Re:So the shit almost hit the fan
on
Steam Users Steamed
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Neither me nor, I suspect, you are lawyers, so probably we shouldn't debate the merits of a lawsuit here. One obvious fact is, though, that Valve can be sued regardless, and they would be insane to go to trial over such a thing.
Maybe they could be sued over this (although I'd expect something in the EULA none of us read would take the wind out of any lawsuit) but I'll bet you a solid $10 that no law suit comes out of this.
Valves gamers are mostly, what? 15-25? Even if the kids and young-adults banded together in a class action setup a) how many of the minor's parents are going to give them permission to participate in the lawsuit b) how many of the 18-25 players are going to bother, what with being
+generally busy--with gaming and college.
+lazy--this age bracket hardly even votes
+broke--college is expensive. So are all of those games c) I have a feeling you'd have trouble finding a lawfirm willing to accept your case. Class action lawsuits often have trouble finding paper mills that poisened the water supply, killing infants and disabling the elderly. Fat chance sueing a gaming company because the held up their end of an EULA that you don't agree with, but obviously accepted since you're playing the game...
Yeah, that works great in households where parents are willing to give their a computer in the room they can play games on or whatever, but only the "family" computer has internet, and of course gaming is not allowed on the family computer.
Oh, wait, no, that doesn't work at all. Cause you have to actually log IN to steam before you can put it in offline mode...
And what if you don't have the interweb? Does that mean you're no longer allowed to play single player offline games? At least with windows you can phone in your activation code...
Re:More control over EXE Files? Search Pluggins? E
on
Firefox In Print
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· Score: 1
What if you meant to hit cancel but hit OK anyway?
Windows gives you TWO security warnings, and firefox still asks "Do you want to open this with Explorer.exe or save it?"
What are the chances you're going to accidentally hit the OK button 3 times instead of hitting cancle?
You're much MUCH more likely to get a virus packed inside an XPI container and have the user install that.
Re:books beat electronic documents?
on
Firefox In Print
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· Score: 2, Informative
...and I could easily see said book becoming obsolete roughly 1 month after its release date.
It'll only be obsolete if Firefox was changed completely. Most of the hacks I do to firefox (in about config, etc) are the exact same as they were back when Firefox was named Pheonix. Even if new things are added to a newer Firefox that aren't in the book, a majority of the stuff in the book will still work and the new stuff will probably be similar enough that users who read the book can figure out and find the new stuff on their own.
In any event, reading out of a book is less strain on the eyes, and unless you have two monitors, it's easier to manage a book and a notepad or firefox window than a Firefox window and instructions in a PDF...
Re:More control over EXE Files? Search Pluggins? E
on
Firefox In Print
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· Score: 1
Isn't this the sort of thing people switch to Firefox to AVOID? Warning or no, most people click past those without reading them.
I've always thought this was a stupid argument. If I click on a link that says download, and a download window pops up I know what I'm downloading. If it's an EXE then I'll save it to the desktop and double click on it. Why should I have to save it to the desktop first? Saving an EXE file to the desktop and running it is NO safer than running it from the temp folder...
irresponsible because they put undo strain on websites.
But that's only if a majority of people use the speed enhancements, right?
More control over EXE Files? Search Pluggins? Etc?
on
Firefox In Print
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Besides defining what all the value(including the user addable ones) at about:config do.. what much else is there to tell? Editing the source? I doubt the book goes into that...
Perhaps he could editting some of the JavaScript files FireFox uses.
You need to do this if you want to be able to Remove the Kiddie Gloves and let Firefox allow you to run EXE files you've downloaded out of the browser cache--with a warning of course--so that they are deleted automatically, rather than saving them to a specific folder where you'd have to delete them later.
This is great for things like drivers that you'd install once, but if you needed to install later you'd have to go back for the most updated version anyway, so there's little reason to save offline and since there's still 2 levels of warnings that appear on WinXP SP2 (or 1 level of warning on WinXP SP1), you really haven't decreased security at all.
I'm sure there's lots of other stuff you can do in other script files firefox uses for config.
He could also cover making search plugins... those are relatively simple, but can be confusing for first timmers and are kinda finicky for some websites search setups (the "official" Amazon plugin add's plusses where spaces should be, something that doesn't happen when searching on amazon directly...
No, if Microsoft would have done it I would have made the same response--email them about the error and see if I can't get the link working on it's own. It seems once a month I encounter a major companies website that has a broken or malformed link that can be fixed by checking the page source, something that I expect most/. reader to be capable of--we are all nerd, after all.
Now, if Microsoft screwed up their website in such a way that my personal information was snatched by 3rd party spammers, then I'd ask why they can't get their act together, but websites are pretty commonly screwed up in frequent page updates...
Stuff like this is just like a typo in the newspaper.
View the HTML source code. Yes, they fucked up, but you can get the link out of the source. The forgot to put text inbetween the link start and the link end. "Click this link: <A href="link"></a>."
Otherwise, it works in IE with the auto downloadload thing--that is, you shouldn't need to click the link, cause the page works like it's supposed to... (IE also mysteriously makes the "." at the end of the sentence part of the link, even though it's on the wrong side of the <\a>)
It's better quality than Divx5 in most cases (there was a codec shootout on doom9.org recently) but DivX doesn't install spyware... The only people who got Divx with spyware where those who wanted the pro codec and didn't want to pay the $30, and even then it was well documented and Divx told you up front what you were sacraficing to save the cash... They don't do that anymore, though.
It installs gator when you install recent divx decoder from divx.com Really not my first choice, your visitors will hate you.
DivxPlayer has never installed GATOR. DivXPlayer (Standard) has always been free. DivxPro used to come in a $30 or $40 version or a GATOR supported version. At the time, you just didn't have to download DivxPro (which you don't need unless your authoring) or cough up the cash if you didn't want GATOR.
People who just want to play movies could always, and still can, download a completely free (no ads or spyware) player.
Now they've removed the gator option entirely, so it's either the free standard player of the pro version that you have to pay for.
I don't see why not. Bittorrent traffic has a specific packet design that can be detected irregards to the port being used, and can be blocked that way.
My WRT54G detects bittorrent traffic and gives it lower priority so it doesn't mess up SSH connections or games I have open, and I don't run default ports on any programs I use, unless I absolutely have to.
also they don't offer version for xp without itunes anymore(on their site at least).
Yeah they do! You just need to know what to click;)
If you goto the Quicktime Download Page you're given radio buttons for XP/2000 with iTunes, 98/ME, and MacOS. Below that there's a drop box to select your language. Below that there are three links. Click the link titled "Quicktime StandAlone Player"
This will give you Quicktime without iTunes. It'd be nicer if they had a radio button, but the link isn't really hidden, either.
(BTW, AFIK, Quicktime for Win98/ME is the same as 2000/XP. iTunes just doesn't work on 98/ME, that's why there's two seperate radio buttons.. you should be able to use the 98/ME link just fine, but I might be mistaken...)
If I'm not seriously mistaken, MPEG-4 is only good for high resolution videos and not so good for 320x240 videos.
I used DivX all the time to encode videos to watch on my handheld. It seems to work great for my purposes, and as I understand XviD is better than Divx...
I can't see much that would count as either capitalist or communist in it. It's a generic family, in a generic foreign country (they don't even speak English or any real language), and earning some made up currency (it's "simoleans" not "dollars", and you can't easily convert that into any real currency, because the price ratios and wages are all wrong for any real country.) They go to work, they spend their money on groceries and a bigger TV, and occasionally have dinner with their friends. They can't even open their own business at home, or anything that would count as capitalistic.
You're using language, the price of a TV, and the name of a currency to show whether you can tell a society is communist or capitalist? Are you nuts?
The game is quite obviously capitalist promoting, from the ability to earn more money by advancing your career, the ability to change career at will, the ability to buy whatever you want without going on some waiting list or waiting for approval etc. (I appologise for inaccuracy, most of what I know of communism is sniplets from the USSR.. I don't exactly know how things are run in China right now...)
And while it might not be communism persay, in china you can't have more than one child. In the Sims2 you can have LOTS of children with as many different people you aren't married to as you want. I'm sure this would be reason enough to ban the game in Georgia or Texus, let alone in China where they have so much more to disapprove of.
Re:Fewer keys a step back in useability for many
on
New Standard Keyboard
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· Score: 1
Gateway 2000 from years ago which allowed you to remap the keys on the keyboard and had several extra keys which I found quite useful. Often it is nice to be able to map macros to certian keys so when they are pressed they can reproduce several characters These can actually save time.
It's called the Gateway AnyKey Keyboard and it's the best keyboard ever made, since it did the macros in internal non-volital keyboard memory, rather than in a PC program that was platform dependant.
Once that happened, it was far more logical to model the keypad after the calculator pad, since you're more likely to be punching in numbers in a spreadsheet, than punching in phone numbers into the computer.
A spreadsheet program for both the Apple II and latter a different one for the IBM PC were the "killer apps" that drove initial sales for both devices...
Neither me nor, I suspect, you are lawyers, so probably we shouldn't debate the merits of a lawsuit here. One obvious fact is, though, that Valve can be sued regardless, and they would be insane to go to trial over such a thing.
Maybe they could be sued over this (although I'd expect something in the EULA none of us read would take the wind out of any lawsuit) but I'll bet you a solid $10 that no law suit comes out of this.
Valves gamers are mostly, what? 15-25? Even if the kids and young-adults banded together in a class action setup
a) how many of the minor's parents are going to give them permission to participate in the lawsuit
b) how many of the 18-25 players are going to bother, what with being
+generally busy--with gaming and college.
+lazy--this age bracket hardly even votes
+broke--college is expensive. So are all of those games
c) I have a feeling you'd have trouble finding a lawfirm willing to accept your case. Class action lawsuits often have trouble finding paper mills that poisened the water supply, killing infants and disabling the elderly. Fat chance sueing a gaming company because the held up their end of an EULA that you don't agree with, but obviously accepted since you're playing the game...
I just don't see it happening.
Put Steam into Offline mode.
Yeah, that works great in households where parents are willing to give their a computer in the room they can play games on or whatever, but only the "family" computer has internet, and of course gaming is not allowed on the family computer.
Oh, wait, no, that doesn't work at all. Cause you have to actually log IN to steam before you can put it in offline mode...
And what if you don't have the interweb? Does that mean you're no longer allowed to play single player offline games? At least with windows you can phone in your activation code...
What if you meant to hit cancel but hit OK anyway?
Windows gives you TWO security warnings, and firefox still asks "Do you want to open this with Explorer.exe or save it?"
What are the chances you're going to accidentally hit the OK button 3 times instead of hitting cancle?
You're much MUCH more likely to get a virus packed inside an XPI container and have the user install that.
It'll only be obsolete if Firefox was changed completely. Most of the hacks I do to firefox (in about config, etc) are the exact same as they were back when Firefox was named Pheonix. Even if new things are added to a newer Firefox that aren't in the book, a majority of the stuff in the book will still work and the new stuff will probably be similar enough that users who read the book can figure out and find the new stuff on their own.
In any event, reading out of a book is less strain on the eyes, and unless you have two monitors, it's easier to manage a book and a notepad or firefox window than a Firefox window and instructions in a PDF...
Isn't this the sort of thing people switch to Firefox to AVOID? Warning or no, most people click past those without reading them.
I've always thought this was a stupid argument. If I click on a link that says download, and a download window pops up I know what I'm downloading. If it's an EXE then I'll save it to the desktop and double click on it. Why should I have to save it to the desktop first? Saving an EXE file to the desktop and running it is NO safer than running it from the temp folder...
irresponsible because they put undo strain on websites.
But that's only if a majority of people use the speed enhancements, right?
Besides defining what all the value(including the user addable ones) at about:config do.. what much else is there to tell? Editing the source? I doubt the book goes into that...
Perhaps he could editting some of the JavaScript files FireFox uses.
You need to do this if you want to be able to Remove the Kiddie Gloves and let Firefox allow you to run EXE files you've downloaded out of the browser cache--with a warning of course--so that they are deleted automatically, rather than saving them to a specific folder where you'd have to delete them later.
This is great for things like drivers that you'd install once, but if you needed to install later you'd have to go back for the most updated version anyway, so there's little reason to save offline and since there's still 2 levels of warnings that appear on WinXP SP2 (or 1 level of warning on WinXP SP1), you really haven't decreased security at all.
I'm sure there's lots of other stuff you can do in other script files firefox uses for config.
He could also cover making search plugins... those are relatively simple, but can be confusing for first timmers and are kinda finicky for some websites search setups (the "official" Amazon plugin add's plusses where spaces should be, something that doesn't happen when searching on amazon directly...
Imagine a Frankenstein cluster of these! ... or some such
No, if Microsoft would have done it I would have made the same response--email them about the error and see if I can't get the link working on it's own. It seems once a month I encounter a major companies website that has a broken or malformed link that can be fixed by checking the page source, something that I expect most /. reader to be capable of--we are all nerd, after all.
Now, if Microsoft screwed up their website in such a way that my personal information was snatched by 3rd party spammers, then I'd ask why they can't get their act together, but websites are pretty commonly screwed up in frequent page updates...
Stuff like this is just like a typo in the newspaper.
View the HTML source code. Yes, they fucked up, but you can get the link out of the source. The forgot to put text inbetween the link start and the link end.
p thalo/us/win/QuickTimeFullInstaller.exe
"Click this link: <A href="link"></a>."
Here's the url if you don't know how to view HTML source: http://appldnld.m7z.net/qtinstall.info.apple.com/
Otherwise, it works in IE with the auto downloadload thing--that is, you shouldn't need to click the link, cause the page works like it's supposed to... (IE also mysteriously makes the "." at the end of the sentence part of the link, even though it's on the wrong side of the <\a>)
It the same quality as Divx5 (or perhaps better)
It's better quality than Divx5 in most cases (there was a codec shootout on doom9.org recently) but DivX doesn't install spyware... The only people who got Divx with spyware where those who wanted the pro codec and didn't want to pay the $30, and even then it was well documented and Divx told you up front what you were sacraficing to save the cash... They don't do that anymore, though.
It installs gator when you install recent divx decoder from divx.com Really not my first choice, your visitors will hate you.
DivxPlayer has never installed GATOR. DivXPlayer (Standard) has always been free. DivxPro used to come in a $30 or $40 version or a GATOR supported version. At the time, you just didn't have to download DivxPro (which you don't need unless your authoring) or cough up the cash if you didn't want GATOR.
People who just want to play movies could always, and still can, download a completely free (no ads or spyware) player.
Now they've removed the gator option entirely, so it's either the free standard player of the pro version that you have to pay for.
Can they stop ctorrent [sourceforge.net]?
I don't see why not. Bittorrent traffic has a specific packet design that can be detected irregards to the port being used, and can be blocked that way.
My WRT54G detects bittorrent traffic and gives it lower priority so it doesn't mess up SSH connections or games I have open, and I don't run default ports on any programs I use, unless I absolutely have to.
MPEG1 would be decent quality at a reasonable size
MPEG1 offers little, if any, compression. Wouldn't this be like posting WAV format soundclips? Something you don't do if you're worried about size?
also they don't offer version for xp without itunes anymore(on their site at least).
;)
Yeah they do! You just need to know what to click
If you goto the Quicktime Download Page you're given radio buttons for XP/2000 with iTunes, 98/ME, and MacOS. Below that there's a drop box to select your language. Below that there are three links. Click the link titled "Quicktime StandAlone Player"
This will give you Quicktime without iTunes. It'd be nicer if they had a radio button, but the link isn't really hidden, either.
(BTW, AFIK, Quicktime for Win98/ME is the same as 2000/XP. iTunes just doesn't work on 98/ME, that's why there's two seperate radio buttons.. you should be able to use the 98/ME link just fine, but I might be mistaken...)
If I'm not seriously mistaken, MPEG-4 is only good for high resolution videos and not so good for 320x240 videos.
I used DivX all the time to encode videos to watch on my handheld. It seems to work great for my purposes, and as I understand XviD is better than Divx...
I can't see much that would count as either capitalist or communist in it. It's a generic family, in a generic foreign country (they don't even speak English or any real language), and earning some made up currency (it's "simoleans" not "dollars", and you can't easily convert that into any real currency, because the price ratios and wages are all wrong for any real country.) They go to work, they spend their money on groceries and a bigger TV, and occasionally have dinner with their friends. They can't even open their own business at home, or anything that would count as capitalistic.
You're using language, the price of a TV, and the name of a currency to show whether you can tell a society is communist or capitalist? Are you nuts?
The game is quite obviously capitalist promoting, from the ability to earn more money by advancing your career, the ability to change career at will, the ability to buy whatever you want without going on some waiting list or waiting for approval etc. (I appologise for inaccuracy, most of what I know of communism is sniplets from the USSR.. I don't exactly know how things are run in China right now...)
And while it might not be communism persay, in china you can't have more than one child. In the Sims2 you can have LOTS of children with as many different people you aren't married to as you want. I'm sure this would be reason enough to ban the game in Georgia or Texus, let alone in China where they have so much more to disapprove of.
(eXeem ships with Cydoor bundled.)
but you can choose not to install it
Gateway 2000 from years ago which allowed you to remap the keys on the keyboard and had several extra keys which I found quite useful. Often it is nice to be able to map macros to certian keys so when they are pressed they can reproduce several characters These can actually save time.
It's called the Gateway AnyKey Keyboard and it's the best keyboard ever made, since it did the macros in internal non-volital keyboard memory, rather than in a PC program that was platform dependant.
but I've only ever noticed that skill in phone techs who install systems.
You don't have preteen children, do you?
Once that happened, it was far more logical to model the keypad after the calculator pad, since you're more likely to be punching in numbers in a spreadsheet, than punching in phone numbers into the computer.
A spreadsheet program for both the Apple II and latter a different one for the IBM PC were the "killer apps" that drove initial sales for both devices...
It's pretty easy to relearn. I have Copy set to Shift-Del and Paste to Shift-Ins (they are next to the spacebar on my laptop).
How do you remap the shortcut keys? Does it work in all of your apps, or just specific ones that let you switch?
My favorite thing about this is that it was metioned as a comment back in the Ask . article about Server room KVM laptops
/. could be?
I wonder why the AC who submitted this adcopy to
No pain... ...Then you probably didn't eat the same nachos I had???
You mispelled QUIRKY