There's another guy who does this. I think his name is Thunayan Al-Ghanim (calls himself Elequa). His company: Future Media Architects buys up tons of domains especially 3 letter and smaller domains in mass numbers. He then just holds them. For no reason, doesn't even re-sell them. He has made a few of them into functioning websites like dj.net but for the most part he just buys them up to hold them. Why? It really pisses me off that people like this are grabbing all the candy and then not even eating. Just buying domains only so other people can't have them. Should be illegal.
If I imagine my Mom or someone using this I can guarantee that the second you have to go command line to do anything... they are lost. Period. Except that many pro-Linux people (I'm one of them) often respond to confused users by saying "oh that's easy to do... just run this command..." Nope. That's not going to cut it. Until you can do everything and anything including updates, backups, installs, etc all from some nice, well designed and well documented UI windows then you haven't made an OS for the average (non-techie) user. Read my lips. No command line necessary. Period. And there has to be help documentation for every damn thing.
That being said... it's getting close. Maybe Dell can help push it the last few steps.
[Side note... when will websites stop breaking up articles into "pages"?? That's what scrolling is for! Grrr.. at least some have a print friendly version.]
This is a really bad trend, and one that some governments would jump on for important reasons:
The Internet has really 2 core benefits when you look at it's global impact. First you have people who have great lives and live in great countries who can now see instant information about all the horrid things going on in other parts of the world. It helps to get more people caring about what's going on.
And second, it allows people who live in bad conditions or under oppressive governments to see what it could be like somewhere else. They can learn what they "should" have. That they have human rights. That there is such thing as freedom. It can inspire them.
So, what this does is it gives both sides of the world so to speak the motivation and often the means to reach out to each other - to offer help and to ask for/demand it. To get fired up about change.
It's no wonder that many governments and even corporations are worried about that. But in the end... people will find a way around any censorship and change will happen no matter how hard N. Korea or China or whoever tries to fight it.
I'm currently playing Twilight Princess and I'm on I think the second last temple (dungeon). And I've lost interest. I'm having to force myself to finish it. The game is good, but the Zelda games since Ocarina have been clones of each other with different makeup on. Woah- big surprise... you have to collect something for a side quest, find fairy fountain and empty jars. Woah- I didn't see that coming: a forest/earth, fire and water temple. All the temples are identical with different decor. A semi-maze of rooms where you have to find keys to unlock doors to get to more keys and unlock more doors... and then get a new weapon/item and use it to defeat the boss. *yawn*. I'd love a Zelda that doesn't have a single key in it.
Also, the lack of voice acting is glaring... and even though the world is huge and it's very cool in that way... sometimes it takes forever to get where you want. Wind Waker had this main problem. Traveling is boring.
Now, I do love the Zelda games... but they need to re-think the series of temples concept, and add WAY more mini-games and side quests. Also, multi player or NPC team mates would be really cool (something like Alex in HL2).
Oh, and why do they call it Zelda? Let us play as her or give her a bigger role!
Don't worry, according to the I, Robot movie (and book?) we'll all be in electric cars that drive themselves in perfectly organized mega-highways by 2035. I can't wait for that!;)
MIT is famous for it's elaborate student pranks. They call them hacks. For example, turning a hallway(or was it building?) into a Super Mario level, and other great ones. See: http://hacks.mit.edu/
As a Canadian, I don't mind paying the Levy on blank media, and I'd be in favour of a levy on MP3 players, IF it means that I can continue to be free from worrying about a Canadian RIAA busting down my door and lynching me for making backups of my own media or for putting a CD on my mp3 player. A very small price to pay indeed.
All this talk of software as a service being the future is really depressing. It's just a dumb idea for so many reasons, like:
1) Bandwidth limitations for the average Internet user. 2) Internet outages. 3) Software as a service will end up being sold to you with a monthly/yearly subscription fee instead of a one time payment - this will balloon really quickly = $$$. 4) Single point of failure. 5) You have to trust a company with your data and with providing the software you need reliably and without changing it out from under you. 6) Forced version upgrades (can you imagine if all WinXP users were automatically upgraded to Vista with no say in the matter? 7) Not everyone has Internet or has access to the Internet. What if I take my laptop on the road? 8) If your OS is an online service... then the vendor can lock out other programs they don't want you to run. You won't be able to work around this. 9) Your ISP can charge you more since you now NEED Internet so much more. 10) Did I mention privacy? Because no big IT company has ever had data stolen... ha.
I started using the google desktop widgets thing and it started automatically scanning and indexing my computer. I thought that was a good idea for about 2 seconds then un-installed it really quick. It's going to be much more lucrative to be a hacker in the future. You thought having your credit card data stolen really sucks... try having your entire hard drive, plus records of every action you ever did on your computer and every file you had in the past. Sheesh. I can only pray that this concept doesn't fly. GoogleDocs is bad enough - what a stupid idea- at least for any documents that have any value at all.
Yeah, I'm one person rooting against desktop software going online.
Granted I don't know anything about patent law, but if Microsoft says they have patents that are being violated by Linux and the OS community, but refuses to say what those patents are and how they are being violated.... why can't we all just totally ignore Microsoft? In the law, if you get pulled over for a traffic violation... the police don't keep it a secret what you did wrong. Or if someone want to sue you... they can't drag you to court without saying what it's for. So why can Microsoft bring Linux "to the table" without first saying why?
Sounds like they are bluffing.
Since we still don't know the cancer effects of cell phones... and since there's a possibility that cell phones might be related to the disappearance of honey bees (studies show that bees will avoid a hive if a cell phone is placed near it) and the colony collapse disorder, maybe people shouldn't be so quick to drop their land lines.
Add on to that the fact that you have a limited # of minutes per month, you have outages, and you are SOL in a power failure... I think my generation is being foolish to not have a regular phone in addition to their cell phone.
I use a bunch of Firefox plugins to improve my browsing experience... but I recently was stuck using a computer with only IE. I had totally forgotten how many sites were obnoxious. I don't mind some reasonable advertising, but sites seem to be increasing the percent of the screen given to annoying animated/Flash ads, huge colourful ads in the middle of the article, etc.
The worst are the sites that underline every noun and if your mouse accidentally passes over one of those words, a big ad box pops up that you have to close. How did it ever occur to someone to make a site where you aren't even free to move your mouse around if you want to without your reading being interrupted?
It also seems like the big, rich companies are the worst offenders. Like they can afford to piss off visitors, and we'll just take it... 'cause you know MSN is such a great site. Yuk. Usability has been going downhill since forever.... blaming web 2.0 is barking up the wrong tree. Maybe try blaming the boom of web advertising.
The MSN finance message boards are horrid too. Massive frames so the viewable area of the actual board messages is tiny. And strange loading delays that freeze Firefox. I use adblock to kill the frames.
While I think this is a good thing, and that more attention for Linux is also really great... I can't help but wonder if Vista had been a more solid, fast, user friendly, and affordable OS, would these companies even be having these thoughts?
It seems that all this pro-Linux/OSS talk from these big companies like Dell is coming right on the heels of the disappointing launch of Vista. It must be depressing for Microsoft to realize that their wonder-OS has turned people off so badly.
Hopefully this news will be good in two ways: encourage Linux to polish up it's user-friendliness to be relevant to the non-techie average user... and to give Microsoft a clue.
Time for ISPs to stop being so nicey-nice about this.
1) Send an email to all customers saying that the ISP will begin choosing a random day (say every 3 months or so) to scan for infected computers churning out email. 2) On that random day (random so the spam bots won't be programmed to be silent on that day) the ISP shuts down outgoing mail for all infected computers on their network. 3) Customer who can't send mail is irate and calls ISP tech support hotline. 4) Tech support says: we warned you... please follow these virus removal instructions and install/update your anti virus software.
Bam problem solved. People who keep getting blocked every 3 months will quickly learn to take better care of their computers. Along with the customer's invoice the ISP could send an information sheet with prevention and removal instructions.
Maybe governments can give ISPs a little financial help for doing this?
Unfortunately I don't see any other solution other than tough-love.
At what point do we start demanding that game companies keep their mouths shut about games until they are X % done? Like say 95%. Or Beta or something. I've been disappointed by delays in this game one too many times. That's it Spore, you're off my "Games to Watch For" list.
Seriously, since we are moving past the dialup and cable stage, beyond file sizes for most things, the conversation must change to *what* will we be allowed to do with the added bandwidth (as others have noticed); *how* is no longer important to most of us.
Just watch more TV? More infomercials or pointless shows? Faster download times (How many times do I need to download encyclopedia brittanica?) No Thank You. Well, we can now handle websites with more Flash ads per square inch. I'm excited.;)
Wow, one of the most interesting articles I've read in a while. I always used to wonder, when watching movies like I, Robot, how humans would let it get to that point. But if you think about it, it's not like one day a big company tries to sell you a synthetic human housekeeper. It starts with things like these military robots and those automatic floor sweepers and the robo-toys you can buy today. Then it slowly evolves so that you're always telling yourself: "well it's not so different from what I have now...".
I wonder at what point will we have to start seriously considering hard coding the 3 laws or something similar?
In the end I think it will be good for humans to have an artificial intelligent life to co-exist with. We are always dreaming about meeting an alien species to learn from etc.... but instead we might someday invent a companion "species", and despite all the Matrix/I Robot fear-mongering... we might actually grow as a species ourselves from interacting with an artificial intelligence. If we were to lose our ability to empathize with things like animals or robots, don't we lose a bit of what makes us human?
Correction... I mean "Army contractor" not CIA agent. Pfft... just as bad. Hey, don't American's use poppies for anything? I wasn't aware it was just us Canadians.
It looked like nano tech? Looked? What, they saw the bumpy metal texture that is used to 'stick' the dye onto the metal, and they couldn't tell it was just... bumpy metal? Do they have magnifying glasses and microscopes in the US? And they can't find the Canadian mint website to check on the coin? And they couldn't tell that the Canadian employee who handed them the change was not shocked by this coloured coin?
So, let's recap... the CIA agent (or whoever this was) had the following qualities:
-Poor eyesight, lack of magnifying tools. -Never been exposed to metal that was not shiny and smooth. -Has never seen money that was not American (money with colour). -No access to the Internet. -Inability to ask the Canadians around him if this was a normal coin. -No access to tools or a laboratory to test the coin - a hack-saw and microscope would do.
If I was an American, I wouldn't feel quite so safe with these geniuses protecting me.
Huh? I'm not a hardware expert, but in order to play a cd or dvd, your drive has to read bits off of it and pass them to the program playing it. So, you mean that in some cases the drive can't tell what the bit is and in some cases it can? That doesn't make any sense to me.
As for DVDs.... why isn't there a market for DVD RW drives that can write to all needed bits? Is the MPAA or whoever blocking the production of drives capable of burning these?
Forgive me for being totally clueless.... but can someone explain this to me? I never really understood why it was impossible to make a copy of a DVD (or some CDs) without cracking it. Or why you need a no-CD crack for game CDs. If the data on a CD or DVD is just 1s and 0s... why can't you just make an exact copy of the 1s and 0s onto the blank CD and why won't that work? Why do you even need to decrypt it? The only thing I can think of is that there's a physical difference between the original disks and the blank disks you buy at the store. Even encrypted and compressed data is just binary code... so why doesn't making an exact copy of it do the trick?
I would really appreciate any explanation- I've wondered this for years.
Why are they getting this second rate linux thingy? Because the laptop costs $100 (or is it $175) that's why. Now say thank you.
There are some people (cough - me) who have been trying to scrape together money for a laptop for years. Too bad my car or PC keep breaking down. Where's MY $100 laptop? I'll take it with Linux in a second.;)
Slashdot Mirror
There's another guy who does this. I think his name is Thunayan Al-Ghanim (calls himself Elequa). His company: Future Media Architects buys up tons of domains especially 3 letter and smaller domains in mass numbers. He then just holds them. For no reason, doesn't even re-sell them. He has made a few of them into functioning websites like dj.net but for the most part he just buys them up to hold them. Why? It really pisses me off that people like this are grabbing all the candy and then not even eating. Just buying domains only so other people can't have them. Should be illegal.
Yeah I was thinking the same thing. I hope he's not allergic to sesame seeds. Hehehe.
Does this question even need to be asked?
If I imagine my Mom or someone using this I can guarantee that the second you have to go command line to do anything... they are lost. Period. Except that many pro-Linux people (I'm one of them) often respond to confused users by saying "oh that's easy to do... just run this command..." Nope. That's not going to cut it. Until you can do everything and anything including updates, backups, installs, etc all from some nice, well designed and well documented UI windows then you haven't made an OS for the average (non-techie) user. Read my lips. No command line necessary. Period. And there has to be help documentation for every damn thing.
That being said... it's getting close. Maybe Dell can help push it the last few steps.
[Side note... when will websites stop breaking up articles into "pages"?? That's what scrolling is for! Grrr.. at least some have a print friendly version.]
This is a really bad trend, and one that some governments would jump on for important reasons:
The Internet has really 2 core benefits when you look at it's global impact. First you have people who have great lives and live in great countries who can now see instant information about all the horrid things going on in other parts of the world. It helps to get more people caring about what's going on.
And second, it allows people who live in bad conditions or under oppressive governments to see what it could be like somewhere else. They can learn what they "should" have. That they have human rights. That there is such thing as freedom. It can inspire them.
So, what this does is it gives both sides of the world so to speak the motivation and often the means to reach out to each other - to offer help and to ask for/demand it. To get fired up about change.
It's no wonder that many governments and even corporations are worried about that. But in the end... people will find a way around any censorship and change will happen no matter how hard N. Korea or China or whoever tries to fight it.
I'm currently playing Twilight Princess and I'm on I think the second last temple (dungeon). And I've lost interest. I'm having to force myself to finish it. The game is good, but the Zelda games since Ocarina have been clones of each other with different makeup on. Woah- big surprise... you have to collect something for a side quest, find fairy fountain and empty jars. Woah- I didn't see that coming: a forest/earth, fire and water temple. All the temples are identical with different decor. A semi-maze of rooms where you have to find keys to unlock doors to get to more keys and unlock more doors... and then get a new weapon/item and use it to defeat the boss. *yawn*. I'd love a Zelda that doesn't have a single key in it.
Also, the lack of voice acting is glaring... and even though the world is huge and it's very cool in that way... sometimes it takes forever to get where you want. Wind Waker had this main problem. Traveling is boring.
Now, I do love the Zelda games... but they need to re-think the series of temples concept, and add WAY more mini-games and side quests. Also, multi player or NPC team mates would be really cool (something like Alex in HL2).
Oh, and why do they call it Zelda? Let us play as her or give her a bigger role!
Don't worry, according to the I, Robot movie (and book?) we'll all be in electric cars that drive themselves in perfectly organized mega-highways by 2035. I can't wait for that! ;)
MIT is famous for it's elaborate student pranks. They call them hacks. For example, turning a hallway(or was it building?) into a Super Mario level, and other great ones. See: http://hacks.mit.edu/
As a Canadian, I don't mind paying the Levy on blank media, and I'd be in favour of a levy on MP3 players, IF it means that I can continue to be free from worrying about a Canadian RIAA busting down my door and lynching me for making backups of my own media or for putting a CD on my mp3 player. A very small price to pay indeed.
All this talk of software as a service being the future is really depressing. It's just a dumb idea for so many reasons, like:
1) Bandwidth limitations for the average Internet user.
2) Internet outages.
3) Software as a service will end up being sold to you with a monthly/yearly subscription fee instead of a one time payment - this will balloon really quickly = $$$.
4) Single point of failure.
5) You have to trust a company with your data and with providing the software you need reliably and without changing it out from under you.
6) Forced version upgrades (can you imagine if all WinXP users were automatically upgraded to Vista with no say in the matter?
7) Not everyone has Internet or has access to the Internet. What if I take my laptop on the road?
8) If your OS is an online service... then the vendor can lock out other programs they don't want you to run. You won't be able to work around this.
9) Your ISP can charge you more since you now NEED Internet so much more.
10) Did I mention privacy? Because no big IT company has ever had data stolen... ha.
I started using the google desktop widgets thing and it started automatically scanning and indexing my computer. I thought that was a good idea for about 2 seconds then un-installed it really quick. It's going to be much more lucrative to be a hacker in the future. You thought having your credit card data stolen really sucks... try having your entire hard drive, plus records of every action you ever did on your computer and every file you had in the past. Sheesh. I can only pray that this concept doesn't fly. GoogleDocs is bad enough - what a stupid idea- at least for any documents that have any value at all.
Yeah, I'm one person rooting against desktop software going online.
Granted I don't know anything about patent law, but if Microsoft says they have patents that are being violated by Linux and the OS community, but refuses to say what those patents are and how they are being violated.... why can't we all just totally ignore Microsoft? In the law, if you get pulled over for a traffic violation... the police don't keep it a secret what you did wrong. Or if someone want to sue you... they can't drag you to court without saying what it's for. So why can Microsoft bring Linux "to the table" without first saying why? Sounds like they are bluffing.
Since we still don't know the cancer effects of cell phones... and since there's a possibility that cell phones might be related to the disappearance of honey bees (studies show that bees will avoid a hive if a cell phone is placed near it) and the colony collapse disorder, maybe people shouldn't be so quick to drop their land lines.
Add on to that the fact that you have a limited # of minutes per month, you have outages, and you are SOL in a power failure... I think my generation is being foolish to not have a regular phone in addition to their cell phone.
Eggs in one basket people.
I use a bunch of Firefox plugins to improve my browsing experience... but I recently was stuck using a computer with only IE. I had totally forgotten how many sites were obnoxious. I don't mind some reasonable advertising, but sites seem to be increasing the percent of the screen given to annoying animated/Flash ads, huge colourful ads in the middle of the article, etc.
The worst are the sites that underline every noun and if your mouse accidentally passes over one of those words, a big ad box pops up that you have to close. How did it ever occur to someone to make a site where you aren't even free to move your mouse around if you want to without your reading being interrupted?
It also seems like the big, rich companies are the worst offenders. Like they can afford to piss off visitors, and we'll just take it... 'cause you know MSN is such a great site. Yuk. Usability has been going downhill since forever.... blaming web 2.0 is barking up the wrong tree. Maybe try blaming the boom of web advertising.
The MSN finance message boards are horrid too. Massive frames so the viewable area of the actual board messages is tiny. And strange loading delays that freeze Firefox. I use adblock to kill the frames.
While I think this is a good thing, and that more attention for Linux is also really great... I can't help but wonder if Vista had been a more solid, fast, user friendly, and affordable OS, would these companies even be having these thoughts?
It seems that all this pro-Linux/OSS talk from these big companies like Dell is coming right on the heels of the disappointing launch of Vista. It must be depressing for Microsoft to realize that their wonder-OS has turned people off so badly.
Hopefully this news will be good in two ways: encourage Linux to polish up it's user-friendliness to be relevant to the non-techie average user... and to give Microsoft a clue.
Time for ISPs to stop being so nicey-nice about this.
1) Send an email to all customers saying that the ISP will begin choosing a random day (say every 3 months or so) to scan for infected computers churning out email.
2) On that random day (random so the spam bots won't be programmed to be silent on that day) the ISP shuts down outgoing mail for all infected computers on their network.
3) Customer who can't send mail is irate and calls ISP tech support hotline.
4) Tech support says: we warned you... please follow these virus removal instructions and install/update your anti virus software.
Bam problem solved. People who keep getting blocked every 3 months will quickly learn to take better care of their computers. Along with the customer's invoice the ISP could send an information sheet with prevention and removal instructions.
Maybe governments can give ISPs a little financial help for doing this?
Unfortunately I don't see any other solution other than tough-love.
At what point do we start demanding that game companies keep their mouths shut about games until they are X % done? Like say 95%. Or Beta or something. I've been disappointed by delays in this game one too many times. That's it Spore, you're off my "Games to Watch For" list.
So sad.
Wouldn't the deep freeze of space plus the burning re-entry effectively "pasturize" the space debris?
Wow, one of the most interesting articles I've read in a while. I always used to wonder, when watching movies like I, Robot, how humans would let it get to that point. But if you think about it, it's not like one day a big company tries to sell you a synthetic human housekeeper. It starts with things like these military robots and those automatic floor sweepers and the robo-toys you can buy today. Then it slowly evolves so that you're always telling yourself: "well it's not so different from what I have now...".
I wonder at what point will we have to start seriously considering hard coding the 3 laws or something similar?
In the end I think it will be good for humans to have an artificial intelligent life to co-exist with. We are always dreaming about meeting an alien species to learn from etc.... but instead we might someday invent a companion "species", and despite all the Matrix/I Robot fear-mongering... we might actually grow as a species ourselves from interacting with an artificial intelligence. If we were to lose our ability to empathize with things like animals or robots, don't we lose a bit of what makes us human?
Correction... I mean "Army contractor" not CIA agent. Pfft... just as bad. Hey, don't American's use poppies for anything? I wasn't aware it was just us Canadians.
It looked like nano tech? Looked? What, they saw the bumpy metal texture that is used to 'stick' the dye onto the metal, and they couldn't tell it was just... bumpy metal? Do they have magnifying glasses and microscopes in the US? And they can't find the Canadian mint website to check on the coin? And they couldn't tell that the Canadian employee who handed them the change was not shocked by this coloured coin?
So, let's recap... the CIA agent (or whoever this was) had the following qualities:
-Poor eyesight, lack of magnifying tools.
-Never been exposed to metal that was not shiny and smooth.
-Has never seen money that was not American (money with colour).
-No access to the Internet.
-Inability to ask the Canadians around him if this was a normal coin.
-No access to tools or a laboratory to test the coin - a hack-saw and microscope would do.
If I was an American, I wouldn't feel quite so safe with these geniuses protecting me.
Thanks everyone- Now I get it! I feel so much better! ;)
Huh? I'm not a hardware expert, but in order to play a cd or dvd, your drive has to read bits off of it and pass them to the program playing it. So, you mean that in some cases the drive can't tell what the bit is and in some cases it can? That doesn't make any sense to me.
As for DVDs.... why isn't there a market for DVD RW drives that can write to all needed bits? Is the MPAA or whoever blocking the production of drives capable of burning these?
Forgive me for being totally clueless.... but can someone explain this to me? I never really understood why it was impossible to make a copy of a DVD (or some CDs) without cracking it. Or why you need a no-CD crack for game CDs. If the data on a CD or DVD is just 1s and 0s... why can't you just make an exact copy of the 1s and 0s onto the blank CD and why won't that work? Why do you even need to decrypt it? The only thing I can think of is that there's a physical difference between the original disks and the blank disks you buy at the store. Even encrypted and compressed data is just binary code... so why doesn't making an exact copy of it do the trick?
I would really appreciate any explanation- I've wondered this for years.
*confused*
Why are they getting this second rate linux thingy? Because the laptop costs $100 (or is it $175) that's why. Now say thank you.
;)
There are some people (cough - me) who have been trying to scrape together money for a laptop for years. Too bad my car or PC keep breaking down. Where's MY $100 laptop? I'll take it with Linux in a second.