I counter your anecdote with my anecdote! No, seriously - not to be an a$$ or anything, but I haven't gotten a single spam in GMail in over two years. There is none in the inbox, and none in the spam folder (label) either. I'm not sure why you are getting them, but it is clearly not everyone who is so afflicted (thankfully!). I'm not sure if it has something to do with accounts on different back end systems or what, but mine hasn't gotten any spam in one heck of a long time.
Current flow causes magnetism. You can demonstrate that with a non-magnetic copper wire and a battery. The copper doesn't suddenly become "iron like" and have a crystalline structure that responds (is attracted by) to magnetism. It is simply the current flow that causes this.
In much the same way, the molten iron theory is more around currents (fluid currents) causing electrical currents in the core. These electrical currents then cause the magnetism.
Nobody is saying that the iron itself is magnetic (because then it would be magnetite and not iron anyway).
I am a Comcast subscriber affected by the NFL network thing and although I missed a couple of games that I expected to be able to watch - I think they are doing the right thing by refusing to stick special interest stuff like NFL Network on basic cable and make people who don't want to watch it pay for it. Would I have liked to see those couple of games that I thought I could watch? Sure. The NFL shouldn't have tried to move them to a crazy new network like that. Should Comcast stick to their guns on this? Absolutely. It's one of the few things that I think they've ever done right.
For the actual issue being discussed here about the ESPN programming - this is indeed the same as the NFL Network deal. I'd prefer to see this ESPN offering die than have my ISP pay extra (and up my bill proportionately). Either make it free to ISPs like content should be, and, if needed, allow individual subscribers to sign up and pay for the content or make it all free and ad supported. Their choice. But none of this back door forcing the ISP to subscribe on my behalf.
It's fairly easy to do this; you don't generally go build a shim - as unless you are completely hacking the system - the shims already need to be known.
You simply download the Application Compatibility Toolkit from the MS web site and apply the required shim(s) to your app (stores the required config in a.sdb file). You deploy the.sdb along with your application.
There are also tools to help you determine what shims your applications needs. Once you get started with this, it is pretty easy to do.
I think the main reason they don't reflect what real world users are seeing is that their tests are with APPLICATIONS. Now, I fully understand (and endorse) that an OS is there to give you a secure, stable foundation for running applications. But this was never Vista's problem. The problems were more like "slow start menu response", "windows explorer slow or out to lunch", "search took a long time", things that make the OS FEEL slow.
It was never really "Excel runs slow on Vista" or "Photoshop is slow on Vista" (sure, some people said that but in general it wasn't really slow that way.
Win 7 improves the places where the OS itself seemed slow, but the PC World testing doesn't TEST that.
There is a reason why I think. Now, I believe it is easier for folks on computers, for interop with other countries, etc. to standardize on something like DD/MM/YYYY. However, probably in the olden days - if you had a calendar, you would flip to the correct MONTH first, then find the DAY you wanted. Hence MM/DD/YYYY. Not saying it makes sense anymore, but I am going to guess it started with paper yearly calendars so you could get to the right page before the right day.
You are absolutely right of course. Interestingly, I time it by DVD releases that I watch while on the treadmill. For example, Star Trek (TOS) from the 1960's episodes are 50 minutes long. So apparently there were 50 minutes of "show" to 10 minutes of commercial. Star Trek TNG from the 1990's is 45 minutes of "show" to 15 minutes of commercial. Psych (2nd season) is 43 minutes of "show" to 17 minutes of commercial. I think the worst I have seen so far is 40 minutes of "show" to 20 minutes of commercial.
For me it is very interesting though to see how they foist more and more commercials over time. I'd like to have that 50 minutes of show per hour back!
That may sound nice, but those bloggers are just giving out the "here's what's happening now" type of news - call it the twitter of news.
Bloggers don't do REAL news for free, just like real reporters don't. You really NEED someone out their digging into what shenanigans some chemical company is pulling, who the corporations are paying off in the senate, etc. - and you don't get this by having some blogger go take pictures of a flood.
Do I know the answer to this? No; I wish I was smart enough to figure out a way to make it work. But pro journalism, working stories for weeks, digging into things is not free and there needs to be some way for people to make a living at it or we all lose out on the resource. We all act greedy and take for free and don't pay and we lose the very resource we were taking for free.
You want to heat the glue a bit with a lighter first. Not enough to scorch the sticker (the case is a heat sink so it doesn't scorch too easily).
God - I am so old, it was actually part of my early employment to walk around with NEW PRICE TAGS and a lighter to remove old tags and replace them when the price went up. We had to remove them from cellophane packaging, cardboard packaging, you name it. (This was about a year before we got UPC scanners and the only prices after that were on the shelf and not on the product). Anyway, the stickers come off easily with the process you mentioned and adding a little bit of heat.
First, let me say that I agree with most of your points.
On the stability part though - I would argue that it really depends on your hardware platform. For example, Win 7 beta works great on a Lenovo T60p with port replicator as long as you don't plug in two external monitors. As soon as you plug in a DVI connected monitor (while already running one on the analog VGA port) the machine hard locks. Once you reboot and get past that, if you try to set the VGA analog port as the primary monitor - hard lock. Or, try a Lenovo X200s. From time to time it just switches to 1024x768 on its own and won't go back to the 1440x1050 native resolution even though it shows 1440x1050 as recommended.
So while it seems to be a little better than Vista - it needs work on the stability front on certain hardware before it will be ready for prime time. Now - is this drivers? Probably. But, the claim is that Vista video drivers will work fine. I've filed bug reports on those - and hope to see them fixed.
I've worked 9/80 for the last 13 years or more. I also recently became a supervisor and am still working 9/80 and most of my employees do as well. In our company (68,000 employees total), it is generally implemented as schedule a, b, c, d (where a and b are opposite Friday's and c and d are opposite Monday's. Way back when I did LAN Admin work (Novell back then), Monday's were "password reset day" so I chose one of the Monday off schedules. On my "Monday on" I work from home - so I only drive in 4 days a week.
I don't think I would ever want to go back to a 5 day a week schedule - 9/80 is just so much better.
You also asked about whether the company respect those days off. In general they do really well with it. It is normally the employee that makes most decisions about "oh, we have some vendors coming in Monday - I will come in and just take the following Monday instead." There is almost never a "we need you to give up your day off" (I have rarely ever even heard of this happening and it certainly never happened to me).
Honestly, I thought that the folks selling printed sheet music were selling a piece of paper. Not trolling, but I thought you still have copyright and all. Can you make photocopies of that music and distribute it (legally)? If you can't - then they sell pieces of paper.
Exactly. What we did with our kids at 2 and 3 was sit them on our laps at our computer and put on a counting game or spelling game. I think their first counting one was "Amy Fun 2 3" which was a DOS program (OK, so I am old). Eventually, as they got a bit older (5, 6) we let them have that computer and I got a new one for me.
The parent and GP are totally correct. A 2 year old needs GUIDED learning, not "here's a small computer, go play".
Really, they did? Let's see... I, Mudd - a planet completely populated with androids. Then there was the 'Shore Leave" episode where all the creations on the planet were some sort of robot. Also "Requiem for Methuselah" where Rayna (Kirk's love interest) is an android. How about "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" In it, Dr. Roger Korby and his entire "surviving" staff are androids and they find little girls are sometimes made like computers.
Although TOS certainly didn't do androids or robots on every episode, they certainly did NOT shy away from doing them. I think Kirk almost ended up doing them more than once.
You mean like this: http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/20/0420258, where they opened up the specifications on their binary formats? I understand there is some discussion on the terms - and whether they can be used by GPL projects or not - and I don't take a position on that (not being a lawyer). But, it certainly isn't true that they wouldn't give information about the formats to ANYONE. They certainly HAVE given them to people.
Just playing Devil's advocate here as I believe that EA is clearly in the wrong foisting SecurROM on people. However, to argue the point you mentioned about:
But really the case *I* want to see is one where software installation pops up a click though EULA, the person clicks the EULA's DECLINE button, and then proceeds to complete installing and using the software anyway. It's not particularly hard for a programmer to write a utility to do that
Again, in a Devil's advocate mode: What about the DMCA? Wouldn't it apply here? Apparently, it "criminalizes the act of circumventing an access control, whether or not there is actual infringement of copyright itself.. It would seem that your method, while completely feasible (and I think reasonable), would possibly fall afoul of this provision as it would be circumventing the access control which prevents install if you click "decline".
After having fought with the Lenovo T400 (with the ATI graphics and the built in Intel graphics) in "switchable" mode, I can only hope that Toshiba was able to implement theirs in a way that works well even across the edge cases of configuration and usage.
For example on the T400, it switches (by default) to the Intel integrated when you go to battery. If you use the machine on a port replicator with dual monitors (like is common for us) you get the two screens identified as number 3 and 4 instead of 1 and 2. AND - when you redock, they switch back and forth (primary screen switches from one side to the other). It works so poorly in a docking scenario that we just disabled it in the BIOS (so it is always on the ATI or 'discrete' graphics).
This is one of those ideas that sounds great, but if implemented poorly leaves me scratching my head and wondering why someone designed something so stupid.
Here's hoping that Lenovo works this out and that this implementation from Toshiba works right out of the gate.
That's exactly what I was wondering. I don't know about the local statutes in all the areas where these folks operate, but at least in a few of them it must be illegal. In some, advertising may not be legal, in others it may be a littering offense - but it can't be something that is just allowed everywhere.
It is probably just a low level annoyance for each property owner (what, they get a sign like this a couple of times a year each), and without knowing who to complain about it would be difficult to ever get a fine to anyone. Come to think of it, that blog isn't going to help most people find out who put that sign in their park, yard, school, etc. So there will probably be no practical effect from the disclosure of the parties responsible.
I'm glad your upgrades went so smoothly. I think that is pretty much what most people are saying.
Offered just as a data point, mine didn't go so smoothly. On this Lenvo X60s, it went from 8.04 working fine to 8.10 with no sound. (Actually, it plays the login sound just fine but no apps can play sound). On my older desktop - a P4 Dell with 1 GB RAM and an nVidia 5500 FX card that was working fine with 8.04, it decided the video wasn't working after the update. I did check first, and this is not one of the cards for which support was removed. It had a "low video" message. Took quite some time fiddling and then it all of a sudden began working again. I'm generally impressed with Ubuntu, but both of my upgrades were a little less than successful.
Interesting that you mention BitLocker. I was going to comment something to the effect of, "let me know when a Linux Distro's Live CD can mount my BitLocker encrypted NTFS partition". I'm sure it will happen someday (I'm also sure I'll have to provide the recovery password to unlock it), but I don't believe anyone has this working yet.
BTW, I'm not trolling - if they have done this, I'd be very interested in it.
As an industry expert I imagine you know a whole lot more about this than I would - and I am sure you are completely correct.
Perhaps the cursive issue has to do with the effective resolution you can get from the old paper scans? I know using the tablet edition of Windows Vista I can get much higher than 90% recognition of cursive input on the tablet. However that is probably due to the fact that no scanning is needed: Windows has a basically perfectly resolved snapshot of what my scribble looks like without trying to deal with saturation levels, color variations, or anything else involved with scanning. My experience though with tablet shows me two things:
1) Actually OCR'ing cursive is probably more a function of being able to accurately scan pen and ink writing than it is a function of "cursive is hard to decode".
2) My preconceived notion of "this should be easy" based on my tablet experience is just wrong as I had totally forgotten that actually scanning the text written on yellowing paper with real-world pens (skips, etc.) doesn't even come close to OCR'ing something drawn on a screen.
Sure I would. I used to own some - about 50 shares I believe. I sold them the last time Microsoft did a tender offer as they were just stagnating (very slowing going down). This was a couple of years ago. I had originally gotten them through a program called ShareBuilder that let's you diversify through being able to buy partial shares in several things through a small monthly payroll deduction. I don't really recommend it, but I will admit that I used ShareBuilder. Anyway, why would slashdotters not admit they had some MS shares?
I don't know anything about the FWT site; it may be fine. However, do remember that just because a site is trustworthy over time doesn't mean it is trustworthy today, on this visit.
I just had that driven home for me the other day. In my off time, I am a youth soccer coach. The website for our league has been fine for several years. Last week I visited it and got the malware warning from FireFox. I checked with the webmaster and sure enough, they had gotten hit with a SQL injection attack and had indeed gotten malware of some sort hosted on the site.
So, FWT may be a false positive - but it is at leat possible that they also got successfully attacked.
We really don't have a good system to evaluate trust on the fly due to the dynamic nature of internet content. A page that was fine 20 minutes ago may attack you now.
You know what? I bet they do. They might not call if "Extended Warranty". They'll probably call it "Download Protection" and sell it with lines like: "What if your hard drive crashes? Do you want to have to buy all that music again?"
Just like with real extended warranties - mostly hogwash and lies.
Actually almost all Microsoft Beta code is available in the same languages at first - English, German, Japanese, and sometimes Simplified Chinese. The thing is that they are trying for coverage of the code to make sure localizations fit dialogs, etc. For example, of the languages that use an English like character set (what is it called, Roman or whatever), German tends to have the longest words / phrases. So by covering German they find out whether all of the localizations are going to fit in the space provided. In a similar way, by covering Japanese (and in this case Simplified Chinese) they are covering localizations in non-Roman character sets. Its really not about the number of users / speakers - its about the coverage of testing on the localizations and getting them to fit properly.
Slashdot Mirror
I counter your anecdote with my anecdote! No, seriously - not to be an a$$ or anything, but I haven't gotten a single spam in GMail in over two years. There is none in the inbox, and none in the spam folder (label) either. I'm not sure why you are getting them, but it is clearly not everyone who is so afflicted (thankfully!). I'm not sure if it has something to do with accounts on different back end systems or what, but mine hasn't gotten any spam in one heck of a long time.
Current flow causes magnetism. You can demonstrate that with a non-magnetic copper wire and a battery. The copper doesn't suddenly become "iron like" and have a crystalline structure that responds (is attracted by) to magnetism. It is simply the current flow that causes this.
In much the same way, the molten iron theory is more around currents (fluid currents) causing electrical currents in the core. These electrical currents then cause the magnetism.
Nobody is saying that the iron itself is magnetic (because then it would be magnetite and not iron anyway).
I am a Comcast subscriber affected by the NFL network thing and although I missed a couple of games that I expected to be able to watch - I think they are doing the right thing by refusing to stick special interest stuff like NFL Network on basic cable and make people who don't want to watch it pay for it. Would I have liked to see those couple of games that I thought I could watch? Sure. The NFL shouldn't have tried to move them to a crazy new network like that. Should Comcast stick to their guns on this? Absolutely. It's one of the few things that I think they've ever done right.
For the actual issue being discussed here about the ESPN programming - this is indeed the same as the NFL Network deal. I'd prefer to see this ESPN offering die than have my ISP pay extra (and up my bill proportionately). Either make it free to ISPs like content should be, and, if needed, allow individual subscribers to sign up and pay for the content or make it all free and ad supported. Their choice. But none of this back door forcing the ISP to subscribe on my behalf.
It's fairly easy to do this; you don't generally go build a shim - as unless you are completely hacking the system - the shims already need to be known.
.sdb file). You deploy the .sdb along with your application.
You simply download the Application Compatibility Toolkit from the MS web site and apply the required shim(s) to your app (stores the required config in a
There are also tools to help you determine what shims your applications needs. Once you get started with this, it is pretty easy to do.
I think the main reason they don't reflect what real world users are seeing is that their tests are with APPLICATIONS. Now, I fully understand (and endorse) that an OS is there to give you a secure, stable foundation for running applications. But this was never Vista's problem. The problems were more like "slow start menu response", "windows explorer slow or out to lunch", "search took a long time", things that make the OS FEEL slow.
It was never really "Excel runs slow on Vista" or "Photoshop is slow on Vista" (sure, some people said that but in general it wasn't really slow that way.
Win 7 improves the places where the OS itself seemed slow, but the PC World testing doesn't TEST that.
There is a reason why I think. Now, I believe it is easier for folks on computers, for interop with other countries, etc. to standardize on something like DD/MM/YYYY. However, probably in the olden days - if you had a calendar, you would flip to the correct MONTH first, then find the DAY you wanted. Hence MM/DD/YYYY. Not saying it makes sense anymore, but I am going to guess it started with paper yearly calendars so you could get to the right page before the right day.
You are absolutely right of course. Interestingly, I time it by DVD releases that I watch while on the treadmill. For example, Star Trek (TOS) from the 1960's episodes are 50 minutes long. So apparently there were 50 minutes of "show" to 10 minutes of commercial. Star Trek TNG from the 1990's is 45 minutes of "show" to 15 minutes of commercial. Psych (2nd season) is 43 minutes of "show" to 17 minutes of commercial. I think the worst I have seen so far is 40 minutes of "show" to 20 minutes of commercial.
For me it is very interesting though to see how they foist more and more commercials over time. I'd like to have that 50 minutes of show per hour back!
That may sound nice, but those bloggers are just giving out the "here's what's happening now" type of news - call it the twitter of news.
Bloggers don't do REAL news for free, just like real reporters don't. You really NEED someone out their digging into what shenanigans some chemical company is pulling, who the corporations are paying off in the senate, etc. - and you don't get this by having some blogger go take pictures of a flood.
Do I know the answer to this? No; I wish I was smart enough to figure out a way to make it work. But pro journalism, working stories for weeks, digging into things is not free and there needs to be some way for people to make a living at it or we all lose out on the resource. We all act greedy and take for free and don't pay and we lose the very resource we were taking for free.
You want to heat the glue a bit with a lighter first. Not enough to scorch the sticker (the case is a heat sink so it doesn't scorch too easily).
God - I am so old, it was actually part of my early employment to walk around with NEW PRICE TAGS and a lighter to remove old tags and replace them when the price went up. We had to remove them from cellophane packaging, cardboard packaging, you name it. (This was about a year before we got UPC scanners and the only prices after that were on the shelf and not on the product). Anyway, the stickers come off easily with the process you mentioned and adding a little bit of heat.
First, let me say that I agree with most of your points.
On the stability part though - I would argue that it really depends on your hardware platform. For example, Win 7 beta works great on a Lenovo T60p with port replicator as long as you don't plug in two external monitors. As soon as you plug in a DVI connected monitor (while already running one on the analog VGA port) the machine hard locks. Once you reboot and get past that, if you try to set the VGA analog port as the primary monitor - hard lock. Or, try a Lenovo X200s. From time to time it just switches to 1024x768 on its own and won't go back to the 1440x1050 native resolution even though it shows 1440x1050 as recommended.
So while it seems to be a little better than Vista - it needs work on the stability front on certain hardware before it will be ready for prime time. Now - is this drivers? Probably. But, the claim is that Vista video drivers will work fine. I've filed bug reports on those - and hope to see them fixed.
I've worked 9/80 for the last 13 years or more. I also recently became a supervisor and am still working 9/80 and most of my employees do as well. In our company (68,000 employees total), it is generally implemented as schedule a, b, c, d (where a and b are opposite Friday's and c and d are opposite Monday's. Way back when I did LAN Admin work (Novell back then), Monday's were "password reset day" so I chose one of the Monday off schedules. On my "Monday on" I work from home - so I only drive in 4 days a week.
I don't think I would ever want to go back to a 5 day a week schedule - 9/80 is just so much better.
You also asked about whether the company respect those days off. In general they do really well with it. It is normally the employee that makes most decisions about "oh, we have some vendors coming in Monday - I will come in and just take the following Monday instead." There is almost never a "we need you to give up your day off" (I have rarely ever even heard of this happening and it certainly never happened to me).
Honestly, I thought that the folks selling printed sheet music were selling a piece of paper. Not trolling, but I thought you still have copyright and all. Can you make photocopies of that music and distribute it (legally)? If you can't - then they sell pieces of paper.
Exactly. What we did with our kids at 2 and 3 was sit them on our laps at our computer and put on a counting game or spelling game. I think their first counting one was "Amy Fun 2 3" which was a DOS program (OK, so I am old). Eventually, as they got a bit older (5, 6) we let them have that computer and I got a new one for me.
The parent and GP are totally correct. A 2 year old needs GUIDED learning, not "here's a small computer, go play".
Really, they did? Let's see... I, Mudd - a planet completely populated with androids. Then there was the 'Shore Leave" episode where all the creations on the planet were some sort of robot. Also "Requiem for Methuselah" where Rayna (Kirk's love interest) is an android. How about "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" In it, Dr. Roger Korby and his entire "surviving" staff are androids and they find little girls are sometimes made like computers.
Although TOS certainly didn't do androids or robots on every episode, they certainly did NOT shy away from doing them. I think Kirk almost ended up doing them more than once.
You mean like this: http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/20/0420258, where they opened up the specifications on their binary formats? I understand there is some discussion on the terms - and whether they can be used by GPL projects or not - and I don't take a position on that (not being a lawyer). But, it certainly isn't true that they wouldn't give information about the formats to ANYONE. They certainly HAVE given them to people.
But really the case *I* want to see is one where software installation pops up a click though EULA, the person clicks the EULA's DECLINE button, and then proceeds to complete installing and using the software anyway. It's not particularly hard for a programmer to write a utility to do that
Again, in a Devil's advocate mode: What about the DMCA? Wouldn't it apply here? Apparently, it "criminalizes the act of circumventing an access control, whether or not there is actual infringement of copyright itself.. It would seem that your method, while completely feasible (and I think reasonable), would possibly fall afoul of this provision as it would be circumventing the access control which prevents install if you click "decline".
Thoughts?
After having fought with the Lenovo T400 (with the ATI graphics and the built in Intel graphics) in "switchable" mode, I can only hope that Toshiba was able to implement theirs in a way that works well even across the edge cases of configuration and usage.
For example on the T400, it switches (by default) to the Intel integrated when you go to battery. If you use the machine on a port replicator with dual monitors (like is common for us) you get the two screens identified as number 3 and 4 instead of 1 and 2. AND - when you redock, they switch back and forth (primary screen switches from one side to the other). It works so poorly in a docking scenario that we just disabled it in the BIOS (so it is always on the ATI or 'discrete' graphics).
This is one of those ideas that sounds great, but if implemented poorly leaves me scratching my head and wondering why someone designed something so stupid.
Here's hoping that Lenovo works this out and that this implementation from Toshiba works right out of the gate.
That's exactly what I was wondering. I don't know about the local statutes in all the areas where these folks operate, but at least in a few of them it must be illegal. In some, advertising may not be legal, in others it may be a littering offense - but it can't be something that is just allowed everywhere.
It is probably just a low level annoyance for each property owner (what, they get a sign like this a couple of times a year each), and without knowing who to complain about it would be difficult to ever get a fine to anyone. Come to think of it, that blog isn't going to help most people find out who put that sign in their park, yard, school, etc. So there will probably be no practical effect from the disclosure of the parties responsible.
I'm glad your upgrades went so smoothly. I think that is pretty much what most people are saying.
Offered just as a data point, mine didn't go so smoothly. On this Lenvo X60s, it went from 8.04 working fine to 8.10 with no sound. (Actually, it plays the login sound just fine but no apps can play sound). On my older desktop - a P4 Dell with 1 GB RAM and an nVidia 5500 FX card that was working fine with 8.04, it decided the video wasn't working after the update. I did check first, and this is not one of the cards for which support was removed. It had a "low video" message. Took quite some time fiddling and then it all of a sudden began working again. I'm generally impressed with Ubuntu, but both of my upgrades were a little less than successful.
Interesting that you mention BitLocker. I was going to comment something to the effect of, "let me know when a Linux Distro's Live CD can mount my BitLocker encrypted NTFS partition". I'm sure it will happen someday (I'm also sure I'll have to provide the recovery password to unlock it), but I don't believe anyone has this working yet.
BTW, I'm not trolling - if they have done this, I'd be very interested in it.
As an industry expert I imagine you know a whole lot more about this than I would - and I am sure you are completely correct.
Perhaps the cursive issue has to do with the effective resolution you can get from the old paper scans? I know using the tablet edition of Windows Vista I can get much higher than 90% recognition of cursive input on the tablet. However that is probably due to the fact that no scanning is needed: Windows has a basically perfectly resolved snapshot of what my scribble looks like without trying to deal with saturation levels, color variations, or anything else involved with scanning. My experience though with tablet shows me two things:
1) Actually OCR'ing cursive is probably more a function of being able to accurately scan pen and ink writing than it is a function of "cursive is hard to decode".
2) My preconceived notion of "this should be easy" based on my tablet experience is just wrong as I had totally forgotten that actually scanning the text written on yellowing paper with real-world pens (skips, etc.) doesn't even come close to OCR'ing something drawn on a screen.
Sure I would. I used to own some - about 50 shares I believe. I sold them the last time Microsoft did a tender offer as they were just stagnating (very slowing going down). This was a couple of years ago. I had originally gotten them through a program called ShareBuilder that let's you diversify through being able to buy partial shares in several things through a small monthly payroll deduction. I don't really recommend it, but I will admit that I used ShareBuilder. Anyway, why would slashdotters not admit they had some MS shares?
I don't know anything about the FWT site; it may be fine. However, do remember that just because a site is trustworthy over time doesn't mean it is trustworthy today , on this visit.
I just had that driven home for me the other day. In my off time, I am a youth soccer coach. The website for our league has been fine for several years. Last week I visited it and got the malware warning from FireFox. I checked with the webmaster and sure enough, they had gotten hit with a SQL injection attack and had indeed gotten malware of some sort hosted on the site.
So, FWT may be a false positive - but it is at leat possible that they also got successfully attacked.
We really don't have a good system to evaluate trust on the fly due to the dynamic nature of internet content. A page that was fine 20 minutes ago may attack you now.
You know what? I bet they do. They might not call if "Extended Warranty". They'll probably call it "Download Protection" and sell it with lines like: "What if your hard drive crashes? Do you want to have to buy all that music again?"
Just like with real extended warranties - mostly hogwash and lies.
Actually almost all Microsoft Beta code is available in the same languages at first - English, German, Japanese, and sometimes Simplified Chinese. The thing is that they are trying for coverage of the code to make sure localizations fit dialogs, etc. For example, of the languages that use an English like character set (what is it called, Roman or whatever), German tends to have the longest words / phrases. So by covering German they find out whether all of the localizations are going to fit in the space provided. In a similar way, by covering Japanese (and in this case Simplified Chinese) they are covering localizations in non-Roman character sets. Its really not about the number of users / speakers - its about the coverage of testing on the localizations and getting them to fit properly.