There's this nifty feature in Slashdot known as a 'search'. Not all sites have it, because it often takes a bit of work on the backend to produce useful output. However, progressive sites with excellent editing have this great feature. You can check it out at the link below:
You're a power user; that's why the editorial made the distinction. I have two close friends who use Gmail and refuse to entertain the idea of checking it using POP with an app like Thunderbird. They love the webmail interface and don't seem to mind setting it as their homepage to facilitate easy checking. Offline browsing used to be a necessity when you paid hourly for internet access, but so many people consider their internet connection a permanent fixture and don't worry about the negatives of downtime or a possible catastrophic host failure that deletes all their archives. Besides, with all the spyware worries and people's distrust of their own computer, non-power users are probably more likely to trust Google or Yahoo with their email data anyway.
In most cases, I've had a pretty difficult time explaining the POP paradigm to less tech-savvy folks anyway. Before I manage to fix things, they don't understand why their friends are getting bounced emails about "full accounts" when their local inbox in OE is empty. Gmail and other webmail services remove that confusion and additionally provide the feature that the email-checking experience is roughly identical on any machine they use to check their mail. Non-power users simply don't consider it worth the effort to use a local mail reader.
Microsoft's business model is failing, and rather than wasting precious time figuring out what new things it can do, it needs to quickly copy other successful businesses, and preferably kill them off (as usual) by leveraging its monopoly.
I think you're contradicting yourself in that one sentence. Copying other businesses and leveraging its monopoly is their business model. MS really hasn't come up with anything significant on their own; their success comes from seeing the potential in other people's/companies' work, making it slightly different, and marketing the crap out of it until they own the market. On the other hand, you're seeing how Google is acting the exact same way but with a new speed, as well as a sort of Apple-customer loyalty that MS has never enjoyed, which allows them to get away with barely marketing anything at all. Google is constantly developing novel ideas, often through buyouts, and I'd say they're beating MS in their own game by being more agile. MS is the new IBM, the monolith that can't move quickly enough, and Google is the new MS, darting around under their feet stealing all the new employees and ideas.
Where? I'm making the argument that a center-mounted trackball is out of the way of your hands, and that an off-center trackball would get in the way. What is your argument?
The center-mounted trackball (or trackpad on most modern laptops) doesn't just allow for ambidexterity, but that also puts it out of the way of the hands when typing. Yes, I agree that an off-center trackball/pad would be easier to use when moving the mouse, but when you start typing it's going to get in the way quickly. As far as I'm concerned, these days, it's just for emergencies anyway. If you're sitting for more than 10 minutes and have a flat surface, it pays to break out the USB mouse.
Since there's a danger that some people will prefer this method to the one I posted (grandparent), I have to say that this isn't at all the same thing. "AutoPlay", as it appears in the parent's options, refers to the feature of XP that allows you to choose a program to run when a media is inserted that contains certain types of files (things like Photoshop for photos, Winamp for music, etc). This is not related to the automatic execution of code that is included on the disc itself, which is not disabled if you simply perform the parent's instructions. It also is referred to sometimes as "AutoPlay", or "AutoRun". Either follow my directions to disable autorun/autoplay (the terms are not consistently used) using TweakUI, or the manual registry method, or the GPEDIT.MSC methods mentioned in sibling posts.
Since it seems the "shift" key trick is in the news again, I'd like to point out the permanent "shift key" that already works on the computers of countless geeks. :
In the XP version*, look through the tree list on the left and go to My Computer, AutoPlay, Types.
On the right, uncheck "Enable Autoplay for CD and DVD drives"
Click OK and reboot (just for kicks)
Sure, it's karma whoring, but I get tired of the "shift key" advice when so many of us have moved on. Never worry about evil code on a CD again! If you're particularly paranoid, feel free to deselect the other checkbox as well.
* if you're using the older version, you'll have to do some searching. I have no reference for it.
"Alternative OSes exist; alternative sources of media/content exist; and alternative hardware exists -- when consumers start voting (in droves) with their cash, the current industry "leaders" will likely be caught by surprise. I suspect that those most surprised will not survive."
Unfortunately, "alternative hardware" in the high-end VGA world only barely exists, and not with any serious contention. There are really only two players, and the older parties that used to be alternatives (such as Matrox and Voodoo) have either been destroyed or have been relegated to niche positions. There's also the self-sustaining cycle of Linux's (or insert other OSS OS here) reputation (true or not) as a poor desktop OS, supported significantly by the very driver issues you bring up, which hurt gaming the most. ATI and nVidia probably see Linux as a server OS (which needs only a very simple VGA card, if at all), or a niche desktop OS, which is supported by the fact that people don't seem to play games on them as much. Thus, the cycle is apparent.
As things are now, the open-source driver community manages to provide limited support for most 3D cards after a little while on the market, effectively beating or at least matching the latest hardware from outside the nVidia/ATI camp. Thus, no one really has any incentive to make purchases from any other company, other than philosophical ideals. I don't really see an opportunity for OSS consumers to make a big dent in the current duopoly; it's like voting for a 3rd party in American presidential politics: "Go ahead, throw away your vote".
As the owner of two older AiW cards, I stopped buying AiWs because it just doesn't make fiscal sense to consistently upgrade your TV tuner with your VGA card. The tuner features improve more slowly than gaming cards, and most of the study in this article covers the card's in-game performance, with TV tuning and its quality mentioned as a side note. Personally, I'd rather go with a cutting-edge gaming card for VGA, and a separate tuner for TV, since I won't be forced to part with either if I decide to upgrade the other. Additionally, the tuner chipsets in the AiW often have little 3rd-party support in the drivers, forcing users to use one piece of software to handle TV (ATI's Multimedia Center), often with little support in Linux (I know that MythTV dislikes most of the older AiWs, and I doubt this one will change that). Do yourself a favor and buy a TV Wonder instead (or, of course, a non-ATI product!).
I don't know about you, but I could care less about what the majority of people want to read. I want to read what *I* want to read, and the best way to do that is to find a site that is moderated in a way that matches your interests.
(I think you mean you "couldn't" care less...)
This, though, is what Slashdot could be with some simple training of the editors: a collection of well-chosen articles that is consistently based on a particular range of topics, with well-written summaries. I genuinely don't understand why the editing at/. hasn't improved in the many years of complaints about dupes and bad grammar. Slashdot has gotten into the bad habit of posting "italicized quotations" for the summaries, which specifically prevents the editors from modifying those summaries and doing exactly what the job description entails: editing. Instead of posting rote copy, the editors should be converting the summaries to paraphrased copy with proper grammar, as well as checking for basic errors in facts and interpretations.
Personally, I like the current list that is supplied by the Del.icio.us Popular page. If you're not into things like web design, CSS style, and Web 2.0, it's probably not for you. However, I probably end up visiting 50% of the links that appear on that page simply because the types of people who currently interact with Delicious are just like me. Also, that page doesn't really reward users who contribute to it passively (by saving links on Delicious) since there's no summary to be proud of, or comments to attract attention. It's simply a list of links that are attracting the most attention right now. Eventually even this site will probably succumb to popular interests and become a list of links to ebaum's world, but for now, it's exactly what I want.
"the smaller the number, the more ink per square inch can be placed on the paper. The more ink, the more accurate and lifelike the color of the print"
This is completely backwards. Smaller drops means more accurate placement, and the size of each drop likely has no effect on total ink dispensed since that's completely up to the controller that's spitting them out.
Remember that disseminating false information about a company is libel, so for those of you getting ready to create webpages that list the included code, you'd better make sure your evidence and assumptions are accurate. Otherwise, you might be setting yourselves up for a nice fat lawsuit by Sony, reminiscent of Maui-X. Wouldn't that be ironic?
At least one of these binaries contain LAME code for certain.
Are you arguing that the included code is being used in a way that violates Fair Use, or that simply including the code for comparison (as the grandparent argues) is not fair use? I can't imagine why Sony would need to "use" several MP3 encoders (this comment links to a list of them) to actually encode music. Thus, I would assume that Sony is including bits of code from these programs in order to prevent them from running. Is that a violation of the LGPL?
Henchman: Steve, this $100 project wants an open-source OS to run its laptops
Steve: Okay, let's offer them a closed-source OS and let them decline it
Henchman: Exactly! We'll look philantropic and lose no money!
Article:
Users on Macintosh and Unix workstations can retrieve Kontiki-powered content using standard http download via their browser. Some security features may not be available to these users.
Comment:
I read that as if your on a Mac, Linux or solaris machine your just shit- outa-luck, and if you think your going to download a program from you desktop to your laptop to watch later, your SOL also!
Funny, I read that as "if you're on a computer, you can pretend to have a Mac and download whatever you want forever, and some 'security' features like DRM may not be available". I also use the word "your" to mean posessive third person.
I was planning to write a long comment concerning how retarded it is to compare prices on the basis of GDP [1], which makes about as much sense as comparing price ratios to the ratio of the number of sheep in a country. It's misleading at best, considering the large difference in the populations of the two countries. It's probably more accurate to compare the per-capita GDP [2], which yields the result that Windows (which costs $200 in the US according to the summary writer's numbers) would cost about $15,000 in Vietnam. However, this too is somewhat inaccurate because a) no one pays full price for Win XP Pro non-upgrade, b) You don't have to have XP Pro to get most of the benefits of Windows, and c) MS offers XP Starter Edition in Vietnam, which is supposedly offered for as low as US$15 [3]. Then again, when you figure that price based on per-capita GDP, it still comes to the equivalent of $1120, which isn't small change. So yes, the price is still pretty terrible, but when it comes to the intricacies of currency exchanges, is it fair to pound Microsoft on the basis of price comparisons when they're already discounting a product roughly 75% ?
I will point out that this is not necessarily a problem with different click behavior, but primarily a problem with cursor behavior. If you'll run IE and hold your mouse over the address bar, you'll see that it's a standard arrow pointer, and if you click once, it selects the whole box. You must then click again to deselect and once more to begin your selection. This is exactly how Firefox behaves by default, except that in FF the cursor is an I-beam when you first hold the mouse over the address bar, which has the undesired effect of suggesting that you can immediately begin selecting.
That said, you can fix/change this behavior in FF. Go to about:config and add/change the value of "browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll" to false. To solve your higher-level goal of reducing urls, I use Googlebar Lite, which has a very useful "up one level" button that neatly trims pieces from the url each time you click it. Give it a try.
I can't believe you're not concerned about the chatspeak that's leaking into the editorial: "...even tho the music credits..." It's one thing to have the summary go unchecked, but I think CmdrTaco just regressed 10 years.
Excellent point. With each subsequent "leak", Apple learns more and more about the community who will be circumventing these measures, as well as how to plug them. From the 'article':
We are told that the TPM protections in 10.4.3 are significantly stronger, indicating that Apple has used the previous two releases to refine their mechanism for hardware control.
By the time the final version is released and x86 Macs are the official standard, it ought to take quite some work to get OSX running on a non Apple machine. Like others have said, it will always be possible, but the average consumer doesn't circumvent DVD region encoding either.
Wow, quick to judge. Once MS has given up the push for performance (as in this case), you can guess they're not aiming at the end-user desktop. They don't want this to compete with Vista or any future derivative, they will want it to be used in embedded systems that can't fail. They want it to compete with Linux for small devices, not on the desktop. In cars, IV drips, air traffic controllers, and voting machines, you need computers that never ever crash, so this is the sort of thing that can be used in those lower-performance-allowable situations.
That said, this is research. They have barely even made it known to the public at this point, much less secured some sort of massive marketing campaign. They may later decide that it's pointless to compete with existing solutions (I couldn't say either way), but the only way to find out is to start something and see where it goes.
Slashdot Mirror
Those of us with sturdy tin hats already have our histories disabled. Take that, evil!
http://slashdot.org/search.pl?query=microsoft+frem ont+google+base
There's another /. story on November 30 that seems strangely relevent to this one. You editors might want to check out this great new feature!
In most cases, I've had a pretty difficult time explaining the POP paradigm to less tech-savvy folks anyway. Before I manage to fix things, they don't understand why their friends are getting bounced emails about "full accounts" when their local inbox in OE is empty. Gmail and other webmail services remove that confusion and additionally provide the feature that the email-checking experience is roughly identical on any machine they use to check their mail. Non-power users simply don't consider it worth the effort to use a local mail reader.
I think you're contradicting yourself in that one sentence. Copying other businesses and leveraging its monopoly is their business model. MS really hasn't come up with anything significant on their own; their success comes from seeing the potential in other people's/companies' work, making it slightly different, and marketing the crap out of it until they own the market. On the other hand, you're seeing how Google is acting the exact same way but with a new speed, as well as a sort of Apple-customer loyalty that MS has never enjoyed, which allows them to get away with barely marketing anything at all. Google is constantly developing novel ideas, often through buyouts, and I'd say they're beating MS in their own game by being more agile. MS is the new IBM, the monolith that can't move quickly enough, and Google is the new MS, darting around under their feet stealing all the new employees and ideas.
Where? I'm making the argument that a center-mounted trackball is out of the way of your hands, and that an off-center trackball would get in the way. What is your argument?
The center-mounted trackball (or trackpad on most modern laptops) doesn't just allow for ambidexterity, but that also puts it out of the way of the hands when typing. Yes, I agree that an off-center trackball/pad would be easier to use when moving the mouse, but when you start typing it's going to get in the way quickly. As far as I'm concerned, these days, it's just for emergencies anyway. If you're sitting for more than 10 minutes and have a flat surface, it pays to break out the USB mouse.
Since there's a danger that some people will prefer this method to the one I posted (grandparent), I have to say that this isn't at all the same thing. "AutoPlay", as it appears in the parent's options, refers to the feature of XP that allows you to choose a program to run when a media is inserted that contains certain types of files (things like Photoshop for photos, Winamp for music, etc). This is not related to the automatic execution of code that is included on the disc itself, which is not disabled if you simply perform the parent's instructions. It also is referred to sometimes as "AutoPlay", or "AutoRun". Either follow my directions to disable autorun/autoplay (the terms are not consistently used) using TweakUI, or the manual registry method, or the GPEDIT.MSC methods mentioned in sibling posts.
Sure, it's karma whoring, but I get tired of the "shift key" advice when so many of us have moved on. Never worry about evil code on a CD again! If you're particularly paranoid, feel free to deselect the other checkbox as well.
* if you're using the older version, you'll have to do some searching. I have no reference for it.
Unfortunately, "alternative hardware" in the high-end VGA world only barely exists, and not with any serious contention. There are really only two players, and the older parties that used to be alternatives (such as Matrox and Voodoo) have either been destroyed or have been relegated to niche positions. There's also the self-sustaining cycle of Linux's (or insert other OSS OS here) reputation (true or not) as a poor desktop OS, supported significantly by the very driver issues you bring up, which hurt gaming the most. ATI and nVidia probably see Linux as a server OS (which needs only a very simple VGA card, if at all), or a niche desktop OS, which is supported by the fact that people don't seem to play games on them as much. Thus, the cycle is apparent.
As things are now, the open-source driver community manages to provide limited support for most 3D cards after a little while on the market, effectively beating or at least matching the latest hardware from outside the nVidia/ATI camp. Thus, no one really has any incentive to make purchases from any other company, other than philosophical ideals. I don't really see an opportunity for OSS consumers to make a big dent in the current duopoly; it's like voting for a 3rd party in American presidential politics: "Go ahead, throw away your vote".
As the owner of two older AiW cards, I stopped buying AiWs because it just doesn't make fiscal sense to consistently upgrade your TV tuner with your VGA card. The tuner features improve more slowly than gaming cards, and most of the study in this article covers the card's in-game performance, with TV tuning and its quality mentioned as a side note. Personally, I'd rather go with a cutting-edge gaming card for VGA, and a separate tuner for TV, since I won't be forced to part with either if I decide to upgrade the other. Additionally, the tuner chipsets in the AiW often have little 3rd-party support in the drivers, forcing users to use one piece of software to handle TV (ATI's Multimedia Center), often with little support in Linux (I know that MythTV dislikes most of the older AiWs, and I doubt this one will change that). Do yourself a favor and buy a TV Wonder instead (or, of course, a non-ATI product!).
(I think you mean you "couldn't" care less...)
This, though, is what Slashdot could be with some simple training of the editors: a collection of well-chosen articles that is consistently based on a particular range of topics, with well-written summaries. I genuinely don't understand why the editing at /. hasn't improved in the many years of complaints about dupes and bad grammar. Slashdot has gotten into the bad habit of posting "italicized quotations" for the summaries, which specifically prevents the editors from modifying those summaries and doing exactly what the job description entails: editing. Instead of posting rote copy, the editors should be converting the summaries to paraphrased copy with proper grammar, as well as checking for basic errors in facts and interpretations.
Personally, I like the current list that is supplied by the Del.icio.us Popular page. If you're not into things like web design, CSS style, and Web 2.0, it's probably not for you. However, I probably end up visiting 50% of the links that appear on that page simply because the types of people who currently interact with Delicious are just like me. Also, that page doesn't really reward users who contribute to it passively (by saving links on Delicious) since there's no summary to be proud of, or comments to attract attention. It's simply a list of links that are attracting the most attention right now. Eventually even this site will probably succumb to popular interests and become a list of links to ebaum's world, but for now, it's exactly what I want.
This is completely backwards. Smaller drops means more accurate placement, and the size of each drop likely has no effect on total ink dispensed since that's completely up to the controller that's spitting them out.
You got me :)
Remember that disseminating false information about a company is libel, so for those of you getting ready to create webpages that list the included code, you'd better make sure your evidence and assumptions are accurate. Otherwise, you might be setting yourselves up for a nice fat lawsuit by Sony, reminiscent of Maui-X. Wouldn't that be ironic?
Are you arguing that the included code is being used in a way that violates Fair Use, or that simply including the code for comparison (as the grandparent argues) is not fair use? I can't imagine why Sony would need to "use" several MP3 encoders (this comment links to a list of them) to actually encode music. Thus, I would assume that Sony is including bits of code from these programs in order to prevent them from running. Is that a violation of the LGPL?
Henchman: Steve, this $100 project wants an open-source OS to run its laptops
Steve: Okay, let's offer them a closed-source OS and let them decline it
Henchman: Exactly! We'll look philantropic and lose no money!
Article: Users on Macintosh and Unix workstations can retrieve Kontiki-powered content using standard http download via their browser. Some security features may not be available to these users.
Comment: I read that as if your on a Mac, Linux or solaris machine your just shit- outa-luck, and if you think your going to download a program from you desktop to your laptop to watch later, your SOL also!
Funny, I read that as "if you're on a computer, you can pretend to have a Mac and download whatever you want forever, and some 'security' features like DRM may not be available". I also use the word "your" to mean posessive third person.
Oh wait, free products aren't affected by currency exchanges. Oh well ...
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_ GDP_(nominal)
_ GDP_(nominal)_per_capita
t +run+on+faster+chips/2100-1016_3-5704942.html
... wildly estimative!
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by
[3] http://news.com.com/Windows+for+India,+others+won
[4] 1 - (Price of XP SE) / ((Price of XP Home non-upgrade) * 0.60), assuming SE has roughly 60% of Home's features
That said, you can fix/change this behavior in FF. Go to about:config and add/change the value of "browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll" to false. To solve your higher-level goal of reducing urls, I use Googlebar Lite, which has a very useful "up one level" button that neatly trims pieces from the url each time you click it. Give it a try.
Are you alluding to the musical or the summary?
I can't believe you're not concerned about the chatspeak that's leaking into the editorial: "...even tho the music credits..." It's one thing to have the summary go unchecked, but I think CmdrTaco just regressed 10 years.
Yes, but can they do it blindfolded... dun dun dun!
Haha! No, that just means they'll be putting him on the fasttrack for a PhD so he can start teaching as soon as possible.
We are told that the TPM protections in 10.4.3 are significantly stronger, indicating that Apple has used the previous two releases to refine their mechanism for hardware control.
By the time the final version is released and x86 Macs are the official standard, it ought to take quite some work to get OSX running on a non Apple machine. Like others have said, it will always be possible, but the average consumer doesn't circumvent DVD region encoding either.
That said, this is research. They have barely even made it known to the public at this point, much less secured some sort of massive marketing campaign. They may later decide that it's pointless to compete with existing solutions (I couldn't say either way), but the only way to find out is to start something and see where it goes.