Who are the "Information Technology and Whatsit Foundation"? Because it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if they're a lobby group representing Diebold.
Whenever YouTube takes someone's content down, they should let them know that they can file a counter-claim if they believe they are not infringing. They should give them a link like you did. Problem solved.
Why on Earth would they want to do a thing like that? Every claim and counter-claim costs time and hence money, you don't want to encourage people to make counter-claims.
And you certainly don't want to be piggy-in-the-middle between the RIAA/MPAA and joeuser@aol.com
There was no way they could develop a console which could beat Microsoft or Sony on sheer technical brilliance. It never made much sense to even try.
That meant that they were basically stuck with one of two things:
1. Continue to focus on the younger market with a rehashed Gamecube. 2. Broaden the horizons by looking to a target market which didn't actually happen to be that bothered about the latest FPS (exactly the same as the last one but with a slightly bigger gun).
Looks to me like option 2 was what they went for - and the judgement was spot-on.
Televisions sold in the UK have never supported cable, either analogue or digital.
The cable subscription comes with a set top box included in the price - it used to be the case that the box was analogue, these days it's digital. However, there is the option to have more than one set top box and cable run to several rooms.
But if XP license keys are anything to go by, not every license key works with every version. OEM keys don't work with non-OEM copies, some license keys don't work with some CD pressings.
What's to stop the "always good" keys being nailed to versions of Vista which only support various Far Eastern internationalisations?
Fortunate, then, that what the OP says isn't correct.
It's up to 6 years, within reason. The "reason" being "how long would the product reasonably be expected to last in normal use?"
An oil filter in your car, for example, is completely unreasonable to expect it to last 6 years and you'd be laughed out of court. A refrigerator, on the other hand...
Fortunately, most of the major white goods retailers in the UK get out of this one. Not by any means which is technically legal, but instead by enacting policies in complete contradiction to these laws. The policies would never stand up in court but 99% of customers will give up before taking it to court. Store manager won't give you a refund? Hardly surprising, they train the store managers in company policy, not consumer law.
And PC world is owned by the same people as Currys... who are a major white goods retailer. See the pattern here?
Sorry to ask, but why simply looking at images of children porn is usually seen as a problem? I'm all for sending to jail those who make such images, those who distribute them for profit, and those who pay for them, since all of these persons are directly or indirectly harming children. But just for looking? This is silly.
Because those who look at them create a demand to produce them.
There is an unwritten IT code and the vast majority of IT people I have known or ever come in contact with follow it.
Had you RTFA, you'd know that the whole problem is that the code is unwritten, and therefore everyone has a different interpretation of what is and what isn't acceptable.
Nobody in IT (at least, nobody with half a brain) will openly admit to abusing their privileges. But ask them anonymously and you may well see a different picture.
I just sent the companies customer service a department a link to this posting on Slashdot to remind them that word of mouth still means something, along with a statement that I would never buy from them. If anyone else has got two minutes to spare, do the same. If they get enough maybe it will help this guy out. What a load of crap...
This is PC world we're talking about.
For those who are not from the UK, let me elucidate.
They are owned by Dixons Stores Group (along with Currys and Currys.digital (formerly known as Dixons)) - a major UK high street retailer.
Specifically, a major UK high street retailer which until recently had a reputation for slick, smarmy salesmen, abysmal after-sales service and absurdly high prices. In the last few years they've done something about the prices - the increased popularity of buying online meant that they couldn't really continue to sell £500 worth of PC for £8-1200 - but as far as I can tell the customer service and smarmy salesmen remain. As another poster has already explained, they don't care any more about what a few nerds on/. think any more than McDonalds cares what the Michelin guide people think.
The OP is wasting his time here on/. He realistically has three options:
1. Go to the store and stand there until such time as they agree to repair his laptop - and if that takes many hours, so be it.
This option doesn't work so well these days, seeing as many stores have security guards and they'll just throw you out - in which case he'd have to write to head office. Even if he did and they then agreed to repair the laptop, there's a 99% chance that all they'll do will be to return it to the OEM for repair. 2. Return the laptop to the OEM himself, cutting out the middle man.
This is probably the quickest, cheapest, easiest way for the OP to get a non-broken laptop - even though under UK law he's perfectly entitled to return it to where it was bought from and demand a refund because if the case is cracking after just a few months it is considered probable that it was faulty from the factory. 3. Involve either Trading Standards and/or a Small Claims Court action.
This will take several months, during which time he'd be well advised not to touch the laptop for fear of prejudicing his case. The most he'd be likely to get would be a refund for the laptop and his directly incurred expenses paid - well, that pays for the laptop and filing the court documents but it doesn't do anything about the 3-6 months he spent without a laptop.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice.
If you're a Windows user who's used to PDFs being something that you have to pay good money for Adobe Acrobat to generate, and hasn't yet come across the likes of PDFCreator (which is basically a wrapper around Ghostscript and Windows' existing printing system), then yes it is a big deal.
We've got to start looking out or we will have our shiney metal asses bitten.
I know. Bloody wonderful, isn't it?
The best bit is that every time someone points out that Linux having no viruses does not make it immune from malware, they're silenced by being modded and shouted down as a traditional "file-infector" type virus cannot and does not thrive on the platform.
I'm going to pre-empt that here and now. I'm even going to shout it in the hope that it will get the point across.
THE TRADITIONAL "EXECUTABLE FILE INFECTOR"-TYPE VIRUS IS ALL BUT EXTINCT AND HAS BEEN FOR YEARS. IT HAS BEEN REPLACED WITH TROJANS AND WORMS, NEITHER OF WHICH DEPEND ON INFECTING EXECUTABLE FILES AS A TRANSMISSION VECTOR.
The problem is that everyone and their dogs are running Windows as administrators.
There is still a fair bit of software which requires you run it as an administrator. Or if it doesn't, it doesn't exactly make life easy for those who'd like to run it as a non-admin account.
There is also the Windows XP (don't know if Vista does the same thing, but I doubt it... finally) "feature" where it prompts you to create a user account at install time, explaining that this is "good practise". And then it immediately gives that account administrative privileges.
And even if those things weren't a problem, it still wouldn't prevent the user from running a program which spread in this fashion. About the only thing the program couldn't do is write to some areas of the hard disk and listen for TCP services on a port 1024. Neither of which are of particularly great concern to any malware author today, both of which could just as easily be done on Mac OS X or Linux.
Some countries in Asia where most of the computers are running pirated versions of Windows might care. On a national level, it might start to cause major productivity hits to have all the computers shut down periodically, as the pirates and Microsoft play cat-and-mouse.
I bet you anything you like Microsoft can identify which region a license key was shipped to, probably from just a few characters in it. I further bet you anything you like that there will be absolutely NO license keys from China in the "Definitely Not Genuine" list.
You have to change out the motherboard. You replace the hard disk. None of those are legitimate reasons to break your copy.
You'd better tell Microsoft this. They think the OEM version is tied to the moterboard it shipped with, and the motherboard may only be replaced with an identical model for repair rather than upgrade.
Not such a problem if you're Dell, have motherboards manufactured by the million in China and retain a stock of spares. If you're Fred's Computers, however, this is a major issue.
That will lead to a re-evaluation of the risks involved when dealing with Microsoft, as highlighted by recent issues with their WGA servers.
Unless and until Dell and HP demonstrate that there really is a viable market out there to sell Linux desktops to, the risk of doing business with Microsoft will for many OEMs be judged to be substantially smaller than the risk of not doing business with Microsoft.
In the past you bought the LP, then a few years later you bought the cassette. Then the CD, then the AAC, then whatever the next big thing is in 10 years time.
If you insisted on buying a digital personal audio player which only plays non-DRM'd music - well, I guess you're going to have to find someone who'll sell you that. Good luck if your tastes include anyone who's signed to a major record label.
It propagates by user incompetence, not by a technical flaw...
If the last 8-10 years have taught the IT industry nothing else, we should at least be well aware by now that basing your security on "user never does anything stupid" is a pretty effective way to ensure that the user's system will be emailing everyone and his dog adverts for Geniun Vigara!!!111 (sic) by the end of the day.
I daresay IBM were granted sublicensing rights at a time when Microsoft hadn't even considered that such a license as the GPL could exist, let alone be in any sort of common use. I bet you anything you like they wouldn't license code in such a way today.
I doubt they are. US intelligence may be a lot of things, but even they would be hard pressed to deny the existence of the moon and keep a straight face.
...you took OO.o as it stands now, rebranded it "Microsoft Office 2009 Preview" (just the splash screen, title bar and help text should be adequate) and showed it to someone who'd made such a complaint. Tell them that "Microsoft found people were confused by the change of interface in 2007 so they changed it back again to something which looks more like Office 2000" or other such bull.
I bet most of the complainers would announce themselves to be perfectly happy with this, and far prefer it to OpenOffice.
Slashdot Mirror
My understanding is that satellite phtography is frequently black & white, with colour filters so the CCD only picks up particular wavelengths.
Three black and white photos (covering the red, green and blue parts of the spectrum) are then merged into one colour one.
Who are the "Information Technology and Whatsit Foundation"? Because it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if they're a lobby group representing Diebold.
Whenever YouTube takes someone's content down, they should let them know that they can file a counter-claim if they believe they are not infringing. They should give them a link like you did. Problem solved.
Why on Earth would they want to do a thing like that? Every claim and counter-claim costs time and hence money, you don't want to encourage people to make counter-claims.
And you certainly don't want to be piggy-in-the-middle between the RIAA/MPAA and joeuser@aol.com
Look at it from Nintendo's point of view, though.
There was no way they could develop a console which could beat Microsoft or Sony on sheer technical brilliance. It never made much sense to even try.
That meant that they were basically stuck with one of two things:
1. Continue to focus on the younger market with a rehashed Gamecube.
2. Broaden the horizons by looking to a target market which didn't actually happen to be that bothered about the latest FPS (exactly the same as the last one but with a slightly bigger gun).
Looks to me like option 2 was what they went for - and the judgement was spot-on.
Televisions sold in the UK have never supported cable, either analogue or digital.
The cable subscription comes with a set top box included in the price - it used to be the case that the box was analogue, these days it's digital. However, there is the option to have more than one set top box and cable run to several rooms.
I know.
But if XP license keys are anything to go by, not every license key works with every version. OEM keys don't work with non-OEM copies, some license keys don't work with some CD pressings.
What's to stop the "always good" keys being nailed to versions of Vista which only support various Far Eastern internationalisations?
Fortunate, then, that what the OP says isn't correct.
It's up to 6 years, within reason. The "reason" being "how long would the product reasonably be expected to last in normal use?"
An oil filter in your car, for example, is completely unreasonable to expect it to last 6 years and you'd be laughed out of court. A refrigerator, on the other hand...
Fortunately, most of the major white goods retailers in the UK get out of this one. Not by any means which is technically legal, but instead by enacting policies in complete contradiction to these laws. The policies would never stand up in court but 99% of customers will give up before taking it to court. Store manager won't give you a refund? Hardly surprising, they train the store managers in company policy, not consumer law.
And PC world is owned by the same people as Currys... who are a major white goods retailer. See the pattern here?
Sorry to ask, but why simply looking at images of children porn is usually seen as a problem? I'm all for sending to jail those who make such images, those who distribute them for profit, and those who pay for them, since all of these persons are directly or indirectly harming children. But just for looking? This is silly.
Because those who look at them create a demand to produce them.
There is an unwritten IT code and the vast majority of IT people I have known or ever come in contact with follow it.
Had you RTFA, you'd know that the whole problem is that the code is unwritten, and therefore everyone has a different interpretation of what is and what isn't acceptable.
Nobody in IT (at least, nobody with half a brain) will openly admit to abusing their privileges. But ask them anonymously and you may well see a different picture.
I just sent the companies customer service a department a link to this posting on Slashdot to remind them that word of mouth still means something, along with a statement that I would never buy from them. If anyone else has got two minutes to spare, do the same. If they get enough maybe it will help this guy out. What a load of crap...
/. think any more than McDonalds cares what the Michelin guide people think.
/. He realistically has three options:
This is PC world we're talking about.
For those who are not from the UK, let me elucidate.
They are owned by Dixons Stores Group (along with Currys and Currys.digital (formerly known as Dixons)) - a major UK high street retailer.
Specifically, a major UK high street retailer which until recently had a reputation for slick, smarmy salesmen, abysmal after-sales service and absurdly high prices. In the last few years they've done something about the prices - the increased popularity of buying online meant that they couldn't really continue to sell £500 worth of PC for £8-1200 - but as far as I can tell the customer service and smarmy salesmen remain. As another poster has already explained, they don't care any more about what a few nerds on
The OP is wasting his time here on
1. Go to the store and stand there until such time as they agree to repair his laptop - and if that takes many hours, so be it.
This option doesn't work so well these days, seeing as many stores have security guards and they'll just throw you out - in which case he'd have to write to head office. Even if he did and they then agreed to repair the laptop, there's a 99% chance that all they'll do will be to return it to the OEM for repair.
2. Return the laptop to the OEM himself, cutting out the middle man.
This is probably the quickest, cheapest, easiest way for the OP to get a non-broken laptop - even though under UK law he's perfectly entitled to return it to where it was bought from and demand a refund because if the case is cracking after just a few months it is considered probable that it was faulty from the factory.
3. Involve either Trading Standards and/or a Small Claims Court action.
This will take several months, during which time he'd be well advised not to touch the laptop for fear of prejudicing his case. The most he'd be likely to get would be a refund for the laptop and his directly incurred expenses paid - well, that pays for the laptop and filing the court documents but it doesn't do anything about the 3-6 months he spent without a laptop.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice.
Is having a save as PDF button really a big deal?
If you're a Windows user who's used to PDFs being something that you have to pay good money for Adobe Acrobat to generate, and hasn't yet come across the likes of PDFCreator (which is basically a wrapper around Ghostscript and Windows' existing printing system), then yes it is a big deal.
Well, the reviewer is partly right. It was a problem. Circa Word '95-'97.
.doc.
But I've read GSM specs in Word 2003, and they're thousands of pages long. In fact, the format you download them in is
We've got to start looking out or we will have our shiney metal asses bitten.
I know. Bloody wonderful, isn't it?
The best bit is that every time someone points out that Linux having no viruses does not make it immune from malware, they're silenced by being modded and shouted down as a traditional "file-infector" type virus cannot and does not thrive on the platform.
I'm going to pre-empt that here and now. I'm even going to shout it in the hope that it will get the point across.
THE TRADITIONAL "EXECUTABLE FILE INFECTOR"-TYPE VIRUS IS ALL BUT EXTINCT AND HAS BEEN FOR YEARS. IT HAS BEEN REPLACED WITH TROJANS AND WORMS, NEITHER OF WHICH DEPEND ON INFECTING EXECUTABLE FILES AS A TRANSMISSION VECTOR.
The problem is that everyone and their dogs are running Windows as administrators.
There is still a fair bit of software which requires you run it as an administrator. Or if it doesn't, it doesn't exactly make life easy for those who'd like to run it as a non-admin account.
There is also the Windows XP (don't know if Vista does the same thing, but I doubt it... finally) "feature" where it prompts you to create a user account at install time, explaining that this is "good practise". And then it immediately gives that account administrative privileges.
And even if those things weren't a problem, it still wouldn't prevent the user from running a program which spread in this fashion. About the only thing the program couldn't do is write to some areas of the hard disk and listen for TCP services on a port 1024. Neither of which are of particularly great concern to any malware author today, both of which could just as easily be done on Mac OS X or Linux.
Some countries in Asia where most of the computers are running pirated versions of Windows might care. On a national level, it might start to cause major productivity hits to have all the computers shut down periodically, as the pirates and Microsoft play cat-and-mouse.
I bet you anything you like Microsoft can identify which region a license key was shipped to, probably from just a few characters in it. I further bet you anything you like that there will be absolutely NO license keys from China in the "Definitely Not Genuine" list.
WU has been around since what, Windows 98? Makes me wonder what took them so long.
Particularly since in the days of Windows '98, there really was no serious competition on the desktop.
You have to change out the motherboard. You replace the hard disk. None of those are legitimate reasons to break your copy.
You'd better tell Microsoft this. They think the OEM version is tied to the moterboard it shipped with, and the motherboard may only be replaced with an identical model for repair rather than upgrade.
Not such a problem if you're Dell, have motherboards manufactured by the million in China and retain a stock of spares. If you're Fred's Computers, however, this is a major issue.
That will lead to a re-evaluation of the risks involved when dealing with Microsoft, as highlighted by recent issues with their WGA servers.
Unless and until Dell and HP demonstrate that there really is a viable market out there to sell Linux desktops to, the risk of doing business with Microsoft will for many OEMs be judged to be substantially smaller than the risk of not doing business with Microsoft.
The same way you always have.
In the past you bought the LP, then a few years later you bought the cassette. Then the CD, then the AAC, then whatever the next big thing is in 10 years time.
If you insisted on buying a digital personal audio player which only plays non-DRM'd music - well, I guess you're going to have to find someone who'll sell you that. Good luck if your tastes include anyone who's signed to a major record label.
It propagates by user incompetence, not by a technical flaw...
If the last 8-10 years have taught the IT industry nothing else, we should at least be well aware by now that basing your security on "user never does anything stupid" is a pretty effective way to ensure that the user's system will be emailing everyone and his dog adverts for Geniun Vigara!!!111 (sic) by the end of the day.
Bear in mind that it's probably fairly old code.
I daresay IBM were granted sublicensing rights at a time when Microsoft hadn't even considered that such a license as the GPL could exist, let alone be in any sort of common use. I bet you anything you like they wouldn't license code in such a way today.
If they're referring to the moon
I doubt they are. US intelligence may be a lot of things, but even they would be hard pressed to deny the existence of the moon and keep a straight face.
Actually if you have no plan for international data AT&T charges .0195 per KB
But is that $0.0195 or 0.0195 cents?
Was that a hotel or a mobile phone bill? Roaming charges were recently the subject of an EU court case which has placed a cap on them:
s /roaming/roaming_regulation/index_en.htm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4851730.stm
http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activitie
Though I can't see it helping much if you're using a US cell phone in the EU.
What if....
...you took OO.o as it stands now, rebranded it "Microsoft Office 2009 Preview" (just the splash screen, title bar and help text should be adequate) and showed it to someone who'd made such a complaint. Tell them that "Microsoft found people were confused by the change of interface in 2007 so they changed it back again to something which looks more like Office 2000" or other such bull.
I bet most of the complainers would announce themselves to be perfectly happy with this, and far prefer it to OpenOffice.