Why is this fraud? It should be fraudulent to block other players from accessing my software.
Its really incredible how people instinctively side with bad corporate policies. How about my rights as a consumer? How about the right to tinker? How about educating people about Apple's horrible policies?
I see nothing wrong with this. I hope its a wake up call to the industry and I hope it shows all the apple fanboys whats wrong with their favorite company.
Securing infrastructure has nothing to do with politics. Do you honestly think Islamic terrorists have a rational political stance and that compliance will lead to some historically unseen in humankind age of peace? No, compliance with religious nuts will lead to collapse. Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, et al want destruction of their enemies and to shift the world to a brutal form of Islam, little else.
While the US, like any other powerful country, has a questionable historical track record, I would rather have it be the leader of the world than the current alternatives: Iran, Russia, or China.
For a long time the//e was one of the few popular color computers. I remember a period where computer labs had slightly older TRS-80s side-by-side with//e's. Many//e's at the time had the cheaper monochrome monitors. Photo here.
>While the sympathetic media reports them as "gaffes" if any Republican said half the stuff that he did
Bullshit, the media handled all of Bush's gaffes with kid gloves and gave him a free pass on mostly everything for most of his two terms. The idea that the media is liberal is a hilarious conspiracy theory by marginalized conservatives. The people who own the media and make the real decisions on what you hear and believe are hardly liberals, theyre characters like Rupert Murdoch, Rev Moon, and Sam Zell. The hippy media owner only exists in your head. The fact that youre repeating the "liberal media" line is proof at how the well the corporate conservative media operates.
>Windows GUI paradigm has never outgrown these modest roots, and so this day we still have die-hard Windows users who insist that Start menus, maximise buttons, two-button mice, ctrl-C to copy, monolithic apps, and various other naive UI paradigms are the Right and True way to compute.
Most of these "naive" conventions are from Macintosh or Xerox, not MS. I think its humorous that you think picking a different but arbitrary command for copy or removing the maximize button will somehow usher in a new age of UI. All this stuff is learned. The idea of a natural UI is silly. The only natural interface is the nipple.
>And Linux desktop designers who believe them.
The clamoring, overwhelming demand for the Sugar/XO way of doing things never materialized. Ask yourself why. Hint: Microsoft conspiracy theories arent the answer.
>politicians and PR types will try to game the system to make sure that only stories beneficial to them will get published.
Its already gamed by the ownership and editors. The trib runs right-wing in Chicago and endorsed Bush in 2004. Their slant and editorial is a force of its own. Adding a democractic element will off-set this.
Prove the NSA backdoors before adding more to the FUD-pile that is slashdot commenting on commercial software. Ill help you start: a mention of the letters NSA via a hex dump isnt proof of anything but your own credulity.
Why is being calm equated to being a zombie or being in a herd? Im certainly not advocating spiking the water with anything but fluoride, but its interesting how we react to news like this. We completely accept the speedy society. Hell, politicans and business want us to be stressed out and speedy. They want us to gulp down more afternoon coffee, red bull, bawls, soda, sugar, etc. It makes you more productive right? So, now youre doing the work of two people and catching up on your deadlines. Its not their concern that youre slowly developing heart disease or that youre anxious all the time and finally end up crashing around 3 or 4pm only to go home and veg out in front of the TV until bedtime to start the cycle over again. Theyre just happy they didnt have to hire an extra person in your department.
So, when someone suggests that calm might be better for you socially and medically, suddenly we're frothing at the mouth and jonsing for starbucks. I think this says a lot about modern society. Personally, I have no patience with the speedy types. You know, the over-worked person at your company who is on her third starbucks before 10am and wont stop talking your ear off or is buzzing around like a loon at all your meetings. Yeah, I want to work on a project with her.
Perhaps there's something to being in a calm town, regardless whether its water causing it or just people who want to be calm and happy instead of anxious and speedy.
Err, why arent they up on the licensing to begin with? If Obama does anything he should force them to audit and catch up so they can see the real cost of software. MS isnt necessarily the bad guy here. Afterall, the audit revealed problems. Fix your licenses then migrate away. Dont keep abusing your volume keys and putting yourself under MS's gun. This is the VA's incompetent IT staff's doing. Perhaps Obama should just fire them all and start fresh.
>slower than wired(of similar price, I'm not talking netzero dialup).
Agreed. Ive used EVDO broadband cards many times at my last job and, frankly, theyre barely passable as mobile solutions and they make terrible fixed solutions. Ive noticed:
At any moment the card may want to switch you to a different tower. Say goodbye to any established session.
At any moment youll drop to dial-up speeds because the card decides it doesnt have enough signal to maintain EVDO and drops to 1X.
Serious throttling. I have yet to be able to download a torrent faster than.01 KB/sec
Speed issues. I probably average 200-400kbps with 1mbps peaks.
Heating issues. Those cards get hot. Theyre not designed for 24/7 use.
Serious latency and packet loss.
Frequently changing IP. Like 10x a day.
--
That said, there might be a WISP solution for him, but Id rather have a 1.5mbps solid DSL line than a 3mbps mobile wireless connection.
>Guys like that are paying for the R&D costs of the uber-high-end cards that you can I enjoy for $100 a few years later.
Color me skeptical. Ford doesnt need to sell a Lambourghini priced car to keep its prices low. Walmart doesnt offer a gourmet aisle to pay for all the cheap food. Levis doesnt sell high fashion to subsidize their cheap jeans. The economies of scale work just fine without Joe Overclocker spending 4,000 on a rig every six months.
You can design for a $100 price point and deliver a $100 price point without having a $400 product. The high end gaming card gets attention at CES and gives kiddies braggging rights. I imagine the early adopters are simply puffing up 2nd quarters profits by 1%, not paying for the die shrink of my current card. The competition between NVIDIA and AMD is too fierce to slack off on progress.
>When I plug in my camera and a little popup comes up I really like that.
Thats not autorun, thats a device connecting to the USB bus and a service you installed with your camera launching an app. I doubt the root of your camera has an autorun.inf file.
I dont think Ive ever spent more than 120 dollars on a video card. I just wait for the high end to come down in price. My last card was a nvidia 7900. I think I got it for $119. It died, sent it in for warranty repairs, and I got an 8800GTS in return. Ive been using that ever since.
$100 or so has always bought you a very nice card. The problem is that there are lots of geeks with more money than sense. Or who are obsessed with FPS bragging rights. You know these types, their forum sigs are every overpriced component in their systm.
Im sure some AMD reseller will sell a gold plated $99 card with monster cables or somesuch because some kiddie has $300 of xmas money to burn.
If this industry had any sense theyd be aiming to ship out with quiet fans instead of the el cheapo tiny fans so many reference designs used. Nvidia is doing a better job in this regard with it big two slot cards, but I always had to buy a zalman or other quiet fan for my video cards.
There's a Linksys cable modem I know of that has a recent firmware, and by recent I mean last year or so. Linksys wont release the firmware as they expect only the cable companies to do so. The cable companies only release it to people who bought their cable modems from them directly. So there are thousands of people putting up with bugs because they bought their modem retail and have no legitimate access to the updated firmware.
What if I pulled this firmware from a cable company owned modem and wrote these people a simple installer? Would the company sing my praises then?
The real issue here is that people frequent web boards for support because the paid phone support they get is beyond worthless. Level 1 people just read scripts and level 2 or 3 people cant release firmwares because of moronic policies. No wonder people are helping themselves. These companies should be ashamed of providing service on such a low level, not happy that someone has taken up the slack for them.
Doing it to 'get by' is what leads to addiction. The problem is that not being able to do something might have root in something the drug doesnt help. For instance, let says Joe has undiagnosed sleep apnea. So he takes your advice and does some meth monday through weds to catch up on work. He relaxes a bit on thursday but gets a new client on friday morning. Now he's doing it five days a week. During the busy period in his industry he works seven days, so he does it every morning. Guess what, he's addicted.
Id rather see people tackling the roots of their inability to perform instead of just taking one chemical after the next. Ive done all the drugs youve mentioned. Guess what? I dont need them and I was being reckless. It turns out my fatigue was from sleep apnea. When treated I dont need any speed. My inability to relax had to do with anxiety. When that got treated I was able to rest well and sleep on time.
Treating the root sure beats doing an upper and downer cocktail and rationalizing it as safe or a smart thing to do. Im not taking the puritanical view, but I am saying that if you are constantly taking drugs just to get by then you should honestly assess your life and see what the real problem is.
If you want to do drugs to have a good time, then knock yourself out. If youre taking them for basic tasks like doing your job then you have a problem. Also, laying off the drugs might help you with your line breaks.
That was really the death knell for adventure games for me, even though I grew up with them. The games were never that logical, yet they were kinda fun, but no one likes being told "You should have given the jerky to the eagle and the lamb to the wizard four hours ago." The damn jerky was 100 saves ago I dont have any saves from then. Or whatever the item that was easily to mix up in the beginning in King's Quest V. That was my last adventure game.
I felt without a gaming home until I later discovered the FPS and Civilization along with copious amounts of online tradewars. Not to mention Master of Orion and Dune II. So long adventure games. It was good while it lasted. We'll always have the memories. Please dont try to find me on facebook. Youre already blocked.
USPS has never, in my entire life, lost or damaged a package or letter of mine.
One anecdote proves nothing. Mail in Chicago is pretty bad, but Im not going to demand USPS fold. Obviously, dense metro areas are just going to have more problems than suburban or rural areas. USPS does a good enough job but theft is out of control. I had to quit gamefly because of theft. Perhaps USPS can start looking into monitoring its employees and making examples of theives.
Then why was it for sale at toys r us? I think the problem is that kids really dont want an jerky and delicate electric toy when imagination works much better. Adults dont like locked down non-programmable robots. I think the people at Woowee and Ugobe still dont realize how unnatural these things are. Their loud servos and jerky motions really says "dont buy me." Especially at $349 clams.
I was thinking of getting the robopanda for my neice, but its just a terrible robot. Id rather see a lower tech toy without the loud servos, preferably covered in fur and not in a plastic shell. At least the Wowee people have reasonable pricing.
>Why do we need a new "dominant" player? Why can't we just have a plethora of OSs that inter-operate at a basic level and let users and companies cater to one or all of the preferred OSs?
You mean like the 80s when I was first using a computer? C64/128, Apple lle/c, DOS/Win PC, TRS80, Timex, Amiga, Adam, and Mac all around the same time? All reinventing the same wheel. Nothing ran on anything else. The OS wars were worse than what we have on here. Nerds sure know how to whine.
I kinda like just a couple of dominant players all working off each other and cross-platform software that actually works. Id hate to go to the old days of "What kind of computer do you have? Oh, Ive never heard of that."
>Firefox broke the domination and now you have IE, FF, Chrome, Safari, Opera
Application development is not the same as OS development. You can upgrade an App a dozen times between OS releases. An OS should be stable and minimal to allow us to write apps for it. A dozen OS's constantly changing versions wont really help, it'll just hurt. PCs seem to have a natural monopoly, or at least people prefer their software to work on their home computers, work computers, friends computers, school computers, etc. In the end, the people create the market. I dont see a return to the 1980s style way of doing things anytime soon.
This is true in windows too. Remember Storm? It was created with simple.exe files, not any exploits. I believe they just mass emailed 'greetingcard.exe.' Grandma ran it. Thats all it takes. It blows my mind mail servers are sending out executable to people in this day and age.
There is a difference between dying in an accident and dying because your leader thinks fighting a way over oil or colonialism is a good idea. One can be avoided the other cant. One is a limit of transportation systems and the other is a power the state has over me, namely the draft. I think youre kidding yourself if you cant see this simple difference.
Not to metion that the trasporation industry works are limiting accidents and deaths while the military industry works hard at maximizing deaths.
Every country needs a military but youre naive if you think that most conflicts arent optional.
Slashdot Mirror
Why is this fraud? It should be fraudulent to block other players from accessing my software.
Its really incredible how people instinctively side with bad corporate policies. How about my rights as a consumer? How about the right to tinker? How about educating people about Apple's horrible policies?
I see nothing wrong with this. I hope its a wake up call to the industry and I hope it shows all the apple fanboys whats wrong with their favorite company.
Securing infrastructure has nothing to do with politics. Do you honestly think Islamic terrorists have a rational political stance and that compliance will lead to some historically unseen in humankind age of peace? No, compliance with religious nuts will lead to collapse. Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, et al want destruction of their enemies and to shift the world to a brutal form of Islam, little else.
While the US, like any other powerful country, has a questionable historical track record, I would rather have it be the leader of the world than the current alternatives: Iran, Russia, or China.
It can run windows 7 all day long, just not the cheap starter edition.
For a long time the //e was one of the few popular color computers. I remember a period where computer labs had slightly older TRS-80s side-by-side with //e's. Many //e's at the time had the cheaper monochrome monitors. Photo here.
>Then we got movement too, not just pretty words on the BBS
Between those two events was color ANSI graphics on the BBS. It was like magic! Well, to the 9 year old me it was.
>While the sympathetic media reports them as "gaffes" if any Republican said half the stuff that he did
Bullshit, the media handled all of Bush's gaffes with kid gloves and gave him a free pass on mostly everything for most of his two terms. The idea that the media is liberal is a hilarious conspiracy theory by marginalized conservatives. The people who own the media and make the real decisions on what you hear and believe are hardly liberals, theyre characters like Rupert Murdoch, Rev Moon, and Sam Zell. The hippy media owner only exists in your head. The fact that youre repeating the "liberal media" line is proof at how the well the corporate conservative media operates.
>Windows GUI paradigm has never outgrown these modest roots, and so this day we still have die-hard Windows users who insist that Start menus, maximise buttons, two-button mice, ctrl-C to copy, monolithic apps, and various other naive UI paradigms are the Right and True way to compute.
Most of these "naive" conventions are from Macintosh or Xerox, not MS. I think its humorous that you think picking a different but arbitrary command for copy or removing the maximize button will somehow usher in a new age of UI. All this stuff is learned. The idea of a natural UI is silly. The only natural interface is the nipple.
>And Linux desktop designers who believe them.
The clamoring, overwhelming demand for the Sugar/XO way of doing things never materialized. Ask yourself why. Hint: Microsoft conspiracy theories arent the answer.
>politicians and PR types will try to game the system to make sure that only stories beneficial to them will get published.
Its already gamed by the ownership and editors. The trib runs right-wing in Chicago and endorsed Bush in 2004. Their slant and editorial is a force of its own. Adding a democractic element will off-set this.
Not to mention #1 fails half the time because of blocks based by referrer.
Prove the NSA backdoors before adding more to the FUD-pile that is slashdot commenting on commercial software. Ill help you start: a mention of the letters NSA via a hex dump isnt proof of anything but your own credulity.
Why is being calm equated to being a zombie or being in a herd? Im certainly not advocating spiking the water with anything but fluoride, but its interesting how we react to news like this. We completely accept the speedy society. Hell, politicans and business want us to be stressed out and speedy. They want us to gulp down more afternoon coffee, red bull, bawls, soda, sugar, etc. It makes you more productive right? So, now youre doing the work of two people and catching up on your deadlines. Its not their concern that youre slowly developing heart disease or that youre anxious all the time and finally end up crashing around 3 or 4pm only to go home and veg out in front of the TV until bedtime to start the cycle over again. Theyre just happy they didnt have to hire an extra person in your department.
So, when someone suggests that calm might be better for you socially and medically, suddenly we're frothing at the mouth and jonsing for starbucks. I think this says a lot about modern society. Personally, I have no patience with the speedy types. You know, the over-worked person at your company who is on her third starbucks before 10am and wont stop talking your ear off or is buzzing around like a loon at all your meetings. Yeah, I want to work on a project with her.
Perhaps there's something to being in a calm town, regardless whether its water causing it or just people who want to be calm and happy instead of anxious and speedy.
Err, why arent they up on the licensing to begin with? If Obama does anything he should force them to audit and catch up so they can see the real cost of software. MS isnt necessarily the bad guy here. Afterall, the audit revealed problems. Fix your licenses then migrate away. Dont keep abusing your volume keys and putting yourself under MS's gun. This is the VA's incompetent IT staff's doing. Perhaps Obama should just fire them all and start fresh.
>slower than wired(of similar price, I'm not talking netzero dialup).
Agreed. Ive used EVDO broadband cards many times at my last job and, frankly, theyre barely passable as mobile solutions and they make terrible fixed solutions. Ive noticed:
At any moment the card may want to switch you to a different tower. Say goodbye to any established session.
At any moment youll drop to dial-up speeds because the card decides it doesnt have enough signal to maintain EVDO and drops to 1X.
Serious throttling. I have yet to be able to download a torrent faster than .01 KB/sec
Speed issues. I probably average 200-400kbps with 1mbps peaks.
Heating issues. Those cards get hot. Theyre not designed for 24/7 use.
Serious latency and packet loss.
Frequently changing IP. Like 10x a day.
--
That said, there might be a WISP solution for him, but Id rather have a 1.5mbps solid DSL line than a 3mbps mobile wireless connection.
>Guys like that are paying for the R&D costs of the uber-high-end cards that you can I enjoy for $100 a few years later.
Color me skeptical. Ford doesnt need to sell a Lambourghini priced car to keep its prices low. Walmart doesnt offer a gourmet aisle to pay for all the cheap food. Levis doesnt sell high fashion to subsidize their cheap jeans. The economies of scale work just fine without Joe Overclocker spending 4,000 on a rig every six months.
You can design for a $100 price point and deliver a $100 price point without having a $400 product. The high end gaming card gets attention at CES and gives kiddies braggging rights. I imagine the early adopters are simply puffing up 2nd quarters profits by 1%, not paying for the die shrink of my current card. The competition between NVIDIA and AMD is too fierce to slack off on progress.
>When I plug in my camera and a little popup comes up I really like that.
Thats not autorun, thats a device connecting to the USB bus and a service you installed with your camera launching an app. I doubt the root of your camera has an autorun.inf file.
I dont think Ive ever spent more than 120 dollars on a video card. I just wait for the high end to come down in price. My last card was a nvidia 7900. I think I got it for $119. It died, sent it in for warranty repairs, and I got an 8800GTS in return. Ive been using that ever since.
$100 or so has always bought you a very nice card. The problem is that there are lots of geeks with more money than sense. Or who are obsessed with FPS bragging rights. You know these types, their forum sigs are every overpriced component in their systm.
Im sure some AMD reseller will sell a gold plated $99 card with monster cables or somesuch because some kiddie has $300 of xmas money to burn.
If this industry had any sense theyd be aiming to ship out with quiet fans instead of the el cheapo tiny fans so many reference designs used. Nvidia is doing a better job in this regard with it big two slot cards, but I always had to buy a zalman or other quiet fan for my video cards.
There's a Linksys cable modem I know of that has a recent firmware, and by recent I mean last year or so. Linksys wont release the firmware as they expect only the cable companies to do so. The cable companies only release it to people who bought their cable modems from them directly. So there are thousands of people putting up with bugs because they bought their modem retail and have no legitimate access to the updated firmware.
What if I pulled this firmware from a cable company owned modem and wrote these people a simple installer? Would the company sing my praises then?
The real issue here is that people frequent web boards for support because the paid phone support they get is beyond worthless. Level 1 people just read scripts and level 2 or 3 people cant release firmwares because of moronic policies. No wonder people are helping themselves. These companies should be ashamed of providing service on such a low level, not happy that someone has taken up the slack for them.
Doing it to 'get by' is what leads to addiction. The problem is that not being able to do something might have root in something the drug doesnt help. For instance, let says Joe has undiagnosed sleep apnea. So he takes your advice and does some meth monday through weds to catch up on work. He relaxes a bit on thursday but gets a new client on friday morning. Now he's doing it five days a week. During the busy period in his industry he works seven days, so he does it every morning. Guess what, he's addicted.
Id rather see people tackling the roots of their inability to perform instead of just taking one chemical after the next. Ive done all the drugs youve mentioned. Guess what? I dont need them and I was being reckless. It turns out my fatigue was from sleep apnea. When treated I dont need any speed. My inability to relax had to do with anxiety. When that got treated I was able to rest well and sleep on time.
Treating the root sure beats doing an upper and downer cocktail and rationalizing it as safe or a smart thing to do. Im not taking the puritanical view, but I am saying that if you are constantly taking drugs just to get by then you should honestly assess your life and see what the real problem is.
If you want to do drugs to have a good time, then knock yourself out. If youre taking them for basic tasks like doing your job then you have a problem. Also, laying off the drugs might help you with your line breaks.
No, but in this sales video you'll find how to easily win the hearts of attractive blonde women.
That was really the death knell for adventure games for me, even though I grew up with them. The games were never that logical, yet they were kinda fun, but no one likes being told "You should have given the jerky to the eagle and the lamb to the wizard four hours ago." The damn jerky was 100 saves ago I dont have any saves from then. Or whatever the item that was easily to mix up in the beginning in King's Quest V. That was my last adventure game.
I felt without a gaming home until I later discovered the FPS and Civilization along with copious amounts of online tradewars. Not to mention Master of Orion and Dune II. So long adventure games. It was good while it lasted. We'll always have the memories. Please dont try to find me on facebook. Youre already blocked.
USPS has never, in my entire life, lost or damaged a package or letter of mine.
One anecdote proves nothing. Mail in Chicago is pretty bad, but Im not going to demand USPS fold. Obviously, dense metro areas are just going to have more problems than suburban or rural areas. USPS does a good enough job but theft is out of control. I had to quit gamefly because of theft. Perhaps USPS can start looking into monitoring its employees and making examples of theives.
>I don't think this was meant for kids.
Then why was it for sale at toys r us? I think the problem is that kids really dont want an jerky and delicate electric toy when imagination works much better. Adults dont like locked down non-programmable robots. I think the people at Woowee and Ugobe still dont realize how unnatural these things are. Their loud servos and jerky motions really says "dont buy me." Especially at $349 clams.
I was thinking of getting the robopanda for my neice, but its just a terrible robot. Id rather see a lower tech toy without the loud servos, preferably covered in fur and not in a plastic shell. At least the Wowee people have reasonable pricing.
>Why do we need a new "dominant" player? Why can't we just have a plethora of OSs that inter-operate at a basic level and let users and companies cater to one or all of the preferred OSs?
You mean like the 80s when I was first using a computer? C64/128, Apple lle/c, DOS/Win PC, TRS80, Timex, Amiga, Adam, and Mac all around the same time? All reinventing the same wheel. Nothing ran on anything else. The OS wars were worse than what we have on here. Nerds sure know how to whine.
I kinda like just a couple of dominant players all working off each other and cross-platform software that actually works. Id hate to go to the old days of "What kind of computer do you have? Oh, Ive never heard of that."
>Firefox broke the domination and now you have IE, FF, Chrome, Safari, Opera
Application development is not the same as OS development. You can upgrade an App a dozen times between OS releases. An OS should be stable and minimal to allow us to write apps for it. A dozen OS's constantly changing versions wont really help, it'll just hurt. PCs seem to have a natural monopoly, or at least people prefer their software to work on their home computers, work computers, friends computers, school computers, etc. In the end, the people create the market. I dont see a return to the 1980s style way of doing things anytime soon.
This is true in windows too. Remember Storm? It was created with simple .exe files, not any exploits. I believe they just mass emailed 'greetingcard.exe.' Grandma ran it. Thats all it takes. It blows my mind mail servers are sending out executable to people in this day and age.
A computer is just as secure as its operator.
There is a difference between dying in an accident and dying because your leader thinks fighting a way over oil or colonialism is a good idea. One can be avoided the other cant. One is a limit of transportation systems and the other is a power the state has over me, namely the draft. I think youre kidding yourself if you cant see this simple difference.
Not to metion that the trasporation industry works are limiting accidents and deaths while the military industry works hard at maximizing deaths.
Every country needs a military but youre naive if you think that most conflicts arent optional.