The Program and its derivative work will neither be modified or executed to harm a
ny human being nor through inaction permit any human being to be harmed.
This is Asimov's first law of Robotics.
That's "non-military"? If I'm the military, I'm saying, "my country is 'threatened' by 'terrorists/korean missiles/rabid pandas/cornflakes', and to prevent harm to the citizens, we must use said GPL software to 'protect' ourselves (by killing the invaders)."
Seriously, did none of the slashdotters watch I, Robot? That same idea can be shifted to the army. We must either protect many by sacraficing a few, or protect our people by killing theirs. (As they are a threat - hence "by inaction", humans would be hurt.)
Even if such a case made it to court, would the courts (in a crisis/public feelings) side against the military? Can open source even fight such a case? And who's to say the military won't just make it all into secret shit.
I second that! My family's first PC was the Compaq Deskpro 386. Thankfully my parents stuffed another (larger) harddrive in it. Runs OS/2, tons of fun DOS games (Jill of the Jungle, Apogee, Midwinter, etc) and did word processing (I was a kid at the time, so games > work). First PC I laid hands on. I remember opening up Hack's executable (The Quest for the Amulet of Yendor!) in notepad and wondering, "How the heck do people know what all the funny letters mean?"
Did I mention that the 386 is still alive and kicking? It's almost reached its 19th birthday.
FTFA it seems that my Windows 98 box is quite safe, thank you very much.
Now that's what I call +1 Informative. WinXP vulnerability this, WinXP vulnerability that. All these WinXP warnings, but when was the last time you heard one for Win98? Must be a rocksolid OS. Those people out there with XP should downgrade.
If only, if only... oh well. The solution is simple really - just apply video game tactics. Don't take a pack of orcs head on - shoot 'em through a doorway one at a time. Same goes for viruses, worms, etc, though I'm not quite sure how. Though strong magnets seem to make a fairly good anti-malware. Whatever, back to the orcs.
Mmmhmm. At least three companies made my computer. IBM made the hardware (some of it...), Microsoft the software, and some other people the various other parts. Yup, one machine, many companies. Does it work? Sort of. I experience a certain "voting fraud" every day.
I was at a Krogers, and me and my mom decided to do the Self-Scan, as we had only a few items. I'm happily scanning along, when I get to the beer. Me, I keep scanning, but the computer - too smart for it's own good. Beer. Must show ID. Or be terminated. So my mom digs out her ID and shows it to the lady. She shakes her head no.
Allegedly, a minor can not scan beer. How the holy hell I'm going to get drunk scanning beer (looook at the pritty liiight...) is beyond me, but long story short, Mom had to take the beer, do exactly the same thing I was doing and put it in the cart. I'm a minor, so kill me. Send me to court for scanning a beer...
And I didn't get any of it...:-/. 21... 21... 21...
If it weren't for that darned thing about being polite, there's something to be said for the phrase, "Don't get your panties in a wad..." (I'm just scanning the beer. No drinking. Just scanning. Won't kill you. (Or me.))
Come to think of it. I wasn't scanning beer. I was scanning a cardboard box. Welcome to the land of the "free". (You may all sleep peacefully, knowing that minors shall not be abusing the powers of a barcode reader!) </rant>
You need no such thing. There is always more than one way to solve problems, especially with computers. Here's two ideas that popped into my head with two minutes of thought:
1) Hardware: Get a headphone splitter and a male-to-male headphone cable. (Oddly, I have the male-to-male cable, but not a splitter...) Put the splitter in the computers speaker port. Then your headphones/speakers in one split, and the male to male in the other. Plug the other end of the male-to-male into the wave in (not the mic) and record from wave in (which is really your waveout). Make your Skype call.
I personally don't like the above since it a) involves hardware/some quality loss (depending on the hardware) and b) might cost $$$. (I'm a cheap-o.:P) The other solution: get some software that can record your local OS's waveout. Off the top of my head, I know Audacity will do this, and it's FREE. Start recording your waveout, and make your call.
As for your low quality, I hear a lot of fuzz if I have my microphone selected in my audio settings. (I also don't have the worlds best mic.) Turning off the mic's feedback removes the fuzz, but I can't hear myself (nor would I hear myself in a recording). You can do post-record noise reduction, but that usually seems to make things sound harsh/metalicy. Finally, you're asking for broadcast quality audio from Skype? Skype works over the internet, and there will be quality loss to get the sound from point A to point B live. Let alone pray the sound should skip. I personally think you're asking too much. Professional TV channels doing phone calls aren't always perfect quality, and the satelitte broadcasts from the other side of the earth certainly aren't either. (Thought that's a bit more extreme.) If I knew I was listening to a Skype call, I could forgive a bit of quality. After all, it's just voice, not music.
my perspective may not be shared by the estrogen-challenged among us, but for me part of the satisfaction of board games (as well as of many other hobbies) is the opportunity to interact with and manipulate real objects-- to see a stack of money grow, move around a little iron doggie,
Although "estrogen-challenged", I agree. Perhaps for different reasons, more of a, "How many $500s do I have? Four? Oh, and how many do you have? None! *taunt*" I love being able to wave money in an opponents face... what would we do now? "Oo! Look at this... uh... plastic... that uh... looks just like yours..."
Nearly the same reason for the pieces (thank God they're still there... right?) - it's thrilling to sit there and say, "Oh! Rolled an 11! And guess where that lands me... that's right! Board. Walk." and triumpantly moving your piece there.
What I always loved was that monopoly was freeform between the players. Any deal can be setup: charging interest, buying/selling land, loans, etc. But it's easier to do this with cash. The poor banker would have to swipe cards every two seconds. (He might as well hold on to them...)
Alas, the real question here is: "Paper or plastic?"
An IM icon is all the same thing: It's displayed to the world, shown to everyone who some much as has you on their buddy list. But it is a tough line, but I side with the judge. There is freedom of speech, but this is outside of that. The parents further worsened the situation by fighting it... take the kid aside and explain to him why in this day and age you do not draw such things.
Besides, you've got at least show some tact. I had a teacher whose class I didn't particularly like (I didn't hate him - his class was hard because I didn't study enough, simple as that). And we drew a picture of it part way through the year, but without guns, blood etc. The picture depicted a small raft with three stick figures (labeled with our names) on a giant sea, the sea labelled "The Sea of AP US" (the class name). Our boat had a leak, and was sinking. Next to us, atop a battleship/destroyer with smoking guns pointed at us, was a stick figure (our teacher) holding a sword and wearing a very Napoleon-esque hat. In the sea were sharks with "AP Test" written on them, and at the sea floor a treasure chest called "Passing grades" (or something close). Classmate stuck it to her folder. Great picture.
Since this covers flash media, with all fuss over FAT patents/royalties and now taxes... heck, take the media, format it ext2. It's not purely "blank" anymore - no tax. It hasn't got FAT32 on it, screw Microsoft. Change the manual a bit to include the "you might have to format this yourself" (remove the section of how to plug it in if you need room... I mean, if you couldn't handle stuffing the cylinders & cubes into their shaped holes as a child....) and presto-chango.
Though perhaps the media wouldn't work when you stick it in... oh well.
And the quote at the bottom is just excellent for the copyright / P2P legal stuff:
Just remember: when you go to court, you are trusting your fate to twelve people that weren't smart enough to get out of jury duty!
Seriously though, who could still be running an original installation of Windows 98? Standard operating procedure for Win 98 pretty much dictates a fresh reinstall every so often anyway.
Seriously though, you should've known such a statement would come back to bite you in the butt. I run Windows 98, and yes, it is the original installation, thank you very much.
Only in the Windows world (it seems) do you get a significant number of people who stubornly refuse to give up their applications... from 1995.
Refuse to give up? This article is all about old Windows users being denied the choice to give up software from 1995. Given the current trend now, we can't upgrade even if we wanted. There are those out there who don't wish to pony up the several hundred dollars needed to upgrade a system every few years.
Can they really expect developers to continue to support them? If the developers expect to get their money, then yes. Software that I write runs on Windows 98.
This is, sadly, a growing trend that one should only expect in the Microsoft world. I personally would upgrade, if I could. I've seen computers with specs similar to mine, and although Microsoft says you can "run" never versions of Windows on my hardware, let's be serious - you can't. Not practically, and so far every old computer that probably came with Windows 98 and was "upgraded", runs poorly. More and more applications refuse to run on Windows 98, even Java, supposedly the "run an app on any OS", now balks at my old system. The latest MS Visual Studio, and others. Firefox had been a haven for Windows 98 users - my Internet Explorer is fully patched... as can be. It still is full of holes, I clean off malware every now and then. But as was pointed out earlier, the advice for us: run Firefox and sit behind a router. (Which I do)
This PC (1998) happens, ironically, to be the newest, at least within the house. The other three, all running OS/2, are older. (One doesn't have internet, so perhaps it shouldn't count... but it's from 1987.) Don't get me wrong, I plan to upgrade in the near future, but "upgrading" is buying a new PC. An action that won't take this old one out of commission. Some of us get our money's worth of our equipment. Others don't have the time, cash, or expertise needed.
Our school prides itself on being one of the best public schools in the state, and we have no notable programming/computer science classes. I believe our school had one when I entered in the 7th grade, as I seem to remember being excited about it, but it's since been dropped. We offer a class called "IMS", but, despite it being in the course description, I don't believe they've done any real programming.
And people still aren't any better off - I've fooled people into thinking I've hacked into the FBI with a really cheesy any-real-computer-nerd-would-die-laughing web page. On a laptop with no internet connection. You have people ask you, "You mean you want to sit in front of a computer the rest of your life?", or they'll ask you how to do something with a computer that's way out their (or my) ability - people don't understand that programming isn't just about typing code, that it's a certain way of thinking, a way of wrapping your mind around a problem and being able to describe it to a machine in such detail that it can solve it. As I exquisitely tried to put it one very late night: "People simply misunderstand the type of person a programmer isn't."
It is a shame. I browse and answer questions on programming forums during my spare time, and people post their homework questions in hopes of an answer. What I would give to be able to have homework in programming - they have no idea how lucky they are.
Everything I know, however, I taught myself. (Sort of a neat thing to say, really.) I have little in the way of peers, and no teachers or guidance - any holes in my abilities will surface later. I pronounced "integer" with a hard g until I heard someone say it. I spelled out GUI, whereas most other's I've heard pronouce it ("gooy"), and I pronounce AVI, where I've always heard people spell it out.
Though one unintended consequence of bad schooling: TI-83+s. Our school requires them, and their native ability to use TI-BASIC seems to flush out some programmers. (Though some people who have no desire to program still use it.) Those who do generally start trying to make games, or things to solve various equations. (As opposed to those who merely type them in.)
Teachers tend to trust a student(s) more than the IT department. Some years the IT department was a student. (Ah, the golden years.)
Perhaps this lack of education will cause a shortage of programmers, a spike in demand, and raised salaries for those of us who know what we're doing. Then again, perhaps all our work will be outsourced.
But today the answer is still the same. I will not fix your computer. (I mean, I'm a programmer. I break things. ^_^)
From the article: which also allows the patients to see the words on the screen in their own language. If a patient is deaf, the system can also translate into American Sign Language using video.
What's the point of video sign language? You could just read the words off the screen... seems a trifle pointless.
And does this system just show text, or can it actually pronounce it? (This could be an issue in countries where the literacy rate isn't too high, if say US doctors are doing disaster relief.)
1.) Security. Yeah... XP showed us how great MS is at that. But forgetting XP, 'security' doesn't mean much until it's out and circulating, and people start trying to use that 'security'.
2.) IE 7: Seven eh? Wonderful, I'll breeze right past six, being a five users. If it's Firefox-inspired, is it finally detached enough from the OS to be useful? Tabs are nice, yes, but Firefox and others beat you to it MS. And add some shortcut keys for Heavens sake! One of the things I love about FF is that it can be controlled without a mouse. Productively.
3.) Eye candy. Processor hog, maybe, but I dig computers that look good. As long as it's smooth. Lose the smoothness, and you lose the eye candy.
4.) Desktop search: He complains about the XP search, I do hate that thing. Now we've all got a better reason to store all our documents inside that pretty "My Documents" folder. Forget organization. (I'm guilty of this too...)
5.) Better updates: IE and Windows Update separated? Praise God if this is true. I've installed XP on computers only to have Windows Update crash, fresh out of the box. That, and the upgrades themselves often crash.
6.) More media: A good thing, but this guy loses points: "one of the key reasons to upgrade versions of Windows has been the free stuff Gates and Company toss into the new OS" Very interesting, given the price tag with three digits to the left of that decimal point. Wow, free stuff I pay for!
7.) Parental controls: Reminds me of the little HAL-control installed on Discovery. Worked well.
8.) Better backups: A good thing, whoops, more lost points: "Today, desktops routinely ship with 300GB or 400GB hard drives." Oh yes. Let's make replicas of all our files on our harddisk? Then the entire disk gets lost in some accident, and... well. I've been brought laptops that were "acting bad", whose problem was they'd filled the harddisk up with copies of itself...
9.) P2P collaboration: I can collaborate, joy, but can we share files? (Yup, this OS will sell...)
10.) Quick setup: A good thing, whoops, this guy just seems to shoot himself in the foot: "will slash setup times from about an hour to as little as 15 minutes." An hour, eh? If that's XP you're talking about, it's not an hour. There's install, which takes at least an hour, then patching, patching, and my God, more patching. Then you have to install real software, given that Windows computers come with none themselves.
There's just one thing I want. (Well, maybe not quite) Symbolic links, like what Linux and Macs have. I'd kill for symbolic links. And no, 'shitcuts' do not count. If I use a shortcut to a directory, I can't say:.\shortcut\folder\file. Oh. And backslashes. MS, aren't your programmers screaming at you for having to type things like: "\\\\blah\\folder\\blah"?
Don't get me wrong here though: It could be a huge improvement over XP and family. Unless it's disasterous, I plan to get it myself. (Dual-booting with Linux, and OS X, if possible...)
I for one agree! I love the two-letter commands. (I have MSYS for Windows too, so I can use some of those in Windows as well.) ls, dd, df, ln, cp, mv (over window's move and rename!) Less typing.
As for the names, ok, so what. I could make a list just as easy with the reverse effect. Outlook or KMail? Excel or KSpread? Another gripe I have with that list (asside from the odd capitalization of iPod...) is some of the apps they choose. Photoshop, Textpad, WinAmp, iTunes - Few (I've yet to see one, but I won't rule it out) new Windows computers come with those out of the box. (Still, those are some nice programs.)
People can't remember GIMP? Illustrator is easier to remember than GNU Image Manipluation Program? Perhaps the article may have a point, but I've never had a problem. Even so, if the name doesn't make sense, there's still the hope that the icon might. And the article's screenshot of, I assume, confusing names have most of them paired with descriptions, and in categories...
I didn't elborate enough. You can repeatedly see evolution in progress - including in laboratory experiments.
It's harder to see it in larger lifeforms, but with smaller life that people aren't messing with, we can see evolution repeatedly in progress. Flu germs are a good example, often a mutation will make a germ immune to the vaccines and medicines. This flu germ will survive better, and thus evolution occurs. There's a big overreaction in the US now about bird flu possibly spreading to humans. As a parent also pointed out, we can see this in fossils as well.
There's a decent Wiki article on experimenting with evolution, which also details a few of the scientific experiments that've been conducted on evolution. The Miller-Urey experiment is a good example of how things might've started.
Evolution is much more testable than ID, and is a scientific theory. ID is not testable in any way whatsoever. I'm not saying that ID shouldn't be taught, just that its place is not the science class.
Incredibly, this got passed. This is horribly wrong, and defeats the point of science.
Let's review what science is based on. Known facts that have been determined through repeated testing. Things that we know work, and how they work. Science gives humans the knowledge to build building, bridges, fly into space, save human lives, etc.
And here we are, injecting what supporters fraudulently call the "theory" of intelligent design, into our school classrooms? Last I checked, America's schools weren't fairing so well. We don't need to increase this problem.
John Bacon, said the move "gets rid of a lot of dogma that's being taught in the classroom today."
Say what? We're not getting rid of anything. We're inserting a set of religious beliefs into the science classroom. Science is based on facts that can be tested. You can test evolution. You cannot test ID. ID is a religious belief.
The way my high school world studies teacher did it, and the method I personally agree with, was with a field trip. We took a day, and the whole class (about fifty of us (And not as in class of 2005, class, as in people in a classroom.)) rode the bus to a Muslim Mosque, a Jewish Synagogue, as well as Hinda and Buddist. At each stop, a person from that place would talk to us about their religion and their beliefs. It was wonderful, and, might I add, very educational. My point is, that is where ID belongs. In Social Studies. It's religion, and people need to get over religion being mentioned in school. It can, and should, be done, just in the right place. And we studied it. Along with the creation stories of many of the cultures on Earth, from Greek to Viking.
"Wish my teachers had to admit that Evolution isn't as solid as a Mac:)... And I get really annoyed when people pretend that it's water tight..." (-Another slashdotter)
Unfortunately, the theory of evolution is that tight. It's a theory. "In scientific usage, theory is not the opposite of fact. Theories are typically ways of explaining why things happen, usually after the fact that they happen is no longer in scientific dispute." People misuse the word theory a lot, and it's common to misunderstand it as the opposite of fact. I think if more people were aware of the meaning of the word theory, and therefore what it means to say "the theory of evolution", there'd be less confusion.
"It will be marketed by the religious right... as a huge victory for their side," I'm a Republican, and I should hope I'm religious, and I will not be trumpeting this as a victory of any sort.
Who of us actually would click... "Check out these great new pics of us!! LoLz:)"
The sad thing is, people do! And not only do they click the link pointing at some odd site, they download a file, and execute it!
There was an AIM trojan similar (but not the same, I believe) that got circulated to me (by a few of my 'friends') this last week. It's text was something like, "check out these kewl pics of me!" Now, if anyone I know said "kewl" that'd instantly throw red flags. (And still, I got that same IM _6_ times that one night.) So, I take a look. The link points at some odd site, with a.php file. Now, none of the people who IM'd me that night were smart enough to set up a websever w/ PHP. The PHP file, I find, hands you a.com file (With the oh so cliché name img552.com). (Which I think was actually a full Win32 app...) At any rate, through some research, it seems you needed run it in a root user account.
And that's just the thing. Many of these AIM virus/trojan/etc. need not just one, but several lapses of logic to work. They still manage to spread, however. When you click a link, download a virus, and then run it in a root account (although half the world runs as root...)... that's three (usually) fairly obvious lapses in your thinking.
This isn't a hole in the computer, it's the user. Users are..., uneducated. Many/.ers know this, people don't understand how the technology they live with works. Until they do, things like this will continue to work, and people who fix computers will continue to make a living, and we'll keep having to listen to journalism repeat the same words: Don't open executables you don't recognize. (Then again, don't these stupid Windows computers hide extentions by default? We keep telling users not to open things that end in.com,.exe, etc., but all they see is cool_pic(.com!))
Right. I live in the city (capital of the state, in fact) and we'd feel lucky to pay 40 USD for a cable connection. Unfortunately, we pay twice that. Meanwhile, with this connection, I read stories of people in Europe with higher speed connections for fractions of the price.
Obviously there are differences between Europe and America. America is more spread out. But even in the urban areas... it doesn't compare to what you read about. 10Mb/s? I have 6. (Downstream. Up is
Jokes about cable internet's speed are made offhandly. Meanwhile, the bill is high. I know my parents have considered looking into DSL, or some cheaper alternative.
I personally love OOO for that reason, it does a great job of opening MS Office files. I've used the OpenOffice suite to open files from not only Word, but Excel and Powerpoint (probably the three biggest office apps).
My PC, a Windows 98 machine, didn't come with MS Office. It shipped with Lotus SmartSuite. Well, Lotus does a lousy to decent job of opening MS files, and since OpenOffice was free, I tried it, and it's now my Office package of choice. (Although Lotus still resides on the harddisk since my parents use it (on PC's with OS/2))
PDFs are nice, as most people can open them with no problem, and that's another feature of OpenOffice that's delighted me: Export to PDF.
My only problem with OpenOffice is that it's ungainly and slow. Opening and saving take longer than they should. And there are some font issues with bullets.
Because, with a little knowledge on the users part, Linux can be a rock solid desktop OS.
People are scared of learning a new way of working, and that intimidating thing called a command line. I have GNU bash on my Windows side (blasphemous, I know) because I love the ease and power of shell scripting. (Although it's a wee quirky in Windows) (And because I can redirect stderr to stdout. That feature is a godsend.)
I've used Linux for all sorts of home projects - for instance, gphoto can interface with my camera, and I can automate phototaking with it. (With a little work, I could probably turn it into a webcam.)
The nice thing about command line utilities is that they can easily be made to do what you want, as well as automated to do that.
And why not give the user a choice? I think that's a logical thing to do from a corporate point of view. If there is a demand for Linux, then why not offer it? The customer is always right, and if they'll buy a computer that has some *nix on it, then might as well offer it. (Heck, it's free as well...)
Even if Firefox does have some bugs, I've had it crash a lot less than IE. I've also been infected and had malicious code run thanks to IE, many times. It's never happened with Firefox.
I am a Windows 98 user, however, and Microsoft has long since forgotten about me. I'm not the only one still using this OS, there are plenty of others, and all using the same bug filled IE. So, since no security patch will ever come our way, I use Firefox.
Furthermore, Firefox is not a mature application relative to IE. Yet it works better, and most people who use it never look back. Firefox only recently reached version 1, and updates are still released fairly regularly. (And a lot more often than IE patches!) On top of that, Firefox has better features, and works in more places (Windows, Mac, *nix). Therefore the article's author's point of comparing vulnerabilities in Firefox and IE is moot, since Firefox and IE cannot be compared on this level alone.
While the vulnerabilities pile up for IE, this latest one for Firefox has not only been acknowledged, but there is a workaround to avoid it.
These are astronomers, right? And a good sized chuck of stuff is going to wiz by our little planet on April 13th, 2029, which happens to be a Friday... now then, large chunk of rock, here, Friday the 13th.
"With Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari all free,"
IE? Free? Since when? Just because it comes with the OS (which, might I add, you pay $$$ for) doesn't mean it's free.
Furthermore, what about all the adware, spyware (and for some, viruses) that people have to clear off their harddrive? That takes time, and, "Time is money." And with all the time I've spent doing that with IE..., let's just say with IE, you won't have any "Free time"
Slashdot Mirror
That's "non-military"? If I'm the military, I'm saying, "my country is 'threatened' by 'terrorists/korean missiles/rabid pandas/cornflakes', and to prevent harm to the citizens, we must use said GPL software to 'protect' ourselves (by killing the invaders)."
Seriously, did none of the slashdotters watch I, Robot? That same idea can be shifted to the army. We must either protect many by sacraficing a few, or protect our people by killing theirs. (As they are a threat - hence "by inaction", humans would be hurt.)
Even if such a case made it to court, would the courts (in a crisis/public feelings) side against the military? Can open source even fight such a case? And who's to say the military won't just make it all into secret shit.
I second that! My family's first PC was the Compaq Deskpro 386. Thankfully my parents stuffed another (larger) harddrive in it. Runs OS/2, tons of fun DOS games (Jill of the Jungle, Apogee, Midwinter, etc) and did word processing (I was a kid at the time, so games > work). First PC I laid hands on. I remember opening up Hack's executable (The Quest for the Amulet of Yendor!) in notepad and wondering, "How the heck do people know what all the funny letters mean?"
Did I mention that the 386 is still alive and kicking? It's almost reached its 19th birthday.
If only, if only... oh well. The solution is simple really - just apply video game tactics. Don't take a pack of orcs head on - shoot 'em through a doorway one at a time. Same goes for viruses, worms, etc, though I'm not quite sure how. Though strong magnets seem to make a fairly good anti-malware. Whatever, back to the orcs.
Mmmhmm. At least three companies made my computer. IBM made the hardware (some of it...), Microsoft the software, and some other people the various other parts. Yup, one machine, many companies. Does it work? Sort of. I experience a certain "voting fraud" every day.
I was at a Krogers, and me and my mom decided to do the Self-Scan, as we had only a few items. I'm happily scanning along, when I get to the beer. Me, I keep scanning, but the computer - too smart for it's own good. Beer. Must show ID. Or be terminated. So my mom digs out her ID and shows it to the lady. She shakes her head no.
:-/. 21... 21... 21...
Allegedly, a minor can not scan beer. How the holy hell I'm going to get drunk scanning beer (looook at the pritty liiight...) is beyond me, but long story short, Mom had to take the beer, do exactly the same thing I was doing and put it in the cart. I'm a minor, so kill me. Send me to court for scanning a beer...
And I didn't get any of it...
If it weren't for that darned thing about being polite, there's something to be said for the phrase, "Don't get your panties in a wad..." (I'm just scanning the beer. No drinking. Just scanning. Won't kill you. (Or me.))
Come to think of it. I wasn't scanning beer. I was scanning a cardboard box. Welcome to the land of the "free". (You may all sleep peacefully, knowing that minors shall not be abusing the powers of a barcode reader!) </rant>
You need no such thing. There is always more than one way to solve problems, especially with computers. Here's two ideas that popped into my head with two minutes of thought:
1) Hardware: Get a headphone splitter and a male-to-male headphone cable. (Oddly, I have the male-to-male cable, but not a splitter...) Put the splitter in the computers speaker port. Then your headphones/speakers in one split, and the male to male in the other. Plug the other end of the male-to-male into the wave in (not the mic) and record from wave in (which is really your waveout). Make your Skype call.
I personally don't like the above since it a) involves hardware/some quality loss (depending on the hardware) and b) might cost $$$. (I'm a cheap-o.
As for your low quality, I hear a lot of fuzz if I have my microphone selected in my audio settings. (I also don't have the worlds best mic.) Turning off the mic's feedback removes the fuzz, but I can't hear myself (nor would I hear myself in a recording). You can do post-record noise reduction, but that usually seems to make things sound harsh/metalicy. Finally, you're asking for broadcast quality audio from Skype? Skype works over the internet, and there will be quality loss to get the sound from point A to point B live. Let alone pray the sound should skip. I personally think you're asking too much. Professional TV channels doing phone calls aren't always perfect quality, and the satelitte broadcasts from the other side of the earth certainly aren't either. (Thought that's a bit more extreme.) If I knew I was listening to a Skype call, I could forgive a bit of quality. After all, it's just voice, not music.
Although "estrogen-challenged", I agree. Perhaps for different reasons, more of a, "How many $500s do I have? Four? Oh, and how many do you have? None! *taunt*" I love being able to wave money in an opponents face... what would we do now? "Oo! Look at this... uh... plastic... that uh... looks just like yours..."
Nearly the same reason for the pieces (thank God they're still there... right?) - it's thrilling to sit there and say, "Oh! Rolled an 11! And guess where that lands me... that's right! Board. Walk." and triumpantly moving your piece there.
What I always loved was that monopoly was freeform between the players. Any deal can be setup: charging interest, buying/selling land, loans, etc. But it's easier to do this with cash. The poor banker would have to swipe cards every two seconds. (He might as well hold on to them...)
Alas, the real question here is: "Paper or plastic?"
An IM icon is all the same thing: It's displayed to the world, shown to everyone who some much as has you on their buddy list. But it is a tough line, but I side with the judge. There is freedom of speech, but this is outside of that. The parents further worsened the situation by fighting it... take the kid aside and explain to him why in this day and age you do not draw such things.
Besides, you've got at least show some tact. I had a teacher whose class I didn't particularly like (I didn't hate him - his class was hard because I didn't study enough, simple as that). And we drew a picture of it part way through the year, but without guns, blood etc. The picture depicted a small raft with three stick figures (labeled with our names) on a giant sea, the sea labelled "The Sea of AP US" (the class name). Our boat had a leak, and was sinking. Next to us, atop a battleship/destroyer with smoking guns pointed at us, was a stick figure (our teacher) holding a sword and wearing a very Napoleon-esque hat. In the sea were sharks with "AP Test" written on them, and at the sea floor a treasure chest called "Passing grades" (or something close). Classmate stuck it to her folder. Great picture.
Though perhaps the media wouldn't work when you stick it in... oh well.
And the quote at the bottom is just excellent for the copyright / P2P legal stuff:
Seriously though, who could still be running an original installation of Windows 98? Standard operating procedure for Win 98 pretty much dictates a fresh reinstall every so often anyway.
... from 1995.
Seriously though, you should've known such a statement would come back to bite you in the butt. I run Windows 98, and yes, it is the original installation, thank you very much.
Only in the Windows world (it seems) do you get a significant number of people who stubornly refuse to give up their applications
Refuse to give up? This article is all about old Windows users being denied the choice to give up software from 1995. Given the current trend now, we can't upgrade even if we wanted. There are those out there who don't wish to pony up the several hundred dollars needed to upgrade a system every few years.
Can they really expect developers to continue to support them?
If the developers expect to get their money, then yes. Software that I write runs on Windows 98.
This is, sadly, a growing trend that one should only expect in the Microsoft world. I personally would upgrade, if I could. I've seen computers with specs similar to mine, and although Microsoft says you can "run" never versions of Windows on my hardware, let's be serious - you can't. Not practically, and so far every old computer that probably came with Windows 98 and was "upgraded", runs poorly. More and more applications refuse to run on Windows 98, even Java, supposedly the "run an app on any OS", now balks at my old system. The latest MS Visual Studio, and others. Firefox had been a haven for Windows 98 users - my Internet Explorer is fully patched... as can be. It still is full of holes, I clean off malware every now and then. But as was pointed out earlier, the advice for us: run Firefox and sit behind a router. (Which I do)
This PC (1998) happens, ironically, to be the newest, at least within the house. The other three, all running OS/2, are older. (One doesn't have internet, so perhaps it shouldn't count... but it's from 1987.) Don't get me wrong, I plan to upgrade in the near future, but "upgrading" is buying a new PC. An action that won't take this old one out of commission. Some of us get our money's worth of our equipment. Others don't have the time, cash, or expertise needed.
I, unfortunately, concur.
Our school prides itself on being one of the best public schools in the state, and we have no notable programming/computer science classes. I believe our school had one when I entered in the 7th grade, as I seem to remember being excited about it, but it's since been dropped. We offer a class called "IMS", but, despite it being in the course description, I don't believe they've done any real programming.
And people still aren't any better off - I've fooled people into thinking I've hacked into the FBI with a really cheesy any-real-computer-nerd-would-die-laughing web page. On a laptop with no internet connection. You have people ask you, "You mean you want to sit in front of a computer the rest of your life?", or they'll ask you how to do something with a computer that's way out their (or my) ability - people don't understand that programming isn't just about typing code, that it's a certain way of thinking, a way of wrapping your mind around a problem and being able to describe it to a machine in such detail that it can solve it. As I exquisitely tried to put it one very late night: "People simply misunderstand the type of person a programmer isn't."
It is a shame. I browse and answer questions on programming forums during my spare time, and people post their homework questions in hopes of an answer. What I would give to be able to have homework in programming - they have no idea how lucky they are.
Everything I know, however, I taught myself. (Sort of a neat thing to say, really.) I have little in the way of peers, and no teachers or guidance - any holes in my abilities will surface later. I pronounced "integer" with a hard g until I heard someone say it. I spelled out GUI, whereas most other's I've heard pronouce it ("gooy"), and I pronounce AVI, where I've always heard people spell it out.
Though one unintended consequence of bad schooling: TI-83+s. Our school requires them, and their native ability to use TI-BASIC seems to flush out some programmers. (Though some people who have no desire to program still use it.) Those who do generally start trying to make games, or things to solve various equations. (As opposed to those who merely type them in.)
Teachers tend to trust a student(s) more than the IT department. Some years the IT department was a student. (Ah, the golden years.)
Perhaps this lack of education will cause a shortage of programmers, a spike in demand, and raised salaries for those of us who know what we're doing. Then again, perhaps all our work will be outsourced.
But today the answer is still the same. I will not fix your computer. (I mean, I'm a programmer. I break things. ^_^)
From the article:
which also allows the patients to see the words on the screen in their own language.
If a patient is deaf, the system can also translate into American Sign Language using video.
What's the point of video sign language? You could just read the words off the screen... seems a trifle pointless.
And does this system just show text, or can it actually pronounce it? (This could be an issue in countries where the literacy rate isn't too high, if say US doctors are doing disaster relief.)
1.) Security. Yeah... XP showed us how great MS is at that. But forgetting XP, 'security' doesn't mean much until it's out and circulating, and people start trying to use that 'security'.
.\shortcut\folder\file. Oh. And backslashes. MS, aren't your programmers screaming at you for having to type things like: "\\\\blah\\folder\\blah"?
2.) IE 7: Seven eh? Wonderful, I'll breeze right past six, being a five users. If it's Firefox-inspired, is it finally detached enough from the OS to be useful? Tabs are nice, yes, but Firefox and others beat you to it MS. And add some shortcut keys for Heavens sake! One of the things I love about FF is that it can be controlled without a mouse. Productively.
3.) Eye candy. Processor hog, maybe, but I dig computers that look good. As long as it's smooth. Lose the smoothness, and you lose the eye candy.
4.) Desktop search: He complains about the XP search, I do hate that thing. Now we've all got a better reason to store all our documents inside that pretty "My Documents" folder. Forget organization. (I'm guilty of this too...)
5.) Better updates: IE and Windows Update separated? Praise God if this is true. I've installed XP on computers only to have Windows Update crash, fresh out of the box. That, and the upgrades themselves often crash.
6.) More media: A good thing, but this guy loses points: "one of the key reasons to upgrade versions of Windows has been the free stuff Gates and Company toss into the new OS" Very interesting, given the price tag with three digits to the left of that decimal point. Wow, free stuff I pay for!
7.) Parental controls: Reminds me of the little HAL-control installed on Discovery. Worked well.
8.) Better backups: A good thing, whoops, more lost points: "Today, desktops routinely ship with 300GB or 400GB hard drives." Oh yes. Let's make replicas of all our files on our harddisk? Then the entire disk gets lost in some accident, and... well. I've been brought laptops that were "acting bad", whose problem was they'd filled the harddisk up with copies of itself...
9.) P2P collaboration: I can collaborate, joy, but can we share files? (Yup, this OS will sell...)
10.) Quick setup: A good thing, whoops, this guy just seems to shoot himself in the foot: "will slash setup times from about an hour to as little as 15 minutes." An hour, eh? If that's XP you're talking about, it's not an hour. There's install, which takes at least an hour, then patching, patching, and my God, more patching. Then you have to install real software, given that Windows computers come with none themselves.
There's just one thing I want. (Well, maybe not quite) Symbolic links, like what Linux and Macs have. I'd kill for symbolic links. And no, 'shitcuts' do not count. If I use a shortcut to a directory, I can't say:
Don't get me wrong here though: It could be a huge improvement over XP and family. Unless it's disasterous, I plan to get it myself. (Dual-booting with Linux, and OS X, if possible...)
I for one agree! I love the two-letter commands. (I have MSYS for Windows too, so I can use some of those in Windows as well.) ls, dd, df, ln, cp, mv (over window's move and rename!) Less typing.
As for the names, ok, so what. I could make a list just as easy with the reverse effect. Outlook or KMail? Excel or KSpread? Another gripe I have with that list (asside from the odd capitalization of iPod...) is some of the apps they choose. Photoshop, Textpad, WinAmp, iTunes - Few (I've yet to see one, but I won't rule it out) new Windows computers come with those out of the box. (Still, those are some nice programs.)
People can't remember GIMP? Illustrator is easier to remember than GNU Image Manipluation Program? Perhaps the article may have a point, but I've never had a problem. Even so, if the name doesn't make sense, there's still the hope that the icon might. And the article's screenshot of, I assume, confusing names have most of them paired with descriptions, and in categories...
Just my two cent though.
I didn't elborate enough. You can repeatedly see evolution in progress - including in laboratory experiments.
It's harder to see it in larger lifeforms, but with smaller life that people aren't messing with, we can see evolution repeatedly in progress. Flu germs are a good example, often a mutation will make a germ immune to the vaccines and medicines. This flu germ will survive better, and thus evolution occurs. There's a big overreaction in the US now about bird flu possibly spreading to humans. As a parent also pointed out, we can see this in fossils as well.
There's a decent Wiki article on experimenting with evolution, which also details a few of the scientific experiments that've been conducted on evolution. The Miller-Urey experiment is a good example of how things might've started.
Evolution is much more testable than ID, and is a scientific theory. ID is not testable in any way whatsoever. I'm not saying that ID shouldn't be taught, just that its place is not the science class.
Incredibly, this got passed. This is horribly wrong, and defeats the point of science.
:)... And I get really annoyed when people pretend that it's water tight..." (-Another slashdotter)
Unfortunately, the theory of evolution is that tight. It's a theory. "In scientific usage, theory is not the opposite of fact. Theories are typically ways of explaining why things happen, usually after the fact that they happen is no longer in scientific dispute." People misuse the word theory a lot, and it's common to misunderstand it as the opposite of fact. I think if more people were aware of the meaning of the word theory, and therefore what it means to say "the theory of evolution", there'd be less confusion.
... as a huge victory for their side," I'm a Republican, and I should hope I'm religious, and I will not be trumpeting this as a victory of any sort.
Let's review what science is based on. Known facts that have been determined through repeated testing. Things that we know work, and how they work. Science gives humans the knowledge to build building, bridges, fly into space, save human lives, etc.
And here we are, injecting what supporters fraudulently call the "theory" of intelligent design, into our school classrooms? Last I checked, America's schools weren't fairing so well. We don't need to increase this problem.
John Bacon, said the move "gets rid of a lot of dogma that's being taught in the classroom today."
Say what? We're not getting rid of anything. We're inserting a set of religious beliefs into the science classroom. Science is based on facts that can be tested. You can test evolution. You cannot test ID. ID is a religious belief.
The way my high school world studies teacher did it, and the method I personally agree with, was with a field trip. We took a day, and the whole class (about fifty of us (And not as in class of 2005, class, as in people in a classroom.)) rode the bus to a Muslim Mosque, a Jewish Synagogue, as well as Hinda and Buddist. At each stop, a person from that place would talk to us about their religion and their beliefs. It was wonderful, and, might I add, very educational. My point is, that is where ID belongs. In Social Studies. It's religion, and people need to get over religion being mentioned in school. It can, and should, be done, just in the right place. And we studied it. Along with the creation stories of many of the cultures on Earth, from Greek to Viking.
"Wish my teachers had to admit that Evolution isn't as solid as a Mac
"It will be marketed by the religious right
Who of us actually would click... "Check out these great new pics of us!! LoLz :)"
.php file. Now, none of the people who IM'd me that night were smart enough to set up a websever w/ PHP. The PHP file, I find, hands you a .com file (With the oh so cliché name img552.com). (Which I think was actually a full Win32 app...) At any rate, through some research, it seems you needed run it in a root user account.
/.ers know this, people don't understand how the technology they live with works. Until they do, things like this will continue to work, and people who fix computers will continue to make a living, and we'll keep having to listen to journalism repeat the same words: Don't open executables you don't recognize. (Then again, don't these stupid Windows computers hide extentions by default? We keep telling users not to open things that end in .com, .exe, etc., but all they see is cool_pic(.com!))
/., and I'm preaching to the choir.
The sad thing is, people do! And not only do they click the link pointing at some odd site, they download a file, and execute it!
There was an AIM trojan similar (but not the same, I believe) that got circulated to me (by a few of my 'friends') this last week. It's text was something like, "check out these kewl pics of me!" Now, if anyone I know said "kewl" that'd instantly throw red flags. (And still, I got that same IM _6_ times that one night.) So, I take a look. The link points at some odd site, with a
And that's just the thing. Many of these AIM virus/trojan/etc. need not just one, but several lapses of logic to work. They still manage to spread, however. When you click a link, download a virus, and then run it in a root account (although half the world runs as root...)... that's three (usually) fairly obvious lapses in your thinking.
This isn't a hole in the computer, it's the user. Users are..., uneducated. Many
But this is
Right. I live in the city (capital of the state, in fact) and we'd feel lucky to pay 40 USD for a cable connection. Unfortunately, we pay twice that. Meanwhile, with this connection, I read stories of people in Europe with higher speed connections for fractions of the price.
Obviously there are differences between Europe and America. America is more spread out. But even in the urban areas... it doesn't compare to what you read about. 10Mb/s? I have 6. (Downstream. Up is
Jokes about cable internet's speed are made offhandly. Meanwhile, the bill is high. I know my parents have considered looking into DSL, or some cheaper alternative.
I personally love OOO for that reason, it does a great job of opening MS Office files. I've used the OpenOffice suite to open files from not only Word, but Excel and Powerpoint (probably the three biggest office apps).
My PC, a Windows 98 machine, didn't come with MS Office. It shipped with Lotus SmartSuite. Well, Lotus does a lousy to decent job of opening MS files, and since OpenOffice was free, I tried it, and it's now my Office package of choice. (Although Lotus still resides on the harddisk since my parents use it (on PC's with OS/2))
PDFs are nice, as most people can open them with no problem, and that's another feature of OpenOffice that's delighted me: Export to PDF.
My only problem with OpenOffice is that it's ungainly and slow. Opening and saving take longer than they should. And there are some font issues with bullets.
Because, with a little knowledge on the users part, Linux can be a rock solid desktop OS.
People are scared of learning a new way of working, and that intimidating thing called a command line. I have GNU bash on my Windows side (blasphemous, I know) because I love the ease and power of shell scripting. (Although it's a wee quirky in Windows) (And because I can redirect stderr to stdout. That feature is a godsend.)
I've used Linux for all sorts of home projects - for instance, gphoto can interface with my camera, and I can automate phototaking with it. (With a little work, I could probably turn it into a webcam.)
The nice thing about command line utilities is that they can easily be made to do what you want, as well as automated to do that.
And why not give the user a choice? I think that's a logical thing to do from a corporate point of view. If there is a demand for Linux, then why not offer it? The customer is always right, and if they'll buy a computer that has some *nix on it, then might as well offer it. (Heck, it's free as well...)
Even if Firefox does have some bugs, I've had it crash a lot less than IE. I've also been infected and had malicious code run thanks to IE, many times. It's never happened with Firefox.
I am a Windows 98 user, however, and Microsoft has long since forgotten about me. I'm not the only one still using this OS, there are plenty of others, and all using the same bug filled IE. So, since no security patch will ever come our way, I use Firefox.
Furthermore, Firefox is not a mature application relative to IE. Yet it works better, and most people who use it never look back. Firefox only recently reached version 1, and updates are still released fairly regularly. (And a lot more often than IE patches!) On top of that, Firefox has better features, and works in more places (Windows, Mac, *nix). Therefore the article's author's point of comparing vulnerabilities in Firefox and IE is moot, since Firefox and IE cannot be compared on this level alone.
While the vulnerabilities pile up for IE, this latest one for Firefox has not only been acknowledged, but there is a workaround to avoid it.
Wait, this wasn't your favorite keyboard?
Did anyone check the date?
These are astronomers, right? And a good sized chuck of stuff is going to wiz by our little planet on April 13th, 2029, which happens to be a Friday... now then, large chunk of rock, here, Friday the 13th.
PR1 crashed a whole lot more than 1.0.
Same here---I can remember crashing PR1.0, but only every now and then... but 1.0 hasn't crashed on me yet.
"With Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari all free,"
IE? Free? Since when? Just because it comes with the OS (which, might I add, you pay $$$ for) doesn't mean it's free.
Furthermore, what about all the adware, spyware (and for some, viruses) that people have to clear off their harddrive? That takes time, and, "Time is money." And with all the time I've spent doing that with IE..., let's just say with IE, you won't have any "Free time"