No longer can 2 categories work. We need more then "desktop" and "laptop". Now we have these machines which sport full-size keyboards and 17-inch screens, but have low battery life and are heavy. They are much more portable then a desktop, but not as portable as traditional laptops. They serve a very important use. I use one at work, and I bring it home with me every night so I can work there if needed. This is much simpler then having a desktop at home, and another one at work, and there is no way I could stand working off a compact laptop keyboard and tiny screen.
How is this hacking? He merely changed the URL, which is somthing I do every day because I come accross broken links and stuff.
An equivalent real world scenario is that an action house was setting up for an auction in an unmarked building. A person heard that they were setting up for an auction and went there to see if he could get in on the action early. The auctioneer is an idiot, and starts the auction even tho only 1 person is in the room and sells stuff to him for stupid low prices.
This guy was being sneaky, but it looks to me like he did nothing wrong to obtain this land. I think at most they should have taken away the land and refunded him the price, NOT frozen his account and taken all his other money.
What if one of the bank's ATMs was giving out extra money whenever someone used it, and because you realized that and used it over and over again they take ALL your money, not just the money it gave you in error.
One thing I wont buy from walmart is media of any kind. I know that they refuse to carry things that they object to on their own religious beleifs, and carry edited copys of top-selling artists. Therefore, I would have to research every piece of media to make sure walmart does not carry an edited version of it, and I don't have the time to do that.
I already can't stand watching movies on TV with important pieces of the story edited out to alleviate concerned parents fears. I don't want to have to deal with it for movies that I purchased as well.
From red hats site Benefits By migrating from a costly UNIX platform to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on their workstations, servers, and at the Volpe Center, the FAA was able to eliminate costs and ineffective systems while creating a scalable architecture that met their high-demand environment.
The problem here is not about free speech, free speech is only free in public, in private you have to obide by what the owners of the private area tell you.
The problem is that Blizzard does not correctly enforce their own policies. This person wanted to create a non-hostile environment for people that get offended by terms like 'man thats gay', or 'shut up fag'. Blizzard's own policies go against that type of speech in the first place, but it would seem impossible to effectivly enforce somthing like that on such a large scale. So instead of reporting every single person that made an offensive comment, why not create a guild that does not allow people to talk in a non-discrimanatory matter, which is what this person tried to do. Blizzard then shuts her down, even though the guild she was creating was in effect trying to do exactly what their policies say.
Blizzard is clearly in the 'morally wrong' here, but not the 'legal wrong'. They are allowed to do what they want in their own 'private club', but they should expect a public backlash when they single out people for trying to create a non-hostile environment in what they perceive as a hostile one.
Of course the difference is not very big right now, at least not to average Joe. Developers gear content towards what most of their customers will be able to use, if most people have a 1mbit connection, then it makes no sense to develop sites that require a 6mbit connection to look decent. Once more people have faster connections, developers can make their sites even more media-rich. Verizon appears to be planning for the future, while AT&T can only see whats going on right now.
adding a XXX domain wont solve anything. Its like having a town where everyone HAS to carry a gun. It doesnt address the problem of guns being everywhere else in the world.
a better solution is to create a domain that only has child-friendly material on it. Like creating a town with NO guns allowed.
Parents could choose to only allow their kids to visit this domain and be assured they wont stumble across pictures that they might not want them to see.
I don't think I would have my children live in censorland, but at least the parents afraid of letting their children see the real world would have a place to hide it from them.
It's not that I don't think it should land like an airplane(on a runway), its that too much cost has been put into it to make it land that way vs. landing using a parachute. The old apollo capsules fell to the earth with less exposed to burn up during re-entry. I'm not an expert in thermodynamics so someone please corrent me if I'm wrong.
The point I made about it still taking off on top of giant rockets was my attempt at being silly(how else is it going to aquire enough energy to orbit the planet with technology from this century).
I never quite saw the point of the shuttle(compared to its predecessors) in the first place. I mean, why is it so important to land like an airplane when it still needs to take off on a giant rocket. I applaud NASA on the new designs to get back to technology that actually was reliable.
On a side note, why don't they just install heisenberg compensators in the ISS and make everything easy.
"I don't understand. You're opposed to making it harder for kids to find porn online?"
I don't know if thats what he is trying to say, but the message should be that parents need to protect their childen, NOT the government. Plus, kids are very, VERY resourceful, when I was 10-15 years younger my mom attempted to limit my television watching by hiding the cord for the television when I was home alone, you know what I did? I made a cord myself, the only thing she did by trying to limit me was increase the risk that i will shock and kill myself by messing around with electricity.
The point is, I'm getting sick of this "protect the children" crap, because its only an excuse to take rights away from adults.
Plus, there is much worse content that junior can find online then porn.
"One of the obvious exceptions to my theory is firefox"
There are many open source programs thats are very user friendly, however, the majority of them(mainly the ones that DO NOT run on windows) are not. Try and tell me that mythtv is user friendly after I have just spent 20 hours getting it up and running. Does the average user want/need to know how to install video drivers? No, they don't.
Please don't get me wrong, many many great strides have been made in open source, and I love it. I have pie in the sky dreams that one day everything will be open source, everyone benifits from it. Also, "usability" completely depends on point of view. In my opinion, linux is easier to do because the innards are more exposed. In my mom's option, windows wins hands down because she can actually use it.
Maybe when open source desktops come "factory installed", the average joe user will be able to use it, but that just hasen't happened yet.
"From personal experience, the time it takes me to switch to a MS-state-of-mind at our college terminals, I would say Windows' learning curve is much worse."
Well yeah, you use one or the other more often and its hard to switch back. I admit I am biased myself because I am forced to use windows at work, and use both linux and windows at home.
Let me start this out by saying I am in no way a microsoft enthusiast, I loath their business policies just like almost everyone else here.
Now let me get to my post. As it stands now, Open source is not ready for average users. There just isnt enough focus on the learning curve. I believe the main reason for this is because of it being free. Developers of open source projects don't hire graphic artists and average joe testers to make sure that their products look good and are easy to use. They put in all the features that they want, and make it intuitive enough for them to use. I know this because I am a developer. I constantly write software that I think is really easy to use, then I hand it off to one of the people here at work who arent so great with computers. I watch them use it and usually they come up with all kinds of reasons why its hard to use that I could never think of, just because I already know how to use it. Until more companies start funding open source projects and sinking real good resources into them I just dont see them coming massivly mainstream. One of the obvious exceptions to my theory is firefox. I installed it for my parents and they had absolutly no problem using it, but when my wife sees me messing with my mythtv box she normally has no frickin clue whats going on, and shes an above-average user.
Companies should start focusing on releasing their products open source and charging for the support. That way, the minority of people like us can get their software for free, learn to love it, and tell our friends and family how great it is. They, in turn, will go get it and buy the support because while I dont mind googling to look up and fix every little problem I come accross, most people out there just dont have the attention span or willingness to do it. Companies will buy the support. Its really a win-win situation.
You are probably right, although I did see the link that said "What software is available for my rating". Hopefully this means that you will be able to use any 3rd pary rating tool, which would help keep microsoft honest in their ratings. But who knows, they are microsoft after all.
osCommerce is great if you don't plan on modifying any code. Its really easy to set up and get going. However, if you plan on making large modifications to the code, you are in for a special treat! The code is a gigantic mess, very very painful to read. I had a customer that wanted to use osCommerce, but they wanted to make the site look like their old shopping cart, which was proprietary. Lets just say that it would have been easier for me to build them a new shopping cart from scratch then to modify osCommerce enough to make it work for them.
I really like the Performance rating tool. This will help average computer users judge how good their computers are better. Right now you ask a normal person how good their computer is and they tell you that "Its a dell", or they tell you "Its a 2 Giga-somthing".
The ratings could possibly make this easier, and it could help educate people about why their computer is so slow. From a sales standpoint this could help as well. Computers could be advetised with their rating instead of stuff that geeks like us understand, but is too confusing for many others. This could help them compare deals and make a more informed choice about the computer they are getting.
To be honest, I saw this coming. Not just at AOL, but it is very forseeable that dial-up prices will only go up, and broadband prices will go down, or it will get faster.
Just think about it, doesnt dial-up require a dedicated connection? Just like making a phone call? Where adding additional users to a broadband system just eats up more bandwidth from the large and growing pool.
AOL might be jumping the gun and doing it before dial-up costs actually rise, but as the telcos lose their traditional phone customers to VoIP, a normal phone line will just get more and more expensive.
I would like to know if there are any similar products to these 2 out there. I use my laptop on the couch all the time, and my solution was to use an artists Wooden palette to avoid going impotent from the heat. I honestly didnt know that these things existed. The wooden palatte sure beats having the laptop directly on my pants, but im sure somthing like this could do a much better job.
I can't wait for Microsoft OR Google to release a good web based office client. The advantages of a web-based office solution are numerous, but the biggest that comes to mind is that non-savvy computer people dont have to worry about losing their files. Of course I back up all my documents, but my parents arent that smart. When their hard drive failed they lost it all, including all of their email (outlook). I decided to set them up on an exchange server with Outlook Web Access, which they constantly rave about. Next time they have to migrate to a computer, email is one less thing I have to worry about getting backed up (I use gmail of course, but they like sticking with their ISPs email address and dont like the normal webmail interface).
The disadvantages of a web-based office solution are obvious and aparent, but the fact is that they all start to dissapear as bandwidth goes up and the years march on. Right now a web-based office solution would not work too well due to processor/bandwidth concerns, but in 3-5 years i can see this as a real good solution.
Just imagine, you drop your laptop in hot lava while touring the volcanos in hawaii. Dont despair! All of your documents are safe and sound along with your email back on good ole googles servers. Even more likely is your mom gets a new computer, but instead of calling you and asking you to come over and copy all her old data on to her new computer, she already has access to all of it.
That *should* be true, but here in america, the RIAA has their hands in all of the so called "conservative"'s pockets, every time I see a new law to ban file-sharing, fun, and happyness it seems to be coming from some corporate sponsored conservative. Orrin Hatch's Induce Act. But then again there is also Hillary Clinton. Who is really a conservative disguised as a liberal.
I usually try to avoid politics and social debates, and I'm all for space exploration, but can you really tell me people in the USA or the world should go hungry or go without health care while we spend billions on sending people to space?
Yes, yes we should. Because we can throw billions and billions at all of the world's problems and do absolutly nothing, or, we can throw billions into science, and to somthing truely terrific. If we always worried about making sure every life-threatening problem was solved before we started on stuff like the space program, we would still be hunting with spears and wearing loin-cloths.
Slashdot Mirror
No longer can 2 categories work. We need more then "desktop" and "laptop". Now we have these machines which sport full-size keyboards and 17-inch screens, but have low battery life and are heavy. They are much more portable then a desktop, but not as portable as traditional laptops. They serve a very important use. I use one at work, and I bring it home with me every night so I can work there if needed. This is much simpler then having a desktop at home, and another one at work, and there is no way I could stand working off a compact laptop keyboard and tiny screen.
How is this hacking? He merely changed the URL, which is somthing I do every day because I come accross broken links and stuff.
An equivalent real world scenario is that an action house was setting up for an auction in an unmarked building. A person heard that they were setting up for an auction and went there to see if he could get in on the action early. The auctioneer is an idiot, and starts the auction even tho only 1 person is in the room and sells stuff to him for stupid low prices.
This guy was being sneaky, but it looks to me like he did nothing wrong to obtain this land. I think at most they should have taken away the land and refunded him the price, NOT frozen his account and taken all his other money.
What if one of the bank's ATMs was giving out extra money whenever someone used it, and because you realized that and used it over and over again they take ALL your money, not just the money it gave you in error.
One thing I wont buy from walmart is media of any kind. I know that they refuse to carry things that they object to on their own religious beleifs, and carry edited copys of top-selling artists. Therefore, I would have to research every piece of media to make sure walmart does not carry an edited version of it, and I don't have the time to do that.
I already can't stand watching movies on TV with important pieces of the story edited out to alleviate concerned parents fears. I don't want to have to deal with it for movies that I purchased as well.
From red hats site
Benefits By migrating from a costly UNIX platform to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on their workstations, servers, and at the Volpe Center, the FAA was able to eliminate costs and ineffective systems while creating a scalable architecture that met their high-demand environment.
Not so impressive after all.
The problem here is not about free speech, free speech is only free in public, in private you have to obide by what the owners of the private area tell you.
The problem is that Blizzard does not correctly enforce their own policies. This person wanted to create a non-hostile environment for people that get offended by terms like 'man thats gay', or 'shut up fag'. Blizzard's own policies go against that type of speech in the first place, but it would seem impossible to effectivly enforce somthing like that on such a large scale. So instead of reporting every single person that made an offensive comment, why not create a guild that does not allow people to talk in a non-discrimanatory matter, which is what this person tried to do. Blizzard then shuts her down, even though the guild she was creating was in effect trying to do exactly what their policies say.
Blizzard is clearly in the 'morally wrong' here, but not the 'legal wrong'. They are allowed to do what they want in their own 'private club', but they should expect a public backlash when they single out people for trying to create a non-hostile environment in what they perceive as a hostile one.
Of course the difference is not very big right now, at least not to average Joe. Developers gear content towards what most of their customers will be able to use, if most people have a 1mbit connection, then it makes no sense to develop sites that require a 6mbit connection to look decent. Once more people have faster connections, developers can make their sites even more media-rich. Verizon appears to be planning for the future, while AT&T can only see whats going on right now.
From TFA: The HD-XA1 has no region coding for the HD-DVD content
I guess thats a slight incentive to buy this early, but not enough to justify the rest of the horribly crippling DRM features it will have.
adding a XXX domain wont solve anything. Its like having a town where everyone HAS to carry a gun. It doesnt address the problem of guns being everywhere else in the world.
a better solution is to create a domain that only has child-friendly material on it. Like creating a town with NO guns allowed.
Parents could choose to only allow their kids to visit this domain and be assured they wont stumble across pictures that they might not want them to see.
I don't think I would have my children live in censorland, but at least the parents afraid of letting their children see the real world would have a place to hide it from them.
It's not that I don't think it should land like an airplane(on a runway), its that too much cost has been put into it to make it land that way vs. landing using a parachute. The old apollo capsules fell to the earth with less exposed to burn up during re-entry. I'm not an expert in thermodynamics so someone please corrent me if I'm wrong.
The point I made about it still taking off on top of giant rockets was my attempt at being silly(how else is it going to aquire enough energy to orbit the planet with technology from this century).
I never quite saw the point of the shuttle(compared to its predecessors) in the first place. I mean, why is it so important to land like an airplane when it still needs to take off on a giant rocket. I applaud NASA on the new designs to get back to technology that actually was reliable. On a side note, why don't they just install heisenberg compensators in the ISS and make everything easy.
"I don't understand. You're opposed to making it harder for kids to find porn online?" I don't know if thats what he is trying to say, but the message should be that parents need to protect their childen, NOT the government. Plus, kids are very, VERY resourceful, when I was 10-15 years younger my mom attempted to limit my television watching by hiding the cord for the television when I was home alone, you know what I did? I made a cord myself, the only thing she did by trying to limit me was increase the risk that i will shock and kill myself by messing around with electricity. The point is, I'm getting sick of this "protect the children" crap, because its only an excuse to take rights away from adults. Plus, there is much worse content that junior can find online then porn.
Obviously you didn't read my entire post
"One of the obvious exceptions to my theory is firefox"
There are many open source programs thats are very user friendly, however, the majority of them(mainly the ones that DO NOT run on windows) are not. Try and tell me that mythtv is user friendly after I have just spent 20 hours getting it up and running. Does the average user want/need to know how to install video drivers? No, they don't.
Please don't get me wrong, many many great strides have been made in open source, and I love it. I have pie in the sky dreams that one day everything will be open source, everyone benifits from it.
Also, "usability" completely depends on point of view. In my opinion, linux is easier to do because the innards are more exposed. In my mom's option, windows wins hands down because she can actually use it.
Maybe when open source desktops come "factory installed", the average joe user will be able to use it, but that just hasen't happened yet.
"From personal experience, the time it takes me to switch to a MS-state-of-mind at our college terminals, I would say Windows' learning curve is much worse."
Well yeah, you use one or the other more often and its hard to switch back. I admit I am biased myself because I am forced to use windows at work, and use both linux and windows at home.
Yes they do, just imagine how great the world could be if microsoft joined in. Just charge for support what they charge for the OS now.
Let me start this out by saying I am in no way a microsoft enthusiast, I loath their business policies just like almost everyone else here.
Now let me get to my post. As it stands now, Open source is not ready for average users. There just isnt enough focus on the learning curve. I believe the main reason for this is because of it being free. Developers of open source projects don't hire graphic artists and average joe testers to make sure that their products look good and are easy to use. They put in all the features that they want, and make it intuitive enough for them to use. I know this because I am a developer. I constantly write software that I think is really easy to use, then I hand it off to one of the people here at work who arent so great with computers. I watch them use it and usually they come up with all kinds of reasons why its hard to use that I could never think of, just because I already know how to use it. Until more companies start funding open source projects and sinking real good resources into them I just dont see them coming massivly mainstream. One of the obvious exceptions to my theory is firefox. I installed it for my parents and they had absolutly no problem using it, but when my wife sees me messing with my mythtv box she normally has no frickin clue whats going on, and shes an above-average user.
Companies should start focusing on releasing their products open source and charging for the support. That way, the minority of people like us can get their software for free, learn to love it, and tell our friends and family how great it is. They, in turn, will go get it and buy the support because while I dont mind googling to look up and fix every little problem I come accross, most people out there just dont have the attention span or willingness to do it. Companies will buy the support. Its really a win-win situation.
"left-wing idiots" Most nerds I know are left-wing, most idiots I know are right-wing. Your statement confuses me.
You are probably right, although I did see the link that said "What software is available for my rating". Hopefully this means that you will be able to use any 3rd pary rating tool, which would help keep microsoft honest in their ratings. But who knows, they are microsoft after all.
osCommerce is great if you don't plan on modifying any code. Its really easy to set up and get going. However, if you plan on making large modifications to the code, you are in for a special treat! The code is a gigantic mess, very very painful to read. I had a customer that wanted to use osCommerce, but they wanted to make the site look like their old shopping cart, which was proprietary. Lets just say that it would have been easier for me to build them a new shopping cart from scratch then to modify osCommerce enough to make it work for them.
I really like the Performance rating tool. This will help average computer users judge how good their computers are better. Right now you ask a normal person how good their computer is and they tell you that "Its a dell", or they tell you "Its a 2 Giga-somthing".
The ratings could possibly make this easier, and it could help educate people about why their computer is so slow. From a sales standpoint this could help as well. Computers could be advetised with their rating instead of stuff that geeks like us understand, but is too confusing for many others. This could help them compare deals and make a more informed choice about the computer they are getting.
Correction, the quote should read
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety"
-Benjamin Franklin
Im sure someone else has mentioned this in the thread before.
"They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security"
-Benjamin Franklin
To be honest, I saw this coming. Not just at AOL, but it is very forseeable that dial-up prices will only go up, and broadband prices will go down, or it will get faster. Just think about it, doesnt dial-up require a dedicated connection? Just like making a phone call? Where adding additional users to a broadband system just eats up more bandwidth from the large and growing pool. AOL might be jumping the gun and doing it before dial-up costs actually rise, but as the telcos lose their traditional phone customers to VoIP, a normal phone line will just get more and more expensive.
I would like to know if there are any similar products to these 2 out there. I use my laptop on the couch all the time, and my solution was to use an artists Wooden palette to avoid going impotent from the heat. I honestly didnt know that these things existed. The wooden palatte sure beats having the laptop directly on my pants, but im sure somthing like this could do a much better job.
I can't wait for Microsoft OR Google to release a good web based office client. The advantages of a web-based office solution are numerous, but the biggest that comes to mind is that non-savvy computer people dont have to worry about losing their files. Of course I back up all my documents, but my parents arent that smart. When their hard drive failed they lost it all, including all of their email (outlook). I decided to set them up on an exchange server with Outlook Web Access, which they constantly rave about. Next time they have to migrate to a computer, email is one less thing I have to worry about getting backed up (I use gmail of course, but they like sticking with their ISPs email address and dont like the normal webmail interface).
The disadvantages of a web-based office solution are obvious and aparent, but the fact is that they all start to dissapear as bandwidth goes up and the years march on. Right now a web-based office solution would not work too well due to processor/bandwidth concerns, but in 3-5 years i can see this as a real good solution.
Just imagine, you drop your laptop in hot lava while touring the volcanos in hawaii. Dont despair! All of your documents are safe and sound along with your email back on good ole googles servers. Even more likely is your mom gets a new computer, but instead of calling you and asking you to come over and copy all her old data on to her new computer, she already has access to all of it.
That *should* be true, but here in america, the RIAA has their hands in all of the so called "conservative"'s pockets, every time I see a new law to ban file-sharing, fun, and happyness it seems to be coming from some corporate sponsored conservative. Orrin Hatch's Induce Act. But then again there is also Hillary Clinton. Who is really a conservative disguised as a liberal.
"In soviet russia, CD sells You!"
I usually try to avoid politics and social debates, and I'm all for space exploration, but can you really tell me people in the USA or the world should go hungry or go without health care while we spend billions on sending people to space?
Yes, yes we should. Because we can throw billions and billions at all of the world's problems and do absolutly nothing, or, we can throw billions into science, and to somthing truely terrific. If we always worried about making sure every life-threatening problem was solved before we started on stuff like the space program, we would still be hunting with spears and wearing loin-cloths.