, or I can transfer money into someone else's bank account at no charge? Meanwhile, PayPal are raking in interest on all the money sitting around in users' accounts AND charging them fees for it - PayPal's free service is just useless as soon as someone makes a payment to you by credit-card, and unless you decline that payment and make separate arrangements for receiving those funds all subsequent payments you receive will have fees applied, whatever their source. You might disagree with me and say that 4% is quite reasonable for PaiPal's services, and it's true that PayPal are more efficient than our old British banking institutions, but they don't provide any customer service at all - If I'm mad at my bank I can phone them up & ask to speak to a supervisor; if I'm dissatisfied with th
Despite my wife's best efforts, I missed out on a preorder by three people in line.
Don't be disheartened!! I'm sure that when Sony hear this news they'll rush to give you one in consideration of all those flattering articles you've been posting about them lately.
so how do you make the end users turn their machines in to Sun instead of putting them at the bottom of their trash bag?
Education. When it's not costing them anything the consumer isn't going to mind phoning 1-800-SUN-CYCLE and asking where their local Sun recycling depot is. There'll probably be one in each town. The customer only has incentive to bury the electronics in the trash if doing so is (immediately) cheaper than being responsible.
And if disposal is regulated, instead of manufacture, the market will place a higher value on less nasty manufacturing. I don't see a difference in the manufacturers' interest.
Ummm... no the market won't put any value on less-nasty manufacturing, because the consumer won't be aware of the cost of disposal when they buy the product. Even if one product has a "Nasty1" rating against the "Nasty5" consumer-rating of the other, the consumer may well decide to save $50 now and buy the nastier TV, because he's not concerned about the environment and not forward-thinking enough to consider saving $150 in 5-years time. And when you buy 2nd-hand goods, how do you know how nasty the manufacturer is or how much the cost of disposal might be?
Placing the cost on the manufacturer is the cheapest way to do this, because the manufacturer can make reasonably educated guesses about the cost of disposal. If they make a nastier product then they'll have to charge more for it in order to cover the future cost of disposal and consequently they'll be less competitive against a company that uses lead-free solder.
If it only applies to domestically produced electronics, watch how fast the remainder of non-defence production gets moved overseas.
If you can consider this contingency only an hour after the article was posted to Slashdot, then it's probably occurred to legislators, too. In the EU the importers of such products now have to register their interest in the goods and accept the responsibility of disposal before the goods are allowed to clear customs.
IE: Microsoft are not at a cost disadvantage by having to responsibly dispose of good old made-in-the-USA American Xboxes, because Nintendo America have to do the same for Japanese-made Wiis.
Either way, you're forcing the manufacturer to be responsible for the disposal of an item they sell, which will increase their prices.
So? If all manufacturers increase their prices then who loses? The consumer? This law ensures that the cost of disposal to the consumer is minimised, because it's in the vendor's interest to do so.
If, instead, one requires the consumer to dispose of the electronics responsibly then in 5 years time consumers will be bitching about the cost and surreptitiously fly-dumping. "It's not fair that I should have to pay $100 to dump this TV!! My neighbour only had to pay $50 to dump his - just because mine contains more cadmium! No fair!!" So making the manufacturer responsible for disposal in the initial legislation not only makes this easier to enforce, but it also saves the future hassle of state-by-state consumer-protection laws requiring manufacturers to publish at the time of purchase the cost of disposal for their products.
That's different, I think in a subtle but significant way. The law says that oil must be disposed of properly... If you changed it yourself, then you would have to dispose of it properly.
It's not really that different - electronics good contain some pretty nasty stuff, such as lead, zinc, cadmium and mercury. This law is just a way of ensuring that waste electronics goods are disposed of properly the same way as waste motor oil.
You can't require the end user to recycle these electronics materials responsibly because there's no way for them to extract the lead from the solder in the product, and if you start charging people when they deposit an old PC at the tip then they'll just take out the components and put a different PCI card in the bottom of their trash bag for a month - it'll end up in the landfill just like it was in the first place. A law to require the end-user to dispose of electronics goods wouldn't work because it's not enforceable, and because electronics goods contain multiple elements in a way that waste motor oil does not.
Another alternative would be to levy a tax on electronic goods and use it to fund recycling or responsible disposal of electronics goods at local refuse sites, but it would be difficult to tax different products commensurate with their environmental impact or the cost of their disposal. That would also provide no incentive to manufacturers to manufacture goods that are less environmentally harmful.
At the end of the day, it's going to cost money if we want to avoid poisoning the environment. In the case of electronics goods, at least, making manufacturers responsible for the disposal of the goods they produce is the fairest way to ensure that the cost is fair, representative and as low as possible (because it's in the manufacturers' interests to be efficient).
A lot of UK gamers seem to use VideoGamesPlus.ca for their imports and yesterday a bunch of us received this email:
As I promised I am giving advanced notice on Wii Preorders. They will be going up today October 12th, 2006 at around 4pm Eastern Standard Time.
Sorry for the Short Notice but any Notice is better than nothing.
At about 9pm the games started appearing on the site, which got slower & slower over the next hour or so, obviously as hundreds of idiots repeatedly pressed the refresh button.
Today the console has been taken off the site, presumably indicating that all orders have been sold out. VideoGamesPlus has a very good reputation, and stated that they wouldn't take pre-orders until they knew how many Wii they'd been allocated, so I'm fairly optimistic of getting mine. Of course if you're based in the US you're not sure of getting your console on release day if you order online, but these should arrive a couple of days before UK release.:)
Try WinXP. You just plug in the second screen, right-click to get to the properties and set a couple of preferences, and it works. Call me a troll if you like, but it's true.
I know it's no longer funny when you have to explain the joke, but the GP's remark "Check Signal Cable" suggests that the monitor isn't even plugged in.
I'm currently thinking of setting up a Fon acces point at home (www.fon.com) however I am worried that some people will just go stupid and hog all the bandwith.
Is there anyway to limit individual bandwith to approx 150kps?
Yes. When you log into the Fon router using the registered email address & password you are redirected to your "Fon homepage" which has a sliding meter to set the amount of bandwidth you wish to share. You can also add "guest" accounts - users logging in with one of these do not have admin access.
I may be missing something crucial. Are PCs in the UK not bundled with MS software?
Yup, but the kind of customer who buys this will be the families who have resentfully spent £300 to replace their 5-year-old Windows 98 PC and didn't realise that Word isn't a part of Windows.
They only found out that they had to buy Office as an additional component when they were unable to find it on their new PC and asked someone else for help. A friend probably installed a copy of Office 97 for them 5 years ago, and they haven't thought about it since. When the cost of a computer is a week's wages you're unlikely to want to spend another 2/3 as much again "just for some software", and Tesco have priced these offerings perfectly.
No offence but if you have a Yahoo account and want free POP access perhaps you should go to the options page and turn it the damn on from the yahoo mail site "Yahoo! Mail gives you even more flexibility with two free features! As a Yahoo! Delivers member (you asked to receive special offers via when you registered with us), you can take advantage of email forwarding and POP access. Each one is free, exclusively for Yahoo! Delivers members."
The free "Yahoo delivers" POP3 access is only available in some countries. An account opened with a US postal address will be assigned to the @yahoo.com domain, but is not allowed free POP3. An account opened with a UK postal address is assigned @yahoo.co.uk and does get free POP3.
In fact the first part of your email address before the @ (your "Yahoo ID" used for logon, by Yahoo messenger and for other services) is unique and it seems that a message sent to your_address@yahoo.de will be delivered to that ID whether it's really supposed to be yahoo.com or.co.uk or.jp or whatever. But if you already have your desired Yahoo ID assigned to.com with a US postal address then you don't get the option of the free "Yahoo delivers" POP3 access.
Stroller.
Re:Macintosh "Unspeakable Items" folder.
on
GUIs Get a Makeover
·
· Score: 1, Funny
And yet there was there no "Unspeakable Items" folder.
Sure there is! You just need to install Boot Camp!!.
So you make some accessibility features for games.... I can't compete with 16 year olds anymore,... my reaction is getting slower.... Toning down the game to make it "accessible" would feel like cheating to me.
Well, if the authors were to add "disability features" like auto-aim then the easy answer is not to allow those who use them to play against players who play the game without the aids. Sorta like leagues.
But I don't even think this is necessary. I don't own a Nintendo DS (yet, at least) but I understand that a feature of the Nintendo online gaming system is to match players against others of similar ranking and skill. I don't know if Xbox Live has a similar system, but I don't play PC games online much because I find a server, join a game and get my ass kicked in about two minutes. I love FPS games and used to love playing Unreal Tournament against my flatmates, so this sounds ideal to me - a system where I automatically get matched against other grandads who are as numptie at games as I am.
Ah, ok. Please excuse me - you have my apologies. Having not tried this under the Adobe applications I assumed the point was to load the Google webpage, and because clicking on links within that open Safari I assumed the page be dynamic. I also wanted to reply to a Mac user smug about security.
As a concerned Mac user... I was wondering if these could possibly create vulnerabilities... for mac users.
Well, if you tried downloading the sample PDF in 10.4 you'd see that opening it in Preview shows an apparently-live webpage. So it would seem fairly safe to say the answer may be "yes".
Slashdot Mirror
proscribe. verb:
- forbid, esp. by law : strikes remained proscribed in the armed forces.
- denounce or condemn : certain practices which the Catholic Church proscribed, such as polygyny.
- historical outlaw (someone).
USAGE Proscribe does not have the same meaning as prescribe: see usage at prescribe.
[from New Oxford American Dictionary]
Stroller.
I think that the "secure" bit means that they support some kind of encryption natively, so might potentially be used for locking downloaded games to a specific console, but Nintendo might simply have chose to use them simply because they're very common. I have one lying around on my desk from a camera I returned to the shop a year ago.; in the UK you can buy a 2gig one for about £18.
Stroller.
Back in the old days, PayPal did have strong competition. This ended following the eBay merger.
When browsing eBay auctions you often used to see sellers who would charge a surcharge for accepting payment by PayPal - receiving money by PayPal incurs fees, and many sellers felt it reasonable to pass these to the buyer, should they insist on using PayPal. In fact, almost all sellers charged PayPal fees back then. Why should it cost me money if you're too lazy to write a cheque? (here in the UK, a cheque posted today by first class mail will likely arrive tomorrow, although it'll take a few days to clear, of course)
Until 2001 there were good alternatives to PayPal, companies who didn't charge fees on smaller amounts (less than £50, say) or whose fees where significantly less than PayPal's. NoChex was one of these, and when I first went on eBay and traded DVDs on Usenet, most everyone had both a PayPal & a NoChex account. Back then, everyone stated their surcharges (if applicable) in their adverts or auctions, and everyone understood the reason for it. If you didn't want to pay fees then you just used a different payment method, or if you wanted your purchase delivered in a hurry then you shrugged, paid by PayPal (or one of the alternatives) and in good grace added the appropriate percentage to cover the surcharge. The cost of using PayPal - or other electronic payment method - was fairly transparent even to buyers and frankly, I'm sure the competition did PayPal some good. Realistically, most everyone on eBay has to take electronic payments of at least some type, and now that is PayPal by default.
After eBay bought PayPal in 2001, they ended the practice of passing surcharges on to buyers, requiring sellers to accept all payment types on the same terms, and thus removed the incentive for buyers to use cheaper electronic payment methods. NoChex charges may have been cheaper, but the buyer no longer had any cause to care about that - the seller took the hit on the transaction costs, and no longer had any way of influencing which electronic payment processor the buyer preferred. Subsequently the integration of PayPal into the eBay checkout system was the death of other electronic payment brands.
It seems from their site that NoChex are focussed now on merchant transactions rather than (as they were when I used them) as a user-to-user PayPal-alternative; I'm glad they're still in business, but I feel they (and the consumer) were really stitched-up on that one - if eBay were an operating-systems company we'd describe this behaviour as leveraging their monopoly to extend into other areas, or something.
Looking at my PayPal account, I see that PayPal fees cost me 3.8% on a £45 transaction - a sum that quite frankly I find ridiculous for moving a few bits around a database. How come credit card companies can do the same thing for 1% or 2%, or I can transfer money into someone else's bank account at no charge? Meanwhile, PayPal are raking in interest on all the money sitting around in users' accounts AND charging them fees for it - PayPal's free service is just useless as soon as someone makes a payment to you by credit-card, and unless you decline that payment and make separate arrangements for receiving those funds all subsequent payments you receive will have fees applied, whatever their source. You might disagree with me and say that 4% is quite reasonable for PaiPal's services, and it's true that PayPal are more efficient than our old British banking institutions, but they don't provide any customer service at all - If I'm mad at my bank I can phone them up & ask to speak to a supervisor; if I'm dissatisfied with th
The handsome moderator wisely clicks "insightful".
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Stroller.
Stroller.
Stroller.
Red Steel
Placing the cost on the manufacturer is the cheapest way to do this, because the manufacturer can make reasonably educated guesses about the cost of disposal. If they make a nastier product then they'll have to charge more for it in order to cover the future cost of disposal and consequently they'll be less competitive against a company that uses lead-free solder.
Stroller.
Stroller.
IE: Microsoft are not at a cost disadvantage by having to responsibly dispose of good old made-in-the-USA American Xboxes, because Nintendo America have to do the same for Japanese-made Wiis.
Stroller.
If, instead, one requires the consumer to dispose of the electronics responsibly then in 5 years time consumers will be bitching about the cost and surreptitiously fly-dumping. "It's not fair that I should have to pay $100 to dump this TV!! My neighbour only had to pay $50 to dump his - just because mine contains more cadmium! No fair!!" So making the manufacturer responsible for disposal in the initial legislation not only makes this easier to enforce, but it also saves the future hassle of state-by-state consumer-protection laws requiring manufacturers to publish at the time of purchase the cost of disposal for their products.
Stroller.
You can't require the end user to recycle these electronics materials responsibly because there's no way for them to extract the lead from the solder in the product, and if you start charging people when they deposit an old PC at the tip then they'll just take out the components and put a different PCI card in the bottom of their trash bag for a month - it'll end up in the landfill just like it was in the first place. A law to require the end-user to dispose of electronics goods wouldn't work because it's not enforceable, and because electronics goods contain multiple elements in a way that waste motor oil does not.
Another alternative would be to levy a tax on electronic goods and use it to fund recycling or responsible disposal of electronics goods at local refuse sites, but it would be difficult to tax different products commensurate with their environmental impact or the cost of their disposal. That would also provide no incentive to manufacturers to manufacture goods that are less environmentally harmful.
At the end of the day, it's going to cost money if we want to avoid poisoning the environment. In the case of electronics goods, at least, making manufacturers responsible for the disposal of the goods they produce is the fairest way to ensure that the cost is fair, representative and as low as possible (because it's in the manufacturers' interests to be efficient).
Stroller.
Today the console has been taken off the site, presumably indicating that all orders have been sold out. VideoGamesPlus has a very good reputation, and stated that they wouldn't take pre-orders until they knew how many Wii they'd been allocated, so I'm fairly optimistic of getting mine. Of course if you're based in the US you're not sure of getting your console on release day if you order online, but these should arrive a couple of days before UK release. :)
Stroller.
Stroller.
Stroller.
Stroller.
They only found out that they had to buy Office as an additional component when they were unable to find it on their new PC and asked someone else for help. A friend probably installed a copy of Office 97 for them 5 years ago, and they haven't thought about it since. When the cost of a computer is a week's wages you're unlikely to want to spend another 2/3 as much again "just for some software", and Tesco have priced these offerings perfectly.
Stroller.
In fact the first part of your email address before the @ (your "Yahoo ID" used for logon, by Yahoo messenger and for other services) is unique and it seems that a message sent to your_address@yahoo.de will be delivered to that ID whether it's really supposed to be yahoo.com or .co.uk or .jp or whatever. But if you already have your desired Yahoo ID assigned to .com with a US postal address then you don't get the option of the free "Yahoo delivers" POP3 access.
Stroller.
Stroller.
But I don't even think this is necessary. I don't own a Nintendo DS (yet, at least) but I understand that a feature of the Nintendo online gaming system is to match players against others of similar ranking and skill. I don't know if Xbox Live has a similar system, but I don't play PC games online much because I find a server, join a game and get my ass kicked in about two minutes. I love FPS games and used to love playing Unreal Tournament against my flatmates, so this sounds ideal to me - a system where I automatically get matched against other grandads who are as numptie at games as I am.
Stroller.
Ah, ok. Please excuse me - you have my apologies. Having not tried this under the Adobe applications I assumed the point was to load the Google webpage, and because clicking on links within that open Safari I assumed the page be dynamic. I also wanted to reply to a Mac user smug about security.
Stroller.