If you're using pagerank then the googlebar is spyware. If you consider your private browsing habits to have worth then it is no longer free, but subsidized by the data you generate as a web user.
On the bright side, you can download a version of the toolbar without pagerank and no tracking will be done. That's the version I install on people's computers. You're either for or against spyware in my book, there really is no middle-ground. I'm afraid the old truism is true, and as gator et al has shown us - give them an inch and they'll take a mile.
The suggestion that this could be used to play divx encoded video is very tantalizing. $300 for something that could replace my gamecube, DVD player, and the cabling/SVCDs I make would be very well worth it.
I wonder how long the average windows user will deal with "Allow jf934yhf.exe to use the internet" before they shut down the firewall because of "annoyances."
Obviously, knowing what's going out of your PC is important, but that level of sophistication might make more people see firewalls as a PITA than something they need, not to mention the problems that come up when you're in a game or something that hides or obscures those little 'allow' boxes.
I liked the old firewall because it was simple. It blocked stuff from coming in and arguably your virus scanner should be taking care of the PC itself. I also don't think asking the customer is such a bright idea, if it hooked onto a database somewhere on the net and told you "This is a safe application, this is Quicken" then fine, but it leaves the user guessing what s3rvices.exe is and as we have seen clicking Yes on everything is default behavoir.
Outbound blocking seems like a lot of trouble for little return. I'm assuming this firewall does or will support UPnP so eventually the trojan writers will just exploit that.
I'd much rather see the firewall on by default (is it?), ActiveX off by default (with the exception of windowsupdate), and Windows update on by default. More features isn't the solution, shipping the product airtight is.
Really now, we've had warning windows in Outlook for quite some time and people tend to ignore them. "You say everything is harmful, stupid computer!"
Okay, where can I get some blue and red 3D glasses in this day and age? Preferably some big retail store so I don't have to go through mail order. Does someone know of a cheap book at Borders or Barnes and Noble with a pair of glasses in them?
Because they just arent "another company" there are friggin monopoly. There are what? millions? of net enabled Win98 machines? So when the next big network exploit comes out that means no internet for me at home (cable modem) and a general slow-down of the entire net. Not to mention trojans, zombies, etc.
There are simply larger consequences when a monopoly does something as compared to a niche product like Red Hat.
The same rules simply do not apply to a monopoly.
I wouldnt care if there were only a few thousand Win98 installations on the net, but that is certainly not the case. MS could be offering Upgrade vouchers and such if they really cared about security and their customers. If the hardware can't run XP that's fine, they can upgrade to 2K.
NASA can only really do so much, why isn't the President or anyone else in government there too cheer them on? This is almost a BILLION dollars worth of science here. It seems to be that "Boring science" is a self-fulfilling prophesy.
Don't laugh too hard now. The 1997 sojourner was a media success beyond measure and news stations could have had a Mars countdown with experts, commentary, and animations, etc.
Instead, there's light coverage, next to nothing on live coverage, and thus the importance of these Mars missions are lost on Joe Sixpack.
If these missions are "egghead science" and of no interest to the everyman, its because government and media have failed us.
This is not flamebait, but if Al Gore was president (or another person clued in on technology) something tells me this event would be presented to the world in whole different light.
It may very well be that the last 20th century and the early 21st century will be known to later generations as a time of space pioneering both in the public and private spheres. Its a shame its not very accessible to the layman living in these times.
This worm usually begins like this, but many variations have been seen in both the wild and in the lab.
John: Yo wazzup? Me: No time to chat. I'm a little busy, gotta do some work. John: Then why is your IM on? Me: Because I need it for work.
Soon the worm spreads.
Jane: Hey, why are you giving John the cold shoulder? Me: Shit, I just want to get something done here. I'm sending someone a file with IM then I'm gone. Jane: You're full of it. John knows you're still pissed at him about blah blah.
The worm may even infect unaffiliate third-parties.
Joe: Hey man, you don't know me, but I work with Jane at Curuthers and Magalby and the way you treat her and your so-called pal John is fucking bullshit. You shoud be ashamed of yourself.
Me: Seriously, I just want to get some work done here.
Joe: Yeah, like I'm going to trust a liar like you.
Fix: None. Stopgap: Forever stop using IM with crazy paranoid social primates.
>A 1G USB stick could be the sweet spot for having both apps, data, and (optionally) an entire OS.
Sure, why not?
Ideally, I'd like to be able to carry my "computer" on my keychain and have it interface with both private and public thin-clients. Once my OS boots I can get my documents/download apps from a central depository.
In a pinch I can carry a small thin-client laptop. Heck, why even use USB? If we're pushing one gig, toss in some fault tolerance (mirroring or somesuch) and a high-speed Personal Area Network radio. No need to even take my keys out of my pocket.
I can't find the book online, but this is pretty much what it covers. Let's just say the "Cancer Gambit" doesn't pay.
Smoking was responsible for 70 percent of all cancer deaths and nearly 19 percent of cardiovascular disease deaths in Missouri in 1995. Missouri Department of Health; Center for Health Information Management & Epidemiology. Smoking-Attributable Mortality in Missouri. Monthly Vital Statistics 1998 March;32(1).
Lung cancer has now surpassed heart disease as the leading cause of smoke-related deaths among white middle-class smokers. Thun MJ. Excess Mortality Among Cigarette Smokers: Changes in a 20-year Interval. American Journal of Public Health 1995; 85(9):1223-30.
Smokers have a 50 percent greater chance of contracting a deadly form of adult leukemia. Napier K. Cigarettes: what the warning label doesn't tell you: the first comprehensive guide to the health consequences of smoking. NY: American Council on Science and Health; 1996.
Smoking doubles the risk of developing pancreatic cancer. Silverman DT, Dunn JA, Hoover RN, Schiffman M, Lillemoe KD, Schoenberg JB, et al. Cigarette smoking and pancreas cancer: A case-control study based on direct interviews. Journal of the National Cancer Institute 1994; 86(20):1510-16.
Smoking is a risk factor for developing rheumatoid arthritis. Symmons DPM, et al. Blood Transfusion, Smoking, and Obesity as Risk Factors for the Development of Rheumatoid Arthritis: Results from a Primary Care-Based Incident Case-Control Study in Norfolk, England. Arthritis & Rheumatism 1997; 40:1955-1961.
According to a recent study, smokers have a 70 percent greater risk of suffering from hearing loss than nonsmokers. Cruickshanks K, Klein R, Klein BE, Wiley TL, Nondahl DM, Tweed TS. Journal of the American Medical Association 1998; 279(21):1715-1719.
Smoking increases the chance of developing cataracts and other eye diseases. Napier K. Cigarettes: what the warning label doesn't tell you: the first comprehensive guide to the health consequences of smoking. NY: American Council on Science and Health; 1996.
Smokers who develop skin cancer are more likely to die of their disease than nonsmokers. Napier K. Cigarettes: what the warning label doesn't tell you: the first comprehensive guide to the health consequences of smoking. NY: American Council on Science and Health; 1996.
Smoking increases the risk of duodenal ulcers, Crohn's Disease, and colon polyps. Napier K. Cigarettes: what the warning label doesn't tell you: the first comprehensive guide to the health consequences of smoking. NY: American Council on Science and Health; 1996.
Women who quit smoking may dramatically reduce their risk of cervical cancer. Szarewski A, Jarvis MJ, Sasieni P, Anderson M, Edwards R, Steele SJ, et al. Effect of smoking cessation on cervical lesion size. Lancet 1996; 347(9006):941-3.
Women who are exposed to tobacco smoke (smoking and secondhand smoke) every day are two to three times more likely to develop breast cancer. Morabia A, Bernstein M, Heritier S, Khatchatrian N. Relation of breast cancer with passive and active exposure to tobacco smoke. American Journal of Epidemiology 1996; 143(1):918-28.
Smoking increases the chance of developing colorectal, bladder, kidney, and pancreatic cancers. Napier K. Cigarettes: what the warning label doesn't tell you: the first comprehensive guide to the health consequences of smoking. NY: American Council on Science and Health; 1996.
Smoking increases the chance of impotence in males. Napier K. Cigarettes: what the warning label doesn't tell you: the first comprehensive guide to the health consequences of smoking. NY: American Council on Science and Health; 1996.
Understood, but that means it should not be interfering with video playback. It should gracefully allow the app in the foreground to take the CPU power it needs.
Parent: ""It is clear, however, that if left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare, and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons." --Sen Hillary Clinton, Oct 10, 2002"
Heh, funny how the right also routinely attacks her but when you need someone to back-up your war of choice there she is.
Or perhaps we can just make the worst technology ever Television. Its brought down the level of political discourse to the point where people have no problem tossing aside facts and believing what the man in the suit is saying. I mean, he LOOKS presidential, he certainly can't be lying. Right? Right?
Unencrypted wireless keyboards. Oh man, how did that get out of the gate?
ActiveX Spyware. Looks like an official message from the OS, better click on it.
MP3 players under 256 megabytes. Look ma! I have the convience of spending over 200 dollars for something that barely holds more music than carrying around a el-cheapo CD player and two CDs, plus with the added advantage of lossy compression!
The Color T-Mobile sidekick. "Whoops, we screwed the pooch on licensing so we're going to remotely delete your games. Also, there is no software to download from developers. Enjoy your vendor lock-in!"
Anything targeted at "business people." "Oh hi IT department. I saw a cool ad for this treo/PDAphone/speech2text/etc but I'm too stupid to read the instructions so lets setup a time where you can train me on the stupid stuff I can afford to buy every week and then never use again."
Email to phone services. "Now I can get spam read to me by a computer voice on my cell phone!"
"Speed-up" dial-up web proxies that cost almost as much as DSL. Geez people, just get the damn DSL line.
Segway HT Has yet to revolutionize anything but has shown us how the media can be exploited for free advertising.
Red Hat Linux.
RH:Screw you guys, we're going corporate, you know, where the money is.
ME:But, but I'll pay you for updates! In fact I do!
RH:Too bad kid.
Lindows. Worst. Name. Ever. Its like a Sonyo or a Magnetbox.
Windows/Office activation. Pain for when you need to re-install and pushes people back to the 2000 products.
Cellphone earpieces with hanging mics. You look like a crazy person talking to yourself. No really, you do.
AGP 8x Thanks for making my old AGP cards obsolete and bringing back old PCI cards for PCs that don't need kick-ass 3D.
Best tech:
Alltheweb.com Google now has a kick-ass competitor.
The T-mobile sidekick. Once you get over the vendor lock-in its the best mobile browser out there, sans java-script.
The Treo600. Camera and all the palm apps you can handle and it plays MP3s.
Google text-ads. This should be self-explanatory.
Mandrake policy. Nice to see a distro care enough to say how long they're willing to support the product.
Gnomemeeting. Its like a big geek party.
DVD players that can play SVCDs. Finally.
Adapative spam filters. Just golden.
The Firebird/Thunderbird projects. Bye, bye IE/Outlook on windows.
They dont want the hits, they want to appease their fellow nutty ultra-right wing readers. Newspapers toss them a bone to guarantee they renew their subscriptions and the "right Jebusly thing" was said.
Commercials are already well-done eye-candy. If you really want my time and my dollar make a commercial based on facts, not appeals to emotion. Tell me why your widget is better than the competition's. Give me a good price. Show me reviews from credible outlets. Tell me about your warranty and customer service.
The alternative is what you claim to want: cars with mountains and american flags in the background. Pretty people/famous people hocking the newest RonCo piece of crap, etc.
Fact based advertising was the norm until newspapers began printing graphics in the late 18th century. Google's text ads are nothing more than a revival of an old and much more informative form of advertising, and because these are words we can challenge them on false-advertising laws thus keeping everyone honest.
> You sound like a troll (nobody mentioned anything about a full-tilt KDE port on OS X, fool)
You call him a troll, yet you're name-calling?
> it has more/better features than mozilla (fish://, file://, ftp:// smtp://, etc. etc.)
Hold on, many people here habitually abuse MS for making the "browser the OS" and certainly can spot feature-creep a mile away, but when it comes to KDE's browser its suddenly okay? I like having a whole seperate browser for web and use Nautilus for file browsing. Keeping WAN and Local/LAN seperate is a big plus in mine, and many other's books.
>unlike other browsers (mozilla, IE), it was designed using 'mature' technology
How isn't Moz 'mature?'
>unlike mozilla which was a hack job on top of netscape's browser
This is just untrue. The Moz team gutten NS to the point where they were writing just about everything from scratch.
>unlike mozilla/firebird, I can use it for hours/days with many pages open (15+)
I can do this easily with Moz/Firebird on both Win and Linux. I average 20 tabs and half of them are auto-refreshing every few minutes and this is far from a top of the line machine.
> think this book was designed as a nonfiction book first
Close, its based on a conspiracy theory book called Holy Blood Holy Grail which makes the same assertations about Jebus. I think HBHG continues on to say that the bloodline of the kings of Europe are based on the children of Jebus and sexy Mary.
The Da Vinci code really just adds a fictional framework to this old conspiracy and frankly a xtian conspiracy theory thriller sounds as exciting as a day in Church. Interesting how well its selling in America, we're a bit too Jebus-centric here and always in need of some entertainment.
Looking at amazon's page for HBHG it looks like theresa cottage industry surrounding Magdelene (the sexy Mary as I like to call her). Looks like this author is somewhat of a hack.
Also, it turns out HBHG is hogwash as the historical identity of Jebus is hard to follow in itself and other conspircies it depends on like the Priory of Sion and other crap end up being non-existant religious fantasies.
I'm glad its fictional, the whole Bible Code fad from a couple of years ago was a little too much nutty fundamentalism and bad "science" for comfort.
I believe the Beagle team is firmly in stage 1 but after this quote, "At the moment, I am frustrated rather than concerned." some are already drifting into stage 2.
> WiFi Hot-Spots in airports, cafes, etc. *beg* for pricing in a per-MB model.
There are some serious pitfalls to this approach, per MB makes sense to you and me, but I can certainly tell you that Joe User won't make heads or tails of it. "What's a megabyte" will be his first in a long string of questions.
Secondly, who knows whats running in the background of a laptop. Say Joe User's windows auto-update runs and downloads 9 megs worth of patches in three minutes, do you really expect him to pay you fifty bucks for three minutes of service, especially when he doesn't understand why his laptop did what it just did.
Personally, I don't see wifi as a long-term profitable service. At best I can see it as a secondary service or incentive. Free wifi access with a purchase of 20 dollars or so. Or DSL providers giving access to wifi hot sports for 5 more dollars a month, etc.
I've been to a couple small coffee houses here in Chicago that offer pay-per-play wifi access and *no one* uses it. If you ask why its usually "I'm not paying 30 bucks for that, I can check my email when I get home for free."
Pay for wifi is a lot like a pay toilet, no one likes them and they sure as hell aren't going to pay to use one in a business they are supporting.
>Get off your high horse and understand that all the world does not share your passions.
Oh wow, that's a bit insulting. Its not like the grandparent goes around demanding wifi, its clearly labeled AND advertised. A customer asking about an advertised service certainly is not "on a high horse."
Its this kind of mentality that weakens consumer power, lets companies get away without proper training and support, etc.
Considering how bad the track record of landing something on Mars is, wouldn't it make lots of sense to build satellites with two or more identical landers? The engineerining and design is already done with the landers so it wouldn't cost as much as building a whole seperate mission and it would add fault tolerance if one of them fails to land.
Or maybe NASA and the EU can pitch in a build a giant craft that will carpet-bomb Mars with landers. Mars Air Defense won't stand a chance.
Slashdot Mirror
The #1 tech support issue after Office 2003 comes out:
"Where the heck are my images? Please make it act like the old Outlook."
Its good MS is doing this by default, but most users couldn't care less about security/privacy especially when it inteferes with "purty pictures."
>I love free software.
If you're using pagerank then the googlebar is spyware. If you consider your private browsing habits to have worth then it is no longer free, but subsidized by the data you generate as a web user.
On the bright side, you can download a version of the toolbar without pagerank and no tracking will be done. That's the version I install on people's computers. You're either for or against spyware in my book, there really is no middle-ground. I'm afraid the old truism is true, and as gator et al has shown us - give them an inch and they'll take a mile.
The suggestion that this could be used to play divx encoded video is very tantalizing. $300 for something that could replace my gamecube, DVD player, and the cabling/SVCDs I make would be very well worth it.
I wonder how long the average windows user will deal with "Allow jf934yhf.exe to use the internet" before they shut down the firewall because of "annoyances."
Obviously, knowing what's going out of your PC is important, but that level of sophistication might make more people see firewalls as a PITA than something they need, not to mention the problems that come up when you're in a game or something that hides or obscures those little 'allow' boxes.
I liked the old firewall because it was simple. It blocked stuff from coming in and arguably your virus scanner should be taking care of the PC itself. I also don't think asking the customer is such a bright idea, if it hooked onto a database somewhere on the net and told you "This is a safe application, this is Quicken" then fine, but it leaves the user guessing what s3rvices.exe is and as we have seen clicking Yes on everything is default behavoir.
Outbound blocking seems like a lot of trouble for little return. I'm assuming this firewall does or will support UPnP so eventually the trojan writers will just exploit that.
I'd much rather see the firewall on by default (is it?), ActiveX off by default (with the exception of windowsupdate), and Windows update on by default. More features isn't the solution, shipping the product airtight is.
Really now, we've had warning windows in Outlook for quite some time and people tend to ignore them. "You say everything is harmful, stupid computer!"
>I'm gonna do something illegal to the next person that says ATM machine,
That's what you think you heard when they're actually saying:
ATMachine
PINumber
I believe you are suffering from Acronym Pause Syndrome. See page 938 of the DSM-IV for more info and treatment.
Okay, where can I get some blue and red 3D glasses in this day and age? Preferably some big retail store so I don't have to go through mail order. Does someone know of a cheap book at Borders or Barnes and Noble with a pair of glasses in them?
Because they just arent "another company" there are friggin monopoly. There are what? millions? of net enabled Win98 machines? So when the next big network exploit comes out that means no internet for me at home (cable modem) and a general slow-down of the entire net. Not to mention trojans, zombies, etc.
There are simply larger consequences when a monopoly does something as compared to a niche product like Red Hat.
The same rules simply do not apply to a monopoly.
I wouldnt care if there were only a few thousand Win98 installations on the net, but that is certainly not the case. MS could be offering Upgrade vouchers and such if they really cared about security and their customers. If the hardware can't run XP that's fine, they can upgrade to 2K.
A few additions:
NASA can only really do so much, why isn't the President or anyone else in government there too cheer them on? This is almost a BILLION dollars worth of science here. It seems to be that "Boring science" is a self-fulfilling prophesy.
Don't laugh too hard now. The 1997 sojourner was a media success beyond measure and news stations could have had a Mars countdown with experts, commentary, and animations, etc.
Instead, there's light coverage, next to nothing on live coverage, and thus the importance of these Mars missions are lost on Joe Sixpack.
If these missions are "egghead science" and of no interest to the everyman, its because government and media have failed us.
This is not flamebait, but if Al Gore was president (or another person clued in on technology) something tells me this event would be presented to the world in whole different light.
It may very well be that the last 20th century and the early 21st century will be known to later generations as a time of space pioneering both in the public and private spheres. Its a shame its not very accessible to the layman living in these times.
Status: Critical
Infection rate: Global
This worm usually begins like this, but many variations have been seen in both the wild and in the lab.
John: Yo wazzup?
Me: No time to chat. I'm a little busy, gotta do some work.
John: Then why is your IM on?
Me: Because I need it for work.
Soon the worm spreads.
Jane: Hey, why are you giving John the cold shoulder?
Me: Shit, I just want to get something done here. I'm sending someone a file with IM then I'm gone.
Jane: You're full of it. John knows you're still pissed at him about blah blah.
The worm may even infect unaffiliate third-parties.
Joe: Hey man, you don't know me, but I work with Jane at Curuthers and Magalby and the way you treat her and your so-called pal John is fucking bullshit. You shoud be ashamed of yourself.
Me: Seriously, I just want to get some work done here.
Joe: Yeah, like I'm going to trust a liar like you.
Fix: None.
Stopgap: Forever stop using IM with crazy paranoid social primates.
>A 1G USB stick could be the sweet spot for having both apps, data, and (optionally) an entire OS.
Sure, why not?
Ideally, I'd like to be able to carry my "computer" on my keychain and have it interface with both private and public thin-clients. Once my OS boots I can get my documents/download apps from a central depository.
In a pinch I can carry a small thin-client laptop. Heck, why even use USB? If we're pushing one gig, toss in some fault tolerance (mirroring or somesuch) and a high-speed Personal Area Network radio. No need to even take my keys out of my pocket.
Russ Kick refrences this book.
I can't find the book online, but this is pretty much what it covers. Let's just say the "Cancer Gambit" doesn't pay.
Understood, but that means it should not be interfering with video playback. It should gracefully allow the app in the foreground to take the CPU power it needs.
This is untrue, I'm running it right now and MozillaFirebird is using 100% of my processor.
I can't even watch an MPEG-II video without massive frame-rate skips. Run this thing and it will eat up your processor.
Parent: ""It is clear, however, that if left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare, and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons."
--Sen Hillary Clinton, Oct 10, 2002"
Heh, funny how the right also routinely attacks her but when you need someone to back-up your war of choice there she is.
Or perhaps we can just make the worst technology ever Television. Its brought down the level of political discourse to the point where people have no problem tossing aside facts and believing what the man in the suit is saying. I mean, he LOOKS presidential, he certainly can't be lying. Right? Right?
Unencrypted wireless keyboards. Oh man, how did that get out of the gate?
ActiveX Spyware. Looks like an official message from the OS, better click on it.
MP3 players under 256 megabytes. Look ma! I have the convience of spending over 200 dollars for something that barely holds more music than carrying around a el-cheapo CD player and two CDs, plus with the added advantage of lossy compression!
The Color T-Mobile sidekick. "Whoops, we screwed the pooch on licensing so we're going to remotely delete your games. Also, there is no software to download from developers. Enjoy your vendor lock-in!"
Anything targeted at "business people." "Oh hi IT department. I saw a cool ad for this treo/PDAphone/speech2text/etc but I'm too stupid to read the instructions so lets setup a time where you can train me on the stupid stuff I can afford to buy every week and then never use again."
Email to phone services. "Now I can get spam read to me by a computer voice on my cell phone!"
"Speed-up" dial-up web proxies that cost almost as much as DSL. Geez people, just get the damn DSL line.
Segway HT Has yet to revolutionize anything but has shown us how the media can be exploited for free advertising.
Red Hat Linux.
RH:Screw you guys, we're going corporate, you know, where the money is.
ME:But, but I'll pay you for updates! In fact I do!
RH:Too bad kid.
Lindows. Worst. Name. Ever. Its like a Sonyo or a Magnetbox.
Windows/Office activation. Pain for when you need to re-install and pushes people back to the 2000 products.
Cellphone earpieces with hanging mics. You look like a crazy person talking to yourself. No really, you do.
AGP 8x Thanks for making my old AGP cards obsolete and bringing back old PCI cards for PCs that don't need kick-ass 3D.
Best tech:
Alltheweb.com Google now has a kick-ass competitor.
The T-mobile sidekick. Once you get over the vendor lock-in its the best mobile browser out there, sans java-script.
The Treo600. Camera and all the palm apps you can handle and it plays MP3s.
Google text-ads. This should be self-explanatory.
Mandrake policy. Nice to see a distro care enough to say how long they're willing to support the product.
Gnomemeeting. Its like a big geek party.
DVD players that can play SVCDs. Finally.
Adapative spam filters. Just golden.
The Firebird/Thunderbird projects. Bye, bye IE/Outlook on windows.
Wifi everywhere. Love it.
They dont want the hits, they want to appease their fellow nutty ultra-right wing readers. Newspapers toss them a bone to guarantee they renew their subscriptions and the "right Jebusly thing" was said.
Commercials are already well-done eye-candy. If you really want my time and my dollar make a commercial based on facts, not appeals to emotion. Tell me why your widget is better than the competition's. Give me a good price. Show me reviews from credible outlets. Tell me about your warranty and customer service.
The alternative is what you claim to want: cars with mountains and american flags in the background. Pretty people/famous people hocking the newest RonCo piece of crap, etc.
Fact based advertising was the norm until newspapers began printing graphics in the late 18th century. Google's text ads are nothing more than a revival of an old and much more informative form of advertising, and because these are words we can challenge them on false-advertising laws thus keeping everyone honest.
> You sound like a troll (nobody mentioned anything about a full-tilt KDE port on OS X, fool)
You call him a troll, yet you're name-calling?
> it has more/better features than mozilla (fish://, file://, ftp:// smtp://, etc. etc.)
Hold on, many people here habitually abuse MS for making the "browser the OS" and certainly can spot feature-creep a mile away, but when it comes to KDE's browser its suddenly okay? I like having a whole seperate browser for web and use Nautilus for file browsing. Keeping WAN and Local/LAN seperate is a big plus in mine, and many other's books.
>unlike other browsers (mozilla, IE), it was designed using 'mature' technology
How isn't Moz 'mature?'
>unlike mozilla which was a hack job on top of netscape's browser
This is just untrue. The Moz team gutten NS to the point where they were writing just about everything from scratch.
>unlike mozilla/firebird, I can use it for hours/days with many pages open (15+)
I can do this easily with Moz/Firebird on both Win and Linux. I average 20 tabs and half of them are auto-refreshing every few minutes and this is far from a top of the line machine.
Screw "good ads" which loosely translates to an amusing joke, pretty people/landscapes, and appeals to emotion.
Show me some facts. Tell me why your product is better than your competitors. Show me a good price.
I'm not holding my breath, a fact-based advertising model would kill so many popular brands and empower consumers it wouldn't even be funny.
>Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Or the entire Big O anime series playing now on the cartoon network.
> think this book was designed as a nonfiction book first
Close, its based on a conspiracy theory book called Holy Blood Holy Grail which makes the same assertations about Jebus. I think HBHG continues on to say that the bloodline of the kings of Europe are based on the children of Jebus and sexy Mary.
The Da Vinci code really just adds a fictional framework to this old conspiracy and frankly a xtian conspiracy theory thriller sounds as exciting as a day in Church. Interesting how well its selling in America, we're a bit too Jebus-centric here and always in need of some entertainment.
Looking at amazon's page for HBHG it looks like theresa cottage industry surrounding Magdelene (the sexy Mary as I like to call her). Looks like this author is somewhat of a hack.
Also, it turns out HBHG is hogwash as the historical identity of Jebus is hard to follow in itself and other conspircies it depends on like the Priory of Sion and other crap end up being non-existant religious fantasies.
I'm glad its fictional, the whole Bible Code fad from a couple of years ago was a little too much nutty fundamentalism and bad "science" for comfort.
1. Denial
2. Anger
3. Bargaining
4. Depression
5. Acceptance
I believe the Beagle team is firmly in stage 1 but after this quote, "At the moment, I am frustrated rather than concerned." some are already drifting into stage 2.
> WiFi Hot-Spots in airports, cafes, etc. *beg* for pricing in a per-MB model.
There are some serious pitfalls to this approach, per MB makes sense to you and me, but I can certainly tell you that Joe User won't make heads or tails of it. "What's a megabyte" will be his first in a long string of questions.
Secondly, who knows whats running in the background of a laptop. Say Joe User's windows auto-update runs and downloads 9 megs worth of patches in three minutes, do you really expect him to pay you fifty bucks for three minutes of service, especially when he doesn't understand why his laptop did what it just did.
Personally, I don't see wifi as a long-term profitable service. At best I can see it as a secondary service or incentive. Free wifi access with a purchase of 20 dollars or so. Or DSL providers giving access to wifi hot sports for 5 more dollars a month, etc.
I've been to a couple small coffee houses here in Chicago that offer pay-per-play wifi access and *no one* uses it. If you ask why its usually "I'm not paying 30 bucks for that, I can check my email when I get home for free."
Pay for wifi is a lot like a pay toilet, no one likes them and they sure as hell aren't going to pay to use one in a business they are supporting.
>Get off your high horse and understand that all the world does not share your passions.
Oh wow, that's a bit insulting. Its not like the grandparent goes around demanding wifi, its clearly labeled AND advertised. A customer asking about an advertised service certainly is not "on a high horse."
Its this kind of mentality that weakens consumer power, lets companies get away without proper training and support, etc.
Considering how bad the track record of landing something on Mars is, wouldn't it make lots of sense to build satellites with two or more identical landers? The engineerining and design is already done with the landers so it wouldn't cost as much as building a whole seperate mission and it would add fault tolerance if one of them fails to land.
Or maybe NASA and the EU can pitch in a build a giant craft that will carpet-bomb Mars with landers. Mars Air Defense won't stand a chance.