That a book like this would be written and actually published seems more evidence that Windows Vista is the next incarnation of Windows Me which proved to be a nasty little speed bump on the way to the next "good" version of Windows. It's a real shame to do this to the users. Microsoft is full of talented, bright people to whom Vista is giving a bad name. It's almost never a good idea to push an incomplete product out into the market.
This might account for the recent increase in spam chat messages I've been seeing there. My guess is that the spam filtering is not as effective on chat as email. Indeed, chat may not pass through any kind of filtering at all afaik. That will probably change soon, but in the meantime I suppose the people who cracked the captcha will make a tidy profit.
Geez, Paul McGuinness must really hate and despise U2's fans to basically assume that they're all just a bunch of thieves unless draconian measures are applied. This sounds more like a fascist than someone trying to promote a band. This reminds me of those mall shops that practically frisk you as you come into the store. While it's true that some people will steal things, most of your customers are not thieves and should not be treated as such just because some are. What ever happened to the customer's always right? Contempt for the customer is not what I'd call a good long term business plan, unless, of course, your band is Dethklok!
This is just one more reason to never put any image on the internet that you would have a problem with the whole world seeing. That 17GB of images is going to be circulating for the next 100 years. D*mn! The corollary is, never let anyone take a picture of you that you wouldn't want everyone to see either. I sense the birth of a lot of new internet celebs...whether they like it or not...
I'm no crotchety old man pining away for the the good old days, but it seems to me that DVDs are still working just fine. The format wars are a sometimes interesting diversion, but until HD TVs are the norm and DVDs leave the market altogether, the format war is largely meaningless to most. My SD TV works just fine and until it stops working and/or HD comes down in price another $500USD or so, Blu-ray vs HD-DVD is a nonissue for many if not most. Oh, and that says nothing about digital delivery making physical disks totally irrelevant.
And from the non-business consumer side of things, there are fewer reasons to buy a new PC when other devices can be used to do things online. Smartphones, video game consoles, and DVRs are making the hassle and expense of upgrading your old Windows XP PC less and less necessary. Microsoft already knows this which explains their Xbox and Zune adventures. For the home user, the future is not the PC.
Actually, this is similar to what Apple did to get the strong foothold they once had in the education market. I don't know what the balance is these days, but it is a good move by Microsoft to get better established in an important market. I'm not a huge Microsoft fan, but there isn't anything evil about this, other than the usual profit motive which may or may not be evil depending on who you talk to. In my book, if it helps increase computer literacy then it's a good thing, especially if it increases that of the teachers!
It is easy to see from earlier posts, that one can quickly drown in the very concept of a NASA based MMO or MMORPG. I think that I would start out with the goal of creating an online version of the Space Camp experience and build up from there doing things that you can't do in Space Camp due to physical limitations. So it wouldn't be exactly like some Second Life version of the life of an Astronaut or NASA engineer. It'd be more mission oriented with minigames meant to train and educate with an emphasis on the teamwork required to complete missions. In the later stages for more experienced players, special scenarios would become available. These would be things like exotic equipment failures, introduction of new technology, asteroid deflection, or first contact, to name a few.
If the game can be fun and appealing to the demographic that goes to Space Camp right now, then it may do well enough to justify the investment.
I can understand, a little, why MS might want do this. It could be argued that it will be less of a headache to support the scripting functionality best suited to each platform. But that really wears a little thin when if they would finally support Mac development in Visual Studio they might finally have the one ring to bind and rule them all, so to speak. Visual Studio is a pretty good development platform, for Windows, why not extend it to Mac? And then from there, would it be so hard to allow developers the language of their choice to script MS Office apps whether that be C#, Python, or something else?
Yeah, I know MS generally doesn't support any platform other than Windows as far as dev tools go, but one can dream...
I'm beginning to think that a lot of the worry over old file formats becoming inaccessible in the future is overblown. With the continuing advances of emulation and virtualization technology, it seems highly unlikely that we'll lose all access to documents in old file formats. Emulation of the proper platform and installation of the appropriate software are all that's needed. The real trouble rests with obsolete physical storage media. I still have 5.25" floppies that I haven't been able to read for many years now, but that's hardly Microsoft's fault! And if there's a market for it, someone will be happy to copy all of your old media onto something more modern.
This seems like an almost meaningless technical gesture. It reminds me of those stories about how someone got some version of Linux to run on a digital camera or other generally unlikely device. It may be interesting, but not very useful. Being able to dual boot Windows on an XO laptop seems like nothing more than tech PR without any real substance. The target audience has no need for this.
The thing that I have trouble conceiving of is how people could trust these virtual banks/investment schemes in the first place, especially since there's real money involved. I find Second Life interesting, but like the internet, it's still a bit of the wild west. I barely trust my real world bank to do the right thing with my money, to say nothing of trusting some virtual bank.
This is certainly interesting news. These days when I just need to script something fast, Python is definitely my tool of choice because it works everywhere that I do, and is easier, for me at least, to deal with than Perl. Though I still have a soft spot for Perl because it was the first programming language that actually earned me any money!
All of this filtering talk sounds more and more like the way the Chinese government handles internet traffic there. The filtering has gotten to the point of producing visible degradation in the speed of network activities, and there is no reason to believe that the same thing won't happen in the US if ISPs start doing filtering on the scale needed to be even marginally effective. And in the end, this will only hurt the average consumer who isn't a big fish on the infringement front anyway. The real players and technically savvy will easily find ways around any filtering schemes.
There is no practical way of filtering at the level the media companies seem to want, short of shutting down the internet altogether. In some ways, it's like trying to enforce speed laws, you can pull over a car here and there, but there's no way you'll get them all.
I don't know if the number of unconstitutional laws has gone up or not. But as long as there is no apparent penalty for writing and passing unconstitutional laws, I see no reason why it will diminish. My only question is whether or not the sponsoring lawmakers know that the law won't withstand constitutional scrutiny, but go ahead and push it anyway just for political gain. I guess I want to know just how evil they have become.
There's a lot of talk about encryption here, but it is unlikely that "ordinary" users are going to use it or care. But I would say that if I had any illegal or questionable materials, good sense would make it unlikely I would store them on a Gdrive. And as far as Google data mining my files for ad purposes, my guess is that they will offer a paid service wherein your data is not scanned by them at all, beyond virus scanning I would guess. So if you pay the protection money, then it's cool, if you trust Google that is...
To survive and prosper, Big Music needs to do a couple of things in this new era of the music industry. They first need to go on a diet and get used to smaller revenues coming in with the demise of the force-fed album sale. And second, they need to get more exercise. That is, in order to compensate for smaller revenues due to ala carte buying of songs via download, they need to increase the supply of music by recruiting and promoting a lot more artists. There needs to be an explosion of quantity and diversity of music. If you can't sell more albums, then sell a lot more songs. This is all doable, but it's going to mean abandoning the old business model.
I'm not a fan of Big Music, but if they are smart, they can certainly survive and perhaps even win back all of the goodwill they've lost trying to prop up the old model. Long odds...
I mean, background checks like this probably would have exluded most of the scientists who came over from Germany for the Manhattan Project.
Exactly! Creative types like scientists and engineers probably tend to have less than conventional personal lives. I really don't think anyone needs to go poking into that and so killing off the goose that lays the golden eggs.
Eh, friends are overrated anyway, so I will continue to avoid Facebook, MySpace, and similar services. I prefer my internet kinda wild, nasty, and largely anonymous. Social networking sites add way more structure to online relationships than I would care to have, which leads to the situation in the article. Such structure seems to be of more benefit to marketers than to the members.
This is pure, over the horizon, is the earth round or flat, kind of stuff. While no one is expecting anything extraordinary, you never really know until you go and look.
This is certainly interesting, but I wonder if there are already botnets out there cracking passwords. Things would become really interesting if there were a way to get compromised software on the PS3 network that could then be used to harness thousands of PS3s in the way that folding@home does. Still, using PCs in a botnet would probably be easier, just make up for lower average CPU capability with greater numbers.
So, sadly, there's a real likelihood that his first words, upon realizing he can finally communicate, after years of being unable to and stuck in a totally paralyzed body, will be, "Kill me." Probably not ideal to have the family in the room for.
You raise a fascinating point. This new device when/if perfected could open a new window on a host of personal hells that severely disabled people may be suffering. Hopefully, full two way communication won't lag too far behind. Of course we'd probably do well to avoid anything that smacks of telepathy along the lines outlined by Douglas Adams' Hitch Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy, or Keiichi Sigsawa's Kino no Tabi. Some things need to be kept to one's self.
Recently my car's battery and alternator failed while I was driving to work. Steering the car became progressively more difficult, but I could manage. The really scary part involved braking, or lack thereof. My car quit in the parking garage, and later had to be towed out using an SUV rather than a tow truck because of height restrictions in the garage. Anyway, I had a lot of trouble keeping the car off of the SUV's bumper because it took all of my might to use the brakes. I would hate to be trying to stop a car, possibly in traffic, without power brakes. With that in mind, I think the likelihood of an EMP stopping system resulting in wrecks is very high. Very judicious use would be advised.
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That a book like this would be written and actually published seems more evidence that Windows Vista is the next incarnation of Windows Me which proved to be a nasty little speed bump on the way to the next "good" version of Windows. It's a real shame to do this to the users. Microsoft is full of talented, bright people to whom Vista is giving a bad name. It's almost never a good idea to push an incomplete product out into the market.
This might account for the recent increase in spam chat messages I've been seeing there. My guess is that the spam filtering is not as effective on chat as email. Indeed, chat may not pass through any kind of filtering at all afaik. That will probably change soon, but in the meantime I suppose the people who cracked the captcha will make a tidy profit.
Geez, Paul McGuinness must really hate and despise U2's fans to basically assume that they're all just a bunch of thieves unless draconian measures are applied. This sounds more like a fascist than someone trying to promote a band. This reminds me of those mall shops that practically frisk you as you come into the store. While it's true that some people will steal things, most of your customers are not thieves and should not be treated as such just because some are. What ever happened to the customer's always right? Contempt for the customer is not what I'd call a good long term business plan, unless, of course, your band is Dethklok!
Actually, I love HDTV. I just can't afford one yet! T_T
This is just one more reason to never put any image on the internet that you would have a problem with the whole world seeing. That 17GB of images is going to be circulating for the next 100 years. D*mn! The corollary is, never let anyone take a picture of you that you wouldn't want everyone to see either. I sense the birth of a lot of new internet celebs...whether they like it or not...
LOL, you beat me to that one!
I'm no crotchety old man pining away for the the good old days, but it seems to me that DVDs are still working just fine. The format wars are a sometimes interesting diversion, but until HD TVs are the norm and DVDs leave the market altogether, the format war is largely meaningless to most. My SD TV works just fine and until it stops working and/or HD comes down in price another $500USD or so, Blu-ray vs HD-DVD is a nonissue for many if not most. Oh, and that says nothing about digital delivery making physical disks totally irrelevant.
And from the non-business consumer side of things, there are fewer reasons to buy a new PC when other devices can be used to do things online. Smartphones, video game consoles, and DVRs are making the hassle and expense of upgrading your old Windows XP PC less and less necessary. Microsoft already knows this which explains their Xbox and Zune adventures. For the home user, the future is not the PC.
Actually, this is similar to what Apple did to get the strong foothold they once had in the education market. I don't know what the balance is these days, but it is a good move by Microsoft to get better established in an important market. I'm not a huge Microsoft fan, but there isn't anything evil about this, other than the usual profit motive which may or may not be evil depending on who you talk to. In my book, if it helps increase computer literacy then it's a good thing, especially if it increases that of the teachers!
It is easy to see from earlier posts, that one can quickly drown in the very concept of a NASA based MMO or MMORPG. I think that I would start out with the goal of creating an online version of the Space Camp experience and build up from there doing things that you can't do in Space Camp due to physical limitations. So it wouldn't be exactly like some Second Life version of the life of an Astronaut or NASA engineer. It'd be more mission oriented with minigames meant to train and educate with an emphasis on the teamwork required to complete missions. In the later stages for more experienced players, special scenarios would become available. These would be things like exotic equipment failures, introduction of new technology, asteroid deflection, or first contact, to name a few.
If the game can be fun and appealing to the demographic that goes to Space Camp right now, then it may do well enough to justify the investment.
I can understand, a little, why MS might want do this. It could be argued that it will be less of a headache to support the scripting functionality best suited to each platform. But that really wears a little thin when if they would finally support Mac development in Visual Studio they might finally have the one ring to bind and rule them all, so to speak. Visual Studio is a pretty good development platform, for Windows, why not extend it to Mac? And then from there, would it be so hard to allow developers the language of their choice to script MS Office apps whether that be C#, Python, or something else?
Yeah, I know MS generally doesn't support any platform other than Windows as far as dev tools go, but one can dream...
I'm beginning to think that a lot of the worry over old file formats becoming inaccessible in the future is overblown. With the continuing advances of emulation and virtualization technology, it seems highly unlikely that we'll lose all access to documents in old file formats. Emulation of the proper platform and installation of the appropriate software are all that's needed. The real trouble rests with obsolete physical storage media. I still have 5.25" floppies that I haven't been able to read for many years now, but that's hardly Microsoft's fault! And if there's a market for it, someone will be happy to copy all of your old media onto something more modern.
This seems like an almost meaningless technical gesture. It reminds me of those stories about how someone got some version of Linux to run on a digital camera or other generally unlikely device. It may be interesting, but not very useful. Being able to dual boot Windows on an XO laptop seems like nothing more than tech PR without any real substance. The target audience has no need for this.
The thing that I have trouble conceiving of is how people could trust these virtual banks/investment schemes in the first place, especially since there's real money involved. I find Second Life interesting, but like the internet, it's still a bit of the wild west. I barely trust my real world bank to do the right thing with my money, to say nothing of trusting some virtual bank.
This is certainly interesting news. These days when I just need to script something fast, Python is definitely my tool of choice because it works everywhere that I do, and is easier, for me at least, to deal with than Perl. Though I still have a soft spot for Perl because it was the first programming language that actually earned me any money!
All of this filtering talk sounds more and more like the way the Chinese government handles internet traffic there. The filtering has gotten to the point of producing visible degradation in the speed of network activities, and there is no reason to believe that the same thing won't happen in the US if ISPs start doing filtering on the scale needed to be even marginally effective. And in the end, this will only hurt the average consumer who isn't a big fish on the infringement front anyway. The real players and technically savvy will easily find ways around any filtering schemes.
There is no practical way of filtering at the level the media companies seem to want, short of shutting down the internet altogether. In some ways, it's like trying to enforce speed laws, you can pull over a car here and there, but there's no way you'll get them all.
I don't know if the number of unconstitutional laws has gone up or not. But as long as there is no apparent penalty for writing and passing unconstitutional laws, I see no reason why it will diminish. My only question is whether or not the sponsoring lawmakers know that the law won't withstand constitutional scrutiny, but go ahead and push it anyway just for political gain. I guess I want to know just how evil they have become.
There's a lot of talk about encryption here, but it is unlikely that "ordinary" users are going to use it or care. But I would say that if I had any illegal or questionable materials, good sense would make it unlikely I would store them on a Gdrive. And as far as Google data mining my files for ad purposes, my guess is that they will offer a paid service wherein your data is not scanned by them at all, beyond virus scanning I would guess. So if you pay the protection money, then it's cool, if you trust Google that is...
To survive and prosper, Big Music needs to do a couple of things in this new era of the music industry. They first need to go on a diet and get used to smaller revenues coming in with the demise of the force-fed album sale. And second, they need to get more exercise. That is, in order to compensate for smaller revenues due to ala carte buying of songs via download, they need to increase the supply of music by recruiting and promoting a lot more artists. There needs to be an explosion of quantity and diversity of music. If you can't sell more albums, then sell a lot more songs. This is all doable, but it's going to mean abandoning the old business model.
I'm not a fan of Big Music, but if they are smart, they can certainly survive and perhaps even win back all of the goodwill they've lost trying to prop up the old model. Long odds...
I mean, background checks like this probably would have exluded most of the scientists who came over from Germany for the Manhattan Project.
Exactly! Creative types like scientists and engineers probably tend to have less than conventional personal lives. I really don't think anyone needs to go poking into that and so killing off the goose that lays the golden eggs.
Eh, friends are overrated anyway, so I will continue to avoid Facebook, MySpace, and similar services. I prefer my internet kinda wild, nasty, and largely anonymous. Social networking sites add way more structure to online relationships than I would care to have, which leads to the situation in the article. Such structure seems to be of more benefit to marketers than to the members.
This is pure, over the horizon, is the earth round or flat, kind of stuff. While no one is expecting anything extraordinary, you never really know until you go and look.
This is certainly interesting, but I wonder if there are already botnets out there cracking passwords. Things would become really interesting if there were a way to get compromised software on the PS3 network that could then be used to harness thousands of PS3s in the way that folding@home does. Still, using PCs in a botnet would probably be easier, just make up for lower average CPU capability with greater numbers.
So, sadly, there's a real likelihood that his first words, upon realizing he can finally communicate, after years of being unable to and stuck in a totally paralyzed body, will be, "Kill me." Probably not ideal to have the family in the room for.
You raise a fascinating point. This new device when/if perfected could open a new window on a host of personal hells that severely disabled people may be suffering. Hopefully, full two way communication won't lag too far behind. Of course we'd probably do well to avoid anything that smacks of telepathy along the lines outlined by Douglas Adams' Hitch Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy, or Keiichi Sigsawa's Kino no Tabi. Some things need to be kept to one's self.
Recently my car's battery and alternator failed while I was driving to work. Steering the car became progressively more difficult, but I could manage. The really scary part involved braking, or lack thereof. My car quit in the parking garage, and later had to be towed out using an SUV rather than a tow truck because of height restrictions in the garage. Anyway, I had a lot of trouble keeping the car off of the SUV's bumper because it took all of my might to use the brakes. I would hate to be trying to stop a car, possibly in traffic, without power brakes. With that in mind, I think the likelihood of an EMP stopping system resulting in wrecks is very high. Very judicious use would be advised.