Bitter, given it was the result of an edit before posting that I got slightly cocked up. I would go back and change my post if I could. Give me peace - it's the hangover season!
thegrassyknowl, if you're trying for +5, Funny, you need to be less subtle...
If I were trying for +5 funny I would have actually been funny. I am serious. Why do people insist on using the Internet to make large purchasses of things they know nothing about? If you want a used car, go to a car yard and talk to the salesman and drive it. Don't just expect to find it on carsales.com.au or ebay.
If you're buying a washing machine, or other appliance how can the Internet help you decide which is right for you? Sure, you can get a rough idea of price and features. Until you go to the store and see the device how can you know it's the right size, shape, contains the right bits, etc. I am a seasoned net user and even I leverage the net to its fillest. I certainly don't make purchasses of major things that require seeing/testing/driving them though. A lot of people do though!
My point is the school system is training students to do everything online. People are not interacting anymore. They google it, look on the webpage, and IM each other instead of talking to each other. It is detrimental to society.
Imagine being able to ask google "in one paragraph, summarize the most influential inventions of 2015"
And get back a list of subjective results. This is the problem. All of the results to this, and the gazillions of queries like it, are subjective. Who should decided what the most influential inventions of 2015 are?
When the day comes that we're relying on a machine to tell us what the most influential invention or whatnot is I am definitely moving to my cave!!!
Humans are already experiencing a hard time thinking for themselves. The Interdoodle has trained that out of many people. When the Interdoodle means we won't have to think anymore, how many people do you think will take the lazy option (oops, you don't think).
Some days I wonder if my memory problems might have been FROM an early introduction to the PC. When I was 4 I touched my first keyboard and quickly adjusted to using a keyboard over using a pencil (around 6 years). This is about 25 years ago. Is what I have more like the ADD that today's youths seems to all have, and do they have ADD because of the early introduction to knowledge overload? Do short attention spans possibly come from our 60-75hz gods?
I find that the younger generation can't ADD (with the + sign) unless they have a computer or calculator handy. Ask them to add two wierd numbers (127 and 67, for example) and see how long it takes to get an answer without letting them use a calculator or their computer (hint, you'll be waiting until the devil skates to work).
I got my first computer at about 3 or 4 as well; a C64. I went through school at the time when using a computer in school was considered a treat. In primary school it was less than an hour a week at school (except for the special class I did once a week which was an hour of extra-curricular programming activities that was organised by the school for a few of us with exceptional computing skills).
In high school it was only a couple of hours a week in school that we were allowed to use the computers. Basic typing and computer skills were all that were taught (boooooorrrrring to someone who had advanced C knowledge by the time they were 13). There was also diversity in the platform, with some DOS PCs, some Windows PCs and some BBC micros (my fav game ever was on the BBC but i can't remember the damned name of it), Microbees, Commodore 64s, etc. These days it's all Windows PCs everywhere so the students aren't even learning how to think about what they're doing; they're just learning "click here, drag there".
I think that in the current generation memory problems and total lack of basic skills like handwriting and mathematics are lacking. It's all to do with the gotta-be-online nature of the world these days.
With a generation growing up expecting everything on the Internet
The Internet has ruined the world. Sure, it has the potential to bring GREAT things, and some great things have arisen from the use of the Internet (Google, Slashdot, cheap phone calls, rapid sharing of files and other information,etc).
The problem is that everyone has come to expect that it is some fundamental human right and requirement to be connected to the Internet. This means every man and his dog is out there putting their views on webpages, spouting off their views in forums (hey, i'm guilty of it... I'm here), giving incorrect advice on message boards, etc.
This information never goes away. It's not like a phone conversation or a book, where it will likely be destroyed. Search engines archive it, the wayback machine archives it, people archive it. There is not too much information, there is too much hot air on the Internet. It's getting hard to find things through all the advertising, the porn, the wank from people without a clue and the general junk.
I've been with the Interdoodle since the early 90s. That was really a good time. The Spam problem wasn't so much an issue - it was really just winding up. Search engines rapidly found what you wanted (as long as the search couldn't remotely be linked to porn) and there were generally less idiots on there because the Internet was mostly only available to university staff and large companies back then. The idea of personal Internet was still largely unheard of.
Now, with the widespread adoption of the Internet in schools, coffee shops, shopping malls, universities, businesses, etc, people are accustomed to always being connected. This means they can always "google it". I find that a lot of the problem is that kids are learning the search engine in school, and not the library. They are learning the word processor instead of the pen. They are learning the instant messenger instead of the postal service. They have come to expect to be able to find it online and they have come to trust any page that says what they want it to say without any verification at all.
This really is a case of Internet laziness rather than good old-fashioned people getting smarter. The Internet is probably stifling productivity and innovation becase people are spending too long looking to it for answers to even simple questions.
The solution lies in taking the Internet out of schools and encouraging students to go to the library and use resources like... $DIETY help us... books, teachers, peers, used car salesmen, etc. There are a lot of places people could look instead of the Internet.
You've probably never heard of Rates Technology Inc. (RTI), and that wouldn't be surprising since the company has no products and offers no services. By all appearances, RTI is a company that was set up to collect licensing fees and pursue settlements related to the company's patent portfolio.
I personally think this should be illegal. These companies are preventing innovation becase they don't even have any real patents. There's a bunch of bullshit patents built on flimsy pretexes and containing mostly prior art.
Then they go around litigating to make their money. It's really tantamount to extortion/blackmail. They are trying to scare companies into paying them.
The companies that do innovate get dragged through the courts, which is a costly exercise (Microsoft and Google can really afford it). The smaller companies just say "fuck it" because they know they can't afford to be dragged through the legal system over something so pathetic. How can a system that was designed to encourage innovation and the free sharing of information be so perverse that it is now used to discourage innovation and extort money?
Of course, in the mean time the court system is tied up with companies defending against these bullshit claims. This costs Joe Taxpayer, when the money spent on the court could be better spent providing better health and education.
I say that if you own a patent and are not leveraging its claims in a product or service that you ACTUALLY SELL AS PART OF YOUR CORE BUSINESS OPRATION then your claim to enforce the patent should be invalid; that would stop pricks like these cunts from doing this shit.
You should look at expensive, custom data logging equipment for aquiring the information you need. When you have that you can shield it properly. The manufacturer's specs will show the sensitivity/noise/etc and you can select one that can actually record your signals with reasonable resolution.
Don't run a PC anywhere near it if it's as sensitive as you say. PC's generate a lot of noise and they'll interfere with practically any sensitive measurements... take for example your TV. The TV isn't particularly sensitive but your PC can create noise on some of the channels.
Just hook the data logger up to a PC after the experiment is complete.
Did this guy just watch "Independence Day" or something?
I think he just watched "Contact" where the wankers decided that an extra-terrestrial signal that could be heard by the whole world, nay the whole universe, could comprimise US national security....
Weren't you all taught in school that the US is so big that the whole universe fits inside of it and falls under their control?
If you are from a "large university", how come you can find any big app log files right on campas? Most "large universities" have plenty of "n-tier web-applications". Me thinks your request smells bad.
At my university the response would be a big fat NO!. I have asked the admins for some software that I desparately needed to do my research work efficiently (OSS) and they just said "no that's a security risk". I fail to see how some basic image procesing software is a security risk, but they have it in their head it is.
University admins tend to run much bigger systems that do a lot more. I can see why they would say a big-fat-no to your request and why a smaller local company would be a better place to ask.
Cubicles are not necessarily evil, they are however, a fact of corporate life.
Cubicles present no significant cost gain over giving everyone a small office with a door. That material they use to make cubes is expensive. In fact, this has been done on Slashdot before and many link were posted to different office design styles. The general consensus was that technical types (IT, engineers, etc) like to be able to isolate themselves from the world for periods of time so they can focus entirely on a task.
Cubes don't give you that. I am continually distracted by the goings-on in the next cube. If two or three people are there looking at a demonstration or trying to find a bug then it's very noisy and I find myself having to wind up the volume on my closed-back headphones to unsafe levels.
Should I remind anyone what happens when people in your office are testing audio equipment or a product that talks over a 56k modem in an open plan environment? All I hear all day is that noisy screech of modems (we have hundreds of them scattered around the place) and "test, 1, 2, test" through the other audio equipment that people are testing.
It has been studied to death and decided that if you put technical people in an office with a door they will be more productive. I think this more than offsets all the other reasons for having cubes, and the exotic measures that you have to go through to protect people's privacy when they are in cubes (lockable drawers, filing cabinets, secured rooms for storage of documents, etc).
Cubes are put in place by management who want some level of separation between the "elite" and the rest of us. Management justify it by saying "we want to foster an interractive and friendly work environment to encourage productivity" but they have never had to work in cubes, and dont understand the loss of productivity that will occur when everyone is there.
in my experience you generally do not sign any such contract when you get x-rays or other tests as an outpatient.
I had some medical images taken recently and they made me sign quite a long disclaimer, etc and it was just a simple ultrasound. The lab retained copyrights to the images (according to the piece of paper I signed), but I have the original prints that were made. They retain a digital copy and can reproduce them at any time if I need them.
It really is a matter of asking. AFIK they aren't allowed to charge you to view your own medical images and must hand them over to any licensed physician that you authorise to view them.
Sure beats pleading with the lab to see the results that you PAID for.
Sure beats it, but the lab took the photo, they own the copyright. It's just like getting professional photos (or being inadvertently photographed by someone in the street). They own the copyright on the artwork. They can make money selling you copies and restricting your right to make copies, and damn it they will do that...
I am not sure how other email clients aside from Evolution operate with exchange servers, but Evolution makes people happy and is a decent package.
Evolution is OK, but it uses the OWA package of Exchange. As I said, the web access component hides (or makes complex) a lot of the features that make Exchange/Outlook worth even using.
IF YOU DON'T USE THE BEST TOOLS YOU CAN GET, YOU ARE A MORON! Outlook/Exchange happens to be the best tool right now.
I must be a MORON!!! I use OpenBSD and Linux exclusively and I can't use Outlook/Exchange. I'm not prepared to run my Internet-facing mail server on Exchange (you need mail abilities to use the calendar to its full potential). Putting a M$ product on the greater Internet says more about how moronic you are than not using the best tool for the job.
There are dozens of great tools for simple calendaring. Did you look at Hoarde (http://www.hoarde.org? I bet you didn't. Hoarde have a whole suite of PHP-based groupware applications from Webmail to calendaring to practically anything else you can think of.
Why would you want a bloated, arbitrarily limited, buggy Exchange program running on a fundamentally flawed OS when you can have a PHP-based application running in any webserver you can make PHP work in (usually Apache, but others exist) on any OS that can run the webserver (OpenBSD is my choice for server OS, Linux might float your boat). Sure, there's no client-side application and it's all web based, but the Outlook program leaves a lot to be desired anyway. If it wasn't mandated here by some manager to use Outlook I'd be using a real client without even thinking about it.
Think twice before you start calling people morons. OSS might not be the answer to everything, but if you're using other OSS tools the suggesting that a MS tool is the way to go is just being stupid. How do you propose that I get Outlook clients running in a Linux-only shop? The web client for Exchange hides most of the functions that make the groupware in Exchange so "great".
Yes, but I work on the model of one breath per second for an average of 80 years -> 2,524,608,000 breaths -> $63,115,200 over your useful lifespan.
You can pay the lot in one lump sum, or enter into my length-based monthly payment plan (to ensure that you never pay for breaths you don't take). The monthly plan carries extra administrative load, so I charge $10,000/mo for the service.
Where you can patent something obvious, and then prevent someone else from doing that obvious thing.
You are infringing on my patent:
My idea is the generic method of using a muscular diaphragm to apply force to a bag made of human tissue in order to draw air into and expel air from the bag for the purpose of respiration!
That got me thinking, as a devout athiest, I don't want my son dragged into some waste of time religion, preying to a god that doesn't exist, asking him to solve problems that he's too lazy to go out and solve himself.
Why doesn't somebody pass a law requiring them to shrink wrap and label everything with religious themes as containing such before distribution (think of all those shrink wrapped copies of the bible and that crap the JWs hand out on weekends as well as more than half the Hollywood movies and american TV shows where they are always thanking for for their salvation).
Why doesn't somebody protect children from being taken to church and brainwashed from the day they are born? Because it's "moral and decent to go to church" they'll all say. Anywho, this post doesn't mean much but I felt that I had to say it and get it off my chest!!!
What is so wrong with this? Every time you go to buy/hire/see a movie you fall under the same or similar classification scheme. Nobody has complained about it and it's worked reasonably well as a guide for as many years as I can remember. Movies with extreme graphic violence, sex, drug taking or a myriad of other things deemed unsuitable for immature audiences are rated M15+ or R18+ and kids aren't allowed to see them.
How is it a breach of First Amendment rights to free speech and unconstitutional? The recent banning of GTA San Andreas was a breach of those rights (even though it was subsequently allowed to be re-released with a warning on the box). That was about silencing the producer of the game because some fucking twat didn't like what it contained.
This labelling scheme is about giving the consumer information so they can make a choice, not banning the producer from having their say.
Again, this just gives parents a choice over what they let their kids play. It stops the kids going out and buying games that, like most porn (they're not allowed to go and buy porn), they probably shouldn't be allowed to play. There's nothing stopping the parents going out and getting the game for the kid and letting them play it. This way at least the parents have some control and knowledge of what their kids are playing.
It sounds like a CODEC problem to me, since both players are having that problem. I would guess that even if he installs another media player, he'll have the same problem.
It sounds like a Spyware problem to me. Real and Windows Media Player all talk back to their creator every time you play a file. You can turn it off, but tcpdump on my router shows otherwise. They can get fscked for all I care. I don't particularly want M$ or Real knowing my viewing habbits.
This has nothing to do with a broken light switch and living in a cave. Real and windows media player are the worst two players in existance. I think this is more about coming out of a cave and finally finding a program that can play many more media types and can handle partial (still downloading) and corrupted (bit rot on my CDRs) files with style and grace. I know Windows Media Player takes out the OS when you give it a file with some errors and ask it to play full screen. At least mplayer just detects the errors and exits gracefully!
Do you also want to pay 10 times more for it and have less features (because it takes more programmer time to write it)? how about have to wait much longer and pay much more for upgrades (software is less maintainable when it is optimized for execution speed and not for readability and clarity)
Yet another Windows user... I'll pay more for quality software, but in the end I suggest that better written software would cost more because there would be less maintainence and support required.
I also said that I think features are full of wank to get idiots to actually pay for software. It's often the case that one of the "features" that is exploited to get you to pay for the software is a half-assed after thought that doesn't even do what they claim it does. In any case, having a million features means you have to pay someone to write every one of them and most of the time the program becomes so complex that users only use the most basic subset of functionality because it's quicker to do things the old-fashioned way than to spend the time working out where all of the options to do things are actually located or how they work!
And properly optimised software is no less readable/maintainable than non-optimised software. Non optimised software is usually poorly written from the outset and with little planning. I find that the places that have bottle necks in the code I work on are usually the ones that are the hardest to figure out because the programmer has done something incredibly complex or not bothered to do the analysis to figure out the limits of their algorithm coverage and I have to do all that work to fix the bottleneck and also understand the code I am trying to fix.
Slashdot Mirror
How does that foot taste?
Bitter, given it was the result of an edit before posting that I got slightly cocked up. I would go back and change my post if I could. Give me peace - it's the hangover season!
thegrassyknowl, if you're trying for +5, Funny, you need to be less subtle ...
If I were trying for +5 funny I would have actually been funny. I am serious. Why do people insist on using the Internet to make large purchasses of things they know nothing about? If you want a used car, go to a car yard and talk to the salesman and drive it. Don't just expect to find it on carsales.com.au or ebay.
If you're buying a washing machine, or other appliance how can the Internet help you decide which is right for you? Sure, you can get a rough idea of price and features. Until you go to the store and see the device how can you know it's the right size, shape, contains the right bits, etc. I am a seasoned net user and even I leverage the net to its fillest. I certainly don't make purchasses of major things that require seeing/testing/driving them though. A lot of people do though!
My point is the school system is training students to do everything online. People are not interacting anymore. They google it, look on the webpage, and IM each other instead of talking to each other. It is detrimental to society.
Imagine being able to ask google "in one paragraph, summarize the most influential inventions of 2015"
And get back a list of subjective results. This is the problem. All of the results to this, and the gazillions of queries like it, are subjective. Who should decided what the most influential inventions of 2015 are?
When the day comes that we're relying on a machine to tell us what the most influential invention or whatnot is I am definitely moving to my cave!!!
Humans are already experiencing a hard time thinking for themselves. The Interdoodle has trained that out of many people. When the Interdoodle means we won't have to think anymore, how many people do you think will take the lazy option (oops, you don't think).
Some days I wonder if my memory problems might have been FROM an early introduction to the PC. When I was 4 I touched my first keyboard and quickly adjusted to using a keyboard over using a pencil (around 6 years). This is about 25 years ago. Is what I have more like the ADD that today's youths seems to all have, and do they have ADD because of the early introduction to knowledge overload? Do short attention spans possibly come from our 60-75hz gods?
I find that the younger generation can't ADD (with the + sign) unless they have a computer or calculator handy. Ask them to add two wierd numbers (127 and 67, for example) and see how long it takes to get an answer without letting them use a calculator or their computer (hint, you'll be waiting until the devil skates to work).
I got my first computer at about 3 or 4 as well; a C64. I went through school at the time when using a computer in school was considered a treat. In primary school it was less than an hour a week at school (except for the special class I did once a week which was an hour of extra-curricular programming activities that was organised by the school for a few of us with exceptional computing skills).
In high school it was only a couple of hours a week in school that we were allowed to use the computers. Basic typing and computer skills were all that were taught (boooooorrrrring to someone who had advanced C knowledge by the time they were 13). There was also diversity in the platform, with some DOS PCs, some Windows PCs and some BBC micros (my fav game ever was on the BBC but i can't remember the damned name of it), Microbees, Commodore 64s, etc. These days it's all Windows PCs everywhere so the students aren't even learning how to think about what they're doing; they're just learning "click here, drag there".
I think that in the current generation memory problems and total lack of basic skills like handwriting and mathematics are lacking. It's all to do with the gotta-be-online nature of the world these days.
With a generation growing up expecting everything on the Internet
The Internet has ruined the world. Sure, it has the potential to bring GREAT things, and some great things have arisen from the use of the Internet (Google, Slashdot, cheap phone calls, rapid sharing of files and other information,etc).
The problem is that everyone has come to expect that it is some fundamental human right and requirement to be connected to the Internet. This means every man and his dog is out there putting their views on webpages, spouting off their views in forums (hey, i'm guilty of it... I'm here), giving incorrect advice on message boards, etc.
This information never goes away. It's not like a phone conversation or a book, where it will likely be destroyed. Search engines archive it, the wayback machine archives it, people archive it. There is not too much information, there is too much hot air on the Internet. It's getting hard to find things through all the advertising, the porn, the wank from people without a clue and the general junk.
I've been with the Interdoodle since the early 90s. That was really a good time. The Spam problem wasn't so much an issue - it was really just winding up. Search engines rapidly found what you wanted (as long as the search couldn't remotely be linked to porn) and there were generally less idiots on there because the Internet was mostly only available to university staff and large companies back then. The idea of personal Internet was still largely unheard of.
Now, with the widespread adoption of the Internet in schools, coffee shops, shopping malls, universities, businesses, etc, people are accustomed to always being connected. This means they can always "google it". I find that a lot of the problem is that kids are learning the search engine in school, and not the library. They are learning the word processor instead of the pen. They are learning the instant messenger instead of the postal service. They have come to expect to be able to find it online and they have come to trust any page that says what they want it to say without any verification at all.
This really is a case of Internet laziness rather than good old-fashioned people getting smarter. The Internet is probably stifling productivity and innovation becase people are spending too long looking to it for answers to even simple questions.
The solution lies in taking the Internet out of schools and encouraging students to go to the library and use resources like... $DIETY help us... books, teachers, peers, used car salesmen, etc. There are a lot of places people could look instead of the Internet.
You've probably never heard of Rates Technology Inc. (RTI), and that wouldn't be surprising since the company has no products and offers no services. By all appearances, RTI is a company that was set up to collect licensing fees and pursue settlements related to the company's patent portfolio.
I personally think this should be illegal. These companies are preventing innovation becase they don't even have any real patents. There's a bunch of bullshit patents built on flimsy pretexes and containing mostly prior art.
Then they go around litigating to make their money. It's really tantamount to extortion/blackmail. They are trying to scare companies into paying them.
The companies that do innovate get dragged through the courts, which is a costly exercise (Microsoft and Google can really afford it). The smaller companies just say "fuck it" because they know they can't afford to be dragged through the legal system over something so pathetic. How can a system that was designed to encourage innovation and the free sharing of information be so perverse that it is now used to discourage innovation and extort money?
Of course, in the mean time the court system is tied up with companies defending against these bullshit claims. This costs Joe Taxpayer, when the money spent on the court could be better spent providing better health and education.
I say that if you own a patent and are not leveraging its claims in a product or service that you ACTUALLY SELL AS PART OF YOUR CORE BUSINESS OPRATION then your claim to enforce the patent should be invalid; that would stop pricks like these cunts from doing this shit.
You should look at expensive, custom data logging equipment for aquiring the information you need. When you have that you can shield it properly. The manufacturer's specs will show the sensitivity/noise/etc and you can select one that can actually record your signals with reasonable resolution.
Don't run a PC anywhere near it if it's as sensitive as you say. PC's generate a lot of noise and they'll interfere with practically any sensitive measurements... take for example your TV. The TV isn't particularly sensitive but your PC can create noise on some of the channels.
Just hook the data logger up to a PC after the experiment is complete.
Did this guy just watch "Independence Day" or something?
I think he just watched "Contact" where the wankers decided that an extra-terrestrial signal that could be heard by the whole world, nay the whole universe, could comprimise US national security....
Weren't you all taught in school that the US is so big that the whole universe fits inside of it and falls under their control?
If you are from a "large university", how come you can find any big app log files right on campas? Most "large universities" have plenty of "n-tier web-applications". Me thinks your request smells bad.
At my university the response would be a big fat NO!. I have asked the admins for some software that I desparately needed to do my research work efficiently (OSS) and they just said "no that's a security risk". I fail to see how some basic image procesing software is a security risk, but they have it in their head it is.
University admins tend to run much bigger systems that do a lot more. I can see why they would say a big-fat-no to your request and why a smaller local company would be a better place to ask.
Cubicles are not necessarily evil, they are however, a fact of corporate life.
Cubicles present no significant cost gain over giving everyone a small office with a door. That material they use to make cubes is expensive. In fact, this has been done on Slashdot before and many link were posted to different office design styles. The general consensus was that technical types (IT, engineers, etc) like to be able to isolate themselves from the world for periods of time so they can focus entirely on a task.
Cubes don't give you that. I am continually distracted by the goings-on in the next cube. If two or three people are there looking at a demonstration or trying to find a bug then it's very noisy and I find myself having to wind up the volume on my closed-back headphones to unsafe levels.
Should I remind anyone what happens when people in your office are testing audio equipment or a product that talks over a 56k modem in an open plan environment? All I hear all day is that noisy screech of modems (we have hundreds of them scattered around the place) and "test, 1, 2, test" through the other audio equipment that people are testing.
It has been studied to death and decided that if you put technical people in an office with a door they will be more productive. I think this more than offsets all the other reasons for having cubes, and the exotic measures that you have to go through to protect people's privacy when they are in cubes (lockable drawers, filing cabinets, secured rooms for storage of documents, etc).
Cubes are put in place by management who want some level of separation between the "elite" and the rest of us. Management justify it by saying "we want to foster an interractive and friendly work environment to encourage productivity" but they have never had to work in cubes, and dont understand the loss of productivity that will occur when everyone is there.
in my experience you generally do not sign any such contract when you get x-rays or other tests as an outpatient.
I had some medical images taken recently and they made me sign quite a long disclaimer, etc and it was just a simple ultrasound. The lab retained copyrights to the images (according to the piece of paper I signed), but I have the original prints that were made. They retain a digital copy and can reproduce them at any time if I need them.
It really is a matter of asking. AFIK they aren't allowed to charge you to view your own medical images and must hand them over to any licensed physician that you authorise to view them.
Sure beats pleading with the lab to see the results that you PAID for.
Sure beats it, but the lab took the photo, they own the copyright. It's just like getting professional photos (or being inadvertently photographed by someone in the street). They own the copyright on the artwork. They can make money selling you copies and restricting your right to make copies, and damn it they will do that...
I promise you, I have no spyware on my system.
So you don't have Windows installed then?
I am not sure how other email clients aside from Evolution operate with exchange servers, but Evolution makes people happy and is a decent package.
Evolution is OK, but it uses the OWA package of Exchange. As I said, the web access component hides (or makes complex) a lot of the features that make Exchange/Outlook worth even using.
IF YOU DON'T USE THE BEST TOOLS YOU CAN GET, YOU ARE A MORON! Outlook/Exchange happens to be the best tool right now.
I must be a MORON!!! I use OpenBSD and Linux exclusively and I can't use Outlook/Exchange. I'm not prepared to run my Internet-facing mail server on Exchange (you need mail abilities to use the calendar to its full potential). Putting a M$ product on the greater Internet says more about how moronic you are than not using the best tool for the job.
There are dozens of great tools for simple calendaring. Did you look at Hoarde (http://www.hoarde.org? I bet you didn't. Hoarde have a whole suite of PHP-based groupware applications from Webmail to calendaring to practically anything else you can think of.
Why would you want a bloated, arbitrarily limited, buggy Exchange program running on a fundamentally flawed OS when you can have a PHP-based application running in any webserver you can make PHP work in (usually Apache, but others exist) on any OS that can run the webserver (OpenBSD is my choice for server OS, Linux might float your boat). Sure, there's no client-side application and it's all web based, but the Outlook program leaves a lot to be desired anyway. If it wasn't mandated here by some manager to use Outlook I'd be using a real client without even thinking about it.
Think twice before you start calling people morons. OSS might not be the answer to everything, but if you're using other OSS tools the suggesting that a MS tool is the way to go is just being stupid. How do you propose that I get Outlook clients running in a Linux-only shop? The web client for Exchange hides most of the functions that make the groupware in Exchange so "great".
Although there is a reversal of subject and object, I think your typo 'preying' is rather appropriate. Freudian slip...:)
'twas just a typo. I didn't even notice it when I proof-read it. Thanks for pointing it out :) It was an apt typo though..
Wow. That's cheap. The RIAA wanted $10,000
Yes, but I work on the model of one breath per second for an average of 80 years -> 2,524,608,000 breaths -> $63,115,200 over your useful lifespan.
You can pay the lot in one lump sum, or enter into my length-based monthly payment plan (to ensure that you never pay for breaths you don't take). The monthly plan carries extra administrative load, so I charge $10,000/mo for the service.
IIRC, It was banned in Australia not so long ago. I still haven't seen it on store shelves.
Where you can patent something obvious, and then prevent someone else from doing that obvious thing.
You are infringing on my patent:
My idea is the generic method of using a muscular diaphragm to apply force to a bag made of human tissue in order to draw air into and expel air from the bag for the purpose of respiration!
Please pay me $0.025 for every breath you take.
kids renting Christian video games
That got me thinking, as a devout athiest, I don't want my son dragged into some waste of time religion, preying to a god that doesn't exist, asking him to solve problems that he's too lazy to go out and solve himself.
Why doesn't somebody pass a law requiring them to shrink wrap and label everything with religious themes as containing such before distribution (think of all those shrink wrapped copies of the bible and that crap the JWs hand out on weekends as well as more than half the Hollywood movies and american TV shows where they are always thanking for for their salvation).
Why doesn't somebody protect children from being taken to church and brainwashed from the day they are born? Because it's "moral and decent to go to church" they'll all say. Anywho, this post doesn't mean much but I felt that I had to say it and get it off my chest!!!
What is so wrong with this? Every time you go to buy/hire/see a movie you fall under the same or similar classification scheme. Nobody has complained about it and it's worked reasonably well as a guide for as many years as I can remember. Movies with extreme graphic violence, sex, drug taking or a myriad of other things deemed unsuitable for immature audiences are rated M15+ or R18+ and kids aren't allowed to see them.
How is it a breach of First Amendment rights to free speech and unconstitutional? The recent banning of GTA San Andreas was a breach of those rights (even though it was subsequently allowed to be re-released with a warning on the box). That was about silencing the producer of the game because some fucking twat didn't like what it contained.
This labelling scheme is about giving the consumer information so they can make a choice, not banning the producer from having their say.
Again, this just gives parents a choice over what they let their kids play. It stops the kids going out and buying games that, like most porn (they're not allowed to go and buy porn), they probably shouldn't be allowed to play. There's nothing stopping the parents going out and getting the game for the kid and letting them play it. This way at least the parents have some control and knowledge of what their kids are playing.
you watch too much pr0n...
I watched Will and Grace one time and now M$ thinks I'm gay!
It sounds like a CODEC problem to me, since both players are having that problem. I would guess that even if he installs another media player, he'll have the same problem.
It sounds like a Spyware problem to me. Real and Windows Media Player all talk back to their creator every time you play a file. You can turn it off, but tcpdump on my router shows otherwise. They can get fscked for all I care. I don't particularly want M$ or Real knowing my viewing habbits.
This has nothing to do with a broken light switch and living in a cave. Real and windows media player are the worst two players in existance. I think this is more about coming out of a cave and finally finding a program that can play many more media types and can handle partial (still downloading) and corrupted (bit rot on my CDRs) files with style and grace. I know Windows Media Player takes out the OS when you give it a file with some errors and ask it to play full screen. At least mplayer just detects the errors and exits gracefully!
Unless you're underclocking, your C-64's 6510 runs at about 1 MHz.
Only in the USA and other NTSC countries. To get 25 FPS instead of 30 they dropped the main oscillator speed!
Do you also want to pay 10 times more for it and have less features (because it takes more programmer time to write it)? how about have to wait much longer and pay much more for upgrades (software is less maintainable when it is optimized for execution speed and not for readability and clarity)
Yet another Windows user... I'll pay more for quality software, but in the end I suggest that better written software would cost more because there would be less maintainence and support required.
I also said that I think features are full of wank to get idiots to actually pay for software. It's often the case that one of the "features" that is exploited to get you to pay for the software is a half-assed after thought that doesn't even do what they claim it does. In any case, having a million features means you have to pay someone to write every one of them and most of the time the program becomes so complex that users only use the most basic subset of functionality because it's quicker to do things the old-fashioned way than to spend the time working out where all of the options to do things are actually located or how they work!
And properly optimised software is no less readable/maintainable than non-optimised software. Non optimised software is usually poorly written from the outset and with little planning. I find that the places that have bottle necks in the code I work on are usually the ones that are the hardest to figure out because the programmer has done something incredibly complex or not bothered to do the analysis to figure out the limits of their algorithm coverage and I have to do all that work to fix the bottleneck and also understand the code I am trying to fix.