Yeah, it's possible that Hemos has grown so tired of/. that he's just decided to turn it into a massive meta-troll site. Even the most optimistic nerds would grow deeply cynical after dealing with this crowd for six years.;-)
Anybody read their terms of service? You understand that there are no guarantees, either expressed or implied, regarding the accuracy, confidentiality or availability of the service. eProvisia LCC may choose to share any information acquired in the course of providing its services with other entities, and may, at its sole discretion and based on this information, take whichever actions the company, its affiliates, subsidiaries, or representatives, consider to be appropriate. You henceforth void your reasonable expectation of privacy, and your constitutional rights to a fair and speedy trial.
And their contact information. Um, Palmyra Atoll is an uninhabited pile of sand in the Pacific Ocean. "Palmyra Atoll dollars?" BWAHAHAHA.
Leveraging our paradigm-shifting product line with state of the art technology developed by a dedicated team of professionals, we offer a significant competitive advantage on the diversified but fragmented market of best of breed anti-spam solutions. That line sounds like it was generated with the Web Economy Bullshit Generator.
Thanks for the laugh, Hemos. No, I'm laughing at you, not with you.
We should also consider that Wired edited his responses to fit the allotted space (assuming that this is from the current print issue and not an online-only piece). Any journalist should know that taking quotes can lead to misinterpretations.
I am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that Firefox is but one of many browsers he runs, as would be prudent for someone working on software security. It's quite possible for even third-party browsers to expose flaws in the OS itself, so it's in Microsoft's best interests to keep tabs on how other browsers interact with its platform.
This really needs to be modded down, as it's not only not insightful, it demonstrates a total lack of comprehension of Toulouse's response.
He did not say he didn't use IE. He simply mentioned needing to install a security update of Firefox. Yes, Virginia, there are other browsers that have security flaws other than IE. That doesn't make them better or worse, it just illustrates that the problem isn't isolated to Microsoft.
And I suspect that in performing his job duties, he needs to be familiar with a wide array of browser technologies, not just IE.
You can also disable AutoRun via the properties for your drive in Device Manager. Or, you can turn it off temporarily by holding down the Shift key while loading the disc.
. . . how do we vet the legitimacy of the information posted?
The article was much too short to provide detail, but the one concern I have is that posting reports of suspicious government activity doesn't guarantee its truth. Will there be some type of mechanism that will allow peer review (just like/. or kuro5hin) to determine an item's validity? Otherwise, it just becomes another rumour mill a la F---ed Company, of little value to anyone except the tin-foil hat crowd.
Points, ammunition and more weapons are awarded for completing missions that include stealing cars, crashing them, shooting pedestrians and other motorists, drug dealing and beating up prostitutes.
I don't know about Vice City because I haven't played it, but for GTA3 the above statement is rubbish. You're never required to shoot pedestrians or other bystanders, nor do you deal drugs or beat up hookers. Nor do you ever have to directly target the police. In fact, many of the missions in GTA3 involve busting up a rival gang's drug operations. Kind of ironic that a game with this level of violence carries an implicit anti-drug message.
As for the lawsuit itself, it's simply another example of parents trying to cover up their own failures by blaming the media. These two kids could just have easily been playing America's Army and decided to go on a fantasy hunt for some terrorists. BTW, this game's level of tactical violence is far more realistic than any GTA game, yet it received a 'T' rating. And this is a recruiting tool commissioned by the Army. But I'm sure it will be OK if America's Army turns kids into murderers, so long as they're in uniform and Defending Our Freedoms.
So, you have to, with "intent to harm or defraud," "[use] a communication service without""obtaining the authorization of the provider; or making a payment to the provider in the amount normally charged by the provider for the service; or tampers with, modifies, or maintains a modification to a communication device provided by or installed by the provider."
Well, bully for Texas. I've read Colorado's bill, and it doesn't contain that language. It says, as best as I can tell, that if you don't have permission to use such technologies from your service provider, you can go to jail.
Here's the link to Colorado's bill; please tell me I'm wrong (PDF format):
considering that I do mostly non-game stuff on my home-computer, I'll probably get an LCD because they're easy on my eyes, and they look so damn cool, but I was just wondering about the gaming degradation factor.
I think it depends on the type of games you like to play.
My gaming runs the gamut from strategy to role-playing to first-person shooters, with the action level ramping up roughly in that order. If you tastes lie mostly in strategy (particularly turn-based or war games), I'm not sure you'll notice a graphics degradation as much as you might when playing Unreal Tournament. But real-time strategy games can involve fast-paced action, requiring very quick response times, so the "ghosting" issues may be relevant there as well. And now that the RPG genre is moving to 3D engines (Neverwinter Nights, Dungeon Siege, EverCrack, etc.), the ability of LCD panels to provide rock-solid image stability will become more of an issue with those games as well.
I've tried playing FPS games on an LCD, and it gives me a headache, so I still prefer a CRT with its higher refresh rates and color depth--and a 19" CRT is still cheaper, on average, than a 17" LCD panel (you do have to consider that viewable area on LCDs is greater than on CRTs of the same dimension). But if your gaming is of a more sedate nature, and you have a multi-purpose system, then I think LCDs are now the way to go.
Besides, if you want a dedicated gaming machine, that's what consoles are for.;-)
What is H1-B? Is this the Visa that allows foriegn nationals to work in the US in high tech jobs?
Yes. To be precise, "specialty occupations," which also includes fashion models!
I'm not sure how long H1-B has been available, but at the beginning of the tech boom it became a convenient way to staff high-demand technical positions for which there were insufficient domestic workers. I think the U.S. wanted to avoid some of the problems Japan faced, where a severe shortage of labor led to their later economic troubles.
This is why any business you may decide to start will more than likely fail rather quickly.
Lets see... Spend somewhere around $100 for a decent 15" replacement (and stay clear of the $49 bargan basement, crap-o-the-day monitor) or spend a few bucks shipping to fix your monitors..
You totally missed the point of my post, but let me explain again more slowly:
It is often cheaper for a manufacturer to simply replace a defective product than to pay for shipping it back to a service center, swapping out a part, and then paying again to ship it back to the customer. It depends on the age of the product and its fair market value.
In Real Life, a used G51 is worth maybe 25 bucks. If it works. It doesn't seem cost effective for IBM to pay to replace parts in something that obsolete. It'd be like Ford recalling the Pinto now to fix the gas tank.
I guess it makes for good customer relations, but since when has a megacorporation been concerned with such trifles?;-)
These things are ancient. I've gone through at least two monitors since the G51 was introduced. And a decent new 17" monitor is about $120. Seems like it would be cheaper for IBM to just give owners a credit towards a new monitor.
Perhaps IBM is banking on the fact that most of these dinosaurs are sitting on a shelf somewhere because their tubes blew out long ago. I know I wouldn't bother getting a 6-year-old 15" monitor fixed, even if it was for free.
. . . this is all quite humorous, and certainly a source of embarrassment to the BSA, who apparently can't write scripts sophisticated enough to distinguish MS Office from OpenOffice. (I wonder if Sun has received a similar notice about StarOffice? Just think of the field day Scott McNealy would have with that one.)
But I think it was just a silly mistake on the BSA's part. This story really should be filed under "It's funny. Laugh."
If they didn't give it to the first part, I doubt they'll give it to the middle part. In a way it makes sense. Do you want it to win when you've only seen 2/3s of it? Let's judge it when it is over.
That's how I feel about it. It's truly a monumental achievement, but I think when Return of the King is considered, it will be the standardbearer for the other two as well, and if it wins Best Picture, it won't be on its own merits alone but also for the quality of the previous two films. And I would expect it to sweep a bunch of awards to boot.
Unless, of course, Peter Jackson has hosed it quite badly in the conclusion. But this isn't Star Trek we're talking about here, right?;-)
Miyazaki's Spirited Away is nominated for Best Animated Picture (someday an Anime will be nominated Best Picture).
Uh, no. No animated film will ever again receive a Best Picture nomination (Disney's Beauty and the Beast in 1991 is the only time it's happened). For some reason the Academy believes it's inappropriate for cartoons to compete with "real" movies for honors, so last year they created the Best Animated Feature Film category (won by Shrek). Yeah, it's a load of bullshit. But this way Disney's happy; they have three movies up for the award (Lilo & Stitch, Spirited Away, and the wholly undeserving Treasure Planet).
Somebody explain this: If Y Tu Mama Tambien was one of the best movies of the year and earned a Best Original Screenplay nomination, why isn't it a Best Foreign Language Film candidate? Isn't Mexico its country of origin? Instead we get a movie I've never heard of.
And be totally honest with yourselves: did The Two Towers really deserve a Best Picture nomination this year?
Well then can you recommend some non-bias.NET books?
To be honest, I can't--I don't use.NET and haven't had a need to read about it in-depth. I was making more of a general comment about understanding the backgrounds of authors before deciding whether they'll be reasonably objective about their subject matter.
Obviously, anyone who writes a good book on any subject needs to be an expert of the same--and I doubt someone who isn't at least favorable towards a given technology will be motivated to write about it. (I note that one of the co-authors of the O'Reilly book C# Essentials, for instance, is an engineer at Microsoft. And Programming Perl might be far less useful if Larry Wall hadn't had a hand in writing it.)
Having said that, I think you can peruse books from certain "independent" publishers with a fair amount of confidence that its authors aren't simply shills for their favorite technology vendor. O'Reilly, IMO, publishes the best tech books in the business, and I've never come across one that sounds like an extended marketing brochure. I also have had good luck with Wrox titles. As always, YMMV.
Also, even with a book so Microsoft oriented, I would expect to see either a distinct section, or at least more comments, on the pitfalls and barriers to takeup of the framework. A more critical and less Microsoft-centric text would for me have made this book more authoritative.
Did you read the author's bio--even the short one on bn.com?
David Chappell is Principal of Chappell & Associates and the best-selling author of Understanding ActiveX and OLE (Microsoft Press, 1996) and Understanding Microsoft Windows 2000 Distributed Services (Microsoft Press, 2000). Through his keynotes, seminars, writing, and consulting, David helps IT professionals around the world understand, use, market, and make better decisions about enterprise software technologies.
He's been published by Microsoft, fer chrissakes. He makes a living as a consultant on MS technologies. You can't possibly expect him to be coolly objective about anything coming from Redmond.
Reading the author bio will often give you a clue about his or her technology bias, although it's no guarantee that the book will provide an objective perspective. I wouldn't expect Richard Stallman to write a wholly bias-free book about.NET, either.
Nope, if you read the post, you get 5.1 from the Xbox, not the PS/2
Yeah, I misread it while trying to think of a clever way to play off the "PS/2" reference, which in my experience has always meant the IBM PS/2, *not* a Sony PlayStation 2.
Wouldn't be the first time I've stepped in it on/., probably won't be the last . ..
For the same price of a PS/2, I got Dolby 5.1 in all games, network adapter, built-in hard drive, etc.
Wow, you got Dolby 5.1 from your PS/2??? I was lucky to get the PC speaker to emit more than a strangled sqawk when I played a DOS port of NetHack . ..
I'm surprised no one has picked up on the fact that DirecTV DSL's demise was largely due to the failed merger between Hughes and EchoStar (owner of the Dish Network). Anytime a large merger fails, the losers have to jettison the dead weight that might have otherwise been supported through the strength of the combined companies. DirecTV's broadband operations are expected to lose more than $100 million this year, so it's not surprising that Hughes pulled the plug. Especially when you consider the service did not share infrastructure with the satellite operations (essentially Hughes bought Telocity a year and a half ago and repackaged it with the DirecTV service).
In anticipation of it getting Slashdotted, I have made available a reduced-size copy [photoisland.com] of a DVD screen capture [nausicaa.net] that shows the reddish tint.
On my laptop's TFT display, it's difficult to notice any red tint at all. (I haven't seen the movie before, so I admit I have no basis of comparison.) And the news clips on nausicaa mention that the DVD was remastered to optimize its display on LCD/plasma monitors:
Studio Ghbli said that they did not use the data that was used in theatrical releasing prints of the film, but they used the newly mastered DVD/Video digital data in consideration with the fact that the DVD should be played on Liquid Crystal TV or Plasma TV, so should be no problem for its quality. As for the trailers on the DVD, it might not be color corrected for the DVD format so it might slightly be different from what you see in the DVD feature it they are the same scene.
Not much comfort to those consumers not lucky enough to possess high-zoot TVs, but that may very well be all the explanation they're entitled to.
Having said that, Disney at the very least ought to offer full refunds to those who aren't happy with the DVD. But don't hold your breath waiting for them to spend time and money to remaster the DVD.
Java Complete, by Sybex. That book touts itself as a cheap book to learn Java and even has a good dump of the APIs at the end of the book. That said, it has got to be one of the most poory assembled books on Java I have seen.
If it's anything like the HTML book I bought a few years ago, then the Java book is probably a compilation of various chapters from other, more in-depth books published by Sybex, and priced low (like $20). It's meant to be a "sampler" to entice you to shell out for the other titles. The only interesting chapter I found in HTML Complete was from Web Sites that Suck, which was outdated probably before publication, and several of the chapters (and the CSS reference) were IE-specific, so I'm not sure it was a good buy even at 20 bucks.
I probably wouldn't, if the law applied only to government-controlled systems. The government should notify the public of such incidents--particularly if they compromise the records of its citizens.
But to force private businesses to meet the same level of disclosure is just another misguided attempt to protect our privacy--and hypocritical, too, considering how individual privacy is violated by the government on a daily basis. Businesses do have an ethical obligation to inform customers if their personal information has been compromised--but it needs to be done after an investigation indicates that such is the case. Some script kiddie who manages to replace a company's home page with "w3 own joo!!" shouldn't raise the same alarm as a breach of the state's payroll system--but it seems that is precisely what this law would do. Broad attempts at protecting the public interest usually comes at the expense of private rights.
Slashdot Mirror
Orbitz is no longer owned by the airline consortium; it was bought by Cendant Corporation in October of last year.
Yeah, it's possible that Hemos has grown so tired of /. that he's just decided to turn it into a massive meta-troll site. Even the most optimistic nerds would grow deeply cynical after dealing with this crowd for six years. ;-)
This company can't possibly be real.
Anybody read their terms of service? You understand that there are no guarantees, either expressed or implied, regarding the accuracy, confidentiality or availability of the service. eProvisia LCC may choose to share any information acquired in the course of providing its services with other entities, and may, at its sole discretion and based on this information, take whichever actions the company, its affiliates, subsidiaries, or representatives, consider to be appropriate. You henceforth void your reasonable expectation of privacy, and your constitutional rights to a fair and speedy trial.
And their contact information. Um, Palmyra Atoll is an uninhabited pile of sand in the Pacific Ocean. "Palmyra Atoll dollars?" BWAHAHAHA.
Leveraging our paradigm-shifting product line with state of the art technology developed by a dedicated team of professionals, we offer a significant competitive advantage on the diversified but fragmented market of best of breed anti-spam solutions. That line sounds like it was generated with the Web Economy Bullshit Generator.
Thanks for the laugh, Hemos. No, I'm laughing at you, not with you.
We should also consider that Wired edited his responses to fit the allotted space (assuming that this is from the current print issue and not an online-only piece). Any journalist should know that taking quotes can lead to misinterpretations.
I am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that Firefox is but one of many browsers he runs, as would be prudent for someone working on software security. It's quite possible for even third-party browsers to expose flaws in the OS itself, so it's in Microsoft's best interests to keep tabs on how other browsers interact with its platform.
This really needs to be modded down, as it's not only not insightful, it demonstrates a total lack of comprehension of Toulouse's response.
He did not say he didn't use IE. He simply mentioned needing to install a security update of Firefox. Yes, Virginia, there are other browsers that have security flaws other than IE. That doesn't make them better or worse, it just illustrates that the problem isn't isolated to Microsoft.
And I suspect that in performing his job duties, he needs to be familiar with a wide array of browser technologies, not just IE.
So, please mod the parent down -1, Needs a Clue.
You can also disable AutoRun via the properties for your drive in Device Manager. Or, you can turn it off temporarily by holding down the Shift key while loading the disc.
From the article:
It can truly be said that the last refuge of a doomed corporation is its patent office.
Wait, I thought this article was about Sun, not SCO . . .
. . . how do we vet the legitimacy of the information posted?
/. or kuro5hin) to determine an item's validity? Otherwise, it just becomes another rumour mill a la F---ed Company, of little value to anyone except the tin-foil hat crowd.
The article was much too short to provide detail, but the one concern I have is that posting reports of suspicious government activity doesn't guarantee its truth. Will there be some type of mechanism that will allow peer review (just like
From the article:
Points, ammunition and more weapons are awarded for completing missions that include stealing cars, crashing them, shooting pedestrians and other motorists, drug dealing and beating up prostitutes.
I don't know about Vice City because I haven't played it, but for GTA3 the above statement is rubbish. You're never required to shoot pedestrians or other bystanders, nor do you deal drugs or beat up hookers. Nor do you ever have to directly target the police. In fact, many of the missions in GTA3 involve busting up a rival gang's drug operations. Kind of ironic that a game with this level of violence carries an implicit anti-drug message.
As for the lawsuit itself, it's simply another example of parents trying to cover up their own failures by blaming the media. These two kids could just have easily been playing America's Army and decided to go on a fantasy hunt for some terrorists. BTW, this game's level of tactical violence is far more realistic than any GTA game, yet it received a 'T' rating. And this is a recruiting tool commissioned by the Army. But I'm sure it will be OK if America's Army turns kids into murderers, so long as they're in uniform and Defending Our Freedoms.
So, you have to, with "intent to harm or defraud," "[use] a communication service without""obtaining the authorization of the provider; or making a payment to the provider in the amount normally charged by the provider for the service; or tampers with, modifies, or maintains a modification to a communication device provided by or installed by the provider."
Well, bully for Texas. I've read Colorado's bill, and it doesn't contain that language. It says, as best as I can tell, that if you don't have permission to use such technologies from your service provider, you can go to jail.
Here's the link to Colorado's bill; please tell me I'm wrong (PDF format):
House Bill 1303
considering that I do mostly non-game stuff on my home-computer, I'll probably get an LCD because they're easy on my eyes, and they look so damn cool, but I was just wondering about the gaming degradation factor.
;-)
I think it depends on the type of games you like to play.
My gaming runs the gamut from strategy to role-playing to first-person shooters, with the action level ramping up roughly in that order. If you tastes lie mostly in strategy (particularly turn-based or war games), I'm not sure you'll notice a graphics degradation as much as you might when playing Unreal Tournament. But real-time strategy games can involve fast-paced action, requiring very quick response times, so the "ghosting" issues may be relevant there as well. And now that the RPG genre is moving to 3D engines (Neverwinter Nights, Dungeon Siege, EverCrack, etc.), the ability of LCD panels to provide rock-solid image stability will become more of an issue with those games as well.
I've tried playing FPS games on an LCD, and it gives me a headache, so I still prefer a CRT with its higher refresh rates and color depth--and a 19" CRT is still cheaper, on average, than a 17" LCD panel (you do have to consider that viewable area on LCDs is greater than on CRTs of the same dimension). But if your gaming is of a more sedate nature, and you have a multi-purpose system, then I think LCDs are now the way to go.
Besides, if you want a dedicated gaming machine, that's what consoles are for.
What is H1-B? Is this the Visa that allows foriegn nationals to work in the US in high tech jobs?
Yes. To be precise, "specialty occupations," which also includes fashion models!
I'm not sure how long H1-B has been available, but at the beginning of the tech boom it became a convenient way to staff high-demand technical positions for which there were insufficient domestic workers. I think the U.S. wanted to avoid some of the problems Japan faced, where a severe shortage of labor led to their later economic troubles.
This is why any business you may decide to start will more than likely fail rather quickly.
;-)
Lets see... Spend somewhere around $100 for a decent 15" replacement (and stay clear of the $49 bargan basement, crap-o-the-day monitor) or spend a few bucks shipping to fix your monitors..
You totally missed the point of my post, but let me explain again more slowly:
It is often cheaper for a manufacturer to simply replace a defective product than to pay for shipping it back to a service center, swapping out a part, and then paying again to ship it back to the customer. It depends on the age of the product and its fair market value.
In Real Life, a used G51 is worth maybe 25 bucks. If it works. It doesn't seem cost effective for IBM to pay to replace parts in something that obsolete. It'd be like Ford recalling the Pinto now to fix the gas tank.
I guess it makes for good customer relations, but since when has a megacorporation been concerned with such trifles?
These things are ancient. I've gone through at least two monitors since the G51 was introduced. And a decent new 17" monitor is about $120. Seems like it would be cheaper for IBM to just give owners a credit towards a new monitor.
Perhaps IBM is banking on the fact that most of these dinosaurs are sitting on a shelf somewhere because their tubes blew out long ago. I know I wouldn't bother getting a 6-year-old 15" monitor fixed, even if it was for free.
. . . this is all quite humorous, and certainly a source of embarrassment to the BSA, who apparently can't write scripts sophisticated enough to distinguish MS Office from OpenOffice. (I wonder if Sun has received a similar notice about StarOffice? Just think of the field day Scott McNealy would have with that one.)
But I think it was just a silly mistake on the BSA's part. This story really should be filed under "It's funny. Laugh."
If they didn't give it to the first part, I doubt they'll give it to the middle part. In a way it makes sense. Do you want it to win when you've only seen 2/3s of it? Let's judge it when it is over.
;-)
That's how I feel about it. It's truly a monumental achievement, but I think when Return of the King is considered, it will be the standardbearer for the other two as well, and if it wins Best Picture, it won't be on its own merits alone but also for the quality of the previous two films. And I would expect it to sweep a bunch of awards to boot.
Unless, of course, Peter Jackson has hosed it quite badly in the conclusion. But this isn't Star Trek we're talking about here, right?
Miyazaki's Spirited Away is nominated for Best Animated Picture (someday an Anime will be nominated Best Picture).
Uh, no. No animated film will ever again receive a Best Picture nomination (Disney's Beauty and the Beast in 1991 is the only time it's happened). For some reason the Academy believes it's inappropriate for cartoons to compete with "real" movies for honors, so last year they created the Best Animated Feature Film category (won by Shrek). Yeah, it's a load of bullshit. But this way Disney's happy; they have three movies up for the award (Lilo & Stitch, Spirited Away, and the wholly undeserving Treasure Planet).
Somebody explain this: If Y Tu Mama Tambien was one of the best movies of the year and earned a Best Original Screenplay nomination, why isn't it a Best Foreign Language Film candidate? Isn't Mexico its country of origin? Instead we get a movie I've never heard of.
And be totally honest with yourselves: did The Two Towers really deserve a Best Picture nomination this year?
The Oscars make no sense these days.
Well then can you recommend some non-bias .NET books?
.NET and haven't had a need to read about it in-depth. I was making more of a general comment about understanding the backgrounds of authors before deciding whether they'll be reasonably objective about their subject matter.
To be honest, I can't--I don't use
Obviously, anyone who writes a good book on any subject needs to be an expert of the same--and I doubt someone who isn't at least favorable towards a given technology will be motivated to write about it. (I note that one of the co-authors of the O'Reilly book C# Essentials, for instance, is an engineer at Microsoft. And Programming Perl might be far less useful if Larry Wall hadn't had a hand in writing it.)
Having said that, I think you can peruse books from certain "independent" publishers with a fair amount of confidence that its authors aren't simply shills for their favorite technology vendor. O'Reilly, IMO, publishes the best tech books in the business, and I've never come across one that sounds like an extended marketing brochure. I also have had good luck with Wrox titles. As always, YMMV.
Also, even with a book so Microsoft oriented, I would expect to see either a distinct section, or at least more comments, on the pitfalls and barriers to takeup of the framework. A more critical and less Microsoft-centric text would for me have made this book more authoritative.
.NET, either.
Did you read the author's bio--even the short one on bn.com?
David Chappell is Principal of Chappell & Associates and the best-selling author of Understanding ActiveX and OLE (Microsoft Press, 1996) and Understanding Microsoft Windows 2000 Distributed Services (Microsoft Press, 2000). Through his keynotes, seminars, writing, and consulting, David helps IT professionals around the world understand, use, market, and make better decisions about enterprise software technologies.
He's been published by Microsoft, fer chrissakes. He makes a living as a consultant on MS technologies. You can't possibly expect him to be coolly objective about anything coming from Redmond.
Reading the author bio will often give you a clue about his or her technology bias, although it's no guarantee that the book will provide an objective perspective. I wouldn't expect Richard Stallman to write a wholly bias-free book about
Nope, if you read the post, you get 5.1 from the Xbox, not the PS/2
/., probably won't be the last . . .
Yeah, I misread it while trying to think of a clever way to play off the "PS/2" reference, which in my experience has always meant the IBM PS/2, *not* a Sony PlayStation 2.
Wouldn't be the first time I've stepped in it on
For the same price of a PS/2, I got Dolby 5.1 in all games, network adapter, built-in hard drive, etc.
.
Wow, you got Dolby 5.1 from your PS/2??? I was lucky to get the PC speaker to emit more than a strangled sqawk when I played a DOS port of NetHack . .
I'm surprised no one has picked up on the fact that DirecTV DSL's demise was largely due to the failed merger between Hughes and EchoStar (owner of the Dish Network). Anytime a large merger fails, the losers have to jettison the dead weight that might have otherwise been supported through the strength of the combined companies. DirecTV's broadband operations are expected to lose more than $100 million this year, so it's not surprising that Hughes pulled the plug. Especially when you consider the service did not share infrastructure with the satellite operations (essentially Hughes bought Telocity a year and a half ago and repackaged it with the DirecTV service).
In anticipation of it getting Slashdotted, I have made available a reduced-size copy [photoisland.com] of a DVD screen capture [nausicaa.net] that shows the reddish tint.
On my laptop's TFT display, it's difficult to notice any red tint at all. (I haven't seen the movie before, so I admit I have no basis of comparison.) And the news clips on nausicaa mention that the DVD was remastered to optimize its display on LCD/plasma monitors:
Studio Ghbli said that they did not use the data that was used in theatrical releasing prints of the film, but they used the newly mastered DVD/Video digital data in consideration with the fact that the DVD should be played on Liquid Crystal TV or Plasma TV, so should be no problem for its quality. As for the trailers on the DVD, it might not be color corrected for the DVD format so it might slightly be different from what you see in the DVD feature it they are the same scene.
Not much comfort to those consumers not lucky enough to possess high-zoot TVs, but that may very well be all the explanation they're entitled to.
Having said that, Disney at the very least ought to offer full refunds to those who aren't happy with the DVD. But don't hold your breath waiting for them to spend time and money to remaster the DVD.
Java Complete, by Sybex. That book touts itself as a cheap book to learn Java and even has a good dump of the APIs at the end of the book. That said, it has got to be one of the most poory assembled books on Java I have seen.
If it's anything like the HTML book I bought a few years ago, then the Java book is probably a compilation of various chapters from other, more in-depth books published by Sybex, and priced low (like $20). It's meant to be a "sampler" to entice you to shell out for the other titles. The only interesting chapter I found in HTML Complete was from Web Sites that Suck, which was outdated probably before publication, and several of the chapters (and the CSS reference) were IE-specific, so I'm not sure it was a good buy even at 20 bucks.
Why would anyone here complain?
I probably wouldn't, if the law applied only to government-controlled systems. The government should notify the public of such incidents--particularly if they compromise the records of its citizens.
But to force private businesses to meet the same level of disclosure is just another misguided attempt to protect our privacy--and hypocritical, too, considering how individual privacy is violated by the government on a daily basis. Businesses do have an ethical obligation to inform customers if their personal information has been compromised--but it needs to be done after an investigation indicates that such is the case. Some script kiddie who manages to replace a company's home page with "w3 own joo!!" shouldn't raise the same alarm as a breach of the state's payroll system--but it seems that is precisely what this law would do. Broad attempts at protecting the public interest usually comes at the expense of private rights.