Many countries (in Europe at least) have banned talking while driving, even with headset. More are considering it.
In the UK the law is that you can't use a hand-held phone. So it is ok to have a mobile in a cradle or in your pocket and answer it using a headset but as soon as you touch the phone you are breaking the law. You can also be prosecuted if being on the phone affects your driving even if you are using a headset.
In practice most people have a quick look around for police cars and then answer or make a call, leaving the phone on the passenger seat and using a headset.
so my old laptop didn't come with the XP install disks to allow that
Chances are the XP license for your laptop is an OEM license so is can't be transferred to another machine anyway. Of course the trade of for this is that the laptop would have cost you at least £100 more with a full non-OEM copy of XP.
There is the special olympics where handicapped people compete. It takes place very soon after the 'normal' olympics, on the same objects, same routes etc.
The Special Olympics is for people with intellectual disabilities and should not be confused with the Paralympics which runs in parallel with the Olympic Games.
The Special Olympics is intended to boost the confidence and social skills of intellectually disabled people and isn't a serious sporting event. The Paralympics is every bit as serious as the Olympic Games and the competitors are serious athletes who happen to have a disability. The confusion between the Special Olympics and Paralympics is a sore point for disabled athletes who resent that their major sporting achievements are confused with an event which is more about taking part than it is a competition.
but if I'm playing a game that looks like scrabble down the precise board layout, and plays like scrabble down to the scoring and letter distribution, and such that the rules are precisely those of scrabble, even if they use different phrasing than the official scrabble rules.....well... then, its a scrabble derivative.
What I was trying to get across in my post is that while it may be a derivative of scrabble, the only parts of scrabble that are copyrightable are the board artwork and the text of the rules. The scoring system and letter distribution aren't copyrightable at all although any printed scoring table would be, as would the design of the letters themselves. A similar board graphic may be infringing depending on how closely it matches the orginal but you can't copyright a layout of coloured squares only the particular way you draw them.
There's no reason Scrabulous couldn't be called 'CrossWords' with a different board layout, rules, and scoring system.
Really all they need to do is change the name to prevent confusion with 'Scrabble'. Board layout, rules and scoring aren't protected by copyright or trademarks. As long as they don't use the actual Scrabble board graphics and the exact wording of the rules they are fine.
An idea or concept can't be copyrighted only the actual graphics and wording Hasbro have used in their version. As you have said any patent would have expired by now and almost certainly wouldn't have applied to a web based version of the game.
So technically all they need to do is change the name, of course this won't stop Hasbro from hassling them, threatening to sue and sending cease and desist demands. They will undoubtably continue to bully the developers even though they have no legal grounds to do so.
Every thursday morning my computer is unusable for about 20 minutes because it has to check it's viruses.
Wouldn't it make more sense to schedule a scan on Thursday afternoon at whatever time you finish work and set it to shutdown the machine on completion?
I have my anti virus program set to run at 5pm every day. If I am working later than 5pm then I either just cancel it safe in the knowledge that it will run the next day or let it run in the background, with a dual core processor I find the performance hit is negligible.
"Reset Safari" is accessible with one click at: File: Reset Safari
I think the parent's point about "Reset Safari" is that the language used doesn't mean anything to the average user. It isn't obvious that it is a security option that would clear sessions and cached data. No matter how easy it is to get to if the user doesn't know what it does that doesn't help. "Clear Private Data" at least gives an idea what it will do although it can be argued that a non-technical user still might not understand.
As has already been stated many times in other comments the answer is to have a clearly labelled logout button as part of the web application, and a reminder to the user that they should logout when they are finished to prevent other users accessing their iDisk. Having a logout button in the main.Mac window isn't sufficient as a lot of users will close the main window when the iDisk window opens for them to work in.
so what's the harm in starting a reboot while I start walking to your desk?
The problem with restarting to 'fix' problems is often all you doing is glossing over the real problem, which then happens again and again. It may not be inconvenient for the user to do a restart while you are on your way down, but it is inconvenient if they have to call you twice a week because the cause of the problem has never been diagnosed.
One of the biggest drains on productivity I find in my job is people who will work around problems instead of fixing them. Whether this is by using a different computer, reinstalling the software or just rebooting the machine they will happily do it week after week because "that's what fixes it". Instead of fixing the problem once you end up spending a lot more time working around it everytime.
Can't he just jump with hands as "wings" and land on an oversized airbag?
I think the problem with this is when falling from any significant height it is very difficult to land accurately. The risk of missing the airbag and hitting the ground would be huge unless the airbag covered a very large area. Stunts where stuntmen jump from just a few stories use a very large airbag to reduce the chance of misses but there have still been people injured or killed because of a gust of wind or a misjudged jump.
In the UK even large villages may have a designated weight limit for vehicles to stop trucks from using the smaller village roads as a shortcut. This reduces traffic, noise, accidents and pollution in the villages and keeps the trucks on the main roads where they belong.
Deliveries into or out of the village are normally exempt so it is still possible to get a removal van or for shops to receive deliveries.
Truckers who ignore the signs can receive heavy fines, as can the companies who own the trucks.
The only performance benefit is that the data being read from and written to the drives in order to rebuild the array doesn't have to travel via the system bus to get to the CPU and back again.
The real performance benefit is that the parity calculations required to rebuild the array are being done on a processor specifically designed for that purpose. This makes it much more efficient than a general purpose cpu. You can make up the difference in performance with a high spec multi-core cpu but as well as the cost of an over specced cpu there is still the issue of overal performance of the server. In a home/smb environment it is rare for a server to only be used for storage so maxing out the cpu for hours rebuilding the array isn't a great idea.
I should have been clearer in my post. While the disk performance in normal operation may be comparable hardware RAID does have several key advantages. The first being that with anything other than RAID 0 or 1 the cpu hit from the RAID driver during heavy use will be high even on a high end machine. This is fine if you aren't using that machine for anything else but if it is a desktop machine or a server that is required to do anything else other than serve files then it does cause a problem. This is even more apparent if the array becomes degraded as it will take significantly more cpu time to perform all the parity calculations to rebuild the array.
If you do need to rebuild the array then a decent RAID card will handle it without putting a heavy load on the server and significantly without affecting disk perfomance. In a server that is in constant use this is a key point. Rebuilding a RAID 5 array in software often reduces the disk performance to very low levels, effectively denying access to data until the rebuild is complete.
Software RAID is slower (though a reasonable system doing just software RAID has no trouble outperforming a cheap "real" RAID card)
This is certainly true and software RAID is fine for RAID 0 or RAID 1 but when you get into the realms of calculating parity then a quality hardware RAID card is a necessity. This is especially true if you want to be able to still use the array while rebuilding after a drive failure. Performance will always be lower while rebuilding but a decent hardware RAID card makes the difference between being able to access your data and being stuck without it for however many hours it takes to rebuild.
So lets say you go to South America on a weekend trip and you want to post some pictures on Flickr.. Howto access those password?
You can store Password Safe on a USB flash drive and take it with you to South America, plug it in, run Password Safe from the USB drive and access your passwords.
This would also protect you against keyloggers on a public machine as Password Safe will fill passwords in for you meaning you don't need to actually type it.
My God, even Heavenly Sword is longer than Portal.
Well Heavenly Sword costs $59.99 and reportedly lasts about 7 hours. Portal costs $20 and lasts about 4 hours. Sounds like a pretty good deal to me, and this isn't taking into account time taken to complete the advanced levels or achievements.
No, he's just picking a bad example. The Orange Box is pretty fairly priced, but compare the Nokia N800; it's $236.48 in the USA, and £229.99 here (both prices from Amazon). Pretty close to a 1:1 exchange rate.
But you are right to a certain extent in so far as some electronics do cost more in the UK, as other posters have pointed out part of the extra cost is down better consumer protection legislation that increases the cost of doing business in the UK. Basically consumers have a lot more rights but end up paying slightly more because it costs business more to comply.
Uhh, yeah, but the parent said that games cost the same in pounds as they do in dollars.
The parent is exaggerating, for example the Orange Box is £24.98 on Amazon.co.uk and on Amazon.com it is $47.99. This converts to £23.38 according to today's exchange rate. Once VAT is factored in this would be £27.48. So as you can see the idea that UK pricing is much more expensive is certainly false in this case.
Which is why it is a shame that Apple not only ship a system with so little RAM it is too slow to run the installed OS well, but also make it incredibly difficult to upgrade the RAM to a reasonable level. Yes you can have the RAM factory upgraded when you buy the system, but at a large price premium, and it is no good to those who don't realise they need more until after using the machine.
I have never understood why Apple don't have a removable panel on the mini to allow RAM upgrades, it is a system that works perfectly well on the iMac.
This probably has quite a bit to do with why items tend to be sold in Britain for the same number of pounds as what they want in dollars in the USA.
The reason for higher prices in Britain is sales tax. You pay 17.5% VAT on a game in Britain but in the US sales tax normally isn't included in the prices as it varies from state to state. Now you could argue that sales tax in the UK is too high but that is another discussion altogether.
Politicians and bureaucrats love to throw money at education, and technology, by virtue of being expensive, gives them an excellent outlet for this.
Part of the problem is also that, certainly in the UK, schools aren't allowed to 'horde' money from their budgets. They risk losing any funds that aren't spent in a defined period of time. This means that it is very difficult for a school to save up for somethign they actually need, like a new building, as it requires more money than is available in a single year.
The result of this is that schools who are desperately short on classroom space end up spending loads on expensive technology as otherwise the money would be taken away from them, while half the children are being taught in run down temporary classrooms.
So what if you could blind yourself with one of these? If you're stupid enough to build it and shine it in your eye, tough! You deserve to be blind.
The problem is the kind of people who are stupid enough to blind themselves are also stupid enough to point one of these at other people. I can't say i'd be thrilled if some moron child (or adult) blinded me waving one around and I certainly don't think *I* deserve it.
- Crafting skills in WoW are just as separated from fighting as they were in UO. In order to gather resources, you must be able to face the wilds and at least fight enough to defend yourself from roving monsters. Otherwise a crafter can stay in town safe from harm.
While almost all of the points you have made are spot on this one isn't correct. In order to progress with tradeskills in WoW you need to level up the character as well. For instance to get above 125 Alchemy you need to be over level 20, and to get over 75 in enchanting you need to be level 10. These level requirements are present at higher trade skill levels as well.
The only debt I ever want to have, and I don't really want it very much, is a mortgage
The problem with this is that it can be very difficult to get a mortgage if you have no credit history. Unless you have borrowed money in the past and paid it back on time banks have no way to gauge whether you are likely to pay your mortgage. It is only by borrowing every increasing amounts of money and paying it back reliably that you can increase your credit rating.
Just to add a bit of anecdotal evidence: My sister has never had a credit card or used an overdraft facility, she viewed this as being financially responsible. When she came to apply for a loan to cover a year studying abroad she was refused on the basis that she had no credit history.
good UI design. That's all this is folks, it's a phone with no buttons
That is precisely the reason I am sceptical about the iPhone. Aside from the strange idea of watching video on the same screen that you just covered in fingermarks queuing it up there are reasons to have buttons. Buttons provide tactile feedback when pressed, they are normally different shapes depending on their function so they are easily distinguished without looking. This allows someone to skip a track or change the volume without having to take the phone out of a pocket and look at it.
The same applies to sending text messages. I realise that text messages are not as popular in the US as the UK they are still a major function of a phone. Having seen demos of the iPhone's onscreen keyboard with it's dock like magnification of letters I can't see how it will be possible to send a text message without looking at the screen. Something that I do all the time at the moment especially if i'm walking.
no one's nailed a cell phone UI yet, every interface is confusing as heck and looks like a Super Nintendo's running the graphics.
Off the top of my head Samsung, Sony Ericsson and Nokia all have good phone UIs. The Samsung phone I have at the moment has a perfectly functional UI and I haven't had any problems finding and using the different features of the phone. Starting a text message or making a call can be accomplished with only 1 or 2 button presses.
As far as graphics are concerned most phones now display 65k colours and have pretty nice looking interfaces. If your point is that they don't use 3d effects and other eye candy throughout the interface then you are right. The reason for this is that most people want to be able to make a call or play a music track quickly and easily. What they aren't interested in day to day is the fancy transitions between menu options or other visual effects.
The early iPod models were exactly the same, they had easy to use functional menus that allowed you to quickly and easily navigate to the song you wanted to listen to. They also had (and still have to a certain extent) buttons and controls that allow you to quickly skip a track, pause or change volume without having to look at the device or take it out of a pocket.
It is true that apple has come up with a revolutionary UI and very impressive graphical effects but I am sceptical that any of this will help me make a phone call. Or that after the initial wow factor wears off those transitions and effects won't start to annoy, just like they do in the iMac media GUI when using the remote control (twinkly noises and spinning icons are all very nice but what I want to do is play a song quickly without having to wait for menu effects to finish).
I'm not saying it won't sell, or that it doesn't do the job it is made for, but I do think Apple have lost their way. From a company who revolutionarised user interfaces triumphing ease and speed of use they seem to have shifted the emphasis to more flashy effects and wow factor, losing sight of what the device is for and how people want to use it.
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In the UK the law is that you can't use a hand-held phone. So it is ok to have a mobile in a cradle or in your pocket and answer it using a headset but as soon as you touch the phone you are breaking the law. You can also be prosecuted if being on the phone affects your driving even if you are using a headset.
In practice most people have a quick look around for police cars and then answer or make a call, leaving the phone on the passenger seat and using a headset.
Chances are the XP license for your laptop is an OEM license so is can't be transferred to another machine anyway. Of course the trade of for this is that the laptop would have cost you at least £100 more with a full non-OEM copy of XP.
The Special Olympics is for people with intellectual disabilities and should not be confused with the Paralympics which runs in parallel with the Olympic Games.
The Special Olympics is intended to boost the confidence and social skills of intellectually disabled people and isn't a serious sporting event. The Paralympics is every bit as serious as the Olympic Games and the competitors are serious athletes who happen to have a disability. The confusion between the Special Olympics and Paralympics is a sore point for disabled athletes who resent that their major sporting achievements are confused with an event which is more about taking part than it is a competition.
What I was trying to get across in my post is that while it may be a derivative of scrabble, the only parts of scrabble that are copyrightable are the board artwork and the text of the rules. The scoring system and letter distribution aren't copyrightable at all although any printed scoring table would be, as would the design of the letters themselves. A similar board graphic may be infringing depending on how closely it matches the orginal but you can't copyright a layout of coloured squares only the particular way you draw them.
Really all they need to do is change the name to prevent confusion with 'Scrabble'. Board layout, rules and scoring aren't protected by copyright or trademarks. As long as they don't use the actual Scrabble board graphics and the exact wording of the rules they are fine.
An idea or concept can't be copyrighted only the actual graphics and wording Hasbro have used in their version. As you have said any patent would have expired by now and almost certainly wouldn't have applied to a web based version of the game.
So technically all they need to do is change the name, of course this won't stop Hasbro from hassling them, threatening to sue and sending cease and desist demands. They will undoubtably continue to bully the developers even though they have no legal grounds to do so.
Wouldn't it make more sense to schedule a scan on Thursday afternoon at whatever time you finish work and set it to shutdown the machine on completion?
I have my anti virus program set to run at 5pm every day. If I am working later than 5pm then I either just cancel it safe in the knowledge that it will run the next day or let it run in the background, with a dual core processor I find the performance hit is negligible.
I think the parent's point about "Reset Safari" is that the language used doesn't mean anything to the average user. It isn't obvious that it is a security option that would clear sessions and cached data. No matter how easy it is to get to if the user doesn't know what it does that doesn't help. "Clear Private Data" at least gives an idea what it will do although it can be argued that a non-technical user still might not understand.
As has already been stated many times in other comments the answer is to have a clearly labelled logout button as part of the web application, and a reminder to the user that they should logout when they are finished to prevent other users accessing their iDisk. Having a logout button in the main .Mac window isn't sufficient as a lot of users will close the main window when the iDisk window opens for them to work in.
I am surprised this wasn't met with a swift "Sorry sir by opening the case of the TV you invalidated your warranty and I can't help you any further".
The problem with restarting to 'fix' problems is often all you doing is glossing over the real problem, which then happens again and again. It may not be inconvenient for the user to do a restart while you are on your way down, but it is inconvenient if they have to call you twice a week because the cause of the problem has never been diagnosed.
One of the biggest drains on productivity I find in my job is people who will work around problems instead of fixing them. Whether this is by using a different computer, reinstalling the software or just rebooting the machine they will happily do it week after week because "that's what fixes it". Instead of fixing the problem once you end up spending a lot more time working around it everytime.
I think the problem with this is when falling from any significant height it is very difficult to land accurately. The risk of missing the airbag and hitting the ground would be huge unless the airbag covered a very large area. Stunts where stuntmen jump from just a few stories use a very large airbag to reduce the chance of misses but there have still been people injured or killed because of a gust of wind or a misjudged jump.
In the UK even large villages may have a designated weight limit for vehicles to stop trucks from using the smaller village roads as a shortcut. This reduces traffic, noise, accidents and pollution in the villages and keeps the trucks on the main roads where they belong.
Deliveries into or out of the village are normally exempt so it is still possible to get a removal van or for shops to receive deliveries.
Truckers who ignore the signs can receive heavy fines, as can the companies who own the trucks.
The real performance benefit is that the parity calculations required to rebuild the array are being done on a processor specifically designed for that purpose. This makes it much more efficient than a general purpose cpu. You can make up the difference in performance with a high spec multi-core cpu but as well as the cost of an over specced cpu there is still the issue of overal performance of the server. In a home/smb environment it is rare for a server to only be used for storage so maxing out the cpu for hours rebuilding the array isn't a great idea.
I should have been clearer in my post. While the disk performance in normal operation may be comparable hardware RAID does have several key advantages. The first being that with anything other than RAID 0 or 1 the cpu hit from the RAID driver during heavy use will be high even on a high end machine. This is fine if you aren't using that machine for anything else but if it is a desktop machine or a server that is required to do anything else other than serve files then it does cause a problem. This is even more apparent if the array becomes degraded as it will take significantly more cpu time to perform all the parity calculations to rebuild the array.
If you do need to rebuild the array then a decent RAID card will handle it without putting a heavy load on the server and significantly without affecting disk perfomance. In a server that is in constant use this is a key point. Rebuilding a RAID 5 array in software often reduces the disk performance to very low levels, effectively denying access to data until the rebuild is complete.
This is certainly true and software RAID is fine for RAID 0 or RAID 1 but when you get into the realms of calculating parity then a quality hardware RAID card is a necessity. This is especially true if you want to be able to still use the array while rebuilding after a drive failure. Performance will always be lower while rebuilding but a decent hardware RAID card makes the difference between being able to access your data and being stuck without it for however many hours it takes to rebuild.
You can store Password Safe on a USB flash drive and take it with you to South America, plug it in, run Password Safe from the USB drive and access your passwords.
This would also protect you against keyloggers on a public machine as Password Safe will fill passwords in for you meaning you don't need to actually type it.
Well Heavenly Sword costs $59.99 and reportedly lasts about 7 hours. Portal costs $20 and lasts about 4 hours. Sounds like a pretty good deal to me, and this isn't taking into account time taken to complete the advanced levels or achievements.
Of course that depends where you buy from Play.com offer the same for £149.99 delivered
But you are right to a certain extent in so far as some electronics do cost more in the UK, as other posters have pointed out part of the extra cost is down better consumer protection legislation that increases the cost of doing business in the UK. Basically consumers have a lot more rights but end up paying slightly more because it costs business more to comply.
The parent is exaggerating, for example the Orange Box is £24.98 on Amazon.co.uk and on Amazon.com it is $47.99. This converts to £23.38 according to today's exchange rate. Once VAT is factored in this would be £27.48. So as you can see the idea that UK pricing is much more expensive is certainly false in this case.
Which is why it is a shame that Apple not only ship a system with so little RAM it is too slow to run the installed OS well, but also make it incredibly difficult to upgrade the RAM to a reasonable level. Yes you can have the RAM factory upgraded when you buy the system, but at a large price premium, and it is no good to those who don't realise they need more until after using the machine.
I have never understood why Apple don't have a removable panel on the mini to allow RAM upgrades, it is a system that works perfectly well on the iMac.
The reason for higher prices in Britain is sales tax. You pay 17.5% VAT on a game in Britain but in the US sales tax normally isn't included in the prices as it varies from state to state. Now you could argue that sales tax in the UK is too high but that is another discussion altogether.
Part of the problem is also that, certainly in the UK, schools aren't allowed to 'horde' money from their budgets. They risk losing any funds that aren't spent in a defined period of time. This means that it is very difficult for a school to save up for somethign they actually need, like a new building, as it requires more money than is available in a single year.
The result of this is that schools who are desperately short on classroom space end up spending loads on expensive technology as otherwise the money would be taken away from them, while half the children are being taught in run down temporary classrooms.
The problem is the kind of people who are stupid enough to blind themselves are also stupid enough to point one of these at other people. I can't say i'd be thrilled if some moron child (or adult) blinded me waving one around and I certainly don't think *I* deserve it.
While almost all of the points you have made are spot on this one isn't correct. In order to progress with tradeskills in WoW you need to level up the character as well. For instance to get above 125 Alchemy you need to be over level 20, and to get over 75 in enchanting you need to be level 10. These level requirements are present at higher trade skill levels as well.
The problem with this is that it can be very difficult to get a mortgage if you have no credit history. Unless you have borrowed money in the past and paid it back on time banks have no way to gauge whether you are likely to pay your mortgage. It is only by borrowing every increasing amounts of money and paying it back reliably that you can increase your credit rating.
Just to add a bit of anecdotal evidence: My sister has never had a credit card or used an overdraft facility, she viewed this as being financially responsible. When she came to apply for a loan to cover a year studying abroad she was refused on the basis that she had no credit history.
That is precisely the reason I am sceptical about the iPhone. Aside from the strange idea of watching video on the same screen that you just covered in fingermarks queuing it up there are reasons to have buttons. Buttons provide tactile feedback when pressed, they are normally different shapes depending on their function so they are easily distinguished without looking. This allows someone to skip a track or change the volume without having to take the phone out of a pocket and look at it.
The same applies to sending text messages. I realise that text messages are not as popular in the US as the UK they are still a major function of a phone. Having seen demos of the iPhone's onscreen keyboard with it's dock like magnification of letters I can't see how it will be possible to send a text message without looking at the screen. Something that I do all the time at the moment especially if i'm walking.
Off the top of my head Samsung, Sony Ericsson and Nokia all have good phone UIs. The Samsung phone I have at the moment has a perfectly functional UI and I haven't had any problems finding and using the different features of the phone. Starting a text message or making a call can be accomplished with only 1 or 2 button presses.
As far as graphics are concerned most phones now display 65k colours and have pretty nice looking interfaces. If your point is that they don't use 3d effects and other eye candy throughout the interface then you are right. The reason for this is that most people want to be able to make a call or play a music track quickly and easily. What they aren't interested in day to day is the fancy transitions between menu options or other visual effects.
The early iPod models were exactly the same, they had easy to use functional menus that allowed you to quickly and easily navigate to the song you wanted to listen to. They also had (and still have to a certain extent) buttons and controls that allow you to quickly skip a track, pause or change volume without having to look at the device or take it out of a pocket.
It is true that apple has come up with a revolutionary UI and very impressive graphical effects but I am sceptical that any of this will help me make a phone call. Or that after the initial wow factor wears off those transitions and effects won't start to annoy, just like they do in the iMac media GUI when using the remote control (twinkly noises and spinning icons are all very nice but what I want to do is play a song quickly without having to wait for menu effects to finish).
I'm not saying it won't sell, or that it doesn't do the job it is made for, but I do think Apple have lost their way. From a company who revolutionarised user interfaces triumphing ease and speed of use they seem to have shifted the emphasis to more flashy effects and wow factor, losing sight of what the device is for and how people want to use it.