I think the usual bribe *ahem* I mean workshop is a full funded golf day where MS supply the carts, the booze and a nice lunch. After that I dunno what the next level of "gifts" are I'm not high enough up to know:(
On a side note our dept recently made the announcement they'd be going MS based. A few of us had already suggested alternatives like Linux or Apple. We weren't saying they should buy them on our sayso, but at least go as far as evaluating them as genuine alternatives.
When the MS announcement happened I asked what the review of the other alternatives found. The answer, "What review?" *sigh* Nice to know that MS based tunnel vision is alive and well.
All of which is probably why we're seeing this ridiculous boom in "home improvement" shows. Every second show on TV has some clown renovating, repairing, building or demolishing some poor sods house. Out of the other fifty percent of programming another fifty percent seems to be reality tv shows or "I wanna be a star" tv shows. Then out of that remaining quarter you get the odd movie, the news, sports and current affairs shows and heaven forbid an actual tv show... with a story and characters...
That post should say there's been no definitive link to cancer... yet. I did a bit of looking into magnetic fields and their hazards a few months back (the new office has plant equipment right next to it that caused major magnetic fluctuation - about 13 times normal background magnetic field). Anyway, all the literature I found said there was nothing conclusive and they tested fields massively higher than those emitted by a CRT (like 10,000 times higher). Still, there were no really long term studies so it's still a possibility.
The headache comment I agree with wholeheartedly, being a constant headache sufferer I recently went to a specialist who suggested some things. Basically we humans weren't designed to sit staring at a screen for 8 hours (or more) a day, and the muscles in the neck and shoulders tend to tense up which in turn causes "muscle tension headaches". So yeah you get a headache at most but it's more likely posture than radiation.
I agree wholeheartedly with what you're saying. However, I believe that there is a market for DRM it's just not being serviced properly. They should be selling (giving away) multiple versions of tracks.
Weed has a model where you can distribute a track any way you like (P2P, FTP, CD whatever) and whenever a new person plays it they get three free plays. After that they need to pay. That's a great idea. It still allows the concept of "lending someone a CD" so you're sharing great music and getting people interested.
To extend that idea a bit further I think there should also be tracks available in "pay to play" mode where you make a micropayment when you listen. It may only be a few cents a time but still a payment. If you decide you like the song enough to own it instead of renting it then you actually get to buy it outright for a larger fee. While we're at it if you play it enough that the micropayments hit a certain threshold then you should automatically be granted ownership of it.
Now as for the ownership bit... Once you own a track it should be possible for you to copy it to whatever media/device you like as long as it's yours. I'm not sure how that could work since making an audio CD version would (should) mean losing your DRM. I don't think we should be forced to upgrade to a DRM compatible CD player if our current equipment works fine. Maybe some day as older equipment becomes obsolete that will happen naturally. But until then, I just don't know.
Frankly I think anything that doesn't provide an easy means of uninstalling should be considered malware. And even if you don't consider it malware for the fact it won't uninstall, it's a pain in the neck when you try to hide the toolbar and it reappears each time you start word, or it positions itself wherever the hell it likes.
And another gripe with Acrobat is that it wants to leave a service running all the time. I might create a PDF once every three months. Why should I need a service running in the background the rest of the time? And if you terminate the service some of the PDF functionality just stops working - no explanation, no attempt to restart the service. It just fails. It's ok for a technically savvy user who can recognise what's going and knows to start/stop it when they want. But for Joe Average he won't realise.
I continually get asked to "fix" friends PCs and they're running umpteen little background services/apps that get used maybe once a month, or less. Yet they all want to stay resident all the time as though the users want to use them every hours of every day.
I wish application vendors would provide options to (un)load these things on demand. Let me choose whether I use Acrobat so much that I want to have that service running all the time. And if I don't then when I want to make a PDF it takes me a few extra seconds while the service loads.
Exactly! Some of the standards make sense to some people but not to others. Frankly I find some of the standards very counter-intuitive -sizing and spacing ones particularly.
That said, it'd be nice if everyone who builds a browser would play along with the standards rather than interpreting them as they see fit. At least then we could assume our code would look the same in any browser. I must say though that it's getting much closer than it was about 2 years ago.
Initially I thought browser dependant HTML/CSS extensions were a good idea. eg: If something isn't mentioned in a standard then it's fine if MS implement it however they like. I'm leaning away from that now though, because it means we wind up in the same messy situation where every browser renders pages differently. Now I think the best thing to do would be to hold back features until they can be officially added to the standard. As a corollary the standard needs to be updated more swiftly:)
Australian doesn't even have a constitutional right to free speech like the US so I dunno what he's talking about anyway.
I find it frustrating that the Govt is basically overlegislating things. They're treating we Australian citizens as though we're children incapable of making rational decisions.
As for the whole "is suicide is an option" question, personally I think it should be the individuals right to choose. However, I do think that suicide is wrong unless you've got a permanent, untreatable medical condition that severely reduces the quality of life (eg: cancer). I believe in a situation like that medically assisted suicide should be allowable.
Suicide because you're depressed, or you can't pay the bills or whatever strikes me as (1) a cowards way out, (2) a waste of potential, and (3) a trauma for friends/relatives. After all if you're alive things can improve, you find a new lover, get a new job, win the lotto, make up with family whatever.
Just a FYI Apple, no matter how cheap something is it is NEVER as cheap as free. Free will always win out.
This isn't really true. There are a few factors that influence this;
Free will only win if it's an identical product/service. Shareware/crippleware is a good example of this. The free product lets you do a couple things but if you pay a fee you can do more. Applying that logic to music, if you make a 128k quality file available for free but charge a small fee for a 320k high quality file people will still buy the 320k one. By the same logic you can offer other incentives like cover art, attached lyrics etc.
Secondly, while free, but pirated is still illegal there will always be people who prefer to pay for a couple reasons - either moral grounds (it's the right thing to do!) or fear of prosecution. The price difference between free and pay to download music drastically affects peoples moral threshold and their fear threshold. At $5 a song someone may say "Screw the fact it's illegal, they're trying to rob me!" but at $1 a song or 10c a song they're likely to believe it's fair and pay up.
Finally there's an ease of use factor. If you make a pay system that is lots easier to use people will be willing to fork out the cash because ultimately it's saving them time and effort. eg; to find a "free" version of a song you may have to trawl multiple file sharing networks, then assuming you can find the song you have to filter out the crappy, crackly distored (or truncated versions), the misnamed versions, the files that are really something else etc. If you've got a easily searchible, comprehensive db with guaranteed quality songs surely that's worth paying a little for?
As far as I'm concerned the only issue is what the price should be:)
Well it makes sense to charge differently depending on the track. If you listen to prog rock you often find a single track running for anything up to 30 minutes. If you work on the flate $1 / track principle then it'd cost me a hell of a lot more to buy a punk CD (lots of 2 & 3 minutes tunes) compared to a prog CD (just a few long tunes).
So realistically we should be paying by the number of minutes not the number of tracks.
And that's before you even get to the subject of "premium" tracks -v- "cheapass" tracks. I see nothing wrong with the idea of having new music priced slightly higher and as it gets older/less popular the prices can be dropped. That'd spark a little more interest and promote further sales.
I think if they do have multiple pricing levels (starting higher than $1) it'll soon show whether digital music sales are *really* viable.
I read that first sentence as "It's about laws you're not entitled to know about but you are boned with."
Yes, I have been watching too much Futurama.
Unfortunately, all humour aside the statement is true either way. While most of us are blissfully ignorant of 99% of the laws we're supposed to know it is at least possible to find them. If you're going to drive you check out the road rules, if you're building a house you check the regs on that, if you're going to fly you... can't check the rules because they won't show you. Frightens me.
The silly thing is the MPAA should look at this and realise that people are willing to pay. What they don't like is paying someone/something that they perceive as evil. If the MPAA played nicely they'd actually have lots of P2P people paying for the content they've been downloading.
As an experiment they (the MPAA) should set up an honour system with a couple test movies. Make the movies available, DRM and threat of prosecution free on major p2p networks. They could encode the movie with a short ad at the start saying something like "If you enjoy this movie please show your support by contributing. If this method proves successful we may continue releasing movies this way. You can pay whatever you feel appropriate using..." And detail how you could pay (eg: a paypal account or something).
Then they could see just how many people actually do pay and just how much people are willing to pay. If it actually made a decent amount of sales then they could scrap worries about DRM and whatnot (napster) and just upload their own movies and wait for profits. And people would still go to the cinemas or buy DVDs because they give a different experience to a downloaded MPG/AVI.
We've recently had a discussion at the ISP I game admin for (I'm not a paid employee just a voluntary admin). The painful thing is it's not just porn sites, it affects other things. Our concern is over the sprays used in games like Counterstrike. We already have people spraying offensive stuff with them, what if they start spraying kiddie porn sprays?
It's not even like a website where you know exactly who did it. In CS caching is a bit dodgy so you can't always tell for sure who is spraying a picture. So what do we do? Report everyone in the server to the police? That'd go down really well with the 31 innocent people who have their doors kicked in while the police try to find that one pervert.
Another thing that worries us is how do you get proof? If you take a screenshot of the offending material are you at risk of being branded a paedophile as well? Especially a problem for the ISP if they're getting lots of stuff submitted.
And as far age of consent in Australia I think that's different to the age you can appear in "adult" photos/films. I'd imagine that is still 18+. Oh and it's already illegal to host a website in Australia with pornographic content, even if the photos are of forty year olds.
Which causes problems. Or rather allows problems to continue. Because as soon as users start getting attachments blocked they seek other ways to get them. So people start bringing files into the network via floppy/cd/usb etc.
I'd rather have robust virus checking on the PC than attachment blocking. That way if something sneaks through the email or is brought in using an alternative method it should be caught and handled on the PC.
That said I see nothing wrong with having scanning at the mail server to make sure there aren't mail worms or something nasty getting through. But it should ONLY check for known malicious files/viruses not blanket block EXEs (or RARs.
It reads as though RAR files are infected when they're not, they're just a container. Doesn't anyone who cares about virus security actually scan the files after they extract them but before they run them?
Next thing we'll be getting complaints about ARJ files, or ACE files or UUE files containing viruses.
As a technical user I'm against our corporate firewall/mailsweeper/whatever blocking access to attachments purely based on extension. I actually need some of the zip/exe/doc/etc files that are being sent to me so I can do my job. Overzealous email rules are making it much more difficult to do it.
What I'd like to see is the MPAA suing Macrovision for every pirated movie being downloaded. After all it's their faulty copy-protection that's allowing the downloading to take place.
Looking at it like a homeowner with a leaky pipe. You hire a plumber to stop the leak. When the leak continues you get the plumber back to fix it but it comes out of the plumbers pocket not yours.
On a side note, I already have problems with DVDs not playing properly from time to time. If this makes it worse I'm going to be more inclined to stop buying copy-protected DVDs and find another non "faulty" medium. And I'm sure lots of other consumers feel the same. So effectively they'd be pushing legitimate consumers to dodgy alternatives - effectively *encouraging* piracy.
What I find frustrating is that some of the standards are actually counter-intuitive. Especially with CSS/DHTML sizing. eg: if you size a div to 100% in IE it is 100%. In some of the other standards compliant browsers it actually becomes slightly over 100%. Or rather the div is 100% but then you add a couple pixels extra for the border widths. At which point you wind up with scrollbars on your page:(
Not saying standards aren't important, but I prefer Microsoft's approach in some cases.
Be interesting to run the same suite of tests on several different specced PCs. Instead of just testing performance on an 800MHz PC test it on an 800MHz PC, a 2GHz Athlon, a 2GHz Athlon64 and a 3.2GHz Hyperthreading P4. Not to see which the fastest PC is, but rather to see whether certain browsers require more "power" to really perform well.
And if nothing else it'd be more realistic in terms of what users could expect - I know I haven't used an 800MHz PC in years:)
Seems like some people equate "no format" with wav file. I had the impression from the article that what he means is you'll effectively be buying a *license* to a song. After that I'd expect to have options to download a song in a variety of formats, or even just stream the song to my hearts content.
I could see an initial charge for a license (eg: $1) and possibly small downloading charges for the track in different formats (10c). That way you could own a song for the next 20 years and as newer formats and storage mediums come out you keep "upgrading" the song.
What gets me is that in the case of shoplifting there is an actual accountable loss - the value of the DVD to the store. In the case of downloading the loss may or may not occur. I'll explain...
I'm reviewing a P2P app so I download a movie from the net to test the performance and functionality. I have no intent to watch it or distribute it, it's just more convenient to download a popular movie because there are lots of sources and it's well spread. I have effectively infringed copyright by downloading the DVD yet I have no intention to watch the movie and it has no bearing whatsoever on whether or not I'd have purchased the movie at all. In this case there'd be no actual loss to the publisher.
Another example would those of us in other countries who are p**sed at the stupid movie release delays and want to see a movie NOW not wait two months for it to be released. We download the movie, watch it and when it is released we buy/rent it anyway. Again there is no actual loss to the publisher. And there are undoubtedly other situations that are similar.
I have no issues with people being punished if they download a movie, but I believe intent needs to be looked at in order to determine whether there is an actual loss. And once that happens the fine is determined appropriately (or waived entirely).
Oh and the first downloader shouldn't be responsible for subsequent downloaders. They should be pursued seperately.
ps: I know the law currently doesn't agree. All I'm doing is stating how I think it would be fairer.
The last milestone I tried (seventy-something) loaded up extra stuff into the windows startup. And you're right it doesn't load the whole suite, but it was still loading stuff at startup. Didn't try the 1.x version because I had MS Office and hadn't yet got fed up with it at the time.
I've had a similar experience. Killed a couple decent, new PSUs and since the stores were closed at the time I put in a dodgy old 250W PSU from an old machine (my first ATX PSU) and it's still running fine 18 months later.
Surefire way to kill the PC, get a PSU with a voltage switch on the back. You know the ones that change it from 115/230v. Plug it in turn it on then flip the switch to the other voltage. BANG! Dead pc.
Surprised that pets aren't high on the list. My (otherwise) great pet dogs (pups at the time) used to like chewing the network leads, speaker cables, mouse cable... power cables. It's only luck that I caught them at it a couple times and stopped them before they actually broke through the plastic sheathing.
That may be true but what about those of us who don't give a rats rear-end about inline spelling and grammar checking? I don't have an issue with making additional features available to users but how about making them truly modular so they don't load into memory until you want them.
Office is a pig for this, it wants to load a heap of stuff into memory everytime you fire up your PC (so the office apps are more responsive when you use them). Of course if you started your pc with the intention of gaming or surfing the net then that office "preload" is wasted. And from what I saw of the new Open Office it's taking the same approach.
Give the users the option to choose what components get loaded or not. And give let us choose what stuff gets processed "inline" (like spelling). That's all I want.
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I think the usual bribe *ahem* I mean workshop is a full funded golf day where MS supply the carts, the booze and a nice lunch. After that I dunno what the next level of "gifts" are I'm not high enough up to know :(
On a side note our dept recently made the announcement they'd be going MS based. A few of us had already suggested alternatives like Linux or Apple. We weren't saying they should buy them on our sayso, but at least go as far as evaluating them as genuine alternatives.
When the MS announcement happened I asked what the review of the other alternatives found. The answer, "What review?" *sigh* Nice to know that MS based tunnel vision is alive and well.
All of which is probably why we're seeing this ridiculous boom in "home improvement" shows. Every second show on TV has some clown renovating, repairing, building or demolishing some poor sods house. Out of the other fifty percent of programming another fifty percent seems to be reality tv shows or "I wanna be a star" tv shows. Then out of that remaining quarter you get the odd movie, the news, sports and current affairs shows and heaven forbid an actual tv show... with a story and characters...
God I hate TV these days...
I'm late posting as usual... sigh
That post should say there's been no definitive link to cancer... yet. I did a bit of looking into magnetic fields and their hazards a few months back (the new office has plant equipment right next to it that caused major magnetic fluctuation - about 13 times normal background magnetic field). Anyway, all the literature I found said there was nothing conclusive and they tested fields massively higher than those emitted by a CRT (like 10,000 times higher). Still, there were no really long term studies so it's still a possibility.
The headache comment I agree with wholeheartedly, being a constant headache sufferer I recently went to a specialist who suggested some things. Basically we humans weren't designed to sit staring at a screen for 8 hours (or more) a day, and the muscles in the neck and shoulders tend to tense up which in turn causes "muscle tension headaches". So yeah you get a headache at most but it's more likely posture than radiation.
I agree wholeheartedly with what you're saying. However, I believe that there is a market for DRM it's just not being serviced properly. They should be selling (giving away) multiple versions of tracks.
Weed has a model where you can distribute a track any way you like (P2P, FTP, CD whatever) and whenever a new person plays it they get three free plays. After that they need to pay. That's a great idea. It still allows the concept of "lending someone a CD" so you're sharing great music and getting people interested.
To extend that idea a bit further I think there should also be tracks available in "pay to play" mode where you make a micropayment when you listen. It may only be a few cents a time but still a payment. If you decide you like the song enough to own it instead of renting it then you actually get to buy it outright for a larger fee. While we're at it if you play it enough that the micropayments hit a certain threshold then you should automatically be granted ownership of it.
Now as for the ownership bit... Once you own a track it should be possible for you to copy it to whatever media/device you like as long as it's yours. I'm not sure how that could work since making an audio CD version would (should) mean losing your DRM. I don't think we should be forced to upgrade to a DRM compatible CD player if our current equipment works fine. Maybe some day as older equipment becomes obsolete that will happen naturally. But until then, I just don't know.
Frankly I think anything that doesn't provide an easy means of uninstalling should be considered malware. And even if you don't consider it malware for the fact it won't uninstall, it's a pain in the neck when you try to hide the toolbar and it reappears each time you start word, or it positions itself wherever the hell it likes.
And another gripe with Acrobat is that it wants to leave a service running all the time. I might create a PDF once every three months. Why should I need a service running in the background the rest of the time? And if you terminate the service some of the PDF functionality just stops working - no explanation, no attempt to restart the service. It just fails. It's ok for a technically savvy user who can recognise what's going and knows to start/stop it when they want. But for Joe Average he won't realise.
I continually get asked to "fix" friends PCs and they're running umpteen little background services/apps that get used maybe once a month, or less. Yet they all want to stay resident all the time as though the users want to use them every hours of every day.
I wish application vendors would provide options to (un)load these things on demand. Let me choose whether I use Acrobat so much that I want to have that service running all the time. And if I don't then when I want to make a PDF it takes me a few extra seconds while the service loads.
Rant over sorry :)
Since we're now the fifty-whatevereth state we should at least get the opportunity to vote in your elections. :P
Exactly! Some of the standards make sense to some people but not to others. Frankly I find some of the standards very counter-intuitive -sizing and spacing ones particularly.
That said, it'd be nice if everyone who builds a browser would play along with the standards rather than interpreting them as they see fit. At least then we could assume our code would look the same in any browser. I must say though that it's getting much closer than it was about 2 years ago.
Initially I thought browser dependant HTML/CSS extensions were a good idea. eg: If something isn't mentioned in a standard then it's fine if MS implement it however they like. I'm leaning away from that now though, because it means we wind up in the same messy situation where every browser renders pages differently. Now I think the best thing to do would be to hold back features until they can be officially added to the standard. As a corollary the standard needs to be updated more swiftly :)
Australian doesn't even have a constitutional right to free speech like the US so I dunno what he's talking about anyway.
I find it frustrating that the Govt is basically overlegislating things. They're treating we Australian citizens as though we're children incapable of making rational decisions.
As for the whole "is suicide is an option" question, personally I think it should be the individuals right to choose. However, I do think that suicide is wrong unless you've got a permanent, untreatable medical condition that severely reduces the quality of life (eg: cancer). I believe in a situation like that medically assisted suicide should be allowable.
Suicide because you're depressed, or you can't pay the bills or whatever strikes me as (1) a cowards way out, (2) a waste of potential, and (3) a trauma for friends/relatives. After all if you're alive things can improve, you find a new lover, get a new job, win the lotto, make up with family whatever.
This isn't really true. There are a few factors that influence this;
Free will only win if it's an identical product/service. Shareware/crippleware is a good example of this. The free product lets you do a couple things but if you pay a fee you can do more. Applying that logic to music, if you make a 128k quality file available for free but charge a small fee for a 320k high quality file people will still buy the 320k one. By the same logic you can offer other incentives like cover art, attached lyrics etc.
Secondly, while free, but pirated is still illegal there will always be people who prefer to pay for a couple reasons - either moral grounds (it's the right thing to do!) or fear of prosecution. The price difference between free and pay to download music drastically affects peoples moral threshold and their fear threshold. At $5 a song someone may say "Screw the fact it's illegal, they're trying to rob me!" but at $1 a song or 10c a song they're likely to believe it's fair and pay up.
Finally there's an ease of use factor. If you make a pay system that is lots easier to use people will be willing to fork out the cash because ultimately it's saving them time and effort. eg; to find a "free" version of a song you may have to trawl multiple file sharing networks, then assuming you can find the song you have to filter out the crappy, crackly distored (or truncated versions), the misnamed versions, the files that are really something else etc. If you've got a easily searchible, comprehensive db with guaranteed quality songs surely that's worth paying a little for?
As far as I'm concerned the only issue is what the price should be :)
Any system is vunerable to a LAND attack. I mean when they roll up with a few M1 Abrams and several hundred troops pretty much any system is screwed.
Oh wait that's not the kind of LAND attack you meant... nevermind...
Well it makes sense to charge differently depending on the track. If you listen to prog rock you often find a single track running for anything up to 30 minutes. If you work on the flate $1 / track principle then it'd cost me a hell of a lot more to buy a punk CD (lots of 2 & 3 minutes tunes) compared to a prog CD (just a few long tunes).
So realistically we should be paying by the number of minutes not the number of tracks.
And that's before you even get to the subject of "premium" tracks -v- "cheapass" tracks. I see nothing wrong with the idea of having new music priced slightly higher and as it gets older/less popular the prices can be dropped. That'd spark a little more interest and promote further sales.
I think if they do have multiple pricing levels (starting higher than $1) it'll soon show whether digital music sales are *really* viable.
I read that first sentence as "It's about laws you're not entitled to know about but you are boned with."
Yes, I have been watching too much Futurama.
Unfortunately, all humour aside the statement is true either way. While most of us are blissfully ignorant of 99% of the laws we're supposed to know it is at least possible to find them. If you're going to drive you check out the road rules, if you're building a house you check the regs on that, if you're going to fly you... can't check the rules because they won't show you. Frightens me.
Sure but we're punishing people who haven't done anything wrong at the same time just for the sake of 1 person in a 1000 or 10,000 or whatever.
The silly thing is the MPAA should look at this and realise that people are willing to pay. What they don't like is paying someone/something that they perceive as evil. If the MPAA played nicely they'd actually have lots of P2P people paying for the content they've been downloading.
As an experiment they (the MPAA) should set up an honour system with a couple test movies. Make the movies available, DRM and threat of prosecution free on major p2p networks. They could encode the movie with a short ad at the start saying something like "If you enjoy this movie please show your support by contributing. If this method proves successful we may continue releasing movies this way. You can pay whatever you feel appropriate using ..." And detail how you could pay (eg: a paypal account or something).
Then they could see just how many people actually do pay and just how much people are willing to pay. If it actually made a decent amount of sales then they could scrap worries about DRM and whatnot (napster) and just upload their own movies and wait for profits. And people would still go to the cinemas or buy DVDs because they give a different experience to a downloaded MPG/AVI.
We've recently had a discussion at the ISP I game admin for (I'm not a paid employee just a voluntary admin). The painful thing is it's not just porn sites, it affects other things. Our concern is over the sprays used in games like Counterstrike. We already have people spraying offensive stuff with them, what if they start spraying kiddie porn sprays?
It's not even like a website where you know exactly who did it. In CS caching is a bit dodgy so you can't always tell for sure who is spraying a picture. So what do we do? Report everyone in the server to the police? That'd go down really well with the 31 innocent people who have their doors kicked in while the police try to find that one pervert.
Another thing that worries us is how do you get proof? If you take a screenshot of the offending material are you at risk of being branded a paedophile as well? Especially a problem for the ISP if they're getting lots of stuff submitted.
And as far age of consent in Australia I think that's different to the age you can appear in "adult" photos/films. I'd imagine that is still 18+. Oh and it's already illegal to host a website in Australia with pornographic content, even if the photos are of forty year olds.
Which causes problems. Or rather allows problems to continue. Because as soon as users start getting attachments blocked they seek other ways to get them. So people start bringing files into the network via floppy/cd/usb etc.
I'd rather have robust virus checking on the PC than attachment blocking. That way if something sneaks through the email or is brought in using an alternative method it should be caught and handled on the PC.
That said I see nothing wrong with having scanning at the mail server to make sure there aren't mail worms or something nasty getting through. But it should ONLY check for known malicious files/viruses not blanket block EXEs (or RARs.
It reads as though RAR files are infected when they're not, they're just a container. Doesn't anyone who cares about virus security actually scan the files after they extract them but before they run them?
Next thing we'll be getting complaints about ARJ files, or ACE files or UUE files containing viruses.
As a technical user I'm against our corporate firewall/mailsweeper/whatever blocking access to attachments purely based on extension. I actually need some of the zip/exe/doc/etc files that are being sent to me so I can do my job. Overzealous email rules are making it much more difficult to do it.
What I'd like to see is the MPAA suing Macrovision for every pirated movie being downloaded. After all it's their faulty copy-protection that's allowing the downloading to take place.
Looking at it like a homeowner with a leaky pipe. You hire a plumber to stop the leak. When the leak continues you get the plumber back to fix it but it comes out of the plumbers pocket not yours.
On a side note, I already have problems with DVDs not playing properly from time to time. If this makes it worse I'm going to be more inclined to stop buying copy-protected DVDs and find another non "faulty" medium. And I'm sure lots of other consumers feel the same. So effectively they'd be pushing legitimate consumers to dodgy alternatives - effectively *encouraging* piracy.
What I find frustrating is that some of the standards are actually counter-intuitive. Especially with CSS/DHTML sizing. eg: if you size a div to 100% in IE it is 100%. In some of the other standards compliant browsers it actually becomes slightly over 100%. Or rather the div is 100% but then you add a couple pixels extra for the border widths. At which point you wind up with scrollbars on your page :(
Not saying standards aren't important, but I prefer Microsoft's approach in some cases.
Be interesting to run the same suite of tests on several different specced PCs. Instead of just testing performance on an 800MHz PC test it on an 800MHz PC, a 2GHz Athlon, a 2GHz Athlon64 and a 3.2GHz Hyperthreading P4. Not to see which the fastest PC is, but rather to see whether certain browsers require more "power" to really perform well.
And if nothing else it'd be more realistic in terms of what users could expect - I know I haven't used an 800MHz PC in years :)
Seems like some people equate "no format" with wav file. I had the impression from the article that what he means is you'll effectively be buying a *license* to a song. After that I'd expect to have options to download a song in a variety of formats, or even just stream the song to my hearts content.
I could see an initial charge for a license (eg: $1) and possibly small downloading charges for the track in different formats (10c). That way you could own a song for the next 20 years and as newer formats and storage mediums come out you keep "upgrading" the song.
What gets me is that in the case of shoplifting there is an actual accountable loss - the value of the DVD to the store. In the case of downloading the loss may or may not occur. I'll explain...
I'm reviewing a P2P app so I download a movie from the net to test the performance and functionality. I have no intent to watch it or distribute it, it's just more convenient to download a popular movie because there are lots of sources and it's well spread. I have effectively infringed copyright by downloading the DVD yet I have no intention to watch the movie and it has no bearing whatsoever on whether or not I'd have purchased the movie at all. In this case there'd be no actual loss to the publisher.
Another example would those of us in other countries who are p**sed at the stupid movie release delays and want to see a movie NOW not wait two months for it to be released. We download the movie, watch it and when it is released we buy/rent it anyway. Again there is no actual loss to the publisher. And there are undoubtedly other situations that are similar.
I have no issues with people being punished if they download a movie, but I believe intent needs to be looked at in order to determine whether there is an actual loss. And once that happens the fine is determined appropriately (or waived entirely).
Oh and the first downloader shouldn't be responsible for subsequent downloaders. They should be pursued seperately.
ps: I know the law currently doesn't agree. All I'm doing is stating how I think it would be fairer.
The last milestone I tried (seventy-something) loaded up extra stuff into the windows startup. And you're right it doesn't load the whole suite, but it was still loading stuff at startup. Didn't try the 1.x version because I had MS Office and hadn't yet got fed up with it at the time.
I've had a similar experience. Killed a couple decent, new PSUs and since the stores were closed at the time I put in a dodgy old 250W PSU from an old machine (my first ATX PSU) and it's still running fine 18 months later.
Surefire way to kill the PC, get a PSU with a voltage switch on the back. You know the ones that change it from 115/230v. Plug it in turn it on then flip the switch to the other voltage. BANG! Dead pc.
Surprised that pets aren't high on the list. My (otherwise) great pet dogs (pups at the time) used to like chewing the network leads, speaker cables, mouse cable... power cables. It's only luck that I caught them at it a couple times and stopped them before they actually broke through the plastic sheathing.
That may be true but what about those of us who don't give a rats rear-end about inline spelling and grammar checking? I don't have an issue with making additional features available to users but how about making them truly modular so they don't load into memory until you want them.
Office is a pig for this, it wants to load a heap of stuff into memory everytime you fire up your PC (so the office apps are more responsive when you use them). Of course if you started your pc with the intention of gaming or surfing the net then that office "preload" is wasted. And from what I saw of the new Open Office it's taking the same approach.
Give the users the option to choose what components get loaded or not. And give let us choose what stuff gets processed "inline" (like spelling). That's all I want.