What the author means is that what users say doesn't necessarily mean what techies interpret it as meaning. Users who say 'internet' often mean WWW, but technies don't seem to care. They don't bother to realize that users aren't interested in getting every sentence they say technically and logically accurate, they just say what makes sense to them. The problem arises when techies take things as literal gospel without getting any details.
Step 1: Company A buys 30 new PCs for a new department, or for a department that exists but has not had an upgrade recently and needs better systems (e.g. graphics design) Step 2: Company A uses Microsoft Office, so they request it be installed on these new systems, which are also using Windows XP Pro Step 3: Company A's users of these new systems have to re-learn a new Office suite and a new operating system, because so much has changed needlessly Step 4a: Whenever User A creates a document, Office XP warns them AGAINST saving in a backwards-compatible format (i.e. Word 2000, Word 97/98, etc) even though they use no features at all that would be lost (fearmongering) Step 5a: User A gets fearful of their beautiful presentation looking like crap for the CEO, so they save it in Office XP format, which no one else can read; OR User A gets fearful of their beautiful presentation looking like crap for Company B, from whom they're trying to get a contract, so they save it in Office XP format, which the other company can't read Step 6a: Company A's internal staff get frustrated with having to deal with the XP department's documents, so management orders an upgrade; OR Company B keeps getting Office XP documents from Company A, and (if a smaller company) decides that they have to update their technology to keep up to the big boys, or (if a larger company) decides that they have to update their technology so they don't become outdated and outpaced by the little critters
OR
Step 4b: Users in this department, used to Windows 2000 who have trouble getting used to Windows XP's needless relocating of features, are constantly calling IT to ask how to do something. IT walks the user through the ten or twelve step procedure to do something, but after fifteen minutes of wrangling, realizes that step 3 is invalid because of some unforseen change Step 5b: IT has to run all over the place actually coming to the user's system for a thirty-second fix because they don't have an XP system in front of them. Frustrated, they request upgrades to XP for 'new features, better hardware support, and more stability' Step 6b: Management approves the upgrade, for most of the same reasons specified in 6a
Sure they have a right to do what they want with THEIR network.. They can censor it if they want, even though that does get into a sticky legal issue. Once you start, you are libel for content under your control.
It's not censorship if the government doesn't do it, but your point is well made - if they decide they're going to crack down on illegal file traders, they become responsible for all illegal file traders. Thing is, they don't care if it's illegal or not, so I don't think that applies. You could be trading pictures of kittens, homemade kitten.mpg movies you made of your kitten playing with string, they'd still boot you off (sadly so).
Personally I think its a moral mistake to enforce their beliefs on others when they offer a free service, but that is their choice.
Your pronoun use is a little ambiguous, but I take this to mean that it's a moral mistake for Dalnet to enforce their beliefs on others when they (Dalnet) provide a free service, which doesn't make any sense, because, to be cliche, 'beggars can't be choosers' - if you want to use the network, use it for what it's provided to you for. Perhaps you meant something else, but who knows.
People that do use IRC for transfers don't leech any bandwidth, the key component to DCC is *DIRECT*, it does NOT load the IRC network at all. In reality they use LESS resources then a 8 hour a day 'chatter'.
Except that file sharing channels, if you've ever been to one, are always flooded with text. I find it hard to keep up personally, and I only go to the smaller ones. The larger ones are even worse. Combine that constant advertising of your fserve with the trivia bots, and send that to a dozen or a hundred or two hundred people (depending on the channel), and that's a lot of traffic, a lot of memory for the servers to store userdata for, a lot of bandwidth to share that user data around whenever a netsplit occurs (you can send gigs of traffic a day just syncing, since the new link has to carry data about half the users one way, and half the users another way, and then the two servers have to route it to every other server on the network).
Whiners? Not really, just people that would like to keep what they have now, ( or expand features )if you don't speak out you loose it, regardless of the topic.
Whiners? Definately. They don't pay for it. They don't contribute financially. They just use bandwidth and cpu time and memory of people who felt like being nice and linking servers to Dalnet to provide a service to people. You'd have to be a pretty big jerk to throw that in their face because they're not giving you enough for free. Take the service as it is given, or don't take it at all, but no one is 'entitled' to anything on Dalnet any more than they are entitled to anything in my home. It's a private domain, not a public one, and that's all there is to it.
--Dan
Disclaimer: I opered on an IRC network once, and got a little bitter about people demanding that I fix what was 'wrong' with the network, or insisting they had 'a right to free speech'. IRC networks are private property, you're not entitled to anything, and you have no rights.
Therefore a wise prince will seek means by which his subjects will always and in every possible condition of things have need of his government, and then they will always be faithful to him."
- Niccolo Machiavelli, "The Prince"
Yeah, but Machiavelli lived in a time of war-torn Italy where he was exiled from Florence, his home, which was being beset on one side by the Catholic Church, and on another by France, where there was no strong power to protect his city, so he wrote his book to get back in the good graces of Lorenzo de Medici, as a way of giving advice on how to last as long as possible without getting killed by his subjects or enemies.
The point Machiavelli was making was that if you make your subjects rely on you, they won't start regarding you with apathy and let you die, or antipathy and cause you to do so. Aside from the fact that there aren't any large empires trying to dominate the UK, and there aren't many cases of political assassination by rivals, there are processes by which a man can be removed from power, or the entire government can be changed (with the exception, perhaps, of the House of Lords) and there is no way for those in power to stop it.
That all being said, however, the point does pose an interesting thought, but the answer I form to the 'but still...' is that people in many of the more socially-oriented countries (the UK, Germany, Canada, Sweden) already rely on the government anyway, and ID cards will make that interaction easier.
Depending on how you set it up, it can notify you, notify you + download the updates, or do all of the above AND install the updates.
Definitely true. In fact, it's so concerned about my safety that it prompts me twice a day for the exact same updates, and has done so for two weeks, because it's so concerned that I could fall victim to them. This sort of behaviour gives me nothing but faith in the people who are coding and providing to me these patches.
Now I'm hearing similar things about the GeForceFX vs. ATI's three month old Radeons.
Actually, the 9700 Pro has been out for something like six months, and the GeForce FX won't be out for another three, so it's more like nine months' difference.
Can they really afford to lose the lucrative high-end sales right now?
No, but they won't. First of all, there are all the nvidia fanboys, who think that nvidia rocks because nvidia rocks, ergo nvidia rocks. Secondly, there are the ATI anti-fanboys, who think that ATI sucks because ATI sucks, or because their drivers suck (despite not having actually tried any drivers for three years). Thirdly, there are the people who are stupid, or keep their PC in some kind of sound-proof box. Finally, there are people who don't buy the top-of-the-line cards anyway, that fit into one of the above categories.
Nvidia won't die off for a long long time. They may be new, but fanboys will keep them alive through any tough times they weather... unless ATI can deliver a next-generation card within a few months of nvidia's last-generation card. If ATI can bring out a new card within, say, six months, and whose performance is to the GeForce FX what the 9700 Pro was to the GF4Ti, then I think things will begin to go very, very bad. Unless that happens though, ATI has only won the battle, not the war.
Actually, while this is generally true, I've often found myself at Superstore putting back non-organic products because I found some of their 'Organics' line that was cheaper. It's not as common as I'd like, but it's common enough (and man, the food is good too, except for their Pasta OS, blech).
He is talking about Microsoft doing _exactly_ the same thing that Apple has done with OSX (use someone else's OS), except with Linux instead of BSD. Five years ago, would anyone have thought that Apple would use someone else's OS to run their UI? Heresy!
The difference is that Apple has always been a friendly company - not friendly to everyone, of course, they have to protect their investments, but I look at it this way: Apple may be a 'corporation', which is evil to some, and they may not GPL every line of code ever written, which is evil to others, but they're not anti-competetive (as if they have a chance), and they're not anti-user. MS, on the other hand, is very anti-competetive, and very anti-user. All their software assumes that you're a lying, cheating, thieving bastard, and spies on everything you do. Nice.
MS makes their money by doing what's best for the company. Apple makes their money by doing what's best for the users. What MS doesn't realize is that in the short term, being a jerk is great, but in the long term, Apple's the one who's going to come out on top.
The point I'm trying to make, I guess, is that Apple went with BSD because it was the smart thing to do, it was the clever thing to do, and it's paid off big time already. MS will never go with Linux, because then they don't control everything. They can't control Linux kernel development, they can't control apps, they can't control APIs, they can't control hardware, they can't control much of anything, because they'd always have to give the source back. Companies wouldn't want to write Linux drivers, because binary drivers generally suck, and source drivers don't leave a lot of room for trade secrets. MS requires power-control.
Apple, on the other hand, opened the source, but still keeps a leash on it, in a small sense, and they control the hardware as well, plus the overlying APIs, but Apple's control is quality control, and no one's going to take their quality away from them just by having the source.
I can't see how else Israel will stop suicide bombing unless they only allow their own citizens in public areas, and this method would not be too expensive.
They could stop opressing the Palestinians for one. I hardly think turning the place into an even worse police state than it already is would help matters, especially not for tourism. I'd hardly like to be accosted by the police every time I went out in public while I was there. I found the military presence in Jerusalem quite acceptable, but when it gets opressive towards me, I'd just give up on going, and so would most people.
I just can't wait for the days when things are $1/TB.
Yeah, but by then, Super Windows XP Pro Ultimate Championship Edition will be out, will have backwards compatibility to all prior 8-, 16-, 32-, 64-, and 128-bit architectures, take 8 solar days to load, require 800 terabytes to install, and the neuro-holographic interface will crash regularly, wiping out more data than a human being can process in a lifetime, and throwing people into neural shock. You'll die, but it will be illegal to have any negative feelings towards the occasion, because of the Digital Oblivion Mind-Control Act.
Linux, of course, will still be around and install fine, but no one will care, because they get an extra 7 updates per second playing the Windows version of Quake 82, so it will still be considered a 'toy' OS.
I've been using various digital cellphones lately, from an LG-T520 to an Audiobox 9000 or something (stupid loaner phone while I'm getting some repairs done to my LG), and here's my refutations of what's the dilly, yo:
However, with a digital system when the signal fades, there's no yelling because the signal isn't there, and packets that should be getting to your phone, just get dropped. As a result, Aunt Martha's 'Hello' on a crummy analog connection can still be made out.. but on a digital connection of the same strength might sound like 'He...o' with a gap of silence in the middle.
Even with the worst digital signal I could find, I've never had a problem at all hearing someone else's voice. I've been told that some voicemail I left once dropped out a word, but that's the only comment I've ever had. Other than that, no problems.
he question now becomes, why are they moving to 1.9GHz?
Among the other reasons mentioned, it provides more bandwidth as well, which means a lot of things - more users, more data, more whatever you're sending.
However, the cell phone companies need to cover the area better for there to be as much coverage, especially in the city where there is lots of Multi-path (bounces and signal inversions), and buildings to go through.
I live in Fredericton, NB. We have digital, but barely, since the telco just decided fairly recently to cover the area with digital. There isn't great digital coverage, but see my comment above for the impact this has made. The worst problem I've had is that I get bumped to analog (usually four or five out of six bars) when I'm in a basement room two minutes' walk from daylight, or I get no signal whatsoever, in worse circumstances. Even if digital coverage were hopeless, my phone can not only fall back to Analog from digital, it can do so in the middle of a call. It can't fall forward to digital during a call, but that's ok.
In addition, back to Aunt Martha, as long as her 'Hello' usually sounds like her 'Hello' on a land line, what difference does it make right? Well, unfortunately, the digital standards we have today are from years past. And while they work, they are by no means clear. If you are looking for clarity, you'll want to stick with an analog phone.
I don't know about you, but my phone uses 3G CDMA (hooray Qualcomm), which is a fairly new standard, and most people (even people who KNOW that my only phone is a cellphone) often ask whose house I'm at - because I sound like I'm on a land line, and everyone knows cellphones are horrible, right?
Another related comment: I was standing in Starbucks, of all places, surrounded by a crowd and with the espresso machine going, while I was on my cellphone, but the person on the other end could only hear me. When I wasn't talking, there was no sound. When I was, there was only me. Hooray active noise reduction. That being said, it was the phone itself doing it, and not CDMA's built-in anti-background filter (though that can't have hurt).
The compression algorithms used are lossy; they're specifically designed around transmission of human voice to human ears, and take advantage of what the human ear will tolerate and what it won't.
Don't forget to mention that, in the case of CDMA, it just doesn't transmit while you're talking, and doesn't recieve when the other person isn't. This saves battery power, bandwidth, radiation, everything. Analog, on the other hand, is always doing what it's doing all the time, by nature of it being a connection, as opposed to packets.
What about the pros for digital? Digital is a bit more secure then analog as you can't hear it just by setting a scanner to the correct frequency, you also have to un-encode it from the digital, and smooth the signal out.
Not to mention battery life. I can go for literally a week and a half without charging my phone, as long as I'm not stuck in that stupid room in the forestry building I had class in last semester. When I am, and I get bumped to analog, my battery drains almost 80% in a day. This is partly because I get poor reception, but even in one-bar digital areas, I don't have any sorts of issues (and I should know, Chapters/Starbucks is one such area).
On last thing, the digital system works on 1.9GHz... your home microwave works on 2.4GHz.. It's close enough, you still want to hold that phone next to your head? Remeber what happens to an egg when you put it in the microwave, and then decide.
Oh yeah, and by the way, wireless networking is going to give you testicular cancer, because it uses 2.4 GHz, just like your home microwave. And it'll fry your brain! And eat your fish! And salt your lawn! Fearmongering is pathetic, let's get real.
I use and like my 3G CDMA LG T520, serviced by Telus Communications, 800 MHz digital network by Aliant Telecom. Rare dropped packets, rare analog service, even though there are very few towers around here, and yet the data service is entirely reliable. They're putting up a 1900 MHz digital tower soon, which will provide us with '1x service' (the full 3G shebang), but in the meantime, my phone rocks anyway, and will gladly switch from 1900 MHz digital to 800 MHz digital to analog depending on what it can find.
So why is there such a complaint? Are people getting stuck with digital-only phones? Do Americans have to make this choice actively when they get a cellphone? Every phone Telus sells is 3G CDMA, tri-mode, and cool to boot. No old-school audiobox, no Nokia phones, just good-looking, good-working, sturdy, quality phones, and you know what? They work great, even here.
What everyone forgets about, if they knew of it in the first place, is the free rider effect.
The US bears most of the cost for most of the technological innovation for the entire world. Other countries producing things at a commodity price is easy -- once those things are already commodities.
The American 'we do all, we see all, we know all' philosophy seems geared towards guaranteeing this sort of atmosphere. America is the be-all and end-all of everything, therefore other countries don't matter, and since other countries don't matter, America must be the be-all and end-all. It makes no sense, and it only comes around, and can be explained, by the American tendancy to ignore other countries except when impossible to do so, and to forget afterwards about what can't be ignored.
As another poster replied to you, JSD Uniphase, Nortel, and Telsat are industry-leaders. Likewise our biotech industry, which isn't suffering from persecution by those Churchgoers who believe genetic knowledge is for God alone. Also, I will indicate to you RSA, the encryption method that has lasted 50 years, and may well last another 50, developed in no small part in Israel. Cisco Systems runs their R&D in Israel as well, and it sometimes seems Israeli companies make news every month, but I guess you don't hear about them from CNNfn unless they're on the American exchanges, do you?
Open your eyes and look to some international news channels, if you can even get any, and learn some real facts about the world.
Just to put some fact behind my folly, a few Canadian inventions for your consideration - not the least of which is the telephone, courtesy of Alexander Graham Bell, a Canadian, born in Scotland. Among others, the Snowmobile (Bombardier), the AC radio tube, acetylene, the analytical plotter, the G-suit, basketball, the automatic postal sorter, calcium carbide, the light bulb (believe it or not), the compound steam engine, the electric streetcar, IMAX, hydrofoil watercraft, Java, kerosene, the robertson screw (one of the single best inventions in the history of carpentry), radio-transmitted voice, the zipper.... this list is getting long, so you can read the original yourself, and think twice next time you think innovation is American only. For that matter, what about inventions from before the US existed? A curious thought.
I'm reminded of something Chrichton says in an episode of Farscape (1x22, 'Family Ties'):
Rygel, doing the right thing starts at the beginning of the day, not after you've been caught.
Rambus may be nice now, and may be playing fair now, but only because they can't get anywhere being jerks. That doesn't mean Rambus is no longer evil with their patent BS, it means they're no longer successful with their evil. If given the opportunity, they would go back in a second, I'm certain of it.
First off I don't know if I like the fact that the word "north" was put in there - IMHO I think the wording could have been better.
This is just another example of code-words that the Canadian Conspiracy is using to communicate. This particular reference informs me that the PS3 dev team has been infiltrated by our forces, and is preparing to corrupt the minds of your youth and turn them against you, rebelling with peace. All your kids are belong to us!
My Xbox's hard-drive on the other hand is about fucking useless. Yes, it'll save my game on MY Xbox, but it doesn't do me any good when I go anywhere else.
So go buy an XBox memory card (yes, they do exist) and copy your saves onto them before you go. Simple, no? Hard drives are better for a lot of reasons - more space, permanance, ease of use, etc - and memory cards are good for a lot of reasons - portability, redundancy, etc. - but having a hard drive does not preclude supporting memory cards, it just means that you don't need to have them all the time.
One of the things that really boosted XBox sales this Christmas is that all you need is in one box - the system, the RCA cables, a controller, two games, and you're off to the races. No DVD remote, but that's entirely optional. No second controller, but kids can take turns. With the PS2 however, there were no games included and you had to buy a memory card very soon, yet you paid the same price. Not good. We sold more XBoxen this Christmas than PS2s by twofold at least. Personally, I rang up about three or PS2s and about ten to twelve XBoxes just in December. A lot of this was new tech or games, but a lot of parents were iffy, and discovered that they could pay $300 + $30-70 + $35 + tax, or $300 + tax. The choice is pretty easy when they're all the same to you.
Steve, where are the software trade-in incentives?
I was informed a while ago, though I'm not sure if it's still true, that Adobe will gladly exchange your Windows license for Photoshop 7 for an OS X license for Photoshop 7, straight trade. I would suggest calling Adobe to find out if this is the case, as I would with Macromedia. It doesn't cost them anything, and it promotes good customer relations, so I don't see why not.
Well, a lot of parents don't know to look. Their kids say 'can you buy me this game', and convince the parents that 'it's not that bad'. I've had quite a few parents though, while I was ringing up GTA:VC, ask 'it says Mature, what does that mean?'. My answer: 'Well, it just means you can do some bad stuff, like, uh, you can kill people, run them over, stomp on their corpses, shoot them in the face, hire prostitutes...' (I'm usually cut off before this point). Parents often change their minds. If not, we always make sure to ask before we accept payment, 'You're aware this is a mature game?' A lot of people buy it for their 19-25 year old brother/son/husband. A lot of people don't buy it.
A woman came in the other day to do a return, and while I was handling that, she mentioned how her son had gotten the latest Mortal Kombat, and she was very disturbed by it, though relieved when I told her our return policy still covered it. Moral of the story? Parents ought to shop somewhere with a good return policy, or get a freaking clue and take some passing interest in their children.
A friend of mine had a cellular plan through whatever Baby-Bell services Florida, and he was getting fed up with what he paid. His solution? He called in, and told them about the offer that AT&T had made him, which included unlimited evenings/weekends, tons of daytime minutes, all sorts of perks (voicemail, etc). The catch? It was all BS. He'd never even spoken to an AT&T rep. The result? He got the best cellular plan I'd heard of (still beats mine, actually, and this was three years ago).
So, if you want good service, find a national carrier, or one with decent roaming agreements anyway, and like like a bastard, and hope they believe you. Keep it realistic though.
And yet despite that, the RCMP has said that they will not be actively prosecuting people who do this. They might confiscate your dish if you make some huge deal out of it, putting up 'fuck the po-lice' signs on your lawn and raising a 'DirectTV Piracy 4 Life' flag over your house, but they honestly don't care one way or the other. You can't go through official channels, but if you break the law, well then shame on you.
A lot of people might say 'yeah, they say that, but...', and to them I say, if you've lived where I've lived, you'd know that it's impossible to NOT see DirectTV dishes all over the place, from public property, and the RCMP could be throwing fines left and right. Despite this, no one's said a thing. Curious, no? This is just the Supreme Court defending the local broadcasters (Starchoice/Bell) in principle, and encouraging people to support local (national) business, but nothing more.
As fucked up as the RIAA is, it's even worse when, for instance, the holders of patents on medicine peofit off of the suffering and death of others.
Considering how many trillions of dollars pharmaceutical companies spend designing drugs to relieve the suffering of others, I'm inclined to side in favour of their being able to take advantage of their discoveries.
Your point would seem to villify doctors as well, who make huge amounts of money (in the US at least), all from the illness, pain, and death around them. Doctors feed off the frailties and fears of humankind. Should we speak ill of them for this?
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What the author means is that what users say doesn't necessarily mean what techies interpret it as meaning. Users who say 'internet' often mean WWW, but technies don't seem to care. They don't bother to realize that users aren't interested in getting every sentence they say technically and logically accurate, they just say what makes sense to them. The problem arises when techies take things as literal gospel without getting any details.
--Dan
Step 1: Company A buys 30 new PCs for a new department, or for a department that exists but has not had an upgrade recently and needs better systems (e.g. graphics design)
Step 2: Company A uses Microsoft Office, so they request it be installed on these new systems, which are also using Windows XP Pro
Step 3: Company A's users of these new systems have to re-learn a new Office suite and a new operating system, because so much has changed needlessly
Step 4a: Whenever User A creates a document, Office XP warns them AGAINST saving in a backwards-compatible format (i.e. Word 2000, Word 97/98, etc) even though they use no features at all that would be lost (fearmongering)
Step 5a: User A gets fearful of their beautiful presentation looking like crap for the CEO, so they save it in Office XP format, which no one else can read; OR User A gets fearful of their beautiful presentation looking like crap for Company B, from whom they're trying to get a contract, so they save it in Office XP format, which the other company can't read
Step 6a: Company A's internal staff get frustrated with having to deal with the XP department's documents, so management orders an upgrade; OR Company B keeps getting Office XP documents from Company A, and (if a smaller company) decides that they have to update their technology to keep up to the big boys, or (if a larger company) decides that they have to update their technology so they don't become outdated and outpaced by the little critters
OR
Step 4b: Users in this department, used to Windows 2000 who have trouble getting used to Windows XP's needless relocating of features, are constantly calling IT to ask how to do something. IT walks the user through the ten or twelve step procedure to do something, but after fifteen minutes of wrangling, realizes that step 3 is invalid because of some unforseen change
Step 5b: IT has to run all over the place actually coming to the user's system for a thirty-second fix because they don't have an XP system in front of them. Frustrated, they request upgrades to XP for 'new features, better hardware support, and more stability'
Step 6b: Management approves the upgrade, for most of the same reasons specified in 6a
Step 7: Profit (for MS)
--Dan
Sure they have a right to do what they want with THEIR network.. They can censor it if they want, even though that does get into a sticky legal issue. Once you start, you are libel for content under your control.
It's not censorship if the government doesn't do it, but your point is well made - if they decide they're going to crack down on illegal file traders, they become responsible for all illegal file traders. Thing is, they don't care if it's illegal or not, so I don't think that applies. You could be trading pictures of kittens, homemade kitten.mpg movies you made of your kitten playing with string, they'd still boot you off (sadly so).
Personally I think its a moral mistake to enforce their beliefs on others when they offer a free service, but that is their choice.
Your pronoun use is a little ambiguous, but I take this to mean that it's a moral mistake for Dalnet to enforce their beliefs on others when they (Dalnet) provide a free service, which doesn't make any sense, because, to be cliche, 'beggars can't be choosers' - if you want to use the network, use it for what it's provided to you for. Perhaps you meant something else, but who knows.
People that do use IRC for transfers don't leech any bandwidth, the key component to DCC is *DIRECT*, it does NOT load the IRC network at all. In reality they use LESS resources then a 8 hour a day 'chatter'.
Except that file sharing channels, if you've ever been to one, are always flooded with text. I find it hard to keep up personally, and I only go to the smaller ones. The larger ones are even worse. Combine that constant advertising of your fserve with the trivia bots, and send that to a dozen or a hundred or two hundred people (depending on the channel), and that's a lot of traffic, a lot of memory for the servers to store userdata for, a lot of bandwidth to share that user data around whenever a netsplit occurs (you can send gigs of traffic a day just syncing, since the new link has to carry data about half the users one way, and half the users another way, and then the two servers have to route it to every other server on the network).
Whiners? Not really, just people that would like to keep what they have now, ( or expand features )if you don't speak out you loose it, regardless of the topic.
Whiners? Definately. They don't pay for it. They don't contribute financially. They just use bandwidth and cpu time and memory of people who felt like being nice and linking servers to Dalnet to provide a service to people. You'd have to be a pretty big jerk to throw that in their face because they're not giving you enough for free. Take the service as it is given, or don't take it at all, but no one is 'entitled' to anything on Dalnet any more than they are entitled to anything in my home. It's a private domain, not a public one, and that's all there is to it.
--Dan
Disclaimer: I opered on an IRC network once, and got a little bitter about people demanding that I fix what was 'wrong' with the network, or insisting they had 'a right to free speech'. IRC networks are private property, you're not entitled to anything, and you have no rights.
Therefore a wise prince will seek means by which his subjects will always and in every possible condition of things have need of his government, and then they will always be faithful to him."
- Niccolo Machiavelli, "The Prince"
Yeah, but Machiavelli lived in a time of war-torn Italy where he was exiled from Florence, his home, which was being beset on one side by the Catholic Church, and on another by France, where there was no strong power to protect his city, so he wrote his book to get back in the good graces of Lorenzo de Medici, as a way of giving advice on how to last as long as possible without getting killed by his subjects or enemies.
The point Machiavelli was making was that if you make your subjects rely on you, they won't start regarding you with apathy and let you die, or antipathy and cause you to do so. Aside from the fact that there aren't any large empires trying to dominate the UK, and there aren't many cases of political assassination by rivals, there are processes by which a man can be removed from power, or the entire government can be changed (with the exception, perhaps, of the House of Lords) and there is no way for those in power to stop it.
That all being said, however, the point does pose an interesting thought, but the answer I form to the 'but still...' is that people in many of the more socially-oriented countries (the UK, Germany, Canada, Sweden) already rely on the government anyway, and ID cards will make that interaction easier.
Hmm, disjointed rant. Bedtime.
--Dan
The CBC story is up as well, and seems much more certain about what happened, though they don't mention the Israeli that was on board.
This is a staggering tragedy. Hopefully NASA can find out what really happened soon.
--Dan
Depending on how you set it up, it can notify you, notify you + download the updates, or do all of the above AND install the updates.
Definitely true. In fact, it's so concerned about my safety that it prompts me twice a day for the exact same updates, and has done so for two weeks, because it's so concerned that I could fall victim to them. This sort of behaviour gives me nothing but faith in the people who are coding and providing to me these patches.
--Dan
Now I'm hearing similar things about the GeForceFX vs. ATI's three month old Radeons.
Actually, the 9700 Pro has been out for something like six months, and the GeForce FX won't be out for another three, so it's more like nine months' difference.
Can they really afford to lose the lucrative high-end sales right now?
No, but they won't. First of all, there are all the nvidia fanboys, who think that nvidia rocks because nvidia rocks, ergo nvidia rocks. Secondly, there are the ATI anti-fanboys, who think that ATI sucks because ATI sucks, or because their drivers suck (despite not having actually tried any drivers for three years). Thirdly, there are the people who are stupid, or keep their PC in some kind of sound-proof box. Finally, there are people who don't buy the top-of-the-line cards anyway, that fit into one of the above categories.
Nvidia won't die off for a long long time. They may be new, but fanboys will keep them alive through any tough times they weather... unless ATI can deliver a next-generation card within a few months of nvidia's last-generation card. If ATI can bring out a new card within, say, six months, and whose performance is to the GeForce FX what the 9700 Pro was to the GF4Ti, then I think things will begin to go very, very bad. Unless that happens though, ATI has only won the battle, not the war.
--Dan
Perhaps this story would be best posted at the rumour.mil?
Come on, that was funny!
Oh well..
--Dan
Actually, while this is generally true, I've often found myself at Superstore putting back non-organic products because I found some of their 'Organics' line that was cheaper. It's not as common as I'd like, but it's common enough (and man, the food is good too, except for their Pasta OS, blech).
--Dan
He is talking about Microsoft doing _exactly_ the same thing that Apple has done with OSX (use someone else's OS), except with Linux instead of BSD. Five years ago, would anyone have thought that Apple would use someone else's OS to run their UI? Heresy!
The difference is that Apple has always been a friendly company - not friendly to everyone, of course, they have to protect their investments, but I look at it this way: Apple may be a 'corporation', which is evil to some, and they may not GPL every line of code ever written, which is evil to others, but they're not anti-competetive (as if they have a chance), and they're not anti-user. MS, on the other hand, is very anti-competetive, and very anti-user. All their software assumes that you're a lying, cheating, thieving bastard, and spies on everything you do. Nice.
MS makes their money by doing what's best for the company. Apple makes their money by doing what's best for the users. What MS doesn't realize is that in the short term, being a jerk is great, but in the long term, Apple's the one who's going to come out on top.
The point I'm trying to make, I guess, is that Apple went with BSD because it was the smart thing to do, it was the clever thing to do, and it's paid off big time already. MS will never go with Linux, because then they don't control everything. They can't control Linux kernel development, they can't control apps, they can't control APIs, they can't control hardware, they can't control much of anything, because they'd always have to give the source back. Companies wouldn't want to write Linux drivers, because binary drivers generally suck, and source drivers don't leave a lot of room for trade secrets. MS requires power-control.
Apple, on the other hand, opened the source, but still keeps a leash on it, in a small sense, and they control the hardware as well, plus the overlying APIs, but Apple's control is quality control, and no one's going to take their quality away from them just by having the source.
--Dan
I can't see how else Israel will stop suicide bombing unless they only allow their own citizens in public areas, and this method would not be too expensive.
They could stop opressing the Palestinians for one. I hardly think turning the place into an even worse police state than it already is would help matters, especially not for tourism. I'd hardly like to be accosted by the police every time I went out in public while I was there. I found the military presence in Jerusalem quite acceptable, but when it gets opressive towards me, I'd just give up on going, and so would most people.
--Dan
Actually, the military isn't playing Counterstrike, what they're doing is far more.. shall we say, productive?
.mil, so I decided to check them out...
I was looking through my website logs the other night, and found that I had a few hundred hits from
The logfile of the accesses is online, and the most common entry point from the military to my site is via a Google search, which leads them to part of my images gallery. Not that I can blame them, but they never seem to stay. Go figure.
--Dan
You make a good point. Here is my retort.
I just can't wait for the days when things are $1/TB.
Yeah, but by then, Super Windows XP Pro Ultimate Championship Edition will be out, will have backwards compatibility to all prior 8-, 16-, 32-, 64-, and 128-bit architectures, take 8 solar days to load, require 800 terabytes to install, and the neuro-holographic interface will crash regularly, wiping out more data than a human being can process in a lifetime, and throwing people into neural shock. You'll die, but it will be illegal to have any negative feelings towards the occasion, because of the Digital Oblivion Mind-Control Act.
Linux, of course, will still be around and install fine, but no one will care, because they get an extra 7 updates per second playing the Windows version of Quake 82, so it will still be considered a 'toy' OS.
Sometimes I scare myself...
--Dan
Er, last time I post slashdot at midnight. Try TM520.
--Dan
I've been using various digital cellphones lately, from an LG-T520 to an Audiobox 9000 or something (stupid loaner phone while I'm getting some repairs done to my LG), and here's my refutations of what's the dilly, yo:
However, with a digital system when the signal fades, there's no yelling because the signal isn't there, and packets that should be getting to your phone, just get dropped. As a result, Aunt Martha's 'Hello' on a crummy analog connection can still be made out.. but on a digital connection of the same strength might sound like 'He...o' with a gap of silence in the middle.
Even with the worst digital signal I could find, I've never had a problem at all hearing someone else's voice. I've been told that some voicemail I left once dropped out a word, but that's the only comment I've ever had. Other than that, no problems.
he question now becomes, why are they moving to 1.9GHz?
Among the other reasons mentioned, it provides more bandwidth as well, which means a lot of things - more users, more data, more whatever you're sending.
However, the cell phone companies need to cover the area better for there to be as much coverage, especially in the city where there is lots of Multi-path (bounces and signal inversions), and buildings to go through.
I live in Fredericton, NB. We have digital, but barely, since the telco just decided fairly recently to cover the area with digital. There isn't great digital coverage, but see my comment above for the impact this has made. The worst problem I've had is that I get bumped to analog (usually four or five out of six bars) when I'm in a basement room two minutes' walk from daylight, or I get no signal whatsoever, in worse circumstances. Even if digital coverage were hopeless, my phone can not only fall back to Analog from digital, it can do so in the middle of a call. It can't fall forward to digital during a call, but that's ok.
In addition, back to Aunt Martha, as long as her 'Hello' usually sounds like her 'Hello' on a land line, what difference does it make right? Well, unfortunately, the digital standards we have today are from years past. And while they work, they are by no means clear. If you are looking for clarity, you'll want to stick with an analog phone.
I don't know about you, but my phone uses 3G CDMA (hooray Qualcomm), which is a fairly new standard, and most people (even people who KNOW that my only phone is a cellphone) often ask whose house I'm at - because I sound like I'm on a land line, and everyone knows cellphones are horrible, right?
Another related comment: I was standing in Starbucks, of all places, surrounded by a crowd and with the espresso machine going, while I was on my cellphone, but the person on the other end could only hear me. When I wasn't talking, there was no sound. When I was, there was only me. Hooray active noise reduction. That being said, it was the phone itself doing it, and not CDMA's built-in anti-background filter (though that can't have hurt).
The compression algorithms used are lossy; they're specifically designed around transmission of human voice to human ears, and take advantage of what the human ear will tolerate and what it won't.
Don't forget to mention that, in the case of CDMA, it just doesn't transmit while you're talking, and doesn't recieve when the other person isn't. This saves battery power, bandwidth, radiation, everything. Analog, on the other hand, is always doing what it's doing all the time, by nature of it being a connection, as opposed to packets.
What about the pros for digital? Digital is a bit more secure then analog as you can't hear it just by setting a scanner to the correct frequency, you also have to un-encode it from the digital, and smooth the signal out.
Not to mention battery life. I can go for literally a week and a half without charging my phone, as long as I'm not stuck in that stupid room in the forestry building I had class in last semester. When I am, and I get bumped to analog, my battery drains almost 80% in a day. This is partly because I get poor reception, but even in one-bar digital areas, I don't have any sorts of issues (and I should know, Chapters/Starbucks is one such area).
On last thing, the digital system works on 1.9GHz... your home microwave works on 2.4GHz.. It's close enough, you still want to hold that phone next to your head? Remeber what happens to an egg when you put it in the microwave, and then decide.
Oh yeah, and by the way, wireless networking is going to give you testicular cancer, because it uses 2.4 GHz, just like your home microwave. And it'll fry your brain! And eat your fish! And salt your lawn! Fearmongering is pathetic, let's get real.
I use and like my 3G CDMA LG T520, serviced by Telus Communications, 800 MHz digital network by Aliant Telecom. Rare dropped packets, rare analog service, even though there are very few towers around here, and yet the data service is entirely reliable. They're putting up a 1900 MHz digital tower soon, which will provide us with '1x service' (the full 3G shebang), but in the meantime, my phone rocks anyway, and will gladly switch from 1900 MHz digital to 800 MHz digital to analog depending on what it can find.
So why is there such a complaint? Are people getting stuck with digital-only phones? Do Americans have to make this choice actively when they get a cellphone? Every phone Telus sells is 3G CDMA, tri-mode, and cool to boot. No old-school audiobox, no Nokia phones, just good-looking, good-working, sturdy, quality phones, and you know what? They work great, even here.
--Dan
What everyone forgets about, if they knew of it in the first place, is the free rider effect.
The US bears most of the cost for most of the technological innovation for the entire world. Other countries producing things at a commodity price is easy -- once those things are already commodities.
The American 'we do all, we see all, we know all' philosophy seems geared towards guaranteeing this sort of atmosphere. America is the be-all and end-all of everything, therefore other countries don't matter, and since other countries don't matter, America must be the be-all and end-all. It makes no sense, and it only comes around, and can be explained, by the American tendancy to ignore other countries except when impossible to do so, and to forget afterwards about what can't be ignored.
As another poster replied to you, JSD Uniphase, Nortel, and Telsat are industry-leaders. Likewise our biotech industry, which isn't suffering from persecution by those Churchgoers who believe genetic knowledge is for God alone. Also, I will indicate to you RSA, the encryption method that has lasted 50 years, and may well last another 50, developed in no small part in Israel. Cisco Systems runs their R&D in Israel as well, and it sometimes seems Israeli companies make news every month, but I guess you don't hear about them from CNNfn unless they're on the American exchanges, do you?
Open your eyes and look to some international news channels, if you can even get any, and learn some real facts about the world.
Just to put some fact behind my folly, a few Canadian inventions for your consideration - not the least of which is the telephone, courtesy of Alexander Graham Bell, a Canadian, born in Scotland. Among others, the Snowmobile (Bombardier), the AC radio tube, acetylene, the analytical plotter, the G-suit, basketball, the automatic postal sorter, calcium carbide, the light bulb (believe it or not), the compound steam engine, the electric streetcar, IMAX, hydrofoil watercraft, Java, kerosene, the robertson screw (one of the single best inventions in the history of carpentry), radio-transmitted voice, the zipper.... this list is getting long, so you can read the original yourself, and think twice next time you think innovation is American only. For that matter, what about inventions from before the US existed? A curious thought.
--Dan
I'm reminded of something Chrichton says in an episode of Farscape (1x22, 'Family Ties'):
Rygel, doing the right thing starts at the beginning of the day, not after you've been caught.
Rambus may be nice now, and may be playing fair now, but only because they can't get anywhere being jerks. That doesn't mean Rambus is no longer evil with their patent BS, it means they're no longer successful with their evil. If given the opportunity, they would go back in a second, I'm certain of it.
--Dan
First off I don't know if I like the fact that the word "north" was put in there - IMHO I think the wording could have been better.
This is just another example of code-words that the Canadian Conspiracy is using to communicate. This particular reference informs me that the PS3 dev team has been infiltrated by our forces, and is preparing to corrupt the minds of your youth and turn them against you, rebelling with peace. All your kids are belong to us!
--Dan
My Xbox's hard-drive on the other hand is about fucking useless. Yes, it'll save my game on MY Xbox, but it doesn't do me any good when I go anywhere else.
So go buy an XBox memory card (yes, they do exist) and copy your saves onto them before you go. Simple, no? Hard drives are better for a lot of reasons - more space, permanance, ease of use, etc - and memory cards are good for a lot of reasons - portability, redundancy, etc. - but having a hard drive does not preclude supporting memory cards, it just means that you don't need to have them all the time.
One of the things that really boosted XBox sales this Christmas is that all you need is in one box - the system, the RCA cables, a controller, two games, and you're off to the races. No DVD remote, but that's entirely optional. No second controller, but kids can take turns. With the PS2 however, there were no games included and you had to buy a memory card very soon, yet you paid the same price. Not good. We sold more XBoxen this Christmas than PS2s by twofold at least. Personally, I rang up about three or PS2s and about ten to twelve XBoxes just in December. A lot of this was new tech or games, but a lot of parents were iffy, and discovered that they could pay $300 + $30-70 + $35 + tax, or $300 + tax. The choice is pretty easy when they're all the same to you.
--Dan
--Dan
Steve, where are the software trade-in incentives?
I was informed a while ago, though I'm not sure if it's still true, that Adobe will gladly exchange your Windows license for Photoshop 7 for an OS X license for Photoshop 7, straight trade. I would suggest calling Adobe to find out if this is the case, as I would with Macromedia. It doesn't cost them anything, and it promotes good customer relations, so I don't see why not.
--Dan
Well, a lot of parents don't know to look. Their kids say 'can you buy me this game', and convince the parents that 'it's not that bad'. I've had quite a few parents though, while I was ringing up GTA:VC, ask 'it says Mature, what does that mean?'. My answer: 'Well, it just means you can do some bad stuff, like, uh, you can kill people, run them over, stomp on their corpses, shoot them in the face, hire prostitutes...' (I'm usually cut off before this point). Parents often change their minds. If not, we always make sure to ask before we accept payment, 'You're aware this is a mature game?' A lot of people buy it for their 19-25 year old brother/son/husband. A lot of people don't buy it.
A woman came in the other day to do a return, and while I was handling that, she mentioned how her son had gotten the latest Mortal Kombat, and she was very disturbed by it, though relieved when I told her our return policy still covered it. Moral of the story? Parents ought to shop somewhere with a good return policy, or get a freaking clue and take some passing interest in their children.
--Dan
A friend of mine had a cellular plan through whatever Baby-Bell services Florida, and he was getting fed up with what he paid. His solution? He called in, and told them about the offer that AT&T had made him, which included unlimited evenings/weekends, tons of daytime minutes, all sorts of perks (voicemail, etc). The catch? It was all BS. He'd never even spoken to an AT&T rep. The result? He got the best cellular plan I'd heard of (still beats mine, actually, and this was three years ago).
So, if you want good service, find a national carrier, or one with decent roaming agreements anyway, and like like a bastard, and hope they believe you. Keep it realistic though.
--Dan
And yet despite that, the RCMP has said that they will not be actively prosecuting people who do this. They might confiscate your dish if you make some huge deal out of it, putting up 'fuck the po-lice' signs on your lawn and raising a 'DirectTV Piracy 4 Life' flag over your house, but they honestly don't care one way or the other. You can't go through official channels, but if you break the law, well then shame on you.
A lot of people might say 'yeah, they say that, but...', and to them I say, if you've lived where I've lived, you'd know that it's impossible to NOT see DirectTV dishes all over the place, from public property, and the RCMP could be throwing fines left and right. Despite this, no one's said a thing. Curious, no? This is just the Supreme Court defending the local broadcasters (Starchoice/Bell) in principle, and encouraging people to support local (national) business, but nothing more.
--Dan
As fucked up as the RIAA is, it's even worse when, for instance, the holders of patents on medicine peofit off of the suffering and death of others.
Considering how many trillions of dollars pharmaceutical companies spend designing drugs to relieve the suffering of others, I'm inclined to side in favour of their being able to take advantage of their discoveries.
Your point would seem to villify doctors as well, who make huge amounts of money (in the US at least), all from the illness, pain, and death around them. Doctors feed off the frailties and fears of humankind. Should we speak ill of them for this?
Your point is valid, but your example is poor.
--Dan