I still use my "The Original" Rio PMP300 almost everyday.
So what if it takes almost 20 min to upload 64mb of mp3s through the parallel port. (that's right folks, I got an expansion card and doubled my memory capacity... stand down ladies, I'm already spoken for...)
So what if I had to write a script to re-encode my songs down to 64kbps just to fit more than 90min of music on there (you can't tell the difference in those lame little ear-buds anyway).
So what if they didn't design the battery compartment to the correct specifications, and it resets itself every time I bump it too hard?
So what if it only displays a track number instead of a filename?
Me and my little Rio have been through a lot together. Every out-of-state road trip, every snowmobile crash, every day of school...
There was even the time I used it like it was a jumpdrive to transfer homework from my laptop to my PC when my wireless card was in the shop.
And I still get compliments on my cool mp3 play when I'm up on campus.
But it's probably time now that I broke down and get an iPod.
How about one guy who stands there quietly with a couple of "peace" banners every day. on his own. thats why the law was introduced... seriously, it actually was why it was introduced, because the government found that one guy embarrassing. so now we've lost the right to protest.
You know what? If that is the real reason that law was passed, then I'm right with you in crying myself to sleep every night over the loss of rights; That is very lame. But it does seem to be a bit on the far-fetched side. Do you have any links to articles supporting that notion?
No, pretending we were playing by international law, then when it became obvious that wasn't going to work, blatantly ignoring it, is what we did when we bypassed the UN. I'm with you if you think the UN is a toothless and largely useless entity, but saying you'll abide by its decisions, then ignoring them when they don't go your way, is, actually, illegal. invading a sovereign nation. illegal. and it's illegal for a reason - because it's wrong, which is why only a couple of countries round the world were in favour, and all the others against.
I agree that the pretext under which we went to war in Iraq was completely retarded and flimsy. But I do wonder whose best interests the UN has in mind. But your response doesn't answer my question. What would be your way to deal with another situation in which another Saddam has the UN in his pocket?
just because someone is a terrorist doesn't mean their views are automatically invalid...
Oh, plenty of their views are automatically invalid.
First, their belief that they can have the most impact on foreign policy by killing civiians is clearly wrong. With the exception of Spain, the only thing they're getting done is slowing me down at the airport while a dog smells my briefcase. By any standard, their techniques are clearly ineffectual at winning their goals.
Second, that they are the victims of the Big, Bad Western countries justifies the murder of the civilian populace. I can only guess about you, but I sure as hell didn't vote for W. Will that stop them from blowing up the bus I'm on? I doubt it. If they want to play the pity card, then a nice Ghandi style war of attrition will make more of an impact. I'm sure they have some perfectly cogent arguments to make about how we've raped their women and stolen their lands, but the way that they are expressing them doesn't lend much credibility, no? And moreover, assuming that we are as bad as they claim, they are simply sinking past our level by doing the things they are doing.
Thirdly, the way terrorists wage their war is grossly immoral. Indoctrinating an entire generation of youngsters to carry out their political whims is at least as screwed up as drafting unwilling high-school grads to wade around a jungle. Osama is just a rich, Saudi brat; he snubs his nose at the west by ordering poor and destitute young Afghanis to spill their lives in a subway tunnel. If he is a hero with a righteous cause, why don't we see him strapping C4 to his chest?
And take our domestic terrorists for example: Abortion is a big deal to some. But is killing adults in any way an answer to killing fetuses? And did we as a country cease the practice?
In short, terrorists may have had some valid greivances, but the longer they carry out these ridiculous attacks, the more they lose any credibility they had. The more they do this to us, the less they are the victims.
nice to see you're not generalizing.
Glad you noticed!
ever heard aesop's fable about the sun, the wind, and the man with the coat?
With posts like these, I find it is helpful to ask oneself, is this guy serious, or is he a troll?
Too many people protesting outside parliament? don't find out why they're so angry, just make it illegal for anyone to protest, peacefully or otherwise, within 1km of parliament.
I'm pretty sure the members of parliment read the signs on their way in to work. Seriously, would you go to work if there was a swarm of pissed-off people outside your window who would just as soon talk to you as tip over your car? And on the day of a terrorist attack! Really, are you so brave!?!
Too many corrupt middle-eastern regimes? Don't try to help get rid of the corruption, just invade one and hope for the best!
Isn't bypassing the corruption what we attempted to do when we bypassed the UN? And how, pray tell, do you intend for us to remove the corruption? Bribe Hussein to step down?
Too many terrorist attacks? Don't try to figure out why so many people are willing to die to hurt you, just find a convenient country to blame and invade it!
We do know why so many people are willing to die to hurt us! We're all a bunch of infidels and satan worshippers! And once we understand why they want to kill us, how does that stop the attacks! I can see it now: "Okay Mr. Osama, we know why you are trying to kill our women and children. Now will you please stop blowing us up? Pretty please!"
Too many underage criminals active at night? Make it illegal for *any* children to be on the streets at night, whether they're doing anything wrong or not.
We know what causes this, too. Parents are too busy screwing around or watching TV to keep track of their own kids. Disciplining and raising children never was supposed to be the government's job, and it isn't one they took on willfully.
Too many riots and violent protests? Don't worry about it, just develop new and ever more sophisticated ways of punishing those who take part, or even those who are in the same place at the same time.
And you don't see a problem with "violent protests?" A person who isn't part of the "violent protest" is just as likely to get hit in the head by a rock or trampled to death by enraged hippies as he is to get a nosefull of coughing gas.
I hate to see stuff like this, because this is the kind of logic that makes guys like Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh look intelligent. No wonder Bush was re-elected! You hippy/liberal/pacifists do as much damage to your own credibility as Bush does to his anytime he talks in front of a camera. NO wonder we aren't getting anywhere!
Wait, isn't that terrorism? Using this thing could increase terrorism?
When was the last time we were able to do anything that appeased the terrorists?
If you care to recall, the first WTC bombing happened during the Clinton years, so we shouldn't continue to attribute Islamo-facist attacks on the current administration's foreign policies.
And if it isn't the Islamic fundamentalists, there are plenty of half-baked, home-grown fruities to blow us up. Dare we forget Eric Rudolf, Theodore John Kaczynski, PhD, and Tim McVeigh?
Face it, there are only two things we can do to keep the terrorists from killing us: kill ourselves first, or kill them.
Preaching that we are the cause of terrorism is the same as saying that we are all responsible for bank robberies because we put our money in banks. Blaming ourselves for what Osama bin Laden does makes as much sense as saying that women who are raped bring it upon themselves because they are physically attractive to the rapist!
Pull your heads out of your arses! Terrorists don't care what you think! They won't pass over killing someone who doesn't agree with the current administration! They don't interview their victims before they blow them up make sure that they don't like Bush! We all know how the media feels about the president, but does that stop kidnappers from cutting reporter's heads off with big knives? They are just as happy to blow you up as they are Rush Limbaugh or Tony Blair! They don't discriminate. They only make excuses, which are far-fetched justifications for killing civilians.
Sure, you can make the argument that the WTC was full of "little Eichmanns," but that does in no way justify the killings of the hundreds of innocents on the airliners. If they wanted to go for the capitalist types, couldn't they have at least had the decency to hijack some fat white CEO's Leer jet?
Plenty of people think that instead of starting a war on terror, we should try diplomacy; we should try to find out what their greivances are, and mitigate them peacefully. There are several logistical problems with doing this, of course.
First, who do we talk to? We can't find bin Laden with huge rewards and bounties; what makes you think he would come out under the pretext of a peaceful summit? He clearly distrusts all things Western, and would never put himself in a situation where we could find his location. And diplomacy through week-old tapes would never progress fast enough.
Secondly, before you make that claim, sit down and read their demands. They are completely ridiculous! In between paragraphs of name-calling, telling us that we are infidels and Satanists (and if you can tell me qualitatively what that means...) they are asking for the impossible.
If we treated domestic criminals in the same way Spain responded to their terrorist attacks, we would quickly find ourselves back at the state of nature: after all, nobody elected or appointed the terrorists to govern us; WTF should we listen to them? Would we have gone along with Bush during his '00 term if he had no more legitamacy than our own fears? (Well, you can answer that last question however you like, but most of us didn't go along with him, not really).
Stop making excuses for the terrorists. Nothing we do short of drowning ourselves in the sea like so many lemmings will ever appease their ill-founed hatred in us.
There's no excuse for Microsoft customers to be lazy and uninformed...
They can always get that cute puppy dog to help you set up your firewall.
Or better yet, similar to KDE's "red screen" deterant strategy, Longhorn admin accounts should make that paper clip a permanent part of the administrator's desktop.
I used to work as a Customer Care Specialist (read: warm body in a call-center) for a major cell phone company. We were inundated with this crap on a daily-basis.
My favorite squares on the BS-Bingo board:
value-added
product (used in lieu of service)
maximize
customer care
empathy (as if call-center people are paid to care)
resell value (read: talk people out of switching carriers by reminding them of the useless features they never used anyway)
provisioning time (read: you just bought your phone, but it won't be recognized by the network for up to 12 hours!)
First, as someone who just blew $150 on a physics text book I used four weeks, I've got to ask, why the big rush for educational media that can be updated every school year? I can't conceive of too many subjects taught in high school that need to be on the bleeding edge like that. After all, Newton's Laws haven't changed much in the past 300 years. Is a introductory-level physics text from the early '70s sustantially inferior to one printed last year?
Secondly, there is something to be said about paper as a medium. It is lightweight, portable and easily repaired/replaced. It is as easy to read out of doors as it is indoors. You still can't write in the margins of a PDF class outline. You don't have any of the technical concerns these newfangled laptops will surely pose the school district, and after squinting for six to eight hours at your screen, it feel's much better on the eyes.
Maybe it's because I'm the kind of guy that forgets about using my PDA as soon as the novelty wears off, but I can't see how using a laptop can hold any advantages over providing free-access computer labs at school, and low-cost computers to lower-income students.
If the district aims to get out of the cycle of replacing educational texts each and every year, I'd say that moving to computers is a big step in the wrong direction.
However, despite whether you may think this is a left vs right issue or whatever, I find it highly disturbing that the more liberal groups continue their attempts to strip the rights of states to have their own laws, especially in a representative government.
Amen to isa-kuruption's post. While I don't believe that this law or the underlying filter would be particularly effective, I find the ACLU lawsuit to be detrimental to our way of life in Utah.
It's a government "of the people, by the people, and for the people." The people here are pretty much in favor of such a law, for better or worse, and who is the ACLU to say we can't govern ourselves?
Nobody can honestly say that it isn't too big of a step from "they're offering a pr0n filter" to "they're taking away our right to vote democrat!"
I don't mean to sound insensitive to the part of our population that is composed of folks who don't believe in the LDS faith, but they weren't the ones who were literally forced by gunpoint to live out here in the desert.
If anyone's to blame for this conservative hornet's nest, it's those folks who didn't get along in the 19th century. After all, the church was organized in New England, and was persecuted out of there YEARS before polygamy had anything to do with anything.
I read the article at http://it.sohu.com/20040913/n222021830.shtml about kylin; My simplified chinese is a bit rusty, but what I got out of it was "64-bit support", "a team of 863 IT experts" and "independant of Linux"
Anyway, from the sound of the article, there is a kernel, maybe some simple utilities to go along with it, and they are very proud of the fact that they did it all by themselves.
The article mentions that they want to develop a computing platform that is independantly developed in-country, to allow them more control over how software is deployed in schools, the market, and in the military.
Is there anyone out there that reads simplified well that can verify this?
In case you are wondering, Kylin is poorly anglicized for the pinyin "Qilin", pronounced "chee-lean". It is the name of a mythological creature, similar to a unicorn.
Actually, the choice of an interpreted language for this project is really cool because you can just plug code into your document and run it on a whim, without spending time compiling it.
Though I'm no expert in Python, I guess it is safe to assume that the backtick and the tilde aren't used?
In reading all of this, it is clear that M$ is seeking patents for things they had no hand in inventing.
This caused me to wonder about some of the technologies that they have actually created all by themselves, and would therefore be OK by us/.ers to patent.
So far, my list of genuine Microsoft innovations includes:
1. The Blue Screen of Death
2. Talking Paper Clips
3. Those other two keys between Alt + Ctrl
4. That marquee screen saver that's been around since Windows 3.1
5. 640kb of conventional memory
6. the mouse wheel (that's a good one, I'll admit)
7. A 'Start' button that allows you to shut down your PC
8. right clicking (Well, at least I know for sure that MS didn't steal that one from Apple)
So instead of focusing on stealing up other people's innovations, we can see that there is still plenty for MS to legitimately patent.
Still, I'm sure that this time next year we'll see a patent pending approval for tabbed-browsing
www.microsoft-watch.com And I thought this was the same company that said that nobody wanted to use tabbed-browsing?
the only thing that is depressing about this thread is that we are talking about leo laporte here. he is the only thing i didn't like about TechTV before it took a nose dive.
seriously, I feel for the camera men who had to sit through an hour of Call For Help with that schmuck. In his post at the end of the article he says that he is still on TV. I wonder if it is on cooking show, or if he is one of those telethon phone people who are in the background... it couldn't be on any program that is technology releated
how i miss the days he called in sick and they let the much more intelligent and useful kevin fill in.
that was a really backwards arrangement they had there - they really should have made leo be kevin's back up.
I'm sure that the bulk of spyware can be completely avoided by not ever firing up IE out of the box. The problem with that is the fact that as soon as you power your system on, it jumps on there asking you if you want to go online and read your "welcome to windows" formletter spam from microsoft.
"I see that Internet Explorer is not configured to be your default web browser. Would you like to set it to be your default?"
And has anybody ever tried to delete the iexplore.exe binary? Like dawn of the dead, it keeps comming back for more!
Internet Exploerer is more ridiculous and annoying than that stupid dog that tries to help me find my files.
What IF one of these things came down? I read the specs on the company's website, where they gave data about the length, volume, payload capacity, etc., but they didn't mention how massive the airship itself is. If for some reason it deflated, or was shot down by a really big shoulder fired rocket, what kind of damage are we looking forward to? Moreso because these will be floated above metro areas?
Slashdot Mirror
So what if it takes almost 20 min to upload 64mb of mp3s through the parallel port. (that's right folks, I got an expansion card and doubled my memory capacity... stand down ladies, I'm already spoken for...)
So what if I had to write a script to re-encode my songs down to 64kbps just to fit more than 90min of music on there (you can't tell the difference in those lame little ear-buds anyway).
So what if they didn't design the battery compartment to the correct specifications, and it resets itself every time I bump it too hard?
So what if it only displays a track number instead of a filename?
Me and my little Rio have been through a lot together. Every out-of-state road trip, every snowmobile crash, every day of school...
There was even the time I used it like it was a jumpdrive to transfer homework from my laptop to my PC when my wireless card was in the shop.
And I still get compliments on my cool mp3 play when I'm up on campus.
But it's probably time now that I broke down and get an iPod.
You know what? If that is the real reason that law was passed, then I'm right with you in crying myself to sleep every night over the loss of rights; That is very lame. But it does seem to be a bit on the far-fetched side. Do you have any links to articles supporting that notion?
I agree that the pretext under which we went to war in Iraq was completely retarded and flimsy. But I do wonder whose best interests the UN has in mind. But your response doesn't answer my question. What would be your way to deal with another situation in which another Saddam has the UN in his pocket?
Oh, plenty of their views are automatically invalid.
First, their belief that they can have the most impact on foreign policy by killing civiians is clearly wrong. With the exception of Spain, the only thing they're getting done is slowing me down at the airport while a dog smells my briefcase. By any standard, their techniques are clearly ineffectual at winning their goals.
Second, that they are the victims of the Big, Bad Western countries justifies the murder of the civilian populace. I can only guess about you, but I sure as hell didn't vote for W. Will that stop them from blowing up the bus I'm on? I doubt it. If they want to play the pity card, then a nice Ghandi style war of attrition will make more of an impact. I'm sure they have some perfectly cogent arguments to make about how we've raped their women and stolen their lands, but the way that they are expressing them doesn't lend much credibility, no? And moreover, assuming that we are as bad as they claim, they are simply sinking past our level by doing the things they are doing.
Thirdly, the way terrorists wage their war is grossly immoral. Indoctrinating an entire generation of youngsters to carry out their political whims is at least as screwed up as drafting unwilling high-school grads to wade around a jungle. Osama is just a rich, Saudi brat; he snubs his nose at the west by ordering poor and destitute young Afghanis to spill their lives in a subway tunnel. If he is a hero with a righteous cause, why don't we see him strapping C4 to his chest?
And take our domestic terrorists for example: Abortion is a big deal to some. But is killing adults in any way an answer to killing fetuses? And did we as a country cease the practice?
In short, terrorists may have had some valid greivances, but the longer they carry out these ridiculous attacks, the more they lose any credibility they had. The more they do this to us, the less they are the victims.
Glad you noticed!
No, but I'll google for it tonight.
Too many people protesting outside parliament? don't find out why they're so angry, just make it illegal for anyone to protest, peacefully or otherwise, within 1km of parliament.
I'm pretty sure the members of parliment read the signs on their way in to work. Seriously, would you go to work if there was a swarm of pissed-off people outside your window who would just as soon talk to you as tip over your car? And on the day of a terrorist attack! Really, are you so brave!?!
Too many corrupt middle-eastern regimes? Don't try to help get rid of the corruption, just invade one and hope for the best!
Isn't bypassing the corruption what we attempted to do when we bypassed the UN? And how, pray tell, do you intend for us to remove the corruption? Bribe Hussein to step down?
Too many terrorist attacks? Don't try to figure out why so many people are willing to die to hurt you, just find a convenient country to blame and invade it!
We do know why so many people are willing to die to hurt us! We're all a bunch of infidels and satan worshippers! And once we understand why they want to kill us, how does that stop the attacks!
I can see it now: "Okay Mr. Osama, we know why you are trying to kill our women and children. Now will you please stop blowing us up? Pretty please!"
Too many underage criminals active at night? Make it illegal for *any* children to be on the streets at night, whether they're doing anything wrong or not.
We know what causes this, too. Parents are too busy screwing around or watching TV to keep track of their own kids. Disciplining and raising children never was supposed to be the government's job, and it isn't one they took on willfully.
Too many riots and violent protests? Don't worry about it, just develop new and ever more sophisticated ways of punishing those who take part, or even those who are in the same place at the same time.
And you don't see a problem with "violent protests?" A person who isn't part of the "violent protest" is just as likely to get hit in the head by a rock or trampled to death by enraged hippies as he is to get a nosefull of coughing gas.
I hate to see stuff like this, because this is the kind of logic that makes guys like Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh look intelligent. No wonder Bush was re-elected! You hippy/liberal/pacifists do as much damage to your own credibility as Bush does to his anytime he talks in front of a camera. NO wonder we aren't getting anywhere!
When was the last time we were able to do anything that appeased the terrorists?
If you care to recall, the first WTC bombing happened during the Clinton years, so we shouldn't continue to attribute Islamo-facist attacks on the current administration's foreign policies.
And if it isn't the Islamic fundamentalists, there are plenty of half-baked, home-grown fruities to blow us up. Dare we forget Eric Rudolf, Theodore John Kaczynski, PhD, and Tim McVeigh?
Face it, there are only two things we can do to keep the terrorists from killing us: kill ourselves first, or kill them.
Preaching that we are the cause of terrorism is the same as saying that we are all responsible for bank robberies because we put our money in banks. Blaming ourselves for what Osama bin Laden does makes as much sense as saying that women who are raped bring it upon themselves because they are physically attractive to the rapist!
Pull your heads out of your arses! Terrorists don't care what you think! They won't pass over killing someone who doesn't agree with the current administration! They don't interview their victims before they blow them up make sure that they don't like Bush! We all know how the media feels about the president, but does that stop kidnappers from cutting reporter's heads off with big knives? They are just as happy to blow you up as they are Rush Limbaugh or Tony Blair! They don't discriminate. They only make excuses, which are far-fetched justifications for killing civilians.
Sure, you can make the argument that the WTC was full of "little Eichmanns," but that does in no way justify the killings of the hundreds of innocents on the airliners. If they wanted to go for the capitalist types, couldn't they have at least had the decency to hijack some fat white CEO's Leer jet?
Plenty of people think that instead of starting a war on terror, we should try diplomacy; we should try to find out what their greivances are, and mitigate them peacefully. There are several logistical problems with doing this, of course.
First, who do we talk to? We can't find bin Laden with huge rewards and bounties; what makes you think he would come out under the pretext of a peaceful summit? He clearly distrusts all things Western, and would never put himself in a situation where we could find his location. And diplomacy through week-old tapes would never progress fast enough.
Secondly, before you make that claim, sit down and read their demands. They are completely ridiculous! In between paragraphs of name-calling, telling us that we are infidels and Satanists (and if you can tell me qualitatively what that means...) they are asking for the impossible.
If we treated domestic criminals in the same way Spain responded to their terrorist attacks, we would quickly find ourselves back at the state of nature: after all, nobody elected or appointed the terrorists to govern us; WTF should we listen to them? Would we have gone along with Bush during his '00 term if he had no more legitamacy than our own fears? (Well, you can answer that last question however you like, but most of us didn't go along with him, not really).
Stop making excuses for the terrorists. Nothing we do short of drowning ourselves in the sea like so many lemmings will ever appease their ill-founed hatred in us.
Um... didn't the article say that there were 2000 American guinea pigs in New Mexico who were already subjected to this?
They can always get that cute puppy dog to help you set up your firewall.
Or better yet, similar to KDE's "red screen" deterant strategy, Longhorn admin accounts should make that paper clip a permanent part of the administrator's desktop.
I wonder how unusable it can be in Longhorn? I was pretty sure that feature was maxed out in XP, but Bill does have a knack for continuing to amaze...
And I see that IE still can't display a normal 404 error like every other browser.
My favorite squares on the BS-Bingo board:
value-added
product (used in lieu of service)
maximize
customer care
empathy (as if call-center people are paid to care)
resell value (read: talk people out of switching carriers by reminding them of the useless features they never used anyway)
provisioning time (read: you just bought your phone, but it won't be recognized by the network for up to 12 hours!)
First, as someone who just blew $150 on a physics text book I used four weeks, I've got to ask, why the big rush for educational media that can be updated every school year? I can't conceive of too many subjects taught in high school that need to be on the bleeding edge like that. After all, Newton's Laws haven't changed much in the past 300 years. Is a introductory-level physics text from the early '70s sustantially inferior to one printed last year?
Secondly, there is something to be said about paper as a medium. It is lightweight, portable and easily repaired/replaced. It is as easy to read out of doors as it is indoors. You still can't write in the margins of a PDF class outline. You don't have any of the technical concerns these newfangled laptops will surely pose the school district, and after squinting for six to eight hours at your screen, it feel's much better on the eyes.
Maybe it's because I'm the kind of guy that forgets about using my PDA as soon as the novelty wears off, but I can't see how using a laptop can hold any advantages over providing free-access computer labs at school, and low-cost computers to lower-income students.
If the district aims to get out of the cycle of replacing educational texts each and every year, I'd say that moving to computers is a big step in the wrong direction.
I thought they would be opposed to animal testing
It's a government "of the people, by the people, and for the people." The people here are pretty much in favor of such a law, for better or worse, and who is the ACLU to say we can't govern ourselves?
Nobody can honestly say that it isn't too big of a step from "they're offering a pr0n filter" to "they're taking away our right to vote democrat!"
I don't mean to sound insensitive to the part of our population that is composed of folks who don't believe in the LDS faith, but they weren't the ones who were literally forced by gunpoint to live out here in the desert.
If anyone's to blame for this conservative hornet's nest, it's those folks who didn't get along in the 19th century. After all, the church was organized in New England, and was persecuted out of there YEARS before polygamy had anything to do with anything.
Anyway, from the sound of the article, there is a kernel, maybe some simple utilities to go along with it, and they are very proud of the fact that they did it all by themselves.
The article mentions that they want to develop a computing platform that is independantly developed in-country, to allow them more control over how software is deployed in schools, the market, and in the military.
Is there anyone out there that reads simplified well that can verify this?
In case you are wondering, Kylin is poorly anglicized for the pinyin "Qilin", pronounced "chee-lean". It is the name of a mythological creature, similar to a unicorn.
If they know that much about my penis, then surely they know what's good for my computer, too.
Sounds safe to me!
Neither does the lack of tildes and backticks, for that matter.
Actually, the choice of an interpreted language for this project is really cool because you can just plug code into your document and run it on a whim, without spending time compiling it.
Though I'm no expert in Python, I guess it is safe to assume that the backtick and the tilde aren't used?
This caused me to wonder about some of the technologies that they have actually created all by themselves, and would therefore be OK by us /.ers to patent.
So far, my list of genuine Microsoft innovations includes:
1. The Blue Screen of Death
2. Talking Paper Clips
3. Those other two keys between Alt + Ctrl
4. That marquee screen saver that's been around since Windows 3.1
5. 640kb of conventional memory
6. the mouse wheel (that's a good one, I'll admit)
7. A 'Start' button that allows you to shut down your PC
8. right clicking (Well, at least I know for sure that MS didn't steal that one from Apple)
So instead of focusing on stealing up other people's innovations, we can see that there is still plenty for MS to legitimately patent.
Still, I'm sure that this time next year we'll see a patent pending approval for tabbed-browsing www.microsoft-watch.com
And I thought this was the same company that said that nobody wanted to use tabbed-browsing?
Blah, blah, blah. People only say stuff like this when the rules are in their favor.
This is just going to be just like that new browser that AOL annouonced. No new functionality.
Or maybe they want a Firefox that will filter all popup ads except for their own text-based ones.
In short, whoop-de-freakin'-doo.
the only thing that is depressing about this thread is that we are talking about leo laporte here. he is the only thing i didn't like about TechTV before it took a nose dive.
seriously, I feel for the camera men who had to sit through an hour of Call For Help with that schmuck. In his post at the end of the article he says that he is still on TV. I wonder if it is on cooking show, or if he is one of those telethon phone people who are in the background... it couldn't be on any program that is technology releated
how i miss the days he called in sick and they let the much more intelligent and useful kevin fill in.
that was a really backwards arrangement they had there - they really should have made leo be kevin's back up.
speaking of which, where is kevin these days?
I'm sure that the bulk of spyware can be completely avoided by not ever firing up IE out of the box. The problem with that is the fact that as soon as you power your system on, it jumps on there asking you if you want to go online and read your "welcome to windows" formletter spam from microsoft. "I see that Internet Explorer is not configured to be your default web browser. Would you like to set it to be your default?" And has anybody ever tried to delete the iexplore.exe binary? Like dawn of the dead, it keeps comming back for more! Internet Exploerer is more ridiculous and annoying than that stupid dog that tries to help me find my files.
What IF one of these things came down? I read the specs on the company's website, where they gave data about the length, volume, payload capacity, etc., but they didn't mention how massive the airship itself is. If for some reason it deflated, or was shot down by a really big shoulder fired rocket, what kind of damage are we looking forward to? Moreso because these will be floated above metro areas?