Frankly I dont see a problem with threatening to cease and desist. He emailed the CEO twice in two weeks, both times threatening to leave if he didnt get what he wanted. The tone of his language seemed worse in the second email and I suspect the exec service agent (who handled both emails) thought he was being called a "$12/hour Executive Relations college student" - not realising the customer meant the usual helpline staff.
I love how he ends his first blog post about this with:
"So in the end, I'm definitely switching to the HTC Evo, and cancelling my iPhone & iPad 3G AT&T services - I don't want to give my money to a company that is bothered by its customers, and threatens them legally to prove it."
I thought he said he was going to leave if they didnt solve his problem anyway!
I guess I just dont get this whole "email the CEO" thing. We keep seeing people getting replies from Steve Jobs (no doubt really from his team) and I have read of people having luck with other big companies. I think the problem would go away if they just stopped answering normal customers emails to the CEO and executives, or at least just replied with the customer service contact details.
Not just by myself. But a webcam combined with this new thing called the internet can span those 100+ miles.
The webcam was in the same area as the tourist, the viewer was hundreds of kilometres away.
To be honest, it sounds fair enough to me. That message he posted clearly looks like a threat. I appreciate that he was frustrated and just joking, but he posted it on a public service where people may not realise this.
Im not saying I agree with all the terrorist excuses the police use. There are lots of examples of them over reacting. Just this weekend there was a slashdot article on the school kid whose home project got him in trouble. I think its horrific that poor kid was just trying to learn on his own time and was pleased enough with himself that he wanted to show friends, but now will probably never push himself again. In this case though, I can see how saying such a thing would have people concerned he was being serious. Its not like they are actually charging him with terrorist offences - they will be charging him with a bomb hoax.
I agree. While I may think less of someone who still uses aol as their isp, it is completely unfair to dismiss their applications just because they happen to use an aol or hotmail email account. I use gmail - and when you get down to it it is just an email service, hotmail would do the job just as well.
Anyway, what business is it of my employer which free email provider I decide to use? Along as I have one, so they can contact me...
Id be a bit concerned about using a service like Tor when booking your flights. After all, is letting them know your IP when they know so much else really a big deal?
They already know a lot about who you are, yet it looks quite dodgy if you tried to mask yourself. Also, what if the pc you tor out to the internet from is flagged no-fly? Sure, you could probably eventually prove it was nothing to do with you, but it wouldnt be a fun day in the airport!
Whats the point in replying if your not going to RTFA? Even stating it in the subject still makes part of your post useless.
"Cutting all Power" should mean cutting additional gas that accelerate...or I mean it just work like cruise control that instead of supplying more gas when it goes under speed, it stop supplying more gas when it goes over the speed.
Thats how it works, power to engine is reduced to limit your speed.
But requiring GPS?...
It needs GPS to match the speed limit to roads. HGVs, some company vans, buses, etc in the UK have a limit set like you said. For HGVs this is 56mph, for some vans its 60 or 70. In the case of the HGV this is to make sure it is not driven beyond its safe limit. With the others it stops the vehicle going over the national speed limit.
However, the GPS based system will ensure that the drivers can not (when it is enabled) exceed the speed limit on any road. The tested version has a "warning only" mode, but presumably if this gets used nationwide by large companys they will enforce it, as they do now with HGV limits.
Why do we need to pull GPS into the picture? I have absolutely no idea.
Imagine a taxi driver (im probably being a bit prejudiced, but in my experience they frequently speed on 30mph city roads) - he would have to follow the limits regardless of how many customers he wants to have in the shift. This of course cant ensure good driving but its a step closer.
I want a camera to record where I go and what I do and act as a backup for my cranial memory. I want it to recognize faces to keep track of my history that person.
Facebook handles that for you.
I want an internet connection everywhere so that I can call up an alternative recipe on the fly when I realize at the last minute that I'm missing an ingredient.
Recipe iphone app?
I want to use the sum analyses of my automotive commutes to recommend ways I can change my driving behaviour to extend the life of my car and use less fuel.
Why does that have to be HMD or wearable? Just use a GPS (or your phone) to track your journeys and suggest new routes.
So.. You can pretty much do what you want already. You just have to give up your rights to google, facebook and apple, and have to look down at a screen now and again.
I think we have to accept that yet again the future will not be exactly as predicted (or as cool), but will accomplish similar goals and be cool in different ways in the end.
He manually installs the Flash plugin and calls it unintuitive, when all you need to do is go to a website with Flash content, and it'll automatically install for you. Well, he doesnt say its unintuitive, he just doesnt try any way other than installing it in the terminal. It was when he said that I knew this review was completely useless. And then again in his summary he says
On the other hand, I was also being repeatedly frustrated with my attempts to get things done by the standard methods I'd use on a normal Ubuntu system. Im pretty sure Walmart are not aiming this pc at the average ubuntu user. I would have been much more interested in how usable this machine is by people with limited computer knowledge. Can they find the major apps, do any errors crop up, etc.
You clearly dont get the Intelligent Thinking (IT) theory, thats why we want it taught in schools Gym classes. IT doesnt say that there was no thinking, just that God directed the thinking to produce the conclusions that clearly were too complex to occur on their own.
Ebay only pushes your bid up to the reserve if your maximum is over the reserve. If your bid is below the reserve it allows it to stay at the starting price (or does the normal bidding war between you and the other seller).
Working population of 400M, not total population...
From the CIA factbook: Age structure: 0-14 years: 30.8% (male 173,478,760/female 163,852,827) 15-64 years: 64.3% (male 363,876,219/female 340,181,764) 65 years and over: 4.9% (male 27,258,020/female 26,704,405) (2006 est.)
and: Labor force: 496.4 million (2005 est.)
I dont know if this excludes the unemployed, if it doesnt the working population would drop down to about 450million. So, assuming the CIA are right, the figure quoted in the Times is wrong, but not wildly out.
Well i think, as other people have said, this will help boost OS X usage and thus get more games ported over and be a great boost for apple. However, my concern is if people find themselves booting into windows for games and then not booting back after, up to the point where they dont really use os x at all, why would they buy apple hardware next time around?
Re:Dual boot? How about virtualization, too!
on
Going To Boot Camp
·
· Score: 1
The Parallels press release says most intel core duo chipsets support the intel VT. Given that, what kind of speeds should we expect? Is the only difference between this and vmware the speed gained by VT? Can you switch to the guest os as if it were a host os, and play games etc?
Not as fancy as the one in the review, but how about this? Its got a UK plug/socket but should be fine for use in FR (from the specs on that page it should work with 240v 50/60hz but not 120v). I have one, seems to do the job!
He wasnt asking about the processor, but the chipsets integrated graphics, which all Centrino laptops use. Businessweek quoted Intel as saying the Centrino Duo chipsets graphics should be sufficient for Vista. Vista includes the Aero graphical user interface which puts most of the work on to the graphics chip. Currently, a reasonable mid range graphics card is required and integrated graphics tend to be quite weak so he was worried it may not be enough.
No need to worry, they wont be able to get their hands on it. Im pretty sure the Patriot Act means as soon as the FBI reads the article these terrorist bacteria and the soil harboring them will be detained indefinitely.
Heat would definatly be a problem, but I dont think youd need to put it in a rack. Just put the HDDs, tuners etc in a case hidden away somewhere so it can be noisy with extra fans incase of failure. Then just have a quiet near fanless machine for your tv.
Their way seems silly to me. They tried to make it quiet, which failed (I count six fans including the psu). They tried to give it a big capacity, which is working now, but they will be complaining when that raid0 fails. And they tried to give it lots of tuners (no doubt picking 11 just because its bigger than the last one they did), but kinda cheated because 4 are external. Heck, connect 1 usb tuner and a 1TB NAS box to their previous one and they have virtually the same thing.
I dont know about beyondtv, but mythtv supports using more than one machine as a backend, so you build say 3 machines in different rooms each with 4 tuners and a single hdd for storage (or all using a common NAS box) to produce basically the same thing, but each machine could be near silent and in smaller cases.
I faithfully used MythTV for a year or so, trying releases, CVS versions, etc. Generally, my experience was good. The linux side was a little fiddly - until recently the kernel didnt have have built in drivers for my usb2 nova-t dvb tuner, but once working tended to be fine. MythTV itself however started to annoy me more and more. Most problems i fixed over time, but still a few i couldnt. I had real problems with the TV recently, granted it wasnt totally MythTV's fault (my signal is too strong, or too weak, or getting interferrence - i havent had time to properly look into it). But still, mythtv was having none of it, so i had no livetv or recording.
The most annoying is probably the feature i use most - MythVideo. As my video collection was stored on a samba share, updating was pretty slow, and i couldnt find a option to autoupdate so had to use a crude solution with scripts and directly updating the sql table. This just about worked, although still required exiting to the menu and back again to update the list.
Also, I could not get it to sort my files. As you browse down the directory list, there were a few blocks of ordered names, with a few randomly placed aswell. Near as i could tell it was not sorting the directories by their name, but by the files in them (or their subdirectories and so on). Their order in the sql table seemed to make no difference. To make matters worse though, sometimes when a new file was added and the table was updated, a whole bunch of files would vanish from the browser. I never got around to finding out why, but it was very annoying. As far as i could tell, it wasnt a problem with my sql updating as the table would wind up exactly the same if i did it myself or asked the Video Manager to generate it.
Anyway, rant aside, i recently switched to Microsoft Windows MCE. So much easier its unbelievable. The TV signal is still a little flakey (recordings tend to work fine, but sometimes livetv struggles to get a signal), but its doing better than myth! The video browser works flawlessly, and even updates on the fly. I do have a few minor gripes with MCE too (if anyone can help with these, id be most grateful):
- The Video Browser appears to only support the icon style view, not a list.
- My hauppauge remote doesnt seem to work. Not a big deal, i plan to replace it with an MCE one anyway, but i thought this one should work. (This is the remote for the USB2 Nova-t, when you press any buttons the light does not flash off - it stays on red.)
- Limited number of settings. But i can live with those, so so far MCE is - for me - working out better than Myth.
One problem I would love help with though: Not too long down the line, i would like to buy a couple of MCE extenders, and stick the MCE PC somewhere hidden. I dont yet have a HDTV (or a HDTV source) so can live without that, although it would be nice if i didnt need to replace these when i do make the move so HDTV support would be nice. I can even live without Divx/Xvid support as i could simply reencode to mpeg2, although the space difference would be annoying. But, so far the ones i have seen (basically just the linksys) dont support AC3 audio, which means no films! And lastly, it would be nice if it could support DVD Vobs in the Video browser like MCE does.
I dont really want to use a xbox for the job, and i dont think it solves those problems anyway. The xbox 360 would be an expensive solution and power hungry solution, even if it does solve them all. A possible solution is the Thunderbridge which apparantly supports HDTV upscaling, few other details though. I would consider small and quiet MCE boxes, but i dont think they will stream livetv from the main one.
Any ideas?
Well I have gone on for a bit asking more questions than i have replying to the parent, but I hope you can at least see that for me, MCE is working out better.
The DVIMAGIC, and this, and this do just that. The latter is just for one dvd player, so might just exploit a flaw in that player or something. Not exactly perfect solutions yet, but we are getting towards the dongle you ask for.
There was also a recent article (i forget the url) by someone who claimed to have cracked HDCP. As i recall it was along the lines of comparing the outputs from 10 dvd players/tvs to determine the master key. He never released the information for fear of DMCA, but if someone was to repeat it you could see black market type dongles.
I dont really have a problem with HDCP though, as when i do get a HDTV it will be compliant. The problem I see is we are being forced to fight better and better copy protections. I currently rip CDs and listen to them in iTunes instead of using a CD player. You basically cant do that with DVD Audio (without capturing analogue or using the WinDVD trick), and if you do you cant play them back on a normal player because the watermark will stop it. Similarly, when going around friends i prefer to rip DVDs to a hard disk so we can watch them off that instead of taking the discs. I would want to be able to do that with these high definition discs too, I dont want the only ripper to be Windows Media Center, and the copy to refuse to play on anything but my MCE machine and my authorized portable player.
Even if they do make rippers for BR/HD, what about the next generation?
Well, if Beagle is wondering where we went, instead of wasting money on another explorer why dont we just wait for it to launch "Earth Express 1" into orbit to scan for us?
Slashdot Mirror
Frankly I dont see a problem with threatening to cease and desist. He emailed the CEO twice in two weeks, both times threatening to leave if he didnt get what he wanted. The tone of his language seemed worse in the second email and I suspect the exec service agent (who handled both emails) thought he was being called a "$12/hour Executive Relations college student" - not realising the customer meant the usual helpline staff.
I love how he ends his first blog post about this with:
"So in the end, I'm definitely switching to the HTC Evo, and cancelling my iPhone & iPad 3G AT&T services - I don't want to give my money to a company that is bothered by its customers, and threatens them legally to prove it."
I thought he said he was going to leave if they didnt solve his problem anyway!
I guess I just dont get this whole "email the CEO" thing. We keep seeing people getting replies from Steve Jobs (no doubt really from his team) and I have read of people having luck with other big companies. I think the problem would go away if they just stopped answering normal customers emails to the CEO and executives, or at least just replied with the customer service contact details.
Not just by myself. But a webcam combined with this new thing called the internet can span those 100+ miles. The webcam was in the same area as the tourist, the viewer was hundreds of kilometres away.
To be honest, it sounds fair enough to me. That message he posted clearly looks like a threat. I appreciate that he was frustrated and just joking, but he posted it on a public service where people may not realise this. Im not saying I agree with all the terrorist excuses the police use. There are lots of examples of them over reacting. Just this weekend there was a slashdot article on the school kid whose home project got him in trouble. I think its horrific that poor kid was just trying to learn on his own time and was pleased enough with himself that he wanted to show friends, but now will probably never push himself again. In this case though, I can see how saying such a thing would have people concerned he was being serious. Its not like they are actually charging him with terrorist offences - they will be charging him with a bomb hoax.
I agree. While I may think less of someone who still uses aol as their isp, it is completely unfair to dismiss their applications just because they happen to use an aol or hotmail email account. I use gmail - and when you get down to it it is just an email service, hotmail would do the job just as well. Anyway, what business is it of my employer which free email provider I decide to use? Along as I have one, so they can contact me...
Id be a bit concerned about using a service like Tor when booking your flights. After all, is letting them know your IP when they know so much else really a big deal? They already know a lot about who you are, yet it looks quite dodgy if you tried to mask yourself. Also, what if the pc you tor out to the internet from is flagged no-fly? Sure, you could probably eventually prove it was nothing to do with you, but it wouldnt be a fun day in the airport!
"Cutting all Power" should mean cutting additional gas that accelerate...or I mean it just work like cruise control that instead of supplying more gas when it goes under speed, it stop supplying more gas when it goes over the speed.
Thats how it works, power to engine is reduced to limit your speed.
But requiring GPS? ...
It needs GPS to match the speed limit to roads. HGVs, some company vans, buses, etc in the UK have a limit set like you said. For HGVs this is 56mph, for some vans its 60 or 70. In the case of the HGV this is to make sure it is not driven beyond its safe limit. With the others it stops the vehicle going over the national speed limit.
However, the GPS based system will ensure that the drivers can not (when it is enabled) exceed the speed limit on any road. The tested version has a "warning only" mode, but presumably if this gets used nationwide by large companys they will enforce it, as they do now with HGV limits.
Why do we need to pull GPS into the picture? I have absolutely no idea.
Imagine a taxi driver (im probably being a bit prejudiced, but in my experience they frequently speed on 30mph city roads) - he would have to follow the limits regardless of how many customers he wants to have in the shift. This of course cant ensure good driving but its a step closer.
I want a camera to record where I go and what I do and act as a backup for my cranial memory. I want it to recognize faces to keep track of my history that person.
Facebook handles that for you.
I want an internet connection everywhere so that I can call up an alternative recipe on the fly when I realize at the last minute that I'm missing an ingredient.
Recipe iphone app?
I want to use the sum analyses of my automotive commutes to recommend ways I can change my driving behaviour to extend the life of my car and use less fuel.
Why does that have to be HMD or wearable? Just use a GPS (or your phone) to track your journeys and suggest new routes.
So.. You can pretty much do what you want already. You just have to give up your rights to google, facebook and apple, and have to look down at a screen now and again.
I think we have to accept that yet again the future will not be exactly as predicted (or as cool), but will accomplish similar goals and be cool in different ways in the end.
We should have known moving ThePirateBay to Sealand wouldnt work!
You clearly dont get the Intelligent Thinking (IT) theory, thats why we want it taught in schools Gym classes. IT doesnt say that there was no thinking, just that God directed the thinking to produce the conclusions that clearly were too complex to occur on their own.
Ebay only pushes your bid up to the reserve if your maximum is over the reserve. If your bid is below the reserve it allows it to stay at the starting price (or does the normal bidding war between you and the other seller).
Not over and over indefinitely though. They claim the lie will work 26 times, but our testing has shown it is infact significantly less than that.
Working population of 400M, not total population...
From the CIA factbook:
Age structure:
0-14 years: 30.8% (male 173,478,760/female 163,852,827)
15-64 years: 64.3% (male 363,876,219/female 340,181,764)
65 years and over: 4.9% (male 27,258,020/female 26,704,405) (2006 est.)
and:
Labor force:
496.4 million (2005 est.)
I dont know if this excludes the unemployed, if it doesnt the working population would drop down to about 450million. So, assuming the CIA are right, the figure quoted in the Times is wrong, but not wildly out.
Well duh, you dont own one of these drives yet!
That may be so, but at least our great British leaders arnt introducing a basically compulsary national biometric id database... Oh...
Here at slashdot, we do not tolerate unflattering talk about the George Washington Bridge!
Well i think, as other people have said, this will help boost OS X usage and thus get more games ported over and be a great boost for apple. However, my concern is if people find themselves booting into windows for games and then not booting back after, up to the point where they dont really use os x at all, why would they buy apple hardware next time around?
The Parallels press release says most intel core duo chipsets support the intel VT. Given that, what kind of speeds should we expect? Is the only difference between this and vmware the speed gained by VT? Can you switch to the guest os as if it were a host os, and play games etc?
Not as fancy as the one in the review, but how about this? Its got a UK plug/socket but should be fine for use in FR (from the specs on that page it should work with 240v 50/60hz but not 120v).
I have one, seems to do the job!
He wasnt asking about the processor, but the chipsets integrated graphics, which all Centrino laptops use. Businessweek quoted Intel as saying the Centrino Duo chipsets graphics should be sufficient for Vista. Vista includes the Aero graphical user interface which puts most of the work on to the graphics chip. Currently, a reasonable mid range graphics card is required and integrated graphics tend to be quite weak so he was worried it may not be enough.
No need to worry, they wont be able to get their hands on it. Im pretty sure the Patriot Act means as soon as the FBI reads the article these terrorist bacteria and the soil harboring them will be detained indefinitely.
Heat would definatly be a problem, but I dont think youd need to put it in a rack. Just put the HDDs, tuners etc in a case hidden away somewhere so it can be noisy with extra fans incase of failure. Then just have a quiet near fanless machine for your tv.
Their way seems silly to me. They tried to make it quiet, which failed (I count six fans including the psu). They tried to give it a big capacity, which is working now, but they will be complaining when that raid0 fails. And they tried to give it lots of tuners (no doubt picking 11 just because its bigger than the last one they did), but kinda cheated because 4 are external. Heck, connect 1 usb tuner and a 1TB NAS box to their previous one and they have virtually the same thing.
I dont know about beyondtv, but mythtv supports using more than one machine as a backend, so you build say 3 machines in different rooms each with 4 tuners and a single hdd for storage (or all using a common NAS box) to produce basically the same thing, but each machine could be near silent and in smaller cases.
I faithfully used MythTV for a year or so, trying releases, CVS versions, etc. Generally, my experience was good. The linux side was a little fiddly - until recently the kernel didnt have have built in drivers for my usb2 nova-t dvb tuner, but once working tended to be fine. MythTV itself however started to annoy me more and more. Most problems i fixed over time, but still a few i couldnt. I had real problems with the TV recently, granted it wasnt totally MythTV's fault (my signal is too strong, or too weak, or getting interferrence - i havent had time to properly look into it). But still, mythtv was having none of it, so i had no livetv or recording.
The most annoying is probably the feature i use most - MythVideo. As my video collection was stored on a samba share, updating was pretty slow, and i couldnt find a option to autoupdate so had to use a crude solution with scripts and directly updating the sql table. This just about worked, although still required exiting to the menu and back again to update the list.
Also, I could not get it to sort my files. As you browse down the directory list, there were a few blocks of ordered names, with a few randomly placed aswell. Near as i could tell it was not sorting the directories by their name, but by the files in them (or their subdirectories and so on). Their order in the sql table seemed to make no difference.
To make matters worse though, sometimes when a new file was added and the table was updated, a whole bunch of files would vanish from the browser. I never got around to finding out why, but it was very annoying. As far as i could tell, it wasnt a problem with my sql updating as the table would wind up exactly the same if i did it myself or asked the Video Manager to generate it.
Anyway, rant aside, i recently switched to Microsoft Windows MCE. So much easier its unbelievable. The TV signal is still a little flakey (recordings tend to work fine, but sometimes livetv struggles to get a signal), but its doing better than myth! The video browser works flawlessly, and even updates on the fly. I do have a few minor gripes with MCE too (if anyone can help with these, id be most grateful):
- The Video Browser appears to only support the icon style view, not a list.
- My hauppauge remote doesnt seem to work. Not a big deal, i plan to replace it with an MCE one anyway, but i thought this one should work. (This is the remote for the USB2 Nova-t, when you press any buttons the light does not flash off - it stays on red.)
- Limited number of settings.
But i can live with those, so so far MCE is - for me - working out better than Myth.
One problem I would love help with though:
Not too long down the line, i would like to buy a couple of MCE extenders, and stick the MCE PC somewhere hidden. I dont yet have a HDTV (or a HDTV source) so can live without that, although it would be nice if i didnt need to replace these when i do make the move so HDTV support would be nice. I can even live without Divx/Xvid support as i could simply reencode to mpeg2, although the space difference would be annoying. But, so far the ones i have seen (basically just the linksys) dont support AC3 audio, which means no films! And lastly, it would be nice if it could support DVD Vobs in the Video browser like MCE does.
I dont really want to use a xbox for the job, and i dont think it solves those problems anyway. The xbox 360 would be an expensive solution and power hungry solution, even if it does solve them all. A possible solution is the Thunderbridge which apparantly supports HDTV upscaling, few other details though. I would consider small and quiet MCE boxes, but i dont think they will stream livetv from the main one.
Any ideas?
Well I have gone on for a bit asking more questions than i have replying to the parent, but I hope you can at least see that for me, MCE is working out better.
The DVIMAGIC, and this, and this do just that. The latter is just for one dvd player, so might just exploit a flaw in that player or something. Not exactly perfect solutions yet, but we are getting towards the dongle you ask for.
There was also a recent article (i forget the url) by someone who claimed to have cracked HDCP. As i recall it was along the lines of comparing the outputs from 10 dvd players/tvs to determine the master key. He never released the information for fear of DMCA, but if someone was to repeat it you could see black market type dongles.
I dont really have a problem with HDCP though, as when i do get a HDTV it will be compliant. The problem I see is we are being forced to fight better and better copy protections. I currently rip CDs and listen to them in iTunes instead of using a CD player. You basically cant do that with DVD Audio (without capturing analogue or using the WinDVD trick), and if you do you cant play them back on a normal player because the watermark will stop it. Similarly, when going around friends i prefer to rip DVDs to a hard disk so we can watch them off that instead of taking the discs. I would want to be able to do that with these high definition discs too, I dont want the only ripper to be Windows Media Center, and the copy to refuse to play on anything but my MCE machine and my authorized portable player.
Even if they do make rippers for BR/HD, what about the next generation?
Well, if Beagle is wondering where we went, instead of wasting money on another explorer why dont we just wait for it to launch "Earth Express 1" into orbit to scan for us?