And also, if you were going to choose a song for radio play at 4am you could pick something out of copyright and pay zip, rather than choosing something IN copyright and paying a license. (For radio play read any commercial use - if people could choose free or paid they'd go for free in many cases. E.g. if someone wanted to play an old Cliff Richard track to a public gathering and they had the choice of a free '58 song or a royalty-laden '59 song, which would they choose? As the years roll past there'd be more and more choice of useable material with nothing to pay.)
I thought of a captcha the other day which would be easy for humans and hard for PCs to solve: show three images, tick the one which is smiling or crying or angry or whatever. (Or happiest, saddest) You could mix real photos (greyscale, say) with stick drawings to really stuff up the automated systems.
Only problem is, those with screenreaders would be very much disadvantaged unless you had audio cues to go with the images.
Set up a virtual machine with the appropriate readers installed and configured. Then, save the VM with an installer & key for VMWare (Linux version, if you prefer.) In future, a Windows or Linux emulator will be able to install VMWare and then load & run the VM containing all the installed apps prepped and ready to go.
Now, the problem is indexing and searching within VMs, but at least the data will be readable.
And there's something else nobody seems to take into account with these figures: If someone steals a widget from a shop, the loss is the COST PRICE of that item, not the price they would have sold it for if it hadn't been stolen. E.g. A music CD might have a wholesale price of $5 and a retail of $10. If shoplifted, the shop has lost $5, not $10.
Now, most software includes a CD, a slender manual and a huge glossy box. Let's assume there's an application with a retail price of $799. If someone nicks a copy, what losses should the company selling the software be able to claim? The $799 or the cost of the disk + packaging + an allowance for development? If they download it the company can't even claim they lost the cost of the CD. Not only that, the $799 includes a projected cost of support and issuing patches, but if someone's pirated the app they generally won't be ringing up for support. And the patches have to be released whether you have 10 customers or 5000.
I'm not defending pirates in any way - I derive income from the sales of a software application which I designed and coded. However, I don't think these anti-piracy bods are doing themselves any favours when they claim their 'losses' are bigger than the GDP of some small nations. For example, many people with pirated copies of a certain office suite would almost certainly (99%) adapt to OpenOffice instead, should they be forced to *gasp* buy a copy of the software they've been used to pirating. Claiming every one is a loss of $300-$1050 is disingenous in the extreme.
* Disclaimer for lawsuit-happy music industry megacorps: This is an attempt at humour. In no way am I implying that I condone or facilitate the theft of your wonderful product. I fully believe everyone should be forced to buy the same damn tracks over and over again, despite the fact it's the same music supplied in a different format.
Re:There is no such thing as bad publicity
on
Utube Sues YouTube
·
· Score: 1
They ought to upgrade their webserver account and plaster Google adwords all over the first page. Probably make from from that the plastic pipes, and even if they don't the revenue would no doubt fund the server upgrade.
I can't help thinking there are thousands, nay millions, of companies worldwide who would just love to have this problem. Okay, so the traffic is mostly teens looking for vids of people hurting themselves in new and interesting ways, but traffic is traffic. Maybe sell little iPod couches made out of plastic tubes, eh?
Speaking of tabs, what's the point in having the new dropdown V on the right hand side of the tab strip? When I have nine tabs open to the same site, they all show exactly the same thing!
Please put the close tab X back where it belongs so I don't have to scan all the tabs to work out which one I should click to close the current window. It's a major step backwards, wouldn't you agree?
if (!running_on_windows)
{
print "Unsupported operating system detected.";
print "To enjoy the full php experience please visit www.microsoft.com for an upgrade."
}
I turned mine off when I discovered it was blocking the winsock control even though I'd given the application USING the winsock control full access. It also slowed down email retrieval by a factor of ten. I tested it several times, firewall on and firewall off, and proved it to my own satisfaction. So, out the window with that particular feature.
Here's another example: My motherboard has 2 integrated nics. I installed XP with one nic disabled in the bios. Later, I flashed the bios which automatically enabled both nics. Had to reactivate XP. Deactivated second nic. Later, another bios update activated both Nics. Had to reactivate XP. Swapped out my main hard drive for a bigger one. Had to reactivate XP.
By now I'm expecting to figure large on their 'asswipe pirates' list, so I bought XP Pro OEM when my previous motherboard failed. Hey, no worries in future: this MB only has 1 nic built in.
Depends where you post and who your existing friends are. If you participate in the really busy groups or forums you'll get spammed, but the spammers avoid small groups because it's a bigger effort to reach enough people.
My last power bill here in Australia shows 12.67 cents per 'unit' (I assume that's kw/h) Multiply by.75 for AUD to USD conversion and you get 9.5 US cents per kw/h. Where do I sign up for a wind turbine? And how do I stop the neighbours complaining about it?
I had a Sony colour LCD TV with a 2" screen back in 1991. My experience with that device proved that watching just about anything except talking heads was a waste of time. To make it work they need a projector with keystone correction, so you beam a 10" picture onto a desk or the wall, or a screen that can be rolled up and slid back into the device when not in use. Neither are likely with current tech, but if you guys keep buying these gadgets the manufacturers will have more money to invest in research.
So, TV on mobiles is a great idea. Go buy three of them.
I removed Windows from a server and installed Linux. It's worked just fine ever since, and the next time I have the same problem I just know the same wacky fix will do the trick.
I wouldn't claim Sinclair was big here in Australia. We moved here from the UK in Dec 1983, and it was a wasteland of Commodore 64s. Huge shock after the ubiquity in England, where every corner shop seemed to have a rack of tapes and the bigger dept stores were crammed with machines, peripherals and games.
Thanks to exchange rate/wholesale shenanigans the 48K ZX was $399 australian at the time, whereas in the UK it was selling for closer to A$200-$250.
I was in a WA Speccy club for 4-5 years, membership was static at about 60 and we had to buy our games from the selection of 5 at the Kalamunda PC shop (at 4 times the UK price) or (more likely) order direct from the UK.
Back in 1987 I sold the speccy and bought an Atari ST. Once again there was only one shop in Perth selling ST stuff (although Myers tried for a year or so too) while everyone else went Amiga crazy. When I finally bought a PC clone (P90, 16mb, Win95) I half expected everyone else to buy Apple, but for once I was on the right band wagon.
BTW, I not only have my original ZX81 I also have 10-14 assorted Sinclair machines and a stash of peripherals. Thanks, ebay;-)
Many in the UK credit the speccy with kickstarting home computing in that country, but the little box is always ignored in other round-ups of significant PCs. I don't have much nostalgia for the ST, none at all for my earlier PCs, but just looking at a speccy puts a smile on my face.
Slashdot Mirror
And also, if you were going to choose a song for radio play at 4am you could pick something out of copyright and pay zip, rather than choosing something IN copyright and paying a license. (For radio play read any commercial use - if people could choose free or paid they'd go for free in many cases. E.g. if someone wanted to play an old Cliff Richard track to a public gathering and they had the choice of a free '58 song or a royalty-laden '59 song, which would they choose? As the years roll past there'd be more and more choice of useable material with nothing to pay.)
Apparently the ants, spiders and ladybugs endured the trick just fine, but the fish didn't do so well due to lack of water.
I'm sure there's a whale joke in there somewhere...
The last games I'd play would be movie tie-ins, closely followed by anything released to cash in on a fad.
I thought of a captcha the other day which would be easy for humans and hard for PCs to solve: show three images, tick the one which is smiling or crying or angry or whatever. (Or happiest, saddest) You could mix real photos (greyscale, say) with stick drawings to really stuff up the automated systems.
Only problem is, those with screenreaders would be very much disadvantaged unless you had audio cues to go with the images.
Set up a virtual machine with the appropriate readers installed and configured. Then, save the VM with an installer & key for VMWare (Linux version, if you prefer.) In future, a Windows or Linux emulator will be able to install VMWare and then load & run the VM containing all the installed apps prepped and ready to go. Now, the problem is indexing and searching within VMs, but at least the data will be readable.
My robot could do this a year ago.
And there's something else nobody seems to take into account with these figures: If someone steals a widget from a shop, the loss is the COST PRICE of that item, not the price they would have sold it for if it hadn't been stolen. E.g. A music CD might have a wholesale price of $5 and a retail of $10. If shoplifted, the shop has lost $5, not $10.
Now, most software includes a CD, a slender manual and a huge glossy box. Let's assume there's an application with a retail price of $799. If someone nicks a copy, what losses should the company selling the software be able to claim? The $799 or the cost of the disk + packaging + an allowance for development? If they download it the company can't even claim they lost the cost of the CD. Not only that, the $799 includes a projected cost of support and issuing patches, but if someone's pirated the app they generally won't be ringing up for support. And the patches have to be released whether you have 10 customers or 5000.
I'm not defending pirates in any way - I derive income from the sales of a software application which I designed and coded. However, I don't think these anti-piracy bods are doing themselves any favours when they claim their 'losses' are bigger than the GDP of some small nations. For example, many people with pirated copies of a certain office suite would almost certainly (99%) adapt to OpenOffice instead, should they be forced to *gasp* buy a copy of the software they've been used to pirating. Claiming every one is a loss of $300-$1050 is disingenous in the extreme.
Or if anyone actually purchased music *
* Disclaimer for lawsuit-happy music industry megacorps: This is an attempt at humour. In no way am I implying that I condone or facilitate the theft of your wonderful product. I fully believe everyone should be forced to buy the same damn tracks over and over again, despite the fact it's the same music supplied in a different format.
They ought to upgrade their webserver account and plaster Google adwords all over the first page. Probably make from from that the plastic pipes, and even if they don't the revenue would no doubt fund the server upgrade.
I can't help thinking there are thousands, nay millions, of companies worldwide who would just love to have this problem. Okay, so the traffic is mostly teens looking for vids of people hurting themselves in new and interesting ways, but traffic is traffic. Maybe sell little iPod couches made out of plastic tubes, eh?
Speaking of tabs, what's the point in having the new dropdown V on the right hand side of the tab strip? When I have nine tabs open to the same site, they all show exactly the same thing!
Please put the close tab X back where it belongs so I don't have to scan all the tabs to work out which one I should click to close the current window. It's a major step backwards, wouldn't you agree?
if (!running_on_windows)
{
print "Unsupported operating system detected.";
print "To enjoy the full php experience please visit www.microsoft.com for an upgrade."
}
I turned mine off when I discovered it was blocking the winsock control even though I'd given the application USING the winsock control full access. It also slowed down email retrieval by a factor of ten. I tested it several times, firewall on and firewall off, and proved it to my own satisfaction. So, out the window with that particular feature.
Here's another example: My motherboard has 2 integrated nics. I installed XP with one nic disabled in the bios. Later, I flashed the bios which automatically enabled both nics. Had to reactivate XP. Deactivated second nic. Later, another bios update activated both Nics. Had to reactivate XP. Swapped out my main hard drive for a bigger one. Had to reactivate XP.
By now I'm expecting to figure large on their 'asswipe pirates' list, so I bought XP Pro OEM when my previous motherboard failed. Hey, no worries in future: this MB only has 1 nic built in.
like in a prison or penal colony
...
Dude, this is Australia
Depends where you post and who your existing friends are. If you participate in the really busy groups or forums you'll get spammed, but the spammers avoid small groups because it's a bigger effort to reach enough people.
My last power bill here in Australia shows 12.67 cents per 'unit' (I assume that's kw/h) Multiply by .75 for AUD to USD conversion and you get 9.5 US cents per kw/h. Where do I sign up for a wind turbine? And how do I stop the neighbours complaining about it?
Another happy noscript user here. Yes, it's a pain to whitelist new sites but on the other hand it's a whole lot better than having a compromised PC.
I had a Sony colour LCD TV with a 2" screen back in 1991. My experience with that device proved that watching just about anything except talking heads was a waste of time. To make it work they need a projector with keystone correction, so you beam a 10" picture onto a desk or the wall, or a screen that can be rolled up and slid back into the device when not in use. Neither are likely with current tech, but if you guys keep buying these gadgets the manufacturers will have more money to invest in research.
So, TV on mobiles is a great idea. Go buy three of them.
Txt and html reflow well, and if you're a Windows user you might like this prog (My own ebook reader - freeware)
Same here. I switch them on for music, gaming and DVDs. Otherwise, they're off.
... childhood obesity, couldn't they come up with a better idea than giving kids 'Sugar'?
I bought a Panasonic TV projector. I don't think it's up to the resolution you mention, but watching DVDs across the entire wall is neat.
I removed Windows from a server and installed Linux. It's worked just fine ever since, and the next time I have the same problem I just know the same wacky fix will do the trick.
And in unrelated news, bottled water at airport terminals is now selling for a low $29.99 per bottle.
I wouldn't claim Sinclair was big here in Australia. We moved here from the UK in Dec 1983, and it was a wasteland of Commodore 64s. Huge shock after the ubiquity in England, where every corner shop seemed to have a rack of tapes and the bigger dept stores were crammed with machines, peripherals and games.
;-)
Thanks to exchange rate/wholesale shenanigans the 48K ZX was $399 australian at the time, whereas in the UK it was selling for closer to A$200-$250.
I was in a WA Speccy club for 4-5 years, membership was static at about 60 and we had to buy our games from the selection of 5 at the Kalamunda PC shop (at 4 times the UK price) or (more likely) order direct from the UK.
Back in 1987 I sold the speccy and bought an Atari ST. Once again there was only one shop in Perth selling ST stuff (although Myers tried for a year or so too) while everyone else went Amiga crazy. When I finally bought a PC clone (P90, 16mb, Win95) I half expected everyone else to buy Apple, but for once I was on the right band wagon.
BTW, I not only have my original ZX81 I also have 10-14 assorted Sinclair machines and a stash of peripherals. Thanks, ebay
Many in the UK credit the speccy with kickstarting home computing in that country, but the little box is always ignored in other round-ups of significant PCs. I don't have much nostalgia for the ST, none at all for my earlier PCs, but just looking at a speccy puts a smile on my face.