According to an earlier/. story, the MS/Sun agreement had a special provision that lets Microsoft sue anybody, including Sun, over OpenOffice.org. Does anyone else think this provision was included by MS to be able to use this "Word processing document stored in a single XML file that may be manipulated by applications that understand XML" patent to sue OOo adopters in New Zealand?
100 years ago we would never have dreamed space exploration would be possible.
So I guess you've never heard of H.G. Wells or Jules Verne then? Those two definitly thought it would be possible some day... They just couldn't agree how.
I've been payed to do actionscripting for a flash site in the past. I have to agree that flash is powerfull. There is really no limit in what you can do with it. On the other hand i agree with most other slashdotters that flash is mis/overused on MANY occations. Too much animations can slow older machines to a crawl and are often unnecessary. This can easily be avoided though, if you have a designer that knows what he/she's doing.
Flash does however offer one really important feature that html/js does not: Cross browser compatibility without the hell of checking the user-agent string and writing different js and css for different browsers. A flash site will look and feel the same in ANY browser, provided you use a limited ("websafe") palette and few animations. This cuts down development- and QA time quite a bit.
Another thing i like about flash is that it's graphics are vector based. In my experience it is possible to create a flash site with a smaller footprint than it's html/jpg equivalent.
Bottom line: Flash does not have to be annoying when it's used in the right project for the right reasons.
I stand corrected. My appologies for my misinformed post.
I fully agree selling modded consoles with pirated games is a stupid thing to do. Modding a xbox to run linux is (morally) something completely different IMHO.
I'm just glad I'm don't live in the US of A with those funky laws like the DMCA criminalizing everyone and their dog.
I think MIDI was never meant to be used as a distribution format. It's simply a communication protocol to get data from instruments/to synthesizers.
Offcource MIDI files were distributed by hobbyist musicians in the past, but this was mainly because there was not enough bandwidth or capacity to distribute "rendered" (wave) audio.
With the rise of compression (mp3) and the increase of bandwidth, artists are now better off rendering their music with their own (professional) synthesizers and compress the output to mp3 instead of relying on the enduser's (possibly crappy) soundcard midi bank for playback.
Ps.: I'm not saying there's no one distributing MIDI anymore, just that there's no real reason to do so except perhaps educational purposes.
IAANAL, but I think it is a MSFT issue. The xbox licence states that you may not mod/hack the hardware. They don't want you to mess with it and install things like pirated games. I've even heard (might be wrong) they loose money on the hardware, and turn it into profit through the commissions on games. If that's true I guess that's why they don't want people to install linux on it and use it for non-gaming purposes...
Yes i realize this. I wasn't serious either. That's why I decided to reply with another infamous/. cliché. So my conclusion is that YOU are the "boob" here. (Whatever that may mean.) Fortunatly my post got modded funny so i know others did get the joke:P
How much crack does one need to smoke in order to mod parent Interesting?
"Wow, he thinks Sun sucks! How interesting! Especially since the article has *absolutely nothing* to do with Sun! If only I had more mod points i'd mod this guy Insightfull too! w00t!"
I don't say only legit companies can register.nl domains. That's why I put legit between quotation marks. Although it's easy to register some.nl domain as a "less legit company",.nl domains are still *seen* as more trustworthy.
country code top-level domains are becoming more widely accepted
I don't know about the rest of the world, but here in the Netherlands our country-code TLD (.nl) is far more accepted than.com or.net. People have more trust in it because this TLD can only be registered by "legit" companies.
I think there is a big difference between spam and (agressive) telemarketing. Telemarketeers (especially the frauds) often rely on psychological tricks to force the consumer into buying. They can choose which tactic to use on a certain person based on the reactions they get. Therefore they can put a lot of pressure on the "weak minded" to buy their products. Spam however, does not have this power. Atleast not to the same degree.
Another aspect is the cost of getting the message across. Sending spam costs (virtually) nothing, where telemarketing is quite expensive. Most spammers only needs ONE sell to break even, so there doesn't have to be a real demand for the product for spamming to be profitable.
I see. My apologies for my rather short sighted reply. Your point of 1940s scientists denying something that could already be witnessed is pretty solid.
I think it was the "shoot him" thing that triggered me to write the reply. As you experienced, i'd be killed long ago if shooting ignorant people was common practice;)
No kidding, my HP photoSmart printer driver phoned home "checking for updates", and then a survey popped up right on my screen. "Please fill out this survey so we can offer better service in the future". Quite unpleassant. So i set up my firewall to block the damn thing off the net. This also disabled the auto update, but I wouldn't know why i should update my printer drivers anyway.
Huh? Have you ever heard of a COMMUNIST hijacking a plane and flighing it into a building? Why do you compare communists to terrorists?
It reminds me of that one monty python sketch where John Cleese is sitting in the garden screaming how much he hates those commie basterds... until his wife calls him in for dinner.
Sponger, my friend, you are seriously retarded. Either that or your small little mind snapped under the load of all the propaganda.
I agree. The whole mess the world is in right now could have been avoided by *thinking about the consequences*. The current trend of fighting fire with fire is getting us nowhere. Offcourse this applies to all involved parties. It should be clear by now that we can not leave the thinking to our leaders. We need to take responsibility for our own actions. So in my opinion, it's not the countries that need to get a clue, but the people living in those countries. Face it; It's them who re-elected Dubya.
If someone in 1940 told me that you can't go faster then the speed of sound, I would have told him he was full of shit and shot him.
Maybe it's clear to you now, but you merely adopted that knowledge from modern science. I think it's rather arrogant to state that, if you were an adult in the fourties, you would have known everything you know now.
The funny thing is, the exact same theory (infinite amount of thrust needed) is now applied to the lightbarrier. In 50 years, we'll know stuff we don't know today. So your grandchild will probably be posting a/. comment stating Hawkins was an idiot, and that if he lived in 2004, he would have shot the moron for saying super-lightspeed travel is impossible. The paradox is that we would have never got this far without these "morons".
Slashdot Mirror
According to an earlier /. story, the MS/Sun agreement had a special provision that lets Microsoft sue anybody, including Sun, over OpenOffice.org. Does anyone else think this provision was included by MS to be able to use this "Word processing document stored in a single XML file that may be manipulated by applications that understand XML" patent to sue OOo adopters in New Zealand?
So I guess you've never heard of H.G. Wells or Jules Verne then? Those two definitly thought it would be possible some day... They just couldn't agree how.
I've been payed to do actionscripting for a flash site in the past. I have to agree that flash is powerfull. There is really no limit in what you can do with it. On the other hand i agree with most other slashdotters that flash is mis/overused on MANY occations. Too much animations can slow older machines to a crawl and are often unnecessary. This can easily be avoided though, if you have a designer that knows what he/she's doing.
Flash does however offer one really important feature that html/js does not: Cross browser compatibility without the hell of checking the user-agent string and writing different js and css for different browsers. A flash site will look and feel the same in ANY browser, provided you use a limited ("websafe") palette and few animations. This cuts down development- and QA time quite a bit.
Another thing i like about flash is that it's graphics are vector based. In my experience it is possible to create a flash site with a smaller footprint than it's html/jpg equivalent.
Bottom line: Flash does not have to be annoying when it's used in the right project for the right reasons.
My unkle also has such a card. It just says INCEST MAN.
And just to be on the safe side: I *am* joking.
You must be Canadian then ;)
No, I'm not an American. I just watch Southpark occationally...
How can Funny mods *cost* you karma? What I understand from the FAQ is that Funny mods just don't influence karma at all... Am I missing something?
I stand corrected. My appologies for my misinformed post.
I fully agree selling modded consoles with pirated games is a stupid thing to do. Modding a xbox to run linux is (morally) something completely different IMHO.
I'm just glad I'm don't live in the US of A with those funky laws like the DMCA criminalizing everyone and their dog.
I think MIDI was never meant to be used as a distribution format. It's simply a communication protocol to get data from instruments/to synthesizers.
Offcource MIDI files were distributed by hobbyist musicians in the past, but this was mainly because there was not enough bandwidth or capacity to distribute "rendered" (wave) audio.
With the rise of compression (mp3) and the increase of bandwidth, artists are now better off rendering their music with their own (professional) synthesizers and compress the output to mp3 instead of relying on the enduser's (possibly crappy) soundcard midi bank for playback.
Ps.: I'm not saying there's no one distributing MIDI anymore, just that there's no real reason to do so except perhaps educational purposes.
IAANAL, but I think it is a MSFT issue. The xbox licence states that you may not mod/hack the hardware. They don't want you to mess with it and install things like pirated games. I've even heard (might be wrong) they loose money on the hardware, and turn it into profit through the commissions on games. If that's true I guess that's why they don't want people to install linux on it and use it for non-gaming purposes...
Yes i realize this. I wasn't serious either. That's why I decided to reply with another infamous /. cliché. So my conclusion is that YOU are the "boob" here. (Whatever that may mean.) Fortunatly my post got modded funny so i know others did get the joke :P
How much crack does one need to smoke in order to mod parent Interesting?
"Wow, he thinks Sun sucks! How interesting! Especially since the article has *absolutely nothing* to do with Sun! If only I had more mod points i'd mod this guy Insightfull too! w00t!"
Maybe they should include one of these then...
I don't say only legit companies can register .nl domains. That's why I put legit between quotation marks. Although it's easy to register some .nl domain as a "less legit company", .nl domains are still *seen* as more trustworthy.
I don't know about the rest of the world, but here in the Netherlands our country-code TLD (.nl) is far more accepted than .com or .net. People have more trust in it because this TLD can only be registered by "legit" companies.
I think there is a big difference between spam and (agressive) telemarketing. Telemarketeers (especially the frauds) often rely on psychological tricks to force the consumer into buying. They can choose which tactic to use on a certain person based on the reactions they get. Therefore they can put a lot of pressure on the "weak minded" to buy their products. Spam however, does not have this power. Atleast not to the same degree.
Another aspect is the cost of getting the message across. Sending spam costs (virtually) nothing, where telemarketing is quite expensive. Most spammers only needs ONE sell to break even, so there doesn't have to be a real demand for the product for spamming to be profitable.
I see. My apologies for my rather short sighted reply. Your point of 1940s scientists denying something that could already be witnessed is pretty solid.
I think it was the "shoot him" thing that triggered me to write the reply. As you experienced, i'd be killed long ago if shooting ignorant people was common practice ;)
No kidding, my HP photoSmart printer driver phoned home "checking for updates", and then a survey popped up right on my screen. "Please fill out this survey so we can offer better service in the future". Quite unpleassant. So i set up my firewall to block the damn thing off the net. This also disabled the auto update, but I wouldn't know why i should update my printer drivers anyway.
I don't have that problem, my father and I share a porn collection :)
Have you guys heard of Yuri Lane? When it comes to beatboxing he's the man. Especially check the harmonica video.
ps. The site seems to have some bandwidth problems, so take it easy.
Huh? Have you ever heard of a COMMUNIST hijacking a plane and flighing it into a building? Why do you compare communists to terrorists?
It reminds me of that one monty python sketch where John Cleese is sitting in the garden screaming how much he hates those commie basterds... until his wife calls him in for dinner.
Sponger, my friend, you are seriously retarded. Either that or your small little mind snapped under the load of all the propaganda.
I agree. The whole mess the world is in right now could have been avoided by *thinking about the consequences*. The current trend of fighting fire with fire is getting us nowhere. Offcourse this applies to all involved parties. It should be clear by now that we can not leave the thinking to our leaders. We need to take responsibility for our own actions. So in my opinion, it's not the countries that need to get a clue, but the people living in those countries. Face it; It's them who re-elected Dubya.
Anyway, this is getting a bit offtopic...
How the hell did the conversation change subject from peer reviews to p2p? The fact that they both contain the word "peer" does not make them related.
Unless offcource you're saying scientists should publish their work to p2p networks for peer-reviews...
Maybe it's clear to you now, but you merely adopted that knowledge from modern science. I think it's rather arrogant to state that, if you were an adult in the fourties, you would have known everything you know now.
The funny thing is, the exact same theory (infinite amount of thrust needed) is now applied to the lightbarrier. In 50 years, we'll know stuff we don't know today. So your grandchild will probably be posting a /. comment stating Hawkins was an idiot, and that if he lived in 2004, he would have shot the moron for saying super-lightspeed travel is impossible. The paradox is that we would have never got this far without these "morons".
Including an image from a spam server != *diplaying* it. Just size it 1x1 pixels or something. The bandwidth usage will still be the same.