A few years ago, when the Simpsons was still relevant and funny, they didn't need to do stupid articles like this to keep reminding people that the Simpsons were still on TV.
Then again, Fox keeps crap on TV (Simpsons of late) and takes off great shows like Family Guy (past) and Arrested Development.
Because they have a Series *3* HDTV DVR? IIRC, the current generation of their HD DVRs are expensive (unless you are a new DirecTV customer and you can get them for $299). They lock you into a least a year of service now, they are not doing so well in their main market due to various bad business moves and heavy competition from Cable DVRs, and their customer service has begun to severely suck.
I had a standalone unit and due to the possiblity of commercials during fast-forward and their poor customer service (plus the fact that I got a free DirecTivo with a free year of receiver charges) I switched.
What types of batteries does the MoGo MouseBT require? MoGo MouseBT comes with a built-in, rechargeable battery, and is recharged when it is docked in your laptop's PC card slot. That's a major advantage over other wireless mice, which require frequent change of batteries.
I have two wireless mice and a wireless keyboard all powered by batteries. I'm not quite sure what they mean by "frequent change of batteries". I routinely get three or more months of frequent use out of my mice and six months or more out of the keyboard (and I'm not even using lithium batteries!)
guess what's required is an explicit corporate IT policy, with clear, specific guidelines on what can and cannot be blogged, if at all. This policy then needs to be shared, and "promoted" - beginning with the departments that would use it the most - IT.
Wouldn't it just be better for all if the Fortune 500 companies just didn't allow "blogging" at all? It would end the astroturfing, googlebombing, and also the need for endless regulations that would make the whole exercise a bigger waste of time than it already is.
RSS just isn't handy for news sites, but it becomes really handy for tracking for very good blogs that update seldom and/or irregularly.
It's good for *all* "blogs" regardless of their update frequency. I don't personally use RSS for reading sites but I know that quite a few people use it to read mine. I see plenty of referrer hits from Slashdot readers using RSS to get their news, etc...
The only thing I use RSS for is to show my past Dodgeball check-ins on my website.
Maybe there isn't so much benefit for the potential union members, now that I think about it, but for Microsoft? Resistance makes them futile; they'll find some other temps to assimilate.
Wow, nice troll. Microsoft just wants people to do the job their were contracted for and be done with it. They are already "contract" employees so it's of no consequence to just not rehire them after their contract period is up.
If he's building a site that encourages community, couldn't any other member in the community just as easily make a big push to unionize as he could?
What's the point? They are Microsoft contractors and temporaries usually hired by outside firms. These workers would need to unionize within their own temp agencies and then bargain for better treatment/wages/benefits with them.
I don't see the benefits of independent contractors unionizing as it would defeat the entire purpose of being an independent.
When the US government took over Afghanistan in 2001, it was fortunate in that the current ccTLD owner was killed during bombing of Kabul. It simple forged the man's signature on a piece of paper handing over control to the US-created authority and the job was done.
Really? They have plenty of other links to information in that article but nothing about this particular tidbit. I did a quick search and found nothing in the first 100 results. Granted, I didn't do as much homework as I should have but I would have expected that the author of this article would have provided something more than a simple paragraph making such a claim.
Anyone else have some more evidence or is this another piece of sensationalist journalism that's meant to fire everyone up over nothing?
Re:Respond to comments in a good way?
on
Amazon Connect
·
· Score: 1
How about the restrictions that the authors are going to be under, specifically on what they are allowed to respond with. Who will be looking over their material?
That's their decision when they sign on to this program. I am sure they are told what latitude they will have or will not have.
The users of Amazon.com shouldn't have to tolerate astroturfing and bullshit. Especially if it's just there to increase book sales for both the author and the reseller.
Respond to comments in a good way?
on
Amazon Connect
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Now the authors finally have the ability to respond back to comments!
Are they going to sidestep or blatantly ignore valid questions like Peter Dawkins did at a recent talk/book signing that I attended?
Are these authors going to have control over what posts are kept and which are not?
Personally, I don't want to see another astroturfing arena show up on Amazon. There are already plenty of "professional" reviewers out there that skew the impression of the books/items they review. I don't need the author to have an avenue to hype his own research while getting to pick and choose which comments to ignore/delete and which to keep and respond to.
Microsoft is backing HD-DVD for the same reason. Both are equally good or bad. There is no difference.
While I'm sure there are backroom dealings going on w/Sony and various hardware vendors, I don't see any reports (yet) of them giving coupons and using anti-competitive tactics (which Microsoft has already been found guilty of doing in numerous arenas across the globe) to gain more marketshare for a single standard.
Microsoft *should* be supporting ALL hardware on their OS by default if they want to remain the most useful OS. They shouldn't be playing games (pun, sorry) to try and gain more support for their console's marketshare.
Now, granted, I don't know much about how standards like these are developed, but shouldn't this sort of far-reaching decision with industry-wide implications not be left up to one entity? Especially one with such a vested interest in its outcome, such as Microsoft?
It isn't up to Microsoft. They are just "making an offer you can't refuse." By using their dominance in the PC market as leverage they are going to attempt to cut Sony out of the "next-gen" console market before they even come out of the gate.
Microsoft fucked up severely by not putting foo-format HD DVD in their console BEFORE its release like Sony apparently wants to do. So, to recover from that folly, they are trying to dominate the market BEFORE Sony can because they know that the 360 will not be able to compete if the PS3 has multiples of storage capacity built in.
Ultimately it will be up to the market but Microsoft will do whatever they can to make sure they have every unfair advantage they can.
What we are witnessing here is Microsoft's counter move, using their dominance of desktops to for HD-DVD as the standard.
Yup. The only recourse Sony would then have is to heavily market their music collection holdings on Blu-Ray (which I assume they planned on already) and hope that it evens out the balance. They have lost the media format war in the past, hopefully it won't repeat.
This effectively puts Microsoft's foot firmly in the door on writing the DRM, too. Of course, with their track record that means it'll be either easily cracked and/or your DVD player will become infested with worms and virii.
It effectively attempts to curb Sony's console dominance by making Blu-Ray next to worthless. This is the sole reason they are doing it and by leveraging their weight against PC makers, etc to attempt to harm their competition in a completely different market is the worst of it all.
Could this be expanded to create a mini-bittorrent type network where if the browser can't contact the server, it checks its peers to see if a cached copy exists, and download it from them?
Would it be easier to check and see if there was a Coral Cache'd version and then serve that up instead? Why build a new network (which using BT for would be silly as small-sized content over BT is ridiculous) when you could just utilize something that already exists?
There are other protocols that, in my opinion, are better that BT. I've seen a few that use other (third party) users to mask both the sender and receiver from one-another. I believe this is going to be important especially when it comes to government regulation and censorship. I'm anti-copyright, so I couldn't care less about who owns what.
Awesome, write the plugin and get into the browser. Perhaps if everyone has easy access to it (like they now will w/BT built in) then they will start to use it. The reason that HTTP and FTP are so popular is because support for those protocols were built into the browsers and you didn't need to have an external application fielding the transmissions.
If Foo P2P protocol is made available to everyone easily via IE and Firefox then they will pick it up quickly.
Young people embrace media that is directly interactive (blogging), searchable (google) or which is minimalist but can be snapped together in custom ways (rss based services like podcasts and news feeds). I don't think young people even watch TV nearly as much as middle aged people did at their age.
Exactly why I don't bother with newspapers, even online ones. Newspapers are trying to stick to a pay model which doesn't work in the modern day age. People don't want to pay for content, let alone *old* content. Newspapers have their "free" logins that let you read their content for a short time. Then they want to charge you money (and sometimes quite a bit of it) to search their archives for older content. Personally, it's not worth it when I can get the same content (and sometimes *better* content with discussions from various sources of more worth) for free via Google.
TV, is the same way. They don't usually even offer archived content, let alone searchable/free. Google is trying to, although IMHO failing at this time, have that content be available online and be searchable but I just don't see it working at this time. CurrentTV has a workable model that I enjoy and even though some of the "pods" are blatant advertising I do appreciate being able to search for and watch what I saw on TV before -- sometimes even the clips I watched. Now THAT is what I want to see.
Want to get me back watching TV news? Look at CurrentTV and build something even better. Want me to read newspapers online? Make the content free, searchable, and easily accessable even when it's archived. Don't like the fact that you have to pay for that? Fine, but remember that you time is running out.
Huh, maybe you shouldn't ask this question on Slashdot.
Just because the marketing and network geniuses at the cable companies and telcos determine what the public should deem as an "acceptable" speed for broadband doesn't mean that Slashdotters shouldn't have a valid opinion on it.
I think that my 4mbit downstream is fine for what I do. I don't believe that my 500k upstream is though. I shouldn't be suffering for upstream (on a connection that 100% permits servers) with slow upstream just because a group of money hungry buzzword lovers decided that it's acceptable for home use.
This guy proves he is once again off his rocker. IE 7, even in beta (with the latest builds of Vista), is a damn fine browser. Better than even Firefox/Mozilla dare I say it. Microsoft's browser team is doing just fine on its own.
I don't use either IE7 or Firefox but so what? IE7 is a "damn fine browser" for now... IE overtook Netscape because it was the better browser at the time that MS was using other tactics to force its wide and successful adoption.
Do you really think that IE7 will continue to be a "damn fine browser" when the masses begin using it and the spammers, hackers, and phishers decide it's now viable enough to heavily exploit?
So is this going to be one of those things that gets renewed temporarily...and then renewed temporarily again and again and again until people give in and just accept it? Cuz it sure seems like it.
Well, at this point that's better than the alternative... A permanent extension to the already overreaching powers that the Federal Government has. If this extension is going to have to come up and up again, perhaps -- just perhaps someone will have the fucking balls to stand up and tell the New Aged GOP douchebags that eroding the civil liberties of the American people isn't what this country was founded on. While it may not work, we can at least have it in the news and possibly get more and more people pissed off about it.
When it's already written into law, permanently, it gets ignored and more important news items like the breakup of Jessica and Nick and the possible pregnancies of Angelina and Jennifer get all over airwaves instead.
But what does that all matter when the President can just got behind the public's back and act like a dictactor and issue whatever atrocities against the American public that he feels like -- just as long as it's "to protect us" from the terrorists. Sounds like something that would have happened in Iraq, doesn't it?
Slashdot Mirror
A few years ago, when the Simpsons was still relevant and funny, they didn't need to do stupid articles like this to keep reminding people that the Simpsons were still on TV.
Then again, Fox keeps crap on TV (Simpsons of late) and takes off great shows like Family Guy (past) and Arrested Development.
No really, there a ton of sex tapes going around the internet - that's not enough to make someone famous.
That explains everything! Bill Gates posed in Teen Beat magazine. No wonder he's so famous!
Because they have a Series *3* HDTV DVR? IIRC, the current generation of their HD DVRs are expensive (unless you are a new DirecTV customer and you can get them for $299). They lock you into a least a year of service now, they are not doing so well in their main market due to various bad business moves and heavy competition from Cable DVRs, and their customer service has begun to severely suck.
I had a standalone unit and due to the possiblity of commercials during fast-forward and their poor customer service (plus the fact that I got a free DirecTivo with a free year of receiver charges) I switched.
What types of batteries does the MoGo MouseBT require?
MoGo MouseBT comes with a built-in, rechargeable battery, and is recharged when it is docked in your laptop's PC card slot. That's a major advantage over other wireless mice, which require frequent change of batteries.
I have two wireless mice and a wireless keyboard all powered by batteries. I'm not quite sure what they mean by "frequent change of batteries". I routinely get three or more months of frequent use out of my mice and six months or more out of the keyboard (and I'm not even using lithium batteries!)
All right, all right, it's 14 things that don't make sense then!
guess what's required is an explicit corporate IT policy, with clear, specific guidelines on what can and cannot be blogged, if at all. This policy then needs to be shared, and "promoted" - beginning with the departments that would use it the most - IT.
Wouldn't it just be better for all if the Fortune 500 companies just didn't allow "blogging" at all? It would end the astroturfing, googlebombing, and also the need for endless regulations that would make the whole exercise a bigger waste of time than it already is.
RSS just isn't handy for news sites, but it becomes really handy for tracking for very good blogs that update seldom and/or irregularly.
It's good for *all* "blogs" regardless of their update frequency. I don't personally use RSS for reading sites but I know that quite a few people use it to read mine. I see plenty of referrer hits from Slashdot readers using RSS to get their news, etc...
The only thing I use RSS for is to show my past Dodgeball check-ins on my website.
Maybe there isn't so much benefit for the potential union members, now that I think about it, but for Microsoft? Resistance makes them futile; they'll find some other temps to assimilate.
Wow, nice troll. Microsoft just wants people to do the job their were contracted for and be done with it. They are already "contract" employees so it's of no consequence to just not rehire them after their contract period is up.
If he's building a site that encourages community, couldn't any other member in the community just as easily make a big push to unionize as he could?
What's the point? They are Microsoft contractors and temporaries usually hired by outside firms. These workers would need to unionize within their own temp agencies and then bargain for better treatment/wages/benefits with them.
I don't see the benefits of independent contractors unionizing as it would defeat the entire purpose of being an independent.
two forums that have sprung up as a meeting place (cyber & meat) for current/past/future contractors of the empire. (emphasis mine)
;)
Ummm?! Sounds like you get a whole lot more when you are a contractor for Microsoft
When the US government took over Afghanistan in 2001, it was fortunate in that the current ccTLD owner was killed during bombing of Kabul. It simple forged the man's signature on a piece of paper handing over control to the US-created authority and the job was done.
Really? They have plenty of other links to information in that article but nothing about this particular tidbit. I did a quick search and found nothing in the first 100 results. Granted, I didn't do as much homework as I should have but I would have expected that the author of this article would have provided something more than a simple paragraph making such a claim.
Anyone else have some more evidence or is this another piece of sensationalist journalism that's meant to fire everyone up over nothing?
How about the restrictions that the authors are going to be under, specifically on what they are allowed to respond with. Who will be looking over their material?
That's their decision when they sign on to this program. I am sure they are told what latitude they will have or will not have.
The users of Amazon.com shouldn't have to tolerate astroturfing and bullshit. Especially if it's just there to increase book sales for both the author and the reseller.
Now the authors finally have the ability to respond back to comments!
Are they going to sidestep or blatantly ignore valid questions like Peter Dawkins did at a recent talk/book signing that I attended?
Are these authors going to have control over what posts are kept and which are not?
Personally, I don't want to see another astroturfing arena show up on Amazon. There are already plenty of "professional" reviewers out there that skew the impression of the books/items they review. I don't need the author to have an avenue to hype his own research while getting to pick and choose which comments to ignore/delete and which to keep and respond to.
Microsoft is backing HD-DVD for the same reason. Both are equally good or bad. There is no difference.
While I'm sure there are backroom dealings going on w/Sony and various hardware vendors, I don't see any reports (yet) of them giving coupons and using anti-competitive tactics (which Microsoft has already been found guilty of doing in numerous arenas across the globe) to gain more marketshare for a single standard.
Microsoft *should* be supporting ALL hardware on their OS by default if they want to remain the most useful OS. They shouldn't be playing games (pun, sorry) to try and gain more support for their console's marketshare.
Now, granted, I don't know much about how standards like these are developed, but shouldn't this sort of far-reaching decision with industry-wide implications not be left up to one entity? Especially one with such a vested interest in its outcome, such as Microsoft?
It isn't up to Microsoft. They are just "making an offer you can't refuse." By using their dominance in the PC market as leverage they are going to attempt to cut Sony out of the "next-gen" console market before they even come out of the gate.
Microsoft fucked up severely by not putting foo-format HD DVD in their console BEFORE its release like Sony apparently wants to do. So, to recover from that folly, they are trying to dominate the market BEFORE Sony can because they know that the 360 will not be able to compete if the PS3 has multiples of storage capacity built in.
Ultimately it will be up to the market but Microsoft will do whatever they can to make sure they have every unfair advantage they can.
What we are witnessing here is Microsoft's counter move, using their dominance of desktops to for HD-DVD as the standard.
Yup. The only recourse Sony would then have is to heavily market their music collection holdings on Blu-Ray (which I assume they planned on already) and hope that it evens out the balance. They have lost the media format war in the past, hopefully it won't repeat.
This effectively puts Microsoft's foot firmly in the door on writing the DRM, too. Of course, with their track record that means it'll be either easily cracked and/or your DVD player will become infested with worms and virii.
It effectively attempts to curb Sony's console dominance by making Blu-Ray next to worthless. This is the sole reason they are doing it and by leveraging their weight against PC makers, etc to attempt to harm their competition in a completely different market is the worst of it all.
MN Stories is a local blog that has received some attention when it was named a finalist in the 2005 Weblog Awards for best video blog.
Then there is Chasing Windmills, another Minneapolis based "vlog" which IMHO is really more of a running series than a "blog".
I don't particuarly care for them (or videocasts) right now, but they are a fledgling arena. I'm sure they will improve with time though. We'll see.
Could this be expanded to create a mini-bittorrent type network where if the browser can't contact the server, it checks its peers to see if a cached copy exists, and download it from them?
Would it be easier to check and see if there was a Coral Cache'd version and then serve that up instead? Why build a new network (which using BT for would be silly as small-sized content over BT is ridiculous) when you could just utilize something that already exists?
There are other protocols that, in my opinion, are better that BT. I've seen a few that use other (third party) users to mask both the sender and receiver from one-another. I believe this is going to be important especially when it comes to government regulation and censorship. I'm anti-copyright, so I couldn't care less about who owns what.
Awesome, write the plugin and get into the browser. Perhaps if everyone has easy access to it (like they now will w/BT built in) then they will start to use it. The reason that HTTP and FTP are so popular is because support for those protocols were built into the browsers and you didn't need to have an external application fielding the transmissions.
If Foo P2P protocol is made available to everyone easily via IE and Firefox then they will pick it up quickly.
Young people embrace media that is directly interactive (blogging), searchable (google) or which is minimalist but can be snapped together in custom ways (rss based services like podcasts and news feeds). I don't think young people even watch TV nearly as much as middle aged people did at their age.
Exactly why I don't bother with newspapers, even online ones. Newspapers are trying to stick to a pay model which doesn't work in the modern day age. People don't want to pay for content, let alone *old* content. Newspapers have their "free" logins that let you read their content for a short time. Then they want to charge you money (and sometimes quite a bit of it) to search their archives for older content. Personally, it's not worth it when I can get the same content (and sometimes *better* content with discussions from various sources of more worth) for free via Google.
TV, is the same way. They don't usually even offer archived content, let alone searchable/free. Google is trying to, although IMHO failing at this time, have that content be available online and be searchable but I just don't see it working at this time. CurrentTV has a workable model that I enjoy and even though some of the "pods" are blatant advertising I do appreciate being able to search for and watch what I saw on TV before -- sometimes even the clips I watched. Now THAT is what I want to see.
Want to get me back watching TV news? Look at CurrentTV and build something even better. Want me to read newspapers online? Make the content free, searchable, and easily accessable even when it's archived. Don't like the fact that you have to pay for that? Fine, but remember that you time is running out.
I'm on Frontier and Visi DSL. If I was on cable it wouldn't be Comcast either. It would be Charter (which blocks ports).
Huh, maybe you shouldn't ask this question on Slashdot.
Just because the marketing and network geniuses at the cable companies and telcos determine what the public should deem as an "acceptable" speed for broadband doesn't mean that Slashdotters shouldn't have a valid opinion on it.
I think that my 4mbit downstream is fine for what I do. I don't believe that my 500k upstream is though. I shouldn't be suffering for upstream (on a connection that 100% permits servers) with slow upstream just because a group of money hungry buzzword lovers decided that it's acceptable for home use.
This guy proves he is once again off his rocker. IE 7, even in beta (with the latest builds of Vista), is a damn fine browser. Better than even Firefox/Mozilla dare I say it. Microsoft's browser team is doing just fine on its own.
I don't use either IE7 or Firefox but so what? IE7 is a "damn fine browser" for now... IE overtook Netscape because it was the better browser at the time that MS was using other tactics to force its wide and successful adoption.
Do you really think that IE7 will continue to be a "damn fine browser" when the masses begin using it and the spammers, hackers, and phishers decide it's now viable enough to heavily exploit?
So is this going to be one of those things that gets renewed temporarily...and then renewed temporarily again and again and again until people give in and just accept it? Cuz it sure seems like it.
Well, at this point that's better than the alternative... A permanent extension to the already overreaching powers that the Federal Government has. If this extension is going to have to come up and up again, perhaps -- just perhaps someone will have the fucking balls to stand up and tell the New Aged GOP douchebags that eroding the civil liberties of the American people isn't what this country was founded on. While it may not work, we can at least have it in the news and possibly get more and more people pissed off about it.
When it's already written into law, permanently, it gets ignored and more important news items like the breakup of Jessica and Nick and the possible pregnancies of Angelina and Jennifer get all over airwaves instead.
But what does that all matter when the President can just got behind the public's back and act like a dictactor and issue whatever atrocities against the American public that he feels like -- just as long as it's "to protect us" from the terrorists. Sounds like something that would have happened in Iraq, doesn't it?