"It was originally going to ship in 2003. Then 2005. Then 2006. Now in early 2007."
If this OS release slips one more time, I'll have no choice but to dub it "Windows Vista Forever", in honor of the Duke Nukem game of similar name, and similar development life cycle...
This is an important part of my geek heritage. My parents were both engineers at Motorola. In 1977, they brought home a Motorola MEK6800D2 Evaluation Kit II. (Click the link to see a pretty picture of the eval board.) No computer case, and no monitor, just a 6-digit 7-segment display. The keyboard was a 16-key hexpad, with 8 control keys for data entry, code execution, and debug.
My dad hooked up a speaker to this beast, and got a program from work that could play Beethoven's Fur Elise though the speaker. I learned how to use the hex keypad to enter in the microcode, and then modified the hex song data to play the Star Wars theme. I was 6 years old at the time, and this had a fundamental influence on my geek career.;)
Here's my computer ownership history:
D2 Kit
TRS 80 (on loan from Motorola)
Vic 20
Commodore 64
Mac Classic
Amiga 1000
Powerbook 100
A variety of 286 and 386 laptops (from an amateur used-laptop business during college)
And then a series of AMD-based 486/Pentium/Athlon desktops
It is not like they have bosses who say "Here's a lie. We are paying you to say it."
Watch the documentary http://www.thecorporation.com/"The Corporation". One of the bosses at a Fox affiliate station in Florida said, essentailly, "Here's a lie. We are paying you to say it." And he wasn't talking to a commentator. He was talking to an investigative reporter.
It was regarding a story about Monsanto's bovine growth hormone and it's links to "human health implications" (aka cancer). Monsanto threatened leagal action, and Fox's corporate response was to alter the story (i.e. the facts) to make the Monsanto lawyers happy. The reporters, Steve Wilson and Jane Akre, strongly objected to the changes, and were eventually fired because of this story. You can get details here: http://www.organicconsumers.org/rBGH/foxBgh.htm, or any number of other sources using a Google search.
David Boylan, the WTVT general manager, was quoted as telling the reporters "We paid $3 billion for these television stations. We will decide what the news is. The news is what we tell you it is."
The reporters won the lawsuit, and were awarded $425,000. On August 18, 2000, a Florida state court jury unanimously determined that Fox "acted intentionally and deliberately to falsify or distort the plaintiffs' news reporting on BGH." In appeals, they lost the award because of a technicality on the status of "whistle blower".
This garbage came straight from Fox headquarters, and it's sufficient grounds for me to never trust any news aired by a Fox affiliate.
The other problem is that you put journalism on some sort of pedestal. It has nothing to do with "democracy", and when you get right down it it, all journalists turn out to be commentators of some kind.
The founding fathers of America would disagree. Freedom of the press is an essential part of the checks and balances of a functional democracy. That's why they included freedom of the press as part of the first amendment to the constitution.
Last week I did an extensive websearch trying to find a decent freeware solution to print multiple pictures on a single page for my parent's computer. They have a photo-quality printer, but the Epson software didn't include a multiple images per page feature. The solution I found was:
http://www.hp.com/united-states/ize/home.html
"Image Zone Express" is free basic printing software that nicely organizes digital images into a 4-per-page printing format. I've installed and am now using the software, and it appears to be adware free. It also doesn't seem to require an HP printer. The greatest feature of this software is one-click red eye reduction. I spent an hour in Gimp 2.2 trying to remove red eye from one of my family Christmas photos. It literally took 5 seconds with this HP software. I just clicked on each eyeball in the picture, and the quality of the removal algorithm was impressive.
If anyone knows of Gimp plug-ins that do one-click red eye reduction or multiple images per page, please post links here.
Trollog - A specialized type of Internet Troll. These attention-craving creatures are convinced they have psychic powers, and spend most of their time trying to convince humans that their powers are real. Humans generally respond by discrediting and ridiculing the Trollog, which triggers the Trollog's innate troll behaviors. The Trollog will respond by SHOUTING at seemingly RANDOM intervals, to the POINT that the shouting is MEANINGLESS. When they strike, they prefer to target the human's family, rather than attacking the human directly, as Trollogs have a cowardly disposition. Trollogs insist that they are allied with an army of civil lawyers. However, the only time a lawyer has ever been spotted with a Trollog is in criminal court. The Trollog also has the magical power to create mirror images of itself. The Trollog uses this power to unleash a cacophony of arguments, all claiming support of its desperate belief that it has psychic powers. Trollogs have no psychic powers.
The solution for wikipedia is to make it more like perlmonks.com. On perlmonks, and similar experienced-based sites, you need to gain experience points to get advandced powers. So, in wikipedia's case, a noob could submit an edit request, but it would have to be validated by a more experienced user. Once the noob has a few validated edits to his name, he no longer needs to have his edits verfied or moderated. If it takes an investment of a couple hours of work to get a validated account, the odds of that account being used for abuse goes down considerablly, and respawning vandal accounts like what Trollog used would be useless, because the edit requests would be ignored.
The fundamental problem with wikipedia is that it allows a person to alter an article with a brand new account. This begs for abuse, and wikipedia will have trouble until this is changed.
As for this Trollog character, the best thing to do with him is completely ignore him. If the wikipedia article offends him so much, the wikipedia folks should just delete it, and all references to Trollog. That's the worst punishment for this attention-starved goof.
If you don't like spyware hackers doing this to GPL projects, you can voice your opinion of the software by going to the download.com link mentioned above and submitting your own review using the "rate this title" link.
The download.com submission review procedure is odd. It delays submissions for a couple hours, but I don't know what the heck they do during that time. They sure aren't checking the review content. My test review submission got through, no problem:
Claria Corporation 12-Aug-2004 09:08:21 PM
"Herbal Viagra! Peepee Enlargement! Video Professor! Hair Replacement Ointments! Work from Home!"
As a reseller of dubious online advertising, I highly endorse this software product. As soon as the half-witted user installs this "utility", a tidalwave of beautiful pop-up advertising will fill the user's screen. Every ad generates revenue for our company, so we're very excited about this product. Plus, even if you uninstall the Go Music software, the spam advertisements keep coming! Highly recommended.
It's more likely that katie.com is already being blocked by The Great Firewall of China, so there was no financial advantage to naming the book katie.com in China.
You are hereby formally served notice that this website is in
violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. It has been
brought to our attention that posts on this website provide
information that can be used to bypass the Digital Rights
Management (DRM) implementations of many companies.
You are ordered to cease and desist all discussion of
technology topics that could potentially be used to bypass
DRM implementations. Disallowed topics include discussion
of software, operating systems, programming, digital media, or
digital hardware. Failure to comply with this order will expose
the owners of this website and users of this website to both
criminal and civil liability.
We are requesting a complete log of all users of this site, to
further our investigation into the criminal reverse engineering of
DRM implementations. Failure to comply will result in a court
ordered subpoena of said information.
There is a minor financial mistake in the Register article. The Register reported Huges Electronics second quarter revenues as $2.4 million. The actual revenues for Q2 were $2.37 billion.
I wasn't aware that Huges Electronics was owned by General Motors. That's about as deep as deep pockets can get.
DirecTV's 2003 revenue target was raised to $7.5 billion from $7.3 billion, while operating profit before depreciation and amortization is now anticipated to be $1 billion, compared with April's projection of $900 million.
Let us all shed a tear for DirectTV's lost revenue.
Slashdot Mirror
From the article:
"It was originally going to ship in 2003. Then 2005. Then 2006. Now in early 2007."
If this OS release slips one more time, I'll have no choice but to dub it "Windows Vista Forever", in honor of the Duke Nukem game of similar name, and similar development life cycle...
This is an important part of my geek heritage. My parents were both engineers at Motorola. In 1977, they brought home a Motorola MEK6800D2 Evaluation Kit II. (Click the link to see a pretty picture of the eval board.) No computer case, and no monitor, just a 6-digit 7-segment display. The keyboard was a 16-key hexpad, with 8 control keys for data entry, code execution, and debug.
;)
My dad hooked up a speaker to this beast, and got a program from work that could play Beethoven's Fur Elise though the speaker. I learned how to use the hex keypad to enter in the microcode, and then modified the hex song data to play the Star Wars theme. I was 6 years old at the time, and this had a fundamental influence on my geek career.
Here's my computer ownership history:
D2 Kit
TRS 80 (on loan from Motorola)
Vic 20
Commodore 64
Mac Classic
Amiga 1000
Powerbook 100
A variety of 286 and 386 laptops (from an amateur used-laptop business during college)
And then a series of AMD-based 486/Pentium/Athlon desktops
It is made out of people!!!!
Do you use the shift key for Good, or for Awesome?
It is not like they have bosses who say "Here's a lie. We are paying you to say it."
Watch the documentary http://www.thecorporation.com/"The Corporation". One of the bosses at a Fox affiliate station in Florida said, essentailly, "Here's a lie. We are paying you to say it." And he wasn't talking to a commentator. He was talking to an investigative reporter.
It was regarding a story about Monsanto's bovine growth hormone and it's links to "human health implications" (aka cancer). Monsanto threatened leagal action, and Fox's corporate response was to alter the story (i.e. the facts) to make the Monsanto lawyers happy. The reporters, Steve Wilson and Jane Akre, strongly objected to the changes, and were eventually fired because of this story. You can get details here: http://www.organicconsumers.org/rBGH/foxBgh.htm, or any number of other sources using a Google search.
David Boylan, the WTVT general manager, was quoted as telling the reporters "We paid $3 billion for these television stations. We will decide what the news is. The news is what we tell you it is."
The reporters won the lawsuit, and were awarded $425,000. On August 18, 2000, a Florida state court jury unanimously determined that Fox "acted intentionally and deliberately to falsify or distort the plaintiffs' news reporting on BGH." In appeals, they lost the award because of a technicality on the status of "whistle blower".
This garbage came straight from Fox headquarters, and it's sufficient grounds for me to never trust any news aired by a Fox affiliate.
The other problem is that you put journalism on some sort of pedestal. It has nothing to do with "democracy", and when you get right down it it, all journalists turn out to be commentators of some kind.
The founding fathers of America would disagree. Freedom of the press is an essential part of the checks and balances of a functional democracy. That's why they included freedom of the press as part of the first amendment to the constitution.
This name works great for my SSID. People avoid like, well, the plague.
After RTFA, the astrerisk is at the bottom:
*Based on internal company records and reports from key distribution partners in North America.
It would look less suspicious if they just stated this in the same paragraph of the text, and didn't use the asterisk.
Zug zug!!!
Last week I did an extensive websearch trying to find a decent freeware solution to print multiple pictures on a single page for my parent's computer. They have a photo-quality printer, but the Epson software didn't include a multiple images per page feature. The solution I found was:
http://www.hp.com/united-states/ize/home.html
"Image Zone Express" is free basic printing software that nicely organizes digital images into a 4-per-page printing format. I've installed and am now using the software, and it appears to be adware free. It also doesn't seem to require an HP printer. The greatest feature of this software is one-click red eye reduction. I spent an hour in Gimp 2.2 trying to remove red eye from one of my family Christmas photos. It literally took 5 seconds with this HP software. I just clicked on each eyeball in the picture, and the quality of the removal algorithm was impressive.
If anyone knows of Gimp plug-ins that do one-click red eye reduction or multiple images per page, please post links here.
Disclaimer: I am in no way affiliated with HP.
-Froboz
Speaking of abusing pubilic knowlege databases, there's a new entry on http://www.urbandictionary.com/.
Trollog - A specialized type of Internet Troll. These attention-craving creatures are convinced they have psychic powers, and spend most of their time trying to convince humans that their powers are real. Humans generally respond by discrediting and ridiculing the Trollog, which triggers the Trollog's innate troll behaviors. The Trollog will respond by SHOUTING at seemingly RANDOM intervals, to the POINT that the shouting is MEANINGLESS. When they strike, they prefer to target the human's family, rather than attacking the human directly, as Trollogs have a cowardly disposition. Trollogs insist that they are allied with an army of civil lawyers. However, the only time a lawyer has ever been spotted with a Trollog is in criminal court. The Trollog also has the magical power to create mirror images of itself. The Trollog uses this power to unleash a cacophony of arguments, all claiming support of its desperate belief that it has psychic powers. Trollogs have no psychic powers.
A textbook example of a Trollog can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sollog
The solution for wikipedia is to make it more like perlmonks.com. On perlmonks, and similar experienced-based sites, you need to gain experience points to get advandced powers. So, in wikipedia's case, a noob could submit an edit request, but it would have to be validated by a more experienced user. Once the noob has a few validated edits to his name, he no longer needs to have his edits verfied or moderated. If it takes an investment of a couple hours of work to get a validated account, the odds of that account being used for abuse goes down considerablly, and respawning vandal accounts like what Trollog used would be useless, because the edit requests would be ignored.
The fundamental problem with wikipedia is that it allows a person to alter an article with a brand new account. This begs for abuse, and wikipedia will have trouble until this is changed.
As for this Trollog character, the best thing to do with him is completely ignore him. If the wikipedia article offends him so much, the wikipedia folks should just delete it, and all references to Trollog. That's the worst punishment for this attention-starved goof.
Only 3 comments, and the article is already hosed.
/home/httpd/vhosts/pocketpcaddict.com/httpdocs/db/ db.php on line 88
Mirror anyone?
Fatal error: Call to undefined function: message_die() in
The download.com submission review procedure is odd. It delays submissions for a couple hours, but I don't know what the heck they do during that time. They sure aren't checking the review content. My test review submission got through, no problem:
Claria Corporation 12-Aug-2004 09:08:21 PM
"Herbal Viagra! Peepee Enlargement! Video Professor! Hair Replacement Ointments! Work from Home!"
As a reseller of dubious online advertising, I highly endorse this software product. As soon as the half-witted user installs this "utility", a tidalwave of beautiful pop-up advertising will fill the user's screen. Every ad generates revenue for our company, so we're very excited about this product. Plus, even if you uninstall the Go Music software, the spam advertisements keep coming! Highly recommended.
It's more likely that katie.com is already being blocked by The Great Firewall of China, so there was no financial advantage to naming the book katie.com in China.
Chinese editors don't exactly have a reputation for accuracy.
Another possibility is that "Katie.com" translates to "bite the wax tadpole" in Chinese.
We're forgetting that Al Gore took the initiative in creating Linux.
PS - The same goes for people who quote Cicero in Latin in their sigs.
:P
"Legum servi sumus ut liberi esse possimus." -Cicero
We are slaves of the laws in order that we may be free.
And amazingly enough, it's even on topic! That Cicero sure was a clever guy.
Dear Mr. Slashdot, and users of this website,
You are hereby formally served notice that this website is in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. It has been brought to our attention that posts on this website provide information that can be used to bypass the Digital Rights Management (DRM) implementations of many companies. You are ordered to cease and desist all discussion of technology topics that could potentially be used to bypass DRM implementations. Disallowed topics include discussion of software, operating systems, programming, digital media, or digital hardware. Failure to comply with this order will expose the owners of this website and users of this website to both criminal and civil liability.
We are requesting a complete log of all users of this site, to further our investigation into the criminal reverse engineering of DRM implementations. Failure to comply will result in a court ordered subpoena of said information.
Thank you for your cooperation,
Large Corporation
I wasn't aware that Huges Electronics was owned by General Motors. That's about as deep as deep pockets can get.
Their earnings announcement can be found here:
http://biz.yahoo.com/djus/030716/1215001152_1.htm
Here's an interesting excerpt:
Let us all shed a tear for DirectTV's lost revenue.