Shows like Friends, ER and NYPD Blue have started a trend of producing only 16-18 episodes a year of hit shows
Every season of ER has 22 episodes (except the first which had 26 including the pilot) and the only season of Friends with less than 24 episodes is the last one which has 20. NYPD Blue has always had 22 episodes per season the only exceptions being season 8 with 20, and season 9 with 23.
You really should check your facts before posting, oh sorry I forgot this was/.
Oh and yes I know some of the friends eps are two parts, but they air as two seperate episodes so get counted as 2.
Maybe what you are thinking of is the way networks instead of running a new episode per week spread them out throughout the year and fill the gaps with re-runs. This is a very annoying practice which greatly frustrates fans trying to follow storylines from episode to episode. Tricky to do when you have to wait through a 6 week sceduling break for your next fix.
Something happened to my Windows 2000 disk and it won't install.
So download an iso from a p2p network. I mean you own a license and have a valid cd key if all you need is install media then just get it online. You aren't doing anything wrong as you have permission from the copyright owner to keep the original disc of the software and a backup. You have your original (now borked) and the downloaded iso will be your copy.
The intention is to stop people easily making - and selling - dozens of copies of the same CD.
People who copy and sell cds on a large scale don't buy the originals from iTMS and then knock out copies on their home PC. They more than likely buy the originals and then use stand alone one to many cd burners to churn out hundreds of copies an hour.
DRM and copy protection only inconvenience the person who pays for the media in the first place. The large scale couterfeiters procede completely unaffected. The same is true for DVDs and games.
Cities would do better to restrict vehicles by Speed * Mass in certain places than to identify classes of vehicles by their drive system (electric powered).
As far as I can tell the main reason Segway's are being banned is that they are too fast to be safely ridden on the pavement and too slow to be safely ridden on the roads.
Personally I think Segway's were a flawed idea anyway, you pay the price of a cheapish car for something that is considerably slower than a bike and weighs far too much to carry if it runs out of batteries away from a socket.
IMHO there is no market for another form of transport. If you don't want to drive or use public transport then for short distances there is walking, and for longer distances cycling. Yes they require more effort than standing on a Segway, but god forbid anyone shoudl get any exercise without paying a gym a hefty subscription. You can bet a lot of Segway owners ride their over-priced scooters to work everyday and then after work head off to the gym where they pay hundreds of dollars a month to sit on an exercise bike.
...but the battery life would depend on how long you spent reading each page. You can't just say "it will last 10 000 pages" - someone might spend 10 seconds to read a page, or two minutes...
If you had RTFA you would know that it only takes power to refresh the screen not to maintain a static image. So the battery life is 10,000 pages whether you flick through one a second, or spend an hour on each page.
I am sure there are plenty of iPod owners on/. you know who you are. How many of you actually use track shuffle on you iPod? Out of those who do, how many move more than 10 feet from a power socket whilst listening to music?
I love my iPod, I listen to it a hell of a lot, and for that reason I never use track shuffle, for the simple reason that it totally murders the battery life. Listening to complete albums or fixed playlists I get about 8 hours of battery from my iPod, more than enough to get me through a day. With it on track shuffle this is cut by more than half, and there is nothing more annoying that it dying halfway through a great song when you still have 2 miles to walk home.
This isn't a criticism of iPods, there are reasons for it that are pretty obvious to any tech-savvy person (random tracks means near constant spinning up of the hard drive for you non tech-savvy readers). I knew this when I bought it and it doesn't bother me. The reason I bring it up is they mention iPods 6 times in the article. It seems so strange to use the iPod as an example when the battery drain of shuffling is in my view one of the only things the iPod doesn't have cracked.
Saying that, of course when I have my iPod hooked up to the sound system in my living room power isn't a concern and it shuffles to its hearts content. Throwing up some truly bizarre selections. There really is no words to describe the effect of having Radiohead's 'No Surprises' fade out and be replaced by Wagner's 'Ride of the Valkyries'!
The board I was referring to, the Asus A7N8X uses Soundstorm for onboard sound which is as good if not better than most PCI sound cards (Creative Audigy being an example) is 6 channel and has a SPDIF out.
It also has USB 2.0 and Firewire on board as does almost every other motherboard released in the last year. It has dual network, Nvidia's built into the northbridge and a third party one (possibly realtek). But then whats the problem with Realtek? I have used generic NICs for years most of which use Realtek chips and not had any problems.
I wasn't saying PCI slots were useless, I was saying that losing one slot to the graphics card is much less of a big deal that it used to be. PCI cards are used much less in new systems due to integration on to the motherboard so less slots are needed. True older systems rely more on seperate cards for functionality (I should know I have two NICs an IDE card and a sound card in mine) but then why would you be putting a bleeding edge GFX card in an older system anyway.
So in the situation where Le Louvre has to choose between seeing the Mona Lisa destroyed by a conventional water sprinkler or seeing a few hundred filthy American tourists being cooked alive by 500 degree anoxic Sapphire steam, which do you think they'll choose?
I'm thinking 500 degree steam would do quite a lot of damage to paintings too.....
In that case Lindows should be fine, they don't call it "Microsoft Lindows". Their name is only partially similar to just the generic part of Microsoft's trademark.
90% of the performance of this beastie but has lower power requirements ( 1 molex or none )
I very much doubt Ati's new card won't need any additional power. Don't forget Ati's 9700 Pro was the first card to require more power than the AGP slot provided.
... considering the power requirements and the slot hoggishness.
PCI slots aren't as useful as they used to be. So much is on board now so PCI cards aren't needed. Take the Asus A7N8X for instance, it has two network connectors on board as well as sound comparable to a high quality PCI sound card. And don't forget the slot you lose is the first one, which shares an IRQ with the AGP slot so it isn't a good idea to use it in any case.
A Series 60 phone with MP3-player, Bluetooth, Calendar, Java support, FM-radio and some Gaming capabilities for $200 (or even the original $300) was IMHO never that bad a deal..
Yes its a phone, but talking on it not only makes you look silly its also very difficult due to poor placement of the speaker and mic. Yes it plays games but the button layouts are poor and the screen flickers making playing for more than 10 mins painful on the eyes.
The reason it got such bad press it that it was a very poorly thought out product with some serious and blatant design flaws. They just fixed 2 of them, the game changing one is crucial to its success as a gaming system. But unless they have made it usable as an actual phone its not going to do well. Its only real advantage over the GBA is that it is a phone hybrid, if the phone part is crappy then sticking with your existing phone and buying a GBA for considerably less money is a much better plan.
Well, I guess I better turn off Trillian Pro's logging by default...
In the article it mentions that if the logging is a feature enabled by default then the other person should realise they are being recorded, making it legal. Only if you use a third party program to record the conversation is it illegal.
Not sure if this would protect you if they were using msn/AIM/icq and you were using Trillian, do msn/AIM/icq log by default? How about IRC, I know Mirc logs, not sure if it is enabled by default though.
I've always thought that the idea was just to prevent average joe user from doing things......but as long as 90% of the population can't do that, they've done their job.
It only takes one person to break the DRM. As soon as that happens and the music is released online in non-DRM format then its over. Joe user doesn't need to know anything about breaking DRM or hooking digital outputs up to inputs and re-encoding. All they have to know how to do is open Kazaa and search for the tracks.
Even if all DRM on downloadable music was totally bulletproof it only takes one person to buy the cd, rip and share it. So not only do you need bulletproof DRM for downloadable music, you need it for cds as well. But then no-one buys your cds because they won't play in the car... or on your friends cd player which doesn't detect the latest DRM.... oh and when you put it in your Uncle's Mac it locks the cd drive so you have to call out a repair man.
Maybe you can arrest everyone who cracks the DRM or releases your music online, but by then it is too late. And you can bet your ass when the next generation of DRM comes out someone new will step up and crack that too. Once the music is out there it is freely available to anyone with basic computer skills no matter how great they told you the copy protection was when you bought it, its only effect now is to inconvenience everyone who bought the music legally. But then screwing the paying customers seems to be a standard business model these days.
You make a good point about affecting large corporations wiht lawsuits, but who gets sued when my linux server gets hacked?
In order to claim damages in such a lawsuit you would have to prove that the company in question knew about a vulnerablilty and didn't fix it. Therefore showing negligence on the part of the company.
To apply this to OSS you first need to distinguish between free and Free software. If the linux distro you were using was Open Source but commercial, meaning you paid money for it, making it Free (as in speech) but not free (as in beer) then the same rules would apply. They would be responsible for damages if they knew about a vulnerablility but didn't patch it.
If the software was free (as in beer) then the developers shouldn't be held responsible for any flaws in the software. There is no contract between you and them, they have not promised you anything by allowing you to use their software free of charge.
By making this distinction you make commercial OSS software developers equally liable for negligence without opening up small OSS projects to litigation they have no chance of surviving.
This is of course all hypothetical as at the moment no software companies accept any responsibilty for flaws in their software. And of course IANAL.
If you had RTFA you would have realised that the link in the post is to the NYTimes story. It even says that NYTimes registration is required to view it, so you didn't even read the fscking comment.
I can assure you that we DO NOT have any weapons of mass destruction!;-)
You claim that after unleashing Celine Dion and Bryan Adams on the world.
Re:Problem that doesn't exist big time...
on
Passport to Nowhere
·
· Score: 1
How many accounts do you have, between eBay and paypal and Amazon and slashdot and...? Do you use a different password for each one? Aren't you the least bit worried that the Slashdot editors will use your Slashdot password against your Amazon account?
This is where something like Opera 'Wand' comes in. You use a different username/password for each site and they are all stored locally, then you just hit Ctrl-Enter to fill in the fields. You can use a master password if other people use your system and are likely to try and use your passwords.
It is especially useful for sites that only get visited occasionally as you don't have to remember the password for every news outlet and retail site you have ever registered with.
1.7-1.8 meg floppies, that were a bit slower and less reliable,
You made floppies even slower and less reliable I wouldn't have thought that was even possible. Obviously some kind of WORN file system (Write Once Read Never!)
Slashdot Mirror
What does it mean for a ghost to "eat" Pac-Man?
From the site:
Q: How do the ghosts "eat" Pac Man?
RTFAA: By tagging him! Same goes for when Pac Man eats a Power Pellet and tries to eat the ghosts.
Shows like Friends, ER and NYPD Blue have started a trend of producing only 16-18 episodes a year of hit shows
Every season of ER has 22 episodes (except the first which had 26 including the pilot) and the only season of Friends with less than 24 episodes is the last one which has 20. NYPD Blue has always had 22 episodes per season the only exceptions being season 8 with 20, and season 9 with 23.
You really should check your facts before posting, oh sorry I forgot this was /.
Oh and yes I know some of the friends eps are two parts, but they air as two seperate episodes so get counted as 2.
Maybe what you are thinking of is the way networks instead of running a new episode per week spread them out throughout the year and fill the gaps with re-runs. This is a very annoying practice which greatly frustrates fans trying to follow storylines from episode to episode. Tricky to do when you have to wait through a 6 week sceduling break for your next fix.
Something happened to my Windows 2000 disk and it won't install.
So download an iso from a p2p network. I mean you own a license and have a valid cd key if all you need is install media then just get it online. You aren't doing anything wrong as you have permission from the copyright owner to keep the original disc of the software and a backup. You have your original (now borked) and the downloaded iso will be your copy.
The intention is to stop people easily making - and selling - dozens of copies of the same CD.
People who copy and sell cds on a large scale don't buy the originals from iTMS and then knock out copies on their home PC. They more than likely buy the originals and then use stand alone one to many cd burners to churn out hundreds of copies an hour.
DRM and copy protection only inconvenience the person who pays for the media in the first place. The large scale couterfeiters procede completely unaffected. The same is true for DVDs and games.
Cities would do better to restrict vehicles by Speed * Mass in certain places than to identify classes of vehicles by their drive system (electric powered).
As far as I can tell the main reason Segway's are being banned is that they are too fast to be safely ridden on the pavement and too slow to be safely ridden on the roads.
Personally I think Segway's were a flawed idea anyway, you pay the price of a cheapish car for something that is considerably slower than a bike and weighs far too much to carry if it runs out of batteries away from a socket.
IMHO there is no market for another form of transport. If you don't want to drive or use public transport then for short distances there is walking, and for longer distances cycling. Yes they require more effort than standing on a Segway, but god forbid anyone shoudl get any exercise without paying a gym a hefty subscription. You can bet a lot of Segway owners ride their over-priced scooters to work everyday and then after work head off to the gym where they pay hundreds of dollars a month to sit on an exercise bike.
If you had RTFA you would know that it only takes power to refresh the screen not to maintain a static image. So the battery life is 10,000 pages whether you flick through one a second, or spend an hour on each page.
I use a WYSE terminal, you insensative clod!
I'm a grammar nazi, you insensitive clod!
I gritted my teeth and tried it...
Thats what he said...
So you just hit
"Up-Up-Down-Down-Left-Right-Left-Right B, A, Start"
for root right?
I am sure there are plenty of iPod owners on /. you know who you are. How many of you actually use track shuffle on you iPod? Out of those who do, how many move more than 10 feet from a power socket whilst listening to music?
I love my iPod, I listen to it a hell of a lot, and for that reason I never use track shuffle, for the simple reason that it totally murders the battery life. Listening to complete albums or fixed playlists I get about 8 hours of battery from my iPod, more than enough to get me through a day. With it on track shuffle this is cut by more than half, and there is nothing more annoying that it dying halfway through a great song when you still have 2 miles to walk home.
This isn't a criticism of iPods, there are reasons for it that are pretty obvious to any tech-savvy person (random tracks means near constant spinning up of the hard drive for you non tech-savvy readers). I knew this when I bought it and it doesn't bother me. The reason I bring it up is they mention iPods 6 times in the article. It seems so strange to use the iPod as an example when the battery drain of shuffling is in my view one of the only things the iPod doesn't have cracked.
Saying that, of course when I have my iPod hooked up to the sound system in my living room power isn't a concern and it shuffles to its hearts content. Throwing up some truly bizarre selections. There really is no words to describe the effect of having Radiohead's 'No Surprises' fade out and be replaced by Wagner's 'Ride of the Valkyries'!
The board I was referring to, the Asus A7N8X uses Soundstorm for onboard sound which is as good if not better than most PCI sound cards (Creative Audigy being an example) is 6 channel and has a SPDIF out.
It also has USB 2.0 and Firewire on board as does almost every other motherboard released in the last year. It has dual network, Nvidia's built into the northbridge and a third party one (possibly realtek). But then whats the problem with Realtek? I have used generic NICs for years most of which use Realtek chips and not had any problems.
I wasn't saying PCI slots were useless, I was saying that losing one slot to the graphics card is much less of a big deal that it used to be. PCI cards are used much less in new systems due to integration on to the motherboard so less slots are needed. True older systems rely more on seperate cards for functionality (I should know I have two NICs an IDE card and a sound card in mine) but then why would you be putting a bleeding edge GFX card in an older system anyway.
I always thought i'd be cool to have a little display of system statistics cpu/ram/disk usage, maybe any new emails that have arrived
You mean something like these.
I guesstimate that my tower will hold about twelve liters of water, or about 20 kg of this stuff.
Which is all good until someone invites you to a LAN party and you have to carry the heavy SOB all the way there.
So in the situation where Le Louvre has to choose between seeing the Mona Lisa destroyed by a conventional water sprinkler or seeing a few hundred filthy American tourists being cooked alive by 500 degree anoxic Sapphire steam, which do you think they'll choose?
I'm thinking 500 degree steam would do quite a lot of damage to paintings too.....
It's not just Windows--it's "Microsoft Windows."
In that case Lindows should be fine, they don't call it "Microsoft Lindows". Their name is only partially similar to just the generic part of Microsoft's trademark.
90% of the performance of this beastie but has lower power requirements ( 1 molex or none )
I very much doubt Ati's new card won't need any additional power. Don't forget Ati's 9700 Pro was the first card to require more power than the AGP slot provided.
PCI slots aren't as useful as they used to be. So much is on board now so PCI cards aren't needed. Take the Asus A7N8X for instance, it has two network connectors on board as well as sound comparable to a high quality PCI sound card. And don't forget the slot you lose is the first one, which shares an IRQ with the AGP slot so it isn't a good idea to use it in any case.
A Series 60 phone with MP3-player, Bluetooth, Calendar, Java support, FM-radio and some Gaming capabilities for $200 (or even the original $300) was IMHO never that bad a deal..
Yes its a phone, but talking on it not only makes you look silly its also very difficult due to poor placement of the speaker and mic. Yes it plays games but the button layouts are poor and the screen flickers making playing for more than 10 mins painful on the eyes.
The reason it got such bad press it that it was a very poorly thought out product with some serious and blatant design flaws. They just fixed 2 of them, the game changing one is crucial to its success as a gaming system. But unless they have made it usable as an actual phone its not going to do well. Its only real advantage over the GBA is that it is a phone hybrid, if the phone part is crappy then sticking with your existing phone and buying a GBA for considerably less money is a much better plan.
Well, I guess I better turn off Trillian Pro's logging by default...
In the article it mentions that if the logging is a feature enabled by default then the other person should realise they are being recorded, making it legal. Only if you use a third party program to record the conversation is it illegal.
Not sure if this would protect you if they were using msn/AIM/icq and you were using Trillian, do msn/AIM/icq log by default? How about IRC, I know Mirc logs, not sure if it is enabled by default though.
...again though in quantum physics I'm just an interested observer.
Just an observer? Well that changes everything!I've always thought that the idea was just to prevent average joe user from doing things... ...but as long as 90% of the population can't do that, they've done their job.
It only takes one person to break the DRM. As soon as that happens and the music is released online in non-DRM format then its over. Joe user doesn't need to know anything about breaking DRM or hooking digital outputs up to inputs and re-encoding. All they have to know how to do is open Kazaa and search for the tracks.
Even if all DRM on downloadable music was totally bulletproof it only takes one person to buy the cd, rip and share it. So not only do you need bulletproof DRM for downloadable music, you need it for cds as well. But then no-one buys your cds because they won't play in the car... or on your friends cd player which doesn't detect the latest DRM.... oh and when you put it in your Uncle's Mac it locks the cd drive so you have to call out a repair man.
Maybe you can arrest everyone who cracks the DRM or releases your music online, but by then it is too late. And you can bet your ass when the next generation of DRM comes out someone new will step up and crack that too. Once the music is out there it is freely available to anyone with basic computer skills no matter how great they told you the copy protection was when you bought it, its only effect now is to inconvenience everyone who bought the music legally. But then screwing the paying customers seems to be a standard business model these days.
You make a good point about affecting large corporations wiht lawsuits, but who gets sued when my linux server gets hacked?
In order to claim damages in such a lawsuit you would have to prove that the company in question knew about a vulnerablilty and didn't fix it. Therefore showing negligence on the part of the company.
To apply this to OSS you first need to distinguish between free and Free software. If the linux distro you were using was Open Source but commercial, meaning you paid money for it, making it Free (as in speech) but not free (as in beer) then the same rules would apply. They would be responsible for damages if they knew about a vulnerablility but didn't patch it.
If the software was free (as in beer) then the developers shouldn't be held responsible for any flaws in the software. There is no contract between you and them, they have not promised you anything by allowing you to use their software free of charge.
By making this distinction you make commercial OSS software developers equally liable for negligence without opening up small OSS projects to litigation they have no chance of surviving.
This is of course all hypothetical as at the moment no software companies accept any responsibilty for flaws in their software. And of course IANAL.
It's also on The New York Times' website.
If you had RTFA you would have realised that the link in the post is to the NYTimes story. It even says that NYTimes registration is required to view it, so you didn't even read the fscking comment.
You truly are an April Fool
I can assure you that we DO NOT have any weapons of mass destruction! ;-)
You claim that after unleashing Celine Dion and Bryan Adams on the world.
How many accounts do you have, between eBay and paypal and Amazon and slashdot and ...? Do you use a different password for each one? Aren't you the least bit worried that the Slashdot editors will use your Slashdot password against your Amazon account?
This is where something like Opera 'Wand' comes in. You use a different username/password for each site and they are all stored locally, then you just hit Ctrl-Enter to fill in the fields. You can use a master password if other people use your system and are likely to try and use your passwords.
It is especially useful for sites that only get visited occasionally as you don't have to remember the password for every news outlet and retail site you have ever registered with.
1.7-1.8 meg floppies, that were a bit slower and less reliable,
You made floppies even slower and less reliable I wouldn't have thought that was even possible. Obviously some kind of WORN file system (Write Once Read Never!)