I use an app called Thundertray. Its pretty much a tray launcher and minimizer for tbird. The tray extension on the mozdev site never worked for me for some reason.
Yeah, 'no adware' is right. I mean, can't we really trace this problem back to the lack of a decent micropayment system? These spyware people are making what? A few pennies per install?
How about a big box saying, "Hi, I'm about to install spyware, or you can get the spyware free version for 68 cents," instead of a 45 page EULA? My respect for the company would up a lot. They are *gasp* disclosing what they are trying to install, a different financial solution, and a way to cancel out of the install.
If what you say is true, windows would have 1% of the marketshare by now.
We're dealing with end users here, not experts. They just want something that works and expect their anti-virus company and anti-spyware company to deliver the goods.
What good is branding when the company in question used to be called Gator? They simply changed their name. So long bad PR!
Its cronyism and its killing IT. The entire spyware phenomenon can be traced to activex, which exists to tie the browser to the platform.
That said, I've been running into a lot of OSX converts. They got sick of windows and bought a used iMac for next to nothing or 999 for an ibook with some promotion. My next machine will be an iBook too. With Mozilla and Firefox telling lazy web designers and those who make corporate policy to pay attention to standards, the shift will be even easier.
All MUD-based games are simple skinner boxes in which we are expected to perform repetitive tasks (killing mobs, missions) to get rewards (levels, powers). I played COH for a couple months and appreciated how your team shifted away from the standard MUD model by incorporating missions and large group missions as opposed to relying on just killing mobs which pop-up. Still, its just a variation on the skinner box and there is a lot of MUD-like killing.
Ironically, there is no incentive to "act like a hero" in City of Heroes. Everyone has their role to play, be it tank, healer, hitter, etc. Its very formal and deterministic. Trying to be Spiderman or Superman will get you killed quickly. Can you break this formula and deliver a game in which taking chances produces results? Can you envision a level-less character system? That is to say a game where your cunning, skill, intelligence, patience, tactics etc determine your strength not your level or armor rating? A game where a gunshot kills any level character and only the better players survive regardless if the character is 2 minutes or 2,000 hours old?
For a quick and dirty solution you can just use an edited hosts file which redirects them back to loopback. I dont even connect to their servers. The idea of connecting them is like reaching into a filthy toilet.
Okay so he gets some felony conviction. Will this make corporate america stop buying windows based systems and if they don't then run them without a firewall?
Will people wise up to the fact that allowing binaries in email is just dangerous?
Toss 1 million hackers in prison, a kid with a visual basic book and an hour to burn can take down most systems. That's the problem; we're all driving pintos and complaining about yellow lights being too short. Treating just the symptom gets old fast.
Oh well I gotta go to my deibold atm today. I hope its not bluescreened again. I hope my windows based voting machine works too tomorrow.
I care who wins, but I care more about winning legally and properly. I care about every vote being counted. I wish more of my fellow countrymen felt the same way.
Yep. I am a big firefox evangelist for windows, but SP2 is the Firefox killer in many ways.
That said, there are lots of 98 and 2K installations. There are lots of XP people sick of spyware or are curious about tabs, handy extensions, etc. Or at just worried about security. Computers arent these things in our living room anymore, they are our central digital hub. They have our work, photos, taxes, etc on them. Using IE is like driving drunk. Lots of XP users are slowly coming to realize this.
The really great part about this is that microsoft's incompetence will help the responsbile online community promote real HTML standards. No more "you need this to view that" nonsense. With pages working on mutliple browsers we can edge into better mobile browsers, lower cost to entry, break the digital divide, promote other OS's, etc and show Microsoft that from now on there will be a front to fights its Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish business plan.
I'm not sure how much I like this artificial line between legal and illegal file transfers.
A lot of torrent stuff I do are video clips from political shows, the daily show, etc. I upload an excerpt which as far as most people are concerned is fair use. We use it to talk about an event. Its the same as using a blockquote of text from a news article or photocopying an article for a class or seminar.
To these P2P researchers I'm sure this falls under the category of pirating (lovely word, should I get an eyepatch and a parrot?).
Bitorrent, emule, et al have a lot more legitimate uses than one might think. I think people are being disingenious when they just pick public domain/open source items and say "see look, only 1% of the traffic is legal!"
Re:I'm going as a pirate this year
on
Halloween Fun
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· Score: 1
We did. They won a long time ago. Thanks to things like the "culture war," conservative media passing itself off as "fair and balanced," Reaganomics, the marriage of Christian fundies to the GOP, etc. The damage that has been done will take decades to fix, if not generations.
They got the bullet points. They knew it was a big hand out to law enforcement and would be easily abused. It was either sign it or be declared a traitor by the conservative elites who own the media and face a popular outcry by the media-consumers who would be prompted by their friendly anchorman to take action against an enemy of the state.
The corruption runs deep and its not laziness at its core.
Every so often one of the moderators says something like this:
"Yeah we know its not complaint, but its a lot of work to redo the dynamic code generation. We are putting this off for a while, perhaps to shift to CSS based layouts."
Oh please. The fact the big media hasn't destroyed the tivo company is something of a miracle. All tivo is doing is obeying corrupt american IP laws. Fight this at the grassroots, then in DC. Complaining to tivo for the laws of your republic is counter productive.
Mozilla can start some kind of volunteer based "Mozilla Certified" group to look at new extensions that want this certification. Push the cert like a brand and tell users that non-certified apps might contain spyware and other nasties.
Or take a hard-line approach and change the licensing for XUL developers so they cant use it for spyware. This probably isnt possible as all this stuff is open source.
Perhaps the mozilla people can partner up with the spybot or adaware people and include the binaries in the installer.
"Do you want to install SpyBot, a spyware remover?"
That way, when they leave IE they also get a chance to clean up their machines, thus making FF appear to render all the quicker.
>There aren't enough dungeons or cool things to do besides run around and kill stuff and hope for loot.
All MUD-based games are like this. Essentially you are putting yourself in a Skinner box.
Repetition and the lack of "cool loot" is a feature not a bug. With so many players, there will never be rare loot you can get, and if there is someone who has been playing 23 hours a day is hoarding it. Running around and killing stuff is basically the design.
A lot of people complain about these things without realizing this is why these games are so addictive. There are simply more fun online games that dont demand all your time. The skinner-box is profitable for now, but even the implementations are weak. I played SWG for about two months and its like a generic space game with a few token star wars themes applied. The incentive is poor. Worse, they made the best character, the jedi, next to impossible to score. Compare that to all the Jedi fun you can have with Jedi Academy.
I like games that are challenging, take me away, let me be creative, let me horse around, etc. I have real life leveling to do and MUD-playing back in college did affect my grades and social life (or what was left of it). I'm really curious to see if the skinner-box profit model is going to last.
>but if you notice, there is no guarantee on the speeds for any ISP.
That's not true. In the residential market, yes, mostly because of DSL. But if you get some commercial services, leased lines, ATM, T1, etc your contract will have (or you will negotiate) a level of service they cannot go under.
This is all just about contracts. It seems to me that people just like to bitch about lawyers and would rather be lied to than deal with a company being honest with them by stating that speeds are variable.
Not to mention, its not some carte blanche to do whatever they want. The early days of broadband when the cable companies oversold their product really are gone, and if they come back you at least have the choice between dsl, WISPs, leased lines, etc.
Also, if someone wants a guaranteed minimum level of service, they can pay commercial rates and be done with it.
>non-techie jurors will be awarding oppotunistic internet users money in civil suits all over the place.
Really? How many lawsuits are there regarding speed?
If you have ever worked in tech support you'll know that a good % of the calls are of kiddies who goto dslreports and complain that "Im getting ripped off." Usually they dont know the difference between mbps and kbps or they have a shitload of spyware and Kazaa running at the same time. Or they are so far from the CO that their DSL speed suffers.
No need to drag out the "lawyers are bad!" bogeyman. I suppose you also think the case against MS was a big conspiracy and if you got arrested tomorrow you would defend yourself in court.
I know this is crazy to say around here but a lawyer can take a good case or a bad case(or client). Many class-actions are very ethical, some aren't.
Exactly. Schmidt isn't going to piss on his "do no evil" philosophy by lying. Hell, saying "no comment" would have produced 1,000 articles on the gbrowser and tons of free publicity. It other words, there is no google browser.
That means:
If you give a shit about standards then get off your ass and promote the browser yourself. Dont expect the Google to do it for you. I've got dozens of converts. Its not that hard. Well, now with SP2 out it will only get harder. Time to reframe this issue:
The gbrowser isnt some IE killer. In fact, SP2 is the Firefox killer. Now is the time to get Firefox out. 1.0 should have been released before SP2.
Or we can continue to deny reality and hope google or some other benefactor fixes the standards mess we're in like the fundies who are waiting for the rapture to pull them out of their clothes any minute now.
So, please excuse me for not trusting my one lousy vote to the CEO of some company which is more secretive with its machines than a 16 year old girl with her diary. Pardon me for taking his partisan comments ("I will deliver Ohio for Bush") as just that: an inapropriate partisan comment.
No conspiracy theories needed. If you keep things secret, someone will find a way to abuse them.
>and that there is also a paper record
Err, people want paper tickets they can verify and put in a box for recounts. Attaching a printer to a voting machine at the end of the day is hardly a "paper trail."
>this is Slashdot, you should know tthe possibilities of bash scripting.
Really? I find a lot of the most vocal linux advocates to be using KDE or Gnome for everything and webmin for everything else. They scoff at my simple command line based cygwin setup because "its not linux."
Linux users are definitely geeky, but no offense they arent all command line hackers or even half-assed system admins. OSX users are even below this. I often port scan my subnet and find default services running with default settings on various distros. Its not just mandrake users either.
Thats the thing with popularity, there is a chance the fetished item will be co-opted by those much less interested than the original people and unlike the original "fans" they tend to be loud, obnoxious, insulting, etc. Its kinda like when the mainstream radio crowd "discovers" some indie band. Fanaticism runs deep and no one wants to talk about what equipment they are using this tour, the quality of songwriting, etc just "turn that shit up."
Samsung Electronics has developed a new graphics chip that will allow half VGA screens to produce VGA resolution.
The novelty is specially aimed at future mobiles with VGA screens that will be less than 2.4 inches. It generates color using an entirely new driving method called sub-pixel unit driving methodology. Contrary to existing color display methods that express color pixel by pixel, this new method creates color at the sub-pixel level representing more than two data lines from the same pixel. By composing a new pixel with the sub-pixel on the adjacent scanning line, 480x640 (VGA) resolution can be attained from a 240x640 (half VGA) panel. The device can display up to 260K colors for TFT panels in mobile phones.
Slashdot Mirror
I use an app called Thundertray. Its pretty much a tray launcher and minimizer for tbird. The tray extension on the mozdev site never worked for me for some reason.
Yeah, 'no adware' is right. I mean, can't we really trace this problem back to the lack of a decent micropayment system? These spyware people are making what? A few pennies per install?
How about a big box saying, "Hi, I'm about to install spyware, or you can get the spyware free version for 68 cents," instead of a 45 page EULA? My respect for the company would up a lot. They are *gasp* disclosing what they are trying to install, a different financial solution, and a way to cancel out of the install.
If what you say is true, windows would have 1% of the marketshare by now.
We're dealing with end users here, not experts. They just want something that works and expect their anti-virus company and anti-spyware company to deliver the goods.
What good is branding when the company in question used to be called Gator? They simply changed their name. So long bad PR!
Its cronyism and its killing IT. The entire spyware phenomenon can be traced to activex, which exists to tie the browser to the platform.
That said, I've been running into a lot of OSX converts. They got sick of windows and bought a used iMac for next to nothing or 999 for an ibook with some promotion. My next machine will be an iBook too. With Mozilla and Firefox telling lazy web designers and those who make corporate policy to pay attention to standards, the shift will be even easier.
All MUD-based games are simple skinner boxes in which we are expected to perform repetitive tasks (killing mobs, missions) to get rewards (levels, powers). I played COH for a couple months and appreciated how your team shifted away from the standard MUD model by incorporating missions and large group missions as opposed to relying on just killing mobs which pop-up. Still, its just a variation on the skinner box and there is a lot of MUD-like killing.
Ironically, there is no incentive to "act like a hero" in City of Heroes. Everyone has their role to play, be it tank, healer, hitter, etc. Its very formal and deterministic. Trying to be Spiderman or Superman will get you killed quickly. Can you break this formula and deliver a game in which taking chances produces results? Can you envision a level-less character system? That is to say a game where your cunning, skill, intelligence, patience, tactics etc determine your strength not your level or armor rating? A game where a gunshot kills any level character and only the better players survive regardless if the character is 2 minutes or 2,000 hours old?
For a quick and dirty solution you can just use an edited hosts file which redirects them back to loopback. I dont even connect to their servers. The idea of connecting them is like reaching into a filthy toilet.
Okay so he gets some felony conviction. Will this make corporate america stop buying windows based systems and if they don't then run them without a firewall?
Will people wise up to the fact that allowing binaries in email is just dangerous?
Toss 1 million hackers in prison, a kid with a visual basic book and an hour to burn can take down most systems. That's the problem; we're all driving pintos and complaining about yellow lights being too short. Treating just the symptom gets old fast.
Oh well I gotta go to my deibold atm today. I hope its not bluescreened again. I hope my windows based voting machine works too tomorrow.
dailykos has the details. The GOP doesnt like to lose.
ourvote.com has a site up and a hotline ready. See also: my earlier post on fraud and corruption in American politics.
I care who wins, but I care more about winning legally and properly. I care about every vote being counted. I wish more of my fellow countrymen felt the same way.
Yep. I am a big firefox evangelist for windows, but SP2 is the Firefox killer in many ways.
That said, there are lots of 98 and 2K installations. There are lots of XP people sick of spyware or are curious about tabs, handy extensions, etc. Or at just worried about security. Computers arent these things in our living room anymore, they are our central digital hub. They have our work, photos, taxes, etc on them. Using IE is like driving drunk. Lots of XP users are slowly coming to realize this.
The really great part about this is that microsoft's incompetence will help the responsbile online community promote real HTML standards. No more "you need this to view that" nonsense. With pages working on mutliple browsers we can edge into better mobile browsers, lower cost to entry, break the digital divide, promote other OS's, etc and show Microsoft that from now on there will be a front to fights its Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish business plan.
>I think it's time to just come to grips with the fact that stealing software and music is in fact called "piracy".
No thanks. The history of piracy consists of murder, theft, and rape on the open seas.
This is copyright infringment. Or Fair Use, depending.
It is not theft. Copying a tv show is not the same as stealing a physical DVD.
These are important differences, and letting the content industry frame the issue this way gives them a semantic advantage that is very, very real.
I'm not sure how much I like this artificial line between legal and illegal file transfers.
A lot of torrent stuff I do are video clips from political shows, the daily show, etc. I upload an excerpt which as far as most people are concerned is fair use. We use it to talk about an event. Its the same as using a blockquote of text from a news article or photocopying an article for a class or seminar.
To these P2P researchers I'm sure this falls under the category of pirating (lovely word, should I get an eyepatch and a parrot?).
Bitorrent, emule, et al have a lot more legitimate uses than one might think. I think people are being disingenious when they just pick public domain/open source items and say "see look, only 1% of the traffic is legal!"
>Dremel: the vibrator for men.
Too clever! I'm going to steal that.
Here's a list of abuses from just this week alone.
>If we let these powermad tyrants have power
We did. They won a long time ago. Thanks to things like the "culture war," conservative media passing itself off as "fair and balanced," Reaganomics, the marriage of Christian fundies to the GOP, etc. The damage that has been done will take decades to fix, if not generations.
Here's the corruption from this week alone. Its not laziness at work here.
They got the bullet points. They knew it was a big hand out to law enforcement and would be easily abused. It was either sign it or be declared a traitor by the conservative elites who own the media and face a popular outcry by the media-consumers who would be prompted by their friendly anchorman to take action against an enemy of the state.
The corruption runs deep and its not laziness at its core.
>WHATS UP WITH THAT?!
Every so often one of the moderators says something like this:
"Yeah we know its not complaint, but its a lot of work to redo the dynamic code generation. We are putting this off for a while, perhaps to shift to CSS based layouts."
Or something like that.
No, their soma goes by the name of fox news, msbc, talk radio, etc.
In the new america, facts and history and decadent excesses of the reality based community. The faith based community has no need for such things.
Oh please. The fact the big media hasn't destroyed the tivo company is something of a miracle. All tivo is doing is obeying corrupt american IP laws. Fight this at the grassroots, then in DC. Complaining to tivo for the laws of your republic is counter productive.
Mozilla can start some kind of volunteer based "Mozilla Certified" group to look at new extensions that want this certification. Push the cert like a brand and tell users that non-certified apps might contain spyware and other nasties.
Or take a hard-line approach and change the licensing for XUL developers so they cant use it for spyware. This probably isnt possible as all this stuff is open source.
Perhaps the mozilla people can partner up with the spybot or adaware people and include the binaries in the installer.
"Do you want to install SpyBot, a spyware remover?"
That way, when they leave IE they also get a chance to clean up their machines, thus making FF appear to render all the quicker.
>There aren't enough dungeons or cool things to do besides run around and kill stuff and hope for loot.
All MUD-based games are like this. Essentially you are putting yourself in a Skinner box.
Repetition and the lack of "cool loot" is a feature not a bug. With so many players, there will never be rare loot you can get, and if there is someone who has been playing 23 hours a day is hoarding it. Running around and killing stuff is basically the design.
A lot of people complain about these things without realizing this is why these games are so addictive. There are simply more fun online games that dont demand all your time. The skinner-box is profitable for now, but even the implementations are weak. I played SWG for about two months and its like a generic space game with a few token star wars themes applied. The incentive is poor. Worse, they made the best character, the jedi, next to impossible to score. Compare that to all the Jedi fun you can have with Jedi Academy.
I like games that are challenging, take me away, let me be creative, let me horse around, etc. I have real life leveling to do and MUD-playing back in college did affect my grades and social life (or what was left of it). I'm really curious to see if the skinner-box profit model is going to last.
>but if you notice, there is no guarantee on the speeds for any ISP.
That's not true. In the residential market, yes, mostly because of DSL. But if you get some commercial services, leased lines, ATM, T1, etc your contract will have (or you will negotiate) a level of service they cannot go under.
This is all just about contracts. It seems to me that people just like to bitch about lawyers and would rather be lied to than deal with a company being honest with them by stating that speeds are variable.
Not to mention, its not some carte blanche to do whatever they want. The early days of broadband when the cable companies oversold their product really are gone, and if they come back you at least have the choice between dsl, WISPs, leased lines, etc.
Also, if someone wants a guaranteed minimum level of service, they can pay commercial rates and be done with it.
>non-techie jurors will be awarding oppotunistic internet users money in civil suits all over the place.
Really? How many lawsuits are there regarding speed?
If you have ever worked in tech support you'll know that a good % of the calls are of kiddies who goto dslreports and complain that "Im getting ripped off." Usually they dont know the difference between mbps and kbps or they have a shitload of spyware and Kazaa running at the same time. Or they are so far from the CO that their DSL speed suffers.
No need to drag out the "lawyers are bad!" bogeyman. I suppose you also think the case against MS was a big conspiracy and if you got arrested tomorrow you would defend yourself in court.
I know this is crazy to say around here but a lawyer can take a good case or a bad case(or client). Many class-actions are very ethical, some aren't.
Exactly. Schmidt isn't going to piss on his "do no evil" philosophy by lying. Hell, saying "no comment" would have produced 1,000 articles on the gbrowser and tons of free publicity. It other words, there is no google browser.
That means:
If you give a shit about standards then get off your ass and promote the browser yourself. Dont expect the Google to do it for you. I've got dozens of converts. Its not that hard. Well, now with SP2 out it will only get harder. Time to reframe this issue:
The gbrowser isnt some IE killer. In fact, SP2 is the Firefox killer. Now is the time to get Firefox out. 1.0 should have been released before SP2.
Or we can continue to deny reality and hope google or some other benefactor fixes the standards mess we're in like the fundies who are waiting for the rapture to pull them out of their clothes any minute now.
> systems have been scrutinized, including at a source code level, by independent authorities
These machines are tested in secret and because of IP law and NDAs you will never know the results. The Australians have open source voting machines. Its not that hard to pull off, that is if you CARE about elections. Seems many in power see fraud as par for the course in the US.
So, please excuse me for not trusting my one lousy vote to the CEO of some company which is more secretive with its machines than a 16 year old girl with her diary. Pardon me for taking his partisan comments ("I will deliver Ohio for Bush") as just that: an inapropriate partisan comment.
No conspiracy theories needed. If you keep things secret, someone will find a way to abuse them.
>and that there is also a paper record
Err, people want paper tickets they can verify and put in a box for recounts. Attaching a printer to a voting machine at the end of the day is hardly a "paper trail."
>this is Slashdot, you should know tthe possibilities of bash scripting.
Really? I find a lot of the most vocal linux advocates to be using KDE or Gnome for everything and webmin for everything else. They scoff at my simple command line based cygwin setup because "its not linux."
Linux users are definitely geeky, but no offense they arent all command line hackers or even half-assed system admins. OSX users are even below this. I often port scan my subnet and find default services running with default settings on various distros. Its not just mandrake users either.
Thats the thing with popularity, there is a chance the fetished item will be co-opted by those much less interested than the original people and unlike the original "fans" they tend to be loud, obnoxious, insulting, etc. Its kinda like when the mainstream radio crowd "discovers" some indie band. Fanaticism runs deep and no one wants to talk about what equipment they are using this tour, the quality of songwriting, etc just "turn that shit up."