AOL rip your card off by another $60 every year - saves small business the time and trouble of going out and finding a genuine internet criminal to perform that vital service.
...last night. Looks pretty good, they have some fantastic comedy writers working for Pixar - you could almost believe they were English.
The look and feel of the whole thing was great, however they seem to have backed away from their more and more realistic graphics and this one is 100% cartoon feel.
This was then followed by a commercial for SquareBob in a movie theater that only admits over 21s (the Premium in Framingham, MA). D'oh!
It's cheap, can be locked up neatly, and doesn't require hardware prone to theft.
All the single function machines on our campus (like the library catalogue) run KDE/Konqueror in Kiosk mode now, because the cost per unit is >>$200+screens.
Multi use machines are migrating to dual boot to allow the curious to get some experience and to get infrastructure sorted out, at the cost of about a week of two people's time. Compare and contrast to hardware migration cost. (Replaced machines just get the dual boot image, no fuss.)
Eventually when apps are deamed feature complete for 90% of use the default will be switched to Linux. It might take a while, but it can be done slowly, and if a urgent move is ever required (hello, licensing 7?) it'll all be in place and ready to go.
Just like the real player thing*, it seems that Linux users get the better deal on drivers and crapware.
HP Linux drivers (for the printers at least, I havent used the camera ones) are solid, HP backed, support things like the card readers and have no crapware attached.
There seem to be quite a few cases where Linux drivers and software are actually _better_ than the Windows versions.
*Real player for UNIX is a pretty decent piece of software.
1) Arabs with money and contacts 2) Europe, the second most populous and wealthy power block in the world 2) People within 50 miles of major cities with high explosives and a well tested delivery system 4) ??? 5) Aliens
The money (along with punative damages) should go to registered charities.
Why should anyone get rich from some kind of telemarketer lottery? No, the government shouldnt get the money, but the purpose is to PUNISH the offender not to REWARD the victim.
The money (along with the $4m from oil truck cases etc etc) after ACTUAL damages (loss of income, harrassment etc) could be used to pay for things with social value, such as high quality low income housing, soup kitchens and wider broadband availability. Dont piss it away on making people rich for being in the right place at the right time.
Now I get to pay $x for a tivo subscription and $y for a broadband connection when rental is $x, which happens to be a lot less than $x or $y.
Still, I can see it working. There are a lot of people (hello, #divx on irchighway) who probably would pay for movies if they could download them easily and at high quality because of the unreasonable exertion that walking to the shops causes and the long queues for new releases on the fservs. These people probably all have fat pipes anyway, so it's not an extra cost.
My only problem is that I would have to buy a TV card as the A/V set up on my computer is far better than that on my TV. Bigger screen, much much better resolution and nicer speakers. Makes renting/borrowing DVDs nicer than a video-output-only device.
Having spen all of today revising for my ergonomics exam tomorrow (ha! they things it's engineering! I'd like to see them fly a plane with no wings and a comfy seat), it's convenient I just finished the chapter on user interface design.
However, despite their odd views on almost everything, they have some good points:
Command lines ROCK when you need to remove every file with a "Q" and "l" in the filename containing the word "banana".
GUIs and CLIs work best when they are INTEGRATED so you can use the GUI and it helps you figure out how the CLI works next time.
Linux has the former, with all the normal UNIX goodness. Now it needs to work on the latter. Then it will introduce not just sysadmins who type commands at over 40wpm and know regexs backwards through training, but also those that can benefit from picking up the CLI on a more casual basis, through interaction with other applications.
I have a 3 year old one that I brought from NEC corporate that looks almost as good as a powerbook. It's been reliable, has a great screen, and best of all has firewire+usb+floppy+cdrom+serial+parallel connectors - hard to get on a laptop.
It even manages 3 hours per battery, which is totally amazing, especially after 3 years of use. The one bad point is the modem not working in Linux (winmodems suck). It even has a nice trackpad.
So, I'd be hard pushed not to get another, even with their ethics problems. Guess I'm a lazy consumer and part of the problem:\
If you look at it you can see it ha a bycicle undercarriage (forward and back wheel sets instead of nosewheel+main gear). It also has wings with an unusually high attack angle with respect to the main fuse.
This leads to some crazy descent angle where the arcraft seems to be flying directly AT THE GROUND until it flares at the last second to place the wheel sets parallel to the runway to touchdown.
It's perfectly safe but damn, that's a wierd feeling when you are riding in one.
Given that appearing on TV can make you a crapload of money doing random shit, I think no one is going to care a rats ass about piracy except the networks worrying about advertising figures.
I think that Itchy and Scratchey would be perfect to represent the 'do not record' flag. One of them can use a chainsaw to cut off the legs of the other when he tries to watch a movie with a friend without the proper license.
Harsh, overbearing DRM RIGHT NOW, before consumers forget 'how things were'.
People like Apple slipping in the unreasonableness slowly so you gradually ajust to it (compare the 'no DRM at all, don't buy it and let the market kill it' position pre-iTunes to the current 'reasonable DRM is ok, it's not their fault' now*) are FAR more dangerous that the flat footed attempts of the WMA crowd.
The more violently the content producers introduce this stuff the better the chance of the populace waking up for the tenth of a second required to scare the media companies really badly and getting rid of DRM for at least a good long while more.
So this kind of thing is a good thing, not a bad thing. In the long run it'll mean less arbitrary restrictions and presumption of guilt for everyone.
*This is not a flame, this is the truth. I can't think of one slashdot post pre-iTunes (that was modded up anyway) that said that DRM would suffer anything but a crippling death because people would refuse to buy restricted products, then they would HAVE to come back with unencumbered goods. Now we see people falling over themselves to offer a misguided company congratulations because they fuck you over SLIGHTLY LESS THAN EVERYONE ELSE. Wonderful.
Unless of course you already have a building full of PCs (office for example?) and want to be able to load up some software to create an instant full mesh of access points.
A USB WiFi adaptor that works with HostAP is around $10-$15 in bulk, and you will get much much better coverage with one in every third desktop on your network than with one or two APs per office.
You can then also get other advantages, such as pre-cached handover (great for VoIP), more granular connection tracking, more complex firewall fules and routing tables, better VPN interoperability and other things that most big work sites would kill (or pay Cisco a fortune) for.
Might work in the US but here in the UK we have to pay (rather a lot) for local calls.
I'm not going to pay $0.08/min (peak) for someone in the US to talk to someone down the road.
And that's assuming the software is infalliable. Immagine if it broke and you started placing calls to Azejabstan for £2.50 a minute? Given the average buggyness of most software combined with the general attractions of phone systems to phreakers I would expect a call charge after the first month that could be accidentally confused with a Chinese phone number, international code and all.
Slashdot Mirror
AOL rip your card off by another $60 every year - saves small business the time and trouble of going out and finding a genuine internet criminal to perform that vital service.
No wonder they are America's number 1!
...last night. Looks pretty good, they have some fantastic comedy writers working for Pixar - you could almost believe they were English.
The look and feel of the whole thing was great, however they seem to have backed away from their more and more realistic graphics and this one is 100% cartoon feel.
This was then followed by a commercial for SquareBob in a movie theater that only admits over 21s (the Premium in Framingham, MA). D'oh!
...you could just google for the answer:
7427466391
Now, is that a better or worse answer than figuring it out yourself?
They just want to make the Pigeons smaller so they can fit more into a 1U server case and make google faster.
A sad state the world is in when someone not being an asshole is surprising.
It's cheap, can be locked up neatly, and doesn't require hardware prone to theft.
All the single function machines on our campus (like the library catalogue) run KDE/Konqueror in Kiosk mode now, because the cost per unit is >>$200+screens.
Multi use machines are migrating to dual boot to allow the curious to get some experience and to get infrastructure sorted out, at the cost of about a week of two people's time. Compare and contrast to hardware migration cost. (Replaced machines just get the dual boot image, no fuss.)
Eventually when apps are deamed feature complete for 90% of use the default will be switched to Linux. It might take a while, but it can be done slowly, and if a urgent move is ever required (hello, licensing 7?) it'll all be in place and ready to go.
...and all it is saying to me is that cutting my own ears off could be blessed relief.
Just like the real player thing*, it seems that Linux users get the better deal on drivers and crapware.
HP Linux drivers (for the printers at least, I havent used the camera ones) are solid, HP backed, support things like the card readers and have no crapware attached.
There seem to be quite a few cases where Linux drivers and software are actually _better_ than the Windows versions.
*Real player for UNIX is a pretty decent piece of software.
1) Arabs with money and contacts
2) Europe, the second most populous and wealthy power block in the world
2) People within 50 miles of major cities with high explosives and a well tested delivery system
4) ???
5) Aliens
The money (along with punative damages) should go to registered charities.
Why should anyone get rich from some kind of telemarketer lottery? No, the government shouldnt get the money, but the purpose is to PUNISH the offender not to REWARD the victim.
The money (along with the $4m from oil truck cases etc etc) after ACTUAL damages (loss of income, harrassment etc) could be used to pay for things with social value, such as high quality low income housing, soup kitchens and wider broadband availability. Dont piss it away on making people rich for being in the right place at the right time.
Now I get to pay $x for a tivo subscription and $y for a broadband connection when rental is $x, which happens to be a lot less than $x or $y.
Still, I can see it working. There are a lot of people (hello, #divx on irchighway) who probably would pay for movies if they could download them easily and at high quality because of the unreasonable exertion that walking to the shops causes and the long queues for new releases on the fservs. These people probably all have fat pipes anyway, so it's not an extra cost.
My only problem is that I would have to buy a TV card as the A/V set up on my computer is far better than that on my TV. Bigger screen, much much better resolution and nicer speakers. Makes renting/borrowing DVDs nicer than a video-output-only device.
Then how do they square the fact that it's used by Linus, Robbins, Stalman and all those other agents of God eh?
Will the government remove their not for prophet status if they discover how deep the OSS religion goes?
Having spen all of today revising for my ergonomics exam tomorrow (ha! they things it's engineering! I'd like to see them fly a plane with no wings and a comfy seat), it's convenient I just finished the chapter on user interface design.
However, despite their odd views on almost everything, they have some good points:
Command lines ROCK when you need to remove every file with a "Q" and "l" in the filename containing the word "banana".
GUIs and CLIs work best when they are INTEGRATED so you can use the GUI and it helps you figure out how the CLI works next time.
Linux has the former, with all the normal UNIX goodness. Now it needs to work on the latter. Then it will introduce not just sysadmins who type commands at over 40wpm and know regexs backwards through training, but also those that can benefit from picking up the CLI on a more casual basis, through interaction with other applications.
NEC (do|used to) make some amazing laptops.
:\
I have a 3 year old one that I brought from NEC corporate that looks almost as good as a powerbook. It's been reliable, has a great screen, and best of all has firewire+usb+floppy+cdrom+serial+parallel connectors - hard to get on a laptop.
It even manages 3 hours per battery, which is totally amazing, especially after 3 years of use. The one bad point is the modem not working in Linux (winmodems suck). It even has a nice trackpad.
So, I'd be hard pushed not to get another, even with their ethics problems. Guess I'm a lazy consumer and part of the problem
If you look at it you can see it ha a bycicle undercarriage (forward and back wheel sets instead of nosewheel+main gear). It also has wings with an unusually high attack angle with respect to the main fuse.
This leads to some crazy descent angle where the arcraft seems to be flying directly AT THE GROUND until it flares at the last second to place the wheel sets parallel to the runway to touchdown.
It's perfectly safe but damn, that's a wierd feeling when you are riding in one.
On the Eurofighter project we pay more than that for a hammer.
Isn't that a bit like an inflatable dartboard?
At least they can have a display about all the broken flying car promises.
Yes, but it stops the fish defacating in the ocean, leading to a cleaner planet for all of us.
Given that appearing on TV can make you a crap load of money doing random shit, I think no one is going to care a rats ass about piracy except the networks worrying about advertising figures.
I think that Itchy and Scratchey would be perfect to represent the 'do not record' flag. One of them can use a chainsaw to cut off the legs of the other when he tries to watch a movie with a friend without the proper license.
Harsh, overbearing DRM RIGHT NOW, before consumers forget 'how things were'.
People like Apple slipping in the unreasonableness slowly so you gradually ajust to it (compare the 'no DRM at all, don't buy it and let the market kill it' position pre-iTunes to the current 'reasonable DRM is ok, it's not their fault' now*) are FAR more dangerous that the flat footed attempts of the WMA crowd.
The more violently the content producers introduce this stuff the better the chance of the populace waking up for the tenth of a second required to scare the media companies really badly and getting rid of DRM for at least a good long while more.
So this kind of thing is a good thing, not a bad thing. In the long run it'll mean less arbitrary restrictions and presumption of guilt for everyone.
*This is not a flame, this is the truth. I can't think of one slashdot post pre-iTunes (that was modded up anyway) that said that DRM would suffer anything but a crippling death because people would refuse to buy restricted products, then they would HAVE to come back with unencumbered goods. Now we see people falling over themselves to offer a misguided company congratulations because they fuck you over SLIGHTLY LESS THAN EVERYONE ELSE. Wonderful.
Unless of course you already have a building full of PCs (office for example?) and want to be able to load up some software to create an instant full mesh of access points.
A USB WiFi adaptor that works with HostAP is around $10-$15 in bulk, and you will get much much better coverage with one in every third desktop on your network than with one or two APs per office.
You can then also get other advantages, such as pre-cached handover (great for VoIP), more granular connection tracking, more complex firewall fules and routing tables, better VPN interoperability and other things that most big work sites would kill (or pay Cisco a fortune) for.
Might work in the US but here in the UK we have to pay (rather a lot) for local calls.
I'm not going to pay $0.08/min (peak) for someone in the US to talk to someone down the road.
And that's assuming the software is infalliable. Immagine if it broke and you started placing calls to Azejabstan for £2.50 a minute? Given the average buggyness of most software combined with the general attractions of phone systems to phreakers I would expect a call charge after the first month that could be accidentally confused with a Chinese phone number, international code and all.
But what if they picked a day when he was busy?
At least not if you have your speakers turned on.
Could it be I'm falling in love? No I don't bloody well think so.