As a game user I can relate - but stop making your UIs so frakking non-standard. And when you cant connect to the server give me some kind of meaningful error message, dont make me trawl through forums finding out what to check.
Roll your own geek.
No, serious. A friend of mine is married to a beautiful young lady and she wasn't a geek when she met him. After 10 years she's almost as much a geek as him - she followed battlestar, and knows why the Minbari surrendered on the eve of victory.
Another friend's girlfriend knew nothing about computers (neither did he!) but when they got one she became an net geek ( the late 90's amateur kind ), all IRC and Napster. Proper little nethead she was.
You can take a regular girl and if you're lucky you can turn her into a geek. Just take a slowly and make it FUN. I suspect World Of Warcraft might be your starting point.
Call me an old software biz cynic but when I see the phrase "didn't see any need to implement a voter-verified paper record" I read that as "given complete assurance by the sales team that the system was 100% accurate".
Never attribute to malice that which is just as easily explained by incompetence.
Never attribute to incompetence that is is more readily explained by a bunch of lying sales weasels.
If you can remove stego'd data from the audio recording then you can remove watermarking.
Circumvention of copy right protection measures, so it's a criminal offence. Send round the bobbies and nail 'em up.
I would like to see Mr. McBrides head notice stuck on a spike and left out in Wall Street as a warning to the next ten generations of CEO's that some lawsuit gambles come with too high a price.
None of the MS Patents are valid in the EU where linux was created. From where I'm sitting (in the UK) linux, openoffice, firefox etc violate NO patents. They might do so where you are but not here.
The solution is not to get the patent list and challenge/license but to fix your patent system.
Heres the problem with HDTV : I've got to buy £500+ set to show something with 1080 lines ? Why can I just buy a SkyHD box and plug it into that monitor here that does 1080 lines and costs much less ? I KNOW it costs less than £500 for a HD screen because I've been using them for over 10 years. I'd bet a £500 set is £200 set with a £300 profit.
Why doesn't someone set a website up where people can write references for their employers that prospective job candidates can lookup ? Imagine going to a job interview knowing how much unpaid overtime is "expected" of you or that your lunch breaks are stopwatched.
I'm an , err *thinks fast* Creationist Rightwing Christian !
I insist that Maxis hand over a copy of Spore to me right now so that I can see , erm , how badly it spreads the lie of creationism.
They can have it back in 2 or three years.
I got one of these last year and decided to attack them directly.
I knocked up a small java prog that repeatedly sent random entries back to their server and ran it over the weekend on my spare linux box. By the monday morning they'd gotten over 3000 false account details. That'll take them a while to sort through.
(java.awt.Robot typing and clicking right in the browser in case you were wondering).
Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri - Best Civ Game Ever , Dispite not being a true civ game.
Halflife. Enough said.
Deus Ex. This is how game storylines should work - smartly.
Hostile Waters . You can pick this up now for less than a 10 and you'd be a fool not to.
Spore - Hurry up and release the damn thing! And I WILL torrent it from the US while I wait for a UK release if they do that staggered release date crap.
The UK DNC list appears to be working well for me but I do get occasional calls that I suspect originate from outside the UK. I have two ways of dealing with them and I tend to choose based on whether or not I'm in a hurry :
Hang up.
Stay on long enough to find out what product or service is being hawked and to track down a contact email address for the producer. I then use the trusty old JavaMail API to 100 copy spam the hell that address asking to be removed. Since they have initiated business contact with me that rules the DoS as acceptable under the UK anti spam laws>
What do we teach children in school about road safety? Stop, Look, Listen. Unfortunately with the Tesla Roadster listening wont get you anywhere.
Other than the minor problems of charging and mass child slaughter it looks like a nice car. Maybe they can use a clothes peg to stick a playing card in the wheels or something.
Buy some albums off allofmp3, then contact your local tax office and pay the 17.5% VAT on the items you've just bought. (Assuming these downloads are legal then you should do this anyway but I doubt anybody ever does)
Give it a month or two, then take the VAT office to the small claims court to get the tax back. Say you've heard from BPI press releases that allofmp3 is not legal and as a good law abiding citizen you've deleted all the music you bought . Since the music was not legal you did not have to pay the tax and you want it back.
If the VAT office wins the case ( and do you really think you can beat the tax man in court? ) that sets the legal precedent of allofmp3 as a legal service. The beauty of this is that it puts the tax office in a position of wanting to prove allofmp3 is a legal way to buy music from abroad.
Wasn't the BPI found guilty back in 2002 of defrauding the artists they represent by not passing on the royalties ?
If we could find some artists who think they're getting ripped off then it's a safe bet that some of the financial dealings are done over the BPI's internet connection so thats grounds for having their connection terminated.
It's unacceptable for an ISP to turn a blind eye to corperate corruption and lawbreaking by their customers.
My god those telcos have opened my eyes ! Google and Amazon are getting free rides off them! This must stop ! And don't stop with those interweb companies :
Ford has been getting a free ride off the tarmac companies for nearly a century.
And don't forget the free advertisement plays that the RIAA has been getting from internet radio and p2p ! Charge them for it.
Being using regular pc's now for 10 years (moved "up" from an amiga in 96) and I've been through many cases but my black dragon has lasted three years and I don't see myself getting rid if it any time soon.
It just has so many really nice features. Like the seperate internal and external slide out drive bays. The removable easy access fan mounts. And best of all : You know those case mounting rails for the 5.25" bays that you can never find when you want to mount an new drive ? The dragon has a mounting point for them in the floor of the case so you never lose them.
I wonder why I can't seem to find anyone who sells these anymore ?
The RIP act allows law enforcement agencies to request passwords or keys to encrypted data. It also gives them the power to charge and hold people who don't comply or have forgotten them.
The 90 days for decrypting was just a smokescreen and we never did get told the real reason.
Just to clarify, I'm not some 14-18 yr old script kiddie here. I'm 33 and working in a professional dev team. We had a working app on 3.1M7 , RC2 and then it broke on RC3 and the release and we had to backtrack. (At least, those of us in the office silly enough to use bleeding edge for production work.
Secondly, I'm not willing to post code examples because I've only been with the company 5 weeks and don't really want to risk my job and thus mortgage payments.
Thirdly, it's not a L337 app, it's actually a rather boring app. But the bit's I've coded (which do compile BTW) are rather l337 if I do say so myself.
We were using it where I worked and discovered upon upgrading to 3.1 RC3 that our app wouldn't compile. It still doesn't on this release.
Backup your old copy before you upgrade.
I've met far fewer women doing IT here in the UK than men. I'd bet good money (if I had it) that the % of women in UK IT is much lower than in the US.
Why? IMHO those [women] that I've met in IT are very competent and good at their jobs. But I've not met any yet live IT . Doing the job 9 to 5 is all well and good, but I've yet to meet a woman who does this kind of thing in her spare time. The sort of thing we all do, home projects, fun hacks and the like. I think there are women out there like that but not as common as the men like that.
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As a game user I can relate - but stop making your UIs so frakking non-standard. And when you cant connect to the server give me some kind of meaningful error message, dont make me trawl through forums finding out what to check.
Roll your own geek. No, serious. A friend of mine is married to a beautiful young lady and she wasn't a geek when she met him. After 10 years she's almost as much a geek as him - she followed battlestar, and knows why the Minbari surrendered on the eve of victory. Another friend's girlfriend knew nothing about computers (neither did he!) but when they got one she became an net geek ( the late 90's amateur kind ), all IRC and Napster. Proper little nethead she was. You can take a regular girl and if you're lucky you can turn her into a geek. Just take a slowly and make it FUN. I suspect World Of Warcraft might be your starting point.
Call me an old software biz cynic but when I see the phrase "didn't see any need to implement a voter-verified paper record" I read that as "given complete assurance by the sales team that the system was 100% accurate". Never attribute to malice that which is just as easily explained by incompetence. Never attribute to incompetence that is is more readily explained by a bunch of lying sales weasels.
If you can remove stego'd data from the audio recording then you can remove watermarking. Circumvention of copy right protection measures, so it's a criminal offence. Send round the bobbies and nail 'em up.
If just making a file available constitutes infringement then just having the money available constitutes paying your taxes.
I would like to see Mr. McBrides head notice stuck on a spike and left out in Wall Street as a warning to the next ten generations of CEO's that some lawsuit gambles come with too high a price.
Patent violations : nil-point .
None of the MS Patents are valid in the EU where linux was created. From where I'm sitting (in the UK) linux, openoffice, firefox etc violate NO patents. They might do so where you are but not here.
The solution is not to get the patent list and challenge/license but to fix your patent system.
Heres the problem with HDTV : I've got to buy £500+ set to show something with 1080 lines ? Why can I just buy a SkyHD box and plug it into that monitor here that does 1080 lines and costs much less ? I KNOW it costs less than £500 for a HD screen because I've been using them for over 10 years. I'd bet a £500 set is £200 set with a £300 profit.
Why doesn't someone set a website up where people can write references for their employers that prospective job candidates can lookup ? Imagine going to a job interview knowing how much unpaid overtime is "expected" of you or that your lunch breaks are stopwatched .
I'm an , err *thinks fast* Creationist Rightwing Christian ! I insist that Maxis hand over a copy of Spore to me right now so that I can see , erm , how badly it spreads the lie of creationism. They can have it back in 2 or three years.
Isn't the whole point of Common Carrier status that a comms provider doesn't have any control over what goes over their network ?
Surely if they lose common carrier status then the content owners will go after them in court ?
Hey BigCommsCorp ! Whats in that can there ? Worms you say ?
I got one of these last year and decided to attack them directly.
I knocked up a small java prog that repeatedly sent random entries back to their server and ran it over the weekend on my spare linux box. By the monday morning they'd gotten over 3000 false account details. That'll take them a while to sort through.
(java.awt.Robot typing and clicking right in the browser in case you were wondering).
The UK DNC list appears to be working well for me but I do get occasional calls that I suspect originate from outside the UK. I have two ways of dealing with them and I tend to choose based on whether or not I'm in a hurry :
Fight fire with Napalm.
Or a 3 litre boot of diet coke and a LOT of mentos......
What do we teach children in school about road safety? Stop, Look, Listen. Unfortunately with the Tesla Roadster listening wont get you anywhere.
Other than the minor problems of charging and mass child slaughter it looks like a nice car. Maybe they can use a clothes peg to stick a playing card in the wheels or something.
I know how we can beat these guys !
Buy some albums off allofmp3, then contact your local tax office and pay the 17.5% VAT on the items you've just bought. (Assuming these downloads are legal then you should do this anyway but I doubt anybody ever does)
Give it a month or two, then take the VAT office to the small claims court to get the tax back. Say you've heard from BPI press releases that allofmp3 is not legal and as a good law abiding citizen you've deleted all the music you bought . Since the music was not legal you did not have to pay the tax and you want it back.
If the VAT office wins the case ( and do you really think you can beat the tax man in court? ) that sets the legal precedent of allofmp3 as a legal service. The beauty of this is that it puts the tax office in a position of wanting to prove allofmp3 is a legal way to buy music from abroad.
BTW, IANAL.
Wasn't the BPI found guilty back in 2002 of defrauding the artists they represent by not passing on the royalties ? If we could find some artists who think they're getting ripped off then it's a safe bet that some of the financial dealings are done over the BPI's internet connection so thats grounds for having their connection terminated. It's unacceptable for an ISP to turn a blind eye to corperate corruption and lawbreaking by their customers.
My god those telcos have opened my eyes ! Google and Amazon are getting free rides off them! This must stop ! And don't stop with those interweb companies :
Ford has been getting a free ride off the tarmac companies for nearly a century.
And don't forget the free advertisement plays that the RIAA has been getting from internet radio and p2p ! Charge them for it.
Best case I ever had ? Chieftec Dragon.
Being using regular pc's now for 10 years (moved "up" from an amiga in 96) and I've been through many cases but my black dragon has lasted three years and I don't see myself getting rid if it any time soon.
It just has so many really nice features. Like the seperate internal and external slide out drive bays. The removable easy access fan mounts. And best of all : You know those case mounting rails for the 5.25" bays that you can never find when you want to mount an new drive ? The dragon has a mounting point for them in the floor of the case so you never lose them.
I wonder why I can't seem to find anyone who sells these anymore ?
The RIP act allows law enforcement agencies to request passwords or keys to encrypted data. It also gives them the power to charge and hold people who don't comply or have forgotten them.
The 90 days for decrypting was just a smokescreen and we never did get told the real reason.
Just to clarify, I'm not some 14-18 yr old script kiddie here. I'm 33 and working in a professional dev team. We had a working app on 3.1M7 , RC2 and then it broke on RC3 and the release and we had to backtrack. (At least, those of us in the office silly enough to use bleeding edge for production work.
Secondly, I'm not willing to post code examples because I've only been with the company 5 weeks and don't really want to risk my job and thus mortgage payments.
Thirdly, it's not a L337 app, it's actually a rather boring app. But the bit's I've coded (which do compile BTW) are rather l337 if I do say so myself.
We were using it where I worked and discovered upon upgrading to 3.1 RC3 that our app wouldn't compile. It still doesn't on this release. Backup your old copy before you upgrade.
And to think you could have wasted that time fixing the client crashes that's causing some players PC's to totally freeze up.
I've met far fewer women doing IT here in the UK than men. I'd bet good money (if I had it) that the % of women in UK IT is much lower than in the US.
Why? IMHO those [women] that I've met in IT are very competent and good at their jobs. But I've not met any yet live IT . Doing the job 9 to 5 is all well and good, but I've yet to meet a woman who does this kind of thing in her spare time. The sort of thing we all do, home projects, fun hacks and the like. I think there are women out there like that but not as common as the men like that.