I can't imagine a low-resolution recording of a movie being any sort of substitute for actually seeing the film.
Highlander 2, Highlander 3, Riddick, need I really say more? A cam version can so much soften the impact of a really bad Vogon poetry reading, er, turkey of a Hollywood flick...
(...)a version that isn't fuzzy with garbled sound, though.
After reading the script, I'd say the movie itself is fuzzy with garbled writing.
Sadly, since I don't use BitTorrent with much success and instead rely on eMule/aMule, what copies I get will likely take two weeks to finish downloading and be in Spanish with German subtitles. Oddly, this will probably be easier to follow anyhow.
...why do so many get service from Netflix when their pop-up ads are all over the place lately?
Seriously, I personally am not given to shopping at, doing business with, or even entertaining the thought thereof when it comes to businesses with annoying obtrusive advertising. Especially pop-up users. Netflix can go whistle.
And Wal-Mart? Let them censor whatever they want. I buy my DVDs from mall chains, Best Buy, and a couple of local places with loopy mad owners who can find the oddest stuff and cannot be replaced by Wal-Mart of Netflix.
...you will be able to have a back-up unit for your main hard drive that works with let's say a stack of these multilayer discs in a big platter case and...
Wow. Didn't those data processing center dinosaurs use these in magnetic? I seem to recall catalogs like Misco and Global offering them into the early nineties.
Well maybe we'll just update the look and add really cool neon trim and led-tipped fan blades and so on. Or make them retro with bubblers and rounded cases and call them juke boxes and sell them at Sharper Image.
I agree with those who want an end to the chasing of incrementalism and the format schisms and wars. I'll file this as Seriously Important News when they come up with a disc that backs up my entire hard drive because as of right now, in defiance of pop-tech press claims and pundit prognostications years back, magnetic hard drives are still faster and more spacious than any of these systems, formats, etc. I mean, the dual layer burner on my wife's machine isn't as stable and reliable as the single layer on mine and neither approach me being able to backup either system on less than fifty discs.
If they're this paranoid delusional, then how long until they try biometrics that can't be fooled because they use DNA, thermal, and bioelectrics as well as print patterns?
"Sorry sir, but your DNA marks you as likely to copy this DVD and share it online. You will have to buy something in your allowed purchase group."
This is a king-size case of not getting it on par with Jack Valenti's take on the VCR, the recording industry's take on the cassette recorder, and the Internet industry's obsession with Portal Kombat in the late nineties.
I'll have some of whatever he's smoking!(obligatory Kung Pow reference)
First, who are these people that think Google can do no wrong, and what planet are they on? Net techies are a notoriously cyncial lot so these must be people who think AOL is the Internet. Doesn't sound like anyone I know who's familiar with the history of major corporation, software, and the Internet.
Second, does some of what has come out of Redmond strike anyone as the type of talk that goes along the same lines as someone who just majorly wiped out on a boogie board, slammed into the girl they've been trying to get on the good side of, and then tried to shrug it off by saying they meant to do that?
Google has essentially come out of nowhere with an end-run around the largest self-proclaimed netcentric corporation on Earth, which was caught asleep at the switch living in their own little world of deciding for others what they need rather than ascertaining their needs from those others and then pandering to those needs. That's the sort of disasterous arrogance that Steve Jobs has reeked of for years and where did it get Apple for the longest time? Remember when Apple decided for the users what apps should be availible by way of stonewalling developers whose work they didn't care about? (or didn't pay enough blood money to APDA)
We've heard from major companies before with prognostications about competition and upstarts. Netscape has all but bit the dust, AOL is irrellevant, SCO is a laughing stock, IBM is decrepit and moldy, Oracle is still bound to Lord Ellison and his mountainous ego, and so forth.
All in all, Microsoft has been doing pretty well fixing their stuff of late and Longhorn, other than the DRM obsessiveness, looks to be a big improvement over XP which was a massive improvement over the 95-ME strains of Windows. For them to be acting this way says they're in an internal panic, directionless, and they know it. They've long delusionally thought they knew better so even when they didn't, they didn't act like they were in deep cr*p. Looks to me like the delusion is breaking down, reality is intruding, and they finally realize they don't really know where the Internet is going and what people will glom onto and really worried about not knowing.
Microsoft, welcome to the world in real time. None of us know where anything is headed for sure and that's just life. You can't always set the trends and create the demand. Sometimes, you have to react to them and serve the people with them.
Like customers in tech support who still look for the "any" key, people at large cannot even deal with the basic entanglements they willfully get themselves into. Now we share our stories and knowledge about them?
I wonder how our parents ever got along not having this sort of Internet phenomenon. How ever did they pay the electric bill and understand their furnace service contract without this? Well I pay my cell phone bill and cable bill online by bank card, manage and modify my services by the same web interfaces, and keep track of the bills in MS Money (gnucash seems to be doggedly dedicated to doing things its way instead of mine). How hard is it really to deal with this?
And why do online scams get linked in here? The verious complexities and vagaries of cell phone contracts aren't a scam unless you're too stupid to RTFC and want to blame that instead on the cell company, defining scam as any time you aren't handheld by the other party through everything. News flash to those noobs: "due diligence" applies to all parties in a contract, and doesn't mean the other guy has to do yours for you.
The stupidity in the world never ends. "But you have to help me! I don't know how to press what button to put this silver disc in my Windows!" is but one facet of overall inanity.
I know some will go on about "nightmares" in dealing with their service providers, but I've found 99% of the time, the customer is dead wrong, their provider in the right legally and contractually, and the customer was just too stupid to read their contract, if not too stupid to live. "But it should work the way I think and not the way they say" is not a workable model no matter how much the CU wants it to. It isn't in software, it ain't in banking, and it isn't in utility service.
Pass a law making it legal to DoS attack any IP found to be the originating source of spam greater than a given threshold and the findinds verified independently by two peer spam-hunting organizations. Post said IP on confirmation and let the script kiddies have at them.
Spammers need to be hounded off the net. No ifs, ands, or butts. They need to go and should be subject to direct retribution equivalent to their own actions which amount in the aggregate to a DDoS on the mail systems across the Internet. How many admins have had servers collapse under the load, how many users have had connections die during downloading of thousands of spams and take forever to get to their real mail, etc.?
First, I saw the Dvorak name and immediatelly thought, "there are Linux geeks who use this instead of QWERTY? Amazing. They'll do any kind of project on this platform. I wonder what the Sourceforge page is for it."
Second, I saw the Amiga reference and thought, "I hope this doesn't mean that they'll turn the penguin into a buxom female ala Amy the Squirrel." The image in my head put shivers of disgust down my spine. But then there are so many horny geeks about...
Lastly, I wondered, "why does anyone care what happens between SCO and IBM other than we could merge them and get BISCOM? Yeesh, what boob bait for bubbas. It's like caring about the outcome of a fight between Richard Branson and Donald Trump."
Is this a sign of how irrellevant Dvorak and SCO are to me on a daily basis?
...for doing everything on the cheap, rushing through everything while taking forever to do it, and letting the public's whimisical and capricious nature guide our space program.
We are not now, but someday will be at the point where if we don't get off the planet in a sustainable format, we won't be able to at all after that point due to lack of resources: technological, social, and energy. Imagine an Earth with a planetary population of fifteen billion, schismatic fighting over resources, and no cohesive will to even try to see common ground for the survival of the species.
That day is coming and in that world, how do you expect to do the major housecat herding job it would be to get enough of the wealthiest and advanced nations on the same page for a space colonization effort?
Instead we dilly-dally with the attitude that "it's only moon rocks and photo ops" and "we need to deal with problems right here". We won't have a right here to deal with if we don't make the human race an ongoing proposition. Top down forcing of changes in human behavior have never worked and all the fanatical self-righetousness of the environmental movement isn't catching on and won't ever.
We don't change under pressure very well and need the breathing space and serenity to do it. Try kicking a cigarette habit while simultaneously remodelling your home, refinancing your mortgage, getting two vehicles fixed, having sick family in the hopsital, and having a full desk at work. Now try it when you have three months paid leave and no problems on your plate.
So we need to get off Earth in a meaningful sustainable format right now, make sure that any event down below won't take out the species, and use what we find out there to better our lives, and we need to do it now.
Instead, we're using Russian O2 generators with known issues, and doing things without much more advancement than what we used to go to the moon in 1969. It's 2005 and you'd figure a planet that can make civilian houses nearly air and energy tight could do as well with environmental support on an orbiting tin can.
Bad news: you do. You live on a spaceship called "Planet Earth" whose primary oxigen generator is known as "Rainforest". It's ability of producing oxygen is decaying. From this decay you could calculate your X. Scared? You bloody well should be.
In previous episode of this space opera series, we have seen how attempts to repair "Rainforest" by the brave crew of "Planet Earth" using "Kyoto Agreement" failed due to actions of certain interstellar villain named "Bushadministration". Stay with us for the next episode!
Not remotely true. The damage is being done by people who in many if not most cases are already acting illegally and there's been no real effort to stop them. To effectively shut down the deforestation of the rain forests, we'd need to militarily invade those nations hosting said forests and guard the landscape from settlers, ranchers, and others clear-cutting everything.
Sounds like the war in Give Me Liberty as do the obfuscating environmental politics. "Status deep sh*t, Martha..."
...it's part of MS Office, and it slows a machine as it constantly indexes the living fark out of your machine's docs and everything else for no better reason than MS thinks it should and that it should be part of the default Orifice install.
I turn off this indexing feature every single time on every single machine to improve speed of use by a good 5%-10%.
A full-depth indexing and searching service covering my entire machine would take up more space than the registry, be single massive point of failure for privacy should my machine be compromised, and a drain on my resources. If I am fairly competent at deciding where to put files and keep to that scheme, I shouldn't need to worry about indexing them.
MS if anything should come up with a system file indexer to keep track of every copy of every.dll and other code file on a machine and note their versions, CRCs, signatures, etc...
fully loaded with big drives and everything. Is the only news here that Apple might be doing it?
Apple has some of the most anti-competitive monopolistic practices anywhere and in some cases makes Microsoft look pro-FOSS and helmed by a guy who rate higher on my "likely to eat their young" list than Bill Gates. Yet on/., they keep getting a total pass any time there's any speculation on their doings much less actual meaty news.
Does anyone really think Apple is going to find a way to pull a pacifier out of their rear end for the MPAA and get digital media licensing down and distributing solid for such a thing? Please. They've had the opportunity to recognize the changing scene of content distribution for years now and they still are firmly entrenched in the "the VCR was a bad thing" mindset, never mind dealing like rational adults with the existance of DiVX and P2P.
I can carry around a load of digital video on a portable player right now, and if I want, I can even replace the drive with a more rugged industrial solid state drive. As much and as many videos as I can get my hands on.
Apple would bring what? Legitimacy? Please. DRM from Apple gets a pass on/., but nor from MS. Cool looks? This is worth what technically? The Apple name? Yes, we have a winner.
Sorry, not enough for me unless Apple subdues the MPAA and the movie industry and all their lawyers, makes a reasonably fair system work with reasonable prices, and makes it as convenient as plugging into my broadband network. Because short of that movie industry agreement and blessing, I've already got the rest from other vendors.
Because the difference in the number of movies made, the budgets for each movie, and the number of copies that need to be viewed/sold to make a profit, there's no way the film industry can model itself after the porn industry.
Of course they could. Is Ron Jeremy doing Heather Hunter really any different from Bill Bob Thorton slamming Halle Berry? Only if you note the fact that you don't see the goods with the latter unless you freeze frame the latter's performance in Monsters' Ball.
All we need it higher quality porn or lower quality mainstream. They don't have to have gynecological closeups. I'm sure about as much as Playboy shows after midnight of Kirsten Dunst would satisfy us. I'll forgo high end SFX if I get to see Lucy Liu spread-eagle in the buff on the hood of a Trans Am with her fellow Charlie's Angels stars.
The MPAA still puts out their bogus estimation of lost monies that never would have being paid to them in a world of perfect DRM because the IP was total horsesh*t to begin with. Anyone remember the transition from cheap matinee movie houses to VCRs in the 70s to early 80s? Once, we had no choice but to listen to word of mouth of early victims or go see how bad it was ourself.
Then, cr*ppy movies got shunted to lower echelon theaters with lower ticket prices. Then to VCRs with the straight-to-video phenomenon. Given the pace of tech, the new lowest denominator should be straight-to-DiVX/MPEG2 and the industry should have already embraced it whole-heartedly. Of course, with the legendary mindset of people like Jack Valenti and his peers, it hasn't.
Instead, they're only encouraging piracy by not embracing the newer workable models, attempting to turn back the calendar to days where cr*p was forced onto us with no solution but total abstinence.
I might like to add that I've paid to see exactly three of the twenty-four movies I've seen in the last four years thanks to the movie industry's own largesse where promotional showing tickets are splurged to radio stations. Locally, my newspaper gets overflow tickets from one of several stations and so I see movies for free with the MPAA's and studios' blessings.
How is that any different in the end? Maybe releasing lower quality (camcorder screener) full length teaser copies to the net would actually drive people to the movies. In my case, they've driven me to buy DVDs. But still, they think they've lost on monies I was never going to pay them...
Who didn't see this sort of thing coming btw? Discs that have to have a sort of proximity sensor system to play because they're all invididually encrypted and the key to decrypt is on an rf chip embedded in the media? Easy to see this coming and just as easy to see mod-kits for the players hitting the net on Chinese web sites.
This one phrase undercuts the entirety of this law and everyone who does support of whatever kind down to cleaning the porn spyware off of their siblings' computers knew it the instance they read it.
Politically, Australia is pretty left of center compared to the American middle of the road. I note that a similarly aligned Clinton administration put the DMCA into place. I'm not sure whether I want to be buggered subversively by the left or openly in my face by the right, but either way we seem to be losing with government around the world where digital anything is concerned. They:
...don't get the ephemeral nature of ideas and information and we're not asking for Ghost in the Shell navel contemplating here either...
...still go for the quick fanfare with no substance non-solutions despite being proven wrong every single time...
...claim to be working on behalf of "the people" (who to judge by the legislation are some nefarious group as sinister as the Tri Lateral Commision but certainly not "we the people") and yet everything they do is slanted towards the interests of the few or the one and never the many...
I expect that we'll take a reaming here in the US from the present administration, albeit an open one, and then the next admin will likely be Dems and they'll glad-hand us to the face while shafting us from behind with DMCA2 ("it's fun to circumvent the D-M-C-A... it's fun to fight against D-M-C-A-A...") or something like that. AVP has new meaning, All Versus Politicians, but the tagline hasn't, Whoever Wins, We Lose.
XP has an "incoming" application firewall - it would be of greater value if it had outgoing controls too
Outgoing calls home from software are still figured (in some quarters) to be a great tool against piracy. Sooner or later Microsoft would undoubtedly backdoor their outgoing firewall app with a way for their own apps to call home to prove their authenticity and of course with MS security and code stability being what it is, how long till malware writers crack it and use that backdoor to get around it?
We've already seen viruses that disable well known anti-virus spyware. Any software that the system doesn't peg and the user is stupid or unlucky enough to install thinking it is okay when it isn't will have cart blanche on Windows to fubar any anti-spyware and antivirus apps it finds. When your AV, AS, and firewall software gets trojaned, you're well and truly farked.
Let's not place any hopes on false solutions from MS until they get it through their heads that user access levels are for nothing as long as most of the system runs essentially as root and code either malicious or buggy can break the security model and convince the rest of the system that it is part of it.
Sci-Fi just got so much *right* with BG. The free downloads on their site, the official commentary podcast, and the show itself is just outstanding. I'm waiting eagerly for next season.
Too bad this does not include the program itself which in a word sucks. In a few more words, it has more pregnant pauses, story threads to nowhere, farked up camera work, character profile dyslexia, and obsession with inane irrellevance than anything ever before done in sci-fi. Somehow, it has sailed under the cynicism radar and become geek chic and now is spreading on BitTorrent. So does porn. Does that mean Torrent is somehow changing the world of porn?
Time to get a reality check people. When news coverage of major events, educational programming, and well done entertainment get massively spread by P2P, then we can say the landscape of (television/movies/whatever) is being changed. Torrent=geek chic. BSG=geek chic. BSG over Torrent=orgasmic geek chic. That's a no-brainer, and sadly so too is the quality of the work done on BSG.
Disclaimer: writer has DVR'd BSG since the beginning and has consistantly been more amused by the original series which was at least laughably bad in a campy way. BSG of today is seriously bad and doesn't even realize it. If this keeps up, we're headed for the Murphy Brown level of taking oneself way too seriously. Clones? Religious fanaticism? Political p*ssing contests? Gender/racial blenders in casting and character rewriting? Do these writers ever create anything remotely original or do they draw solely from the headlines and current politics for everything? How many current day cliches do they need to stick into this program before people wake up and hear the phrase "ripped from today's headlines" go through their heads?
This is a very sad sign of the times, indeed, when this is the stuff that passes for television worth sharing online.
...towards biomechanics or techno-organics, whatever you wish to call it. We humans, and all the rest of the fauna, and also the flora, run on chemical energy. The human body puts out a tremendous amount of waste energy, that were it to be absorbed with anything like 100% efficiency would power all the devices you want to carry around in your Internet-on-the-go lifestyle and then some.
Nanotechnology doesn't necessarily have to be about nanomachines built with cutesy little atoms lined up for show-and-tell with the press like certain STM owners have done, although what we learn from that is important. The greatest piece of nanotech in the near future for biological life forms is to understand how we work at the molecular level and make that more efficient where we can, and repair what gets broke, and so forth.
Over time, we'll eventually learn how to stop doing gross mechanical construction and start growing our buildings, our transportation, our entire infrastructure. We will literally be able to grow entire shopping malls, office and apartment buildings, and even spaceships (ala Lexx to a point, sans feeding it human flesh).
We'll grow things that feed on sunlight and other ambient energy as well as chemicals in the environment, just like plants do. They'll create what energy we need, things will be largely self-repairing, and they'll also use our trash and sewage output for consumables.
This is just one of the steps to a better future where high-tech and environmental harmony finally join their paths together.
Of course, The Matrix does point out how much we are wasting with the present penal system. If we could feed perfect synthetic existances to inmates and harness their bodies' energy output, we'd end prison riots and overcrowding, they'd be happier than they ever were in the real world with their behavioral problems and dealing with society and others, and we'd be needing far less prisons and guards. We simply put them into the power plant for the term of their sentence. Maybe even repair their minds while they're inside and retard their aging and return productive members of society at the end of their sentence. Humane, environmentally sound, productive, this could work.
I know what some will say. I am not saying government is perfect and there won't be miscarriages of justice at times. But how is letting them rot and suffer in a cell, their pathologies getting worse, at massive taxpayer expense better? If we find them innocent later on, they at least didn't suffer while inside, they didn't get a lot older sitting around, and they come out unscathed. Or we can find them innocent after we already executed them.
Rambling I know, but there's all sorts of good things that can come from these interfaces between organic and inorganic science. It doesn't have to be some horrible sci-fi/fantasy/horror movie result. The choice is still up to us. I mean "us" as in "humans".
...for someone to figure out how to do a "lava lamp" effect with this, mount their hardware in a rack that's inside a large clear acrylic tube like those used for fancy aquariums, and watch all the pretty backlit blobs moving this way and that. That would be cool.
...what's still used in university physics courses? Not most of the books mentioned by others. What is? Another extremely weighty tome (and those who've held it know it could be used to bludgeon Governor Arnold in one whack) called Geometrodynamics. I tossed it casually back on the shelf at Borders recently and nearly broke the shelf.
If it's a choice of someone giving me their POV based on their understanding of the math and having an encyclopaedia sized copy of the math which I can work with to get my own POV, well that's a matter of whether I'm overachieving and truly engrossed or looking for coffee table material in which case, sure, I'll look at this book.
But not one more thing by Kaku and those in that stripe. I'm tired of popular crap about "this is really how the universe works" and at the time of first printing it has already been contradicted by seven different Discover articles which themselves descend from thirty plus serious physics journals. A one page pamphlet would do that says, "We have no farking idea. We THINK it goes this way, but we don't really know. Here's a an artist's rendering and some fancy quotes. They've not been fact checked because there are no facts, only suppositions. You can get books with serious formulas at your local college bookstore."
...not much. Two boxes running FC3 wit SEL, and neither one has caused me to do any SEL-specific twiddling during any of my configurations, updates, etc. if SEL is doing anything at all for my machines, it's not making itself obtrusive enough to even notice it.
Okay, so maybe that can be taken to mean it ain't working at all so after a couple intrusive checks later tonight, if I find it still working and doing its thing properly, then I'll just ignore this whole thing. Nice that Novell is taking security seriously. Nice that there's an alternative method and system. Total impact on me: none whatsoever at the moment.
Either way beats the fark out of anything from MS though. Nothing security related is unobtrusive unless it isn't working on Windows. Hmmm... Better go check on the SEL asap...
(note that I have been using BSD systems for some 8 years but it's been about a year or two since I had to install one from scratch; I just remember that the install worked a lot better back then)
A lot of things worked better back then but Levitra doesn't do anything for ease of BSD installation and configuration.
It's like Hotel California sometimes. "You can ifconfig any time you like, but you get no ip..." (guitar solo)
They haven't been pushed together afaik, but they all of course can be gotten seperately.
Interactive Imaging Systems used to have two different displays. One was basically a VGA sort of output to a mini-screen you had to look inside a viewport to see and it appeared to the user like a 30" screen or so. But it was like using one of those old porno peep loop machines in the back of an arcade. They also currently have this lineup although they've pulled the vaporhardware thing before. Like with the aforementioned peep screen.
Finger-ring trackballs are rarely seen, though TigerDirect was once carrying them and a local library issued them to their librarians' workstations. Only time I've seen them really.
Fold up keyboards have been around a while.
Like you, I just haven't seen anyone package everything together. Though Xybernaut still sends me amazing amounts of press releases about their products which I know of no one first hand using.
Seriously, I used to carry around a big-arse artist's portfolio case with a three-foot wide drafting board and giant pads to do design sketches back in high school and the total weight was close to thirty pounds with everything in the case.
Someone makes a three-foot wide laptop with screen to match, I am soooo there. Full size keyboard, graphics tablet, and folding joystick right in front of me, big-arse 32" or so screen in front of me, maybe even fold-out flat speakers. How is this too big? I'm sick of chiclet keyboards, undersized screens, cramming all that power into too small a space and creating an upside down hot plate to scortch my crotch with.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't imagine a low-resolution recording of a movie being any sort of substitute for actually seeing the film.
Highlander 2, Highlander 3, Riddick, need I really say more? A cam version can so much soften the impact of a really bad Vogon poetry reading, er, turkey of a Hollywood flick...
(...)a version that isn't fuzzy with garbled sound, though.
After reading the script, I'd say the movie itself is fuzzy with garbled writing.
Sadly, since I don't use BitTorrent with much success and instead rely on eMule/aMule, what copies I get will likely take two weeks to finish downloading and be in Spanish with German subtitles. Oddly, this will probably be easier to follow anyhow.
...why do so many get service from Netflix when their pop-up ads are all over the place lately?
Seriously, I personally am not given to shopping at, doing business with, or even entertaining the thought thereof when it comes to businesses with annoying obtrusive advertising. Especially pop-up users. Netflix can go whistle.
And Wal-Mart? Let them censor whatever they want. I buy my DVDs from mall chains, Best Buy, and a couple of local places with loopy mad owners who can find the oddest stuff and cannot be replaced by Wal-Mart of Netflix.
Am kind of surprised at this though.
...you will be able to have a back-up unit for your main hard drive that works with let's say a stack of these multilayer discs in a big platter case and...
Wow. Didn't those data processing center dinosaurs use these in magnetic? I seem to recall catalogs like Misco and Global offering them into the early nineties.
Well maybe we'll just update the look and add really cool neon trim and led-tipped fan blades and so on. Or make them retro with bubblers and rounded cases and call them juke boxes and sell them at Sharper Image.
I agree with those who want an end to the chasing of incrementalism and the format schisms and wars. I'll file this as Seriously Important News when they come up with a disc that backs up my entire hard drive because as of right now, in defiance of pop-tech press claims and pundit prognostications years back, magnetic hard drives are still faster and more spacious than any of these systems, formats, etc. I mean, the dual layer burner on my wife's machine isn't as stable and reliable as the single layer on mine and neither approach me being able to backup either system on less than fifty discs.
If they're this paranoid delusional, then how long until they try biometrics that can't be fooled because they use DNA, thermal, and bioelectrics as well as print patterns?
"Sorry sir, but your DNA marks you as likely to copy this DVD and share it online. You will have to buy something in your allowed purchase group."
This is a king-size case of not getting it on par with Jack Valenti's take on the VCR, the recording industry's take on the cassette recorder, and the Internet industry's obsession with Portal Kombat in the late nineties.
I'll have some of whatever he's smoking!(obligatory Kung Pow reference)
First, who are these people that think Google can do no wrong, and what planet are they on? Net techies are a notoriously cyncial lot so these must be people who think AOL is the Internet. Doesn't sound like anyone I know who's familiar with the history of major corporation, software, and the Internet.
Second, does some of what has come out of Redmond strike anyone as the type of talk that goes along the same lines as someone who just majorly wiped out on a boogie board, slammed into the girl they've been trying to get on the good side of, and then tried to shrug it off by saying they meant to do that?
Google has essentially come out of nowhere with an end-run around the largest self-proclaimed netcentric corporation on Earth, which was caught asleep at the switch living in their own little world of deciding for others what they need rather than ascertaining their needs from those others and then pandering to those needs. That's the sort of disasterous arrogance that Steve Jobs has reeked of for years and where did it get Apple for the longest time? Remember when Apple decided for the users what apps should be availible by way of stonewalling developers whose work they didn't care about? (or didn't pay enough blood money to APDA)
We've heard from major companies before with prognostications about competition and upstarts. Netscape has all but bit the dust, AOL is irrellevant, SCO is a laughing stock, IBM is decrepit and moldy, Oracle is still bound to Lord Ellison and his mountainous ego, and so forth.
All in all, Microsoft has been doing pretty well fixing their stuff of late and Longhorn, other than the DRM obsessiveness, looks to be a big improvement over XP which was a massive improvement over the 95-ME strains of Windows. For them to be acting this way says they're in an internal panic, directionless, and they know it. They've long delusionally thought they knew better so even when they didn't, they didn't act like they were in deep cr*p. Looks to me like the delusion is breaking down, reality is intruding, and they finally realize they don't really know where the Internet is going and what people will glom onto and really worried about not knowing.
Microsoft, welcome to the world in real time. None of us know where anything is headed for sure and that's just life. You can't always set the trends and create the demand. Sometimes, you have to react to them and serve the people with them.
Like customers in tech support who still look for the "any" key, people at large cannot even deal with the basic entanglements they willfully get themselves into. Now we share our stories and knowledge about them?
I wonder how our parents ever got along not having this sort of Internet phenomenon. How ever did they pay the electric bill and understand their furnace service contract without this? Well I pay my cell phone bill and cable bill online by bank card, manage and modify my services by the same web interfaces, and keep track of the bills in MS Money (gnucash seems to be doggedly dedicated to doing things its way instead of mine). How hard is it really to deal with this?
And why do online scams get linked in here? The verious complexities and vagaries of cell phone contracts aren't a scam unless you're too stupid to RTFC and want to blame that instead on the cell company, defining scam as any time you aren't handheld by the other party through everything. News flash to those noobs: "due diligence" applies to all parties in a contract, and doesn't mean the other guy has to do yours for you.
The stupidity in the world never ends. "But you have to help me! I don't know how to press what button to put this silver disc in my Windows!" is but one facet of overall inanity.
I know some will go on about "nightmares" in dealing with their service providers, but I've found 99% of the time, the customer is dead wrong, their provider in the right legally and contractually, and the customer was just too stupid to read their contract, if not too stupid to live. "But it should work the way I think and not the way they say" is not a workable model no matter how much the CU wants it to. It isn't in software, it ain't in banking, and it isn't in utility service.
Pass a law making it legal to DoS attack any IP found to be the originating source of spam greater than a given threshold and the findinds verified independently by two peer spam-hunting organizations. Post said IP on confirmation and let the script kiddies have at them.
Spammers need to be hounded off the net. No ifs, ands, or butts. They need to go and should be subject to direct retribution equivalent to their own actions which amount in the aggregate to a DDoS on the mail systems across the Internet. How many admins have had servers collapse under the load, how many users have had connections die during downloading of thousands of spams and take forever to get to their real mail, etc.?
First, I saw the Dvorak name and immediatelly thought, "there are Linux geeks who use this instead of QWERTY? Amazing. They'll do any kind of project on this platform. I wonder what the Sourceforge page is for it."
Second, I saw the Amiga reference and thought, "I hope this doesn't mean that they'll turn the penguin into a buxom female ala Amy the Squirrel." The image in my head put shivers of disgust down my spine. But then there are so many horny geeks about...
Lastly, I wondered, "why does anyone care what happens between SCO and IBM other than we could merge them and get BISCOM? Yeesh, what boob bait for bubbas. It's like caring about the outcome of a fight between Richard Branson and Donald Trump."
Is this a sign of how irrellevant Dvorak and SCO are to me on a daily basis?
...for doing everything on the cheap, rushing through everything while taking forever to do it, and letting the public's whimisical and capricious nature guide our space program.
We are not now, but someday will be at the point where if we don't get off the planet in a sustainable format, we won't be able to at all after that point due to lack of resources: technological, social, and energy. Imagine an Earth with a planetary population of fifteen billion, schismatic fighting over resources, and no cohesive will to even try to see common ground for the survival of the species.
That day is coming and in that world, how do you expect to do the major housecat herding job it would be to get enough of the wealthiest and advanced nations on the same page for a space colonization effort?
Instead we dilly-dally with the attitude that "it's only moon rocks and photo ops" and "we need to deal with problems right here". We won't have a right here to deal with if we don't make the human race an ongoing proposition. Top down forcing of changes in human behavior have never worked and all the fanatical self-righetousness of the environmental movement isn't catching on and won't ever.
We don't change under pressure very well and need the breathing space and serenity to do it. Try kicking a cigarette habit while simultaneously remodelling your home, refinancing your mortgage, getting two vehicles fixed, having sick family in the hopsital, and having a full desk at work. Now try it when you have three months paid leave and no problems on your plate.
So we need to get off Earth in a meaningful sustainable format right now, make sure that any event down below won't take out the species, and use what we find out there to better our lives, and we need to do it now.
Instead, we're using Russian O2 generators with known issues, and doing things without much more advancement than what we used to go to the moon in 1969. It's 2005 and you'd figure a planet that can make civilian houses nearly air and energy tight could do as well with environmental support on an orbiting tin can.
Bad news: you do. You live on a spaceship called "Planet Earth" whose primary oxigen generator is known as "Rainforest". It's ability of producing oxygen is decaying. From this decay you could calculate your X. Scared? You bloody well should be.
In previous episode of this space opera series, we have seen how attempts to repair "Rainforest" by the brave crew of "Planet Earth" using "Kyoto Agreement" failed due to actions of certain interstellar villain named "Bushadministration". Stay with us for the next episode!
Not remotely true. The damage is being done by people who in many if not most cases are already acting illegally and there's been no real effort to stop them. To effectively shut down the deforestation of the rain forests, we'd need to militarily invade those nations hosting said forests and guard the landscape from settlers, ranchers, and others clear-cutting everything.
Sounds like the war in Give Me Liberty as do the obfuscating environmental politics. "Status deep sh*t, Martha..."
...it's part of MS Office, and it slows a machine as it constantly indexes the living fark out of your machine's docs and everything else for no better reason than MS thinks it should and that it should be part of the default Orifice install.
.dll and other code file on a machine and note their versions, CRCs, signatures, etc...
I turn off this indexing feature every single time on every single machine to improve speed of use by a good 5%-10%.
A full-depth indexing and searching service covering my entire machine would take up more space than the registry, be single massive point of failure for privacy should my machine be compromised, and a drain on my resources. If I am fairly competent at deciding where to put files and keep to that scheme, I shouldn't need to worry about indexing them.
MS if anything should come up with a system file indexer to keep track of every copy of every
fully loaded with big drives and everything. Is the only news here that Apple might be doing it?
/., they keep getting a total pass any time there's any speculation on their doings much less actual meaty news.
/., but nor from MS. Cool looks? This is worth what technically? The Apple name? Yes, we have a winner.
Apple has some of the most anti-competitive monopolistic practices anywhere and in some cases makes Microsoft look pro-FOSS and helmed by a guy who rate higher on my "likely to eat their young" list than Bill Gates. Yet on
Does anyone really think Apple is going to find a way to pull a pacifier out of their rear end for the MPAA and get digital media licensing down and distributing solid for such a thing? Please. They've had the opportunity to recognize the changing scene of content distribution for years now and they still are firmly entrenched in the "the VCR was a bad thing" mindset, never mind dealing like rational adults with the existance of DiVX and P2P.
I can carry around a load of digital video on a portable player right now, and if I want, I can even replace the drive with a more rugged industrial solid state drive. As much and as many videos as I can get my hands on.
Apple would bring what? Legitimacy? Please. DRM from Apple gets a pass on
Sorry, not enough for me unless Apple subdues the MPAA and the movie industry and all their lawyers, makes a reasonably fair system work with reasonable prices, and makes it as convenient as plugging into my broadband network. Because short of that movie industry agreement and blessing, I've already got the rest from other vendors.
Because the difference in the number of movies made, the budgets for each movie, and the number of copies that need to be viewed/sold to make a profit, there's no way the film industry can model itself after the porn industry.
Of course they could. Is Ron Jeremy doing Heather Hunter really any different from Bill Bob Thorton slamming Halle Berry? Only if you note the fact that you don't see the goods with the latter unless you freeze frame the latter's performance in Monsters' Ball.
All we need it higher quality porn or lower quality mainstream. They don't have to have gynecological closeups. I'm sure about as much as Playboy shows after midnight of Kirsten Dunst would satisfy us. I'll forgo high end SFX if I get to see Lucy Liu spread-eagle in the buff on the hood of a Trans Am with her fellow Charlie's Angels stars.
The MPAA still puts out their bogus estimation of lost monies that never would have being paid to them in a world of perfect DRM because the IP was total horsesh*t to begin with. Anyone remember the transition from cheap matinee movie houses to VCRs in the 70s to early 80s? Once, we had no choice but to listen to word of mouth of early victims or go see how bad it was ourself.
Then, cr*ppy movies got shunted to lower echelon theaters with lower ticket prices. Then to VCRs with the straight-to-video phenomenon. Given the pace of tech, the new lowest denominator should be straight-to-DiVX/MPEG2 and the industry should have already embraced it whole-heartedly. Of course, with the legendary mindset of people like Jack Valenti and his peers, it hasn't.
Instead, they're only encouraging piracy by not embracing the newer workable models, attempting to turn back the calendar to days where cr*p was forced onto us with no solution but total abstinence.
I might like to add that I've paid to see exactly three of the twenty-four movies I've seen in the last four years thanks to the movie industry's own largesse where promotional showing tickets are splurged to radio stations. Locally, my newspaper gets overflow tickets from one of several stations and so I see movies for free with the MPAA's and studios' blessings.
How is that any different in the end? Maybe releasing lower quality (camcorder screener) full length teaser copies to the net would actually drive people to the movies. In my case, they've driven me to buy DVDs. But still, they think they've lost on monies I was never going to pay them...
Who didn't see this sort of thing coming btw? Discs that have to have a sort of proximity sensor system to play because they're all invididually encrypted and the key to decrypt is on an rf chip embedded in the media? Easy to see this coming and just as easy to see mod-kits for the players hitting the net on Chinese web sites.
Politically, Australia is pretty left of center compared to the American middle of the road. I note that a similarly aligned Clinton administration put the DMCA into place. I'm not sure whether I want to be buggered subversively by the left or openly in my face by the right, but either way we seem to be losing with government around the world where digital anything is concerned. They:
I expect that we'll take a reaming here in the US from the present administration, albeit an open one, and then the next admin will likely be Dems and they'll glad-hand us to the face while shafting us from behind with DMCA2 ("it's fun to circumvent the D-M-C-A... it's fun to fight against D-M-C-A-A...") or something like that. AVP has new meaning, All Versus Politicians, but the tagline hasn't, Whoever Wins, We Lose.
XP has an "incoming" application firewall - it would be of greater value if it had outgoing controls too
Outgoing calls home from software are still figured (in some quarters) to be a great tool against piracy. Sooner or later Microsoft would undoubtedly backdoor their outgoing firewall app with a way for their own apps to call home to prove their authenticity and of course with MS security and code stability being what it is, how long till malware writers crack it and use that backdoor to get around it?
We've already seen viruses that disable well known anti-virus spyware. Any software that the system doesn't peg and the user is stupid or unlucky enough to install thinking it is okay when it isn't will have cart blanche on Windows to fubar any anti-spyware and antivirus apps it finds. When your AV, AS, and firewall software gets trojaned, you're well and truly farked.
Let's not place any hopes on false solutions from MS until they get it through their heads that user access levels are for nothing as long as most of the system runs essentially as root and code either malicious or buggy can break the security model and convince the rest of the system that it is part of it.
Sci-Fi just got so much *right* with BG. The free downloads on their site, the official commentary podcast, and the show itself is just outstanding. I'm waiting eagerly for next season.
Too bad this does not include the program itself which in a word sucks. In a few more words, it has more pregnant pauses, story threads to nowhere, farked up camera work, character profile dyslexia, and obsession with inane irrellevance than anything ever before done in sci-fi. Somehow, it has sailed under the cynicism radar and become geek chic and now is spreading on BitTorrent. So does porn. Does that mean Torrent is somehow changing the world of porn?
Time to get a reality check people. When news coverage of major events, educational programming, and well done entertainment get massively spread by P2P, then we can say the landscape of (television/movies/whatever) is being changed. Torrent=geek chic. BSG=geek chic. BSG over Torrent=orgasmic geek chic. That's a no-brainer, and sadly so too is the quality of the work done on BSG.
Disclaimer: writer has DVR'd BSG since the beginning and has consistantly been more amused by the original series which was at least laughably bad in a campy way. BSG of today is seriously bad and doesn't even realize it. If this keeps up, we're headed for the Murphy Brown level of taking oneself way too seriously. Clones? Religious fanaticism? Political p*ssing contests? Gender/racial blenders in casting and character rewriting? Do these writers ever create anything remotely original or do they draw solely from the headlines and current politics for everything? How many current day cliches do they need to stick into this program before people wake up and hear the phrase "ripped from today's headlines" go through their heads?
This is a very sad sign of the times, indeed, when this is the stuff that passes for television worth sharing online.
...towards biomechanics or techno-organics, whatever you wish to call it. We humans, and all the rest of the fauna, and also the flora, run on chemical energy. The human body puts out a tremendous amount of waste energy, that were it to be absorbed with anything like 100% efficiency would power all the devices you want to carry around in your Internet-on-the-go lifestyle and then some.
Nanotechnology doesn't necessarily have to be about nanomachines built with cutesy little atoms lined up for show-and-tell with the press like certain STM owners have done, although what we learn from that is important. The greatest piece of nanotech in the near future for biological life forms is to understand how we work at the molecular level and make that more efficient where we can, and repair what gets broke, and so forth.
Over time, we'll eventually learn how to stop doing gross mechanical construction and start growing our buildings, our transportation, our entire infrastructure. We will literally be able to grow entire shopping malls, office and apartment buildings, and even spaceships (ala Lexx to a point, sans feeding it human flesh).
We'll grow things that feed on sunlight and other ambient energy as well as chemicals in the environment, just like plants do. They'll create what energy we need, things will be largely self-repairing, and they'll also use our trash and sewage output for consumables.
This is just one of the steps to a better future where high-tech and environmental harmony finally join their paths together.
Of course, The Matrix does point out how much we are wasting with the present penal system. If we could feed perfect synthetic existances to inmates and harness their bodies' energy output, we'd end prison riots and overcrowding, they'd be happier than they ever were in the real world with their behavioral problems and dealing with society and others, and we'd be needing far less prisons and guards. We simply put them into the power plant for the term of their sentence. Maybe even repair their minds while they're inside and retard their aging and return productive members of society at the end of their sentence. Humane, environmentally sound, productive, this could work.
I know what some will say. I am not saying government is perfect and there won't be miscarriages of justice at times. But how is letting them rot and suffer in a cell, their pathologies getting worse, at massive taxpayer expense better? If we find them innocent later on, they at least didn't suffer while inside, they didn't get a lot older sitting around, and they come out unscathed. Or we can find them innocent after we already executed them.
Rambling I know, but there's all sorts of good things that can come from these interfaces between organic and inorganic science. It doesn't have to be some horrible sci-fi/fantasy/horror movie result. The choice is still up to us. I mean "us" as in "humans".
...for someone to figure out how to do a "lava lamp" effect with this, mount their hardware in a rack that's inside a large clear acrylic tube like those used for fancy aquariums, and watch all the pretty backlit blobs moving this way and that. That would be cool.
...what's still used in university physics courses? Not most of the books mentioned by others. What is? Another extremely weighty tome (and those who've held it know it could be used to bludgeon Governor Arnold in one whack) called Geometrodynamics. I tossed it casually back on the shelf at Borders recently and nearly broke the shelf.
If it's a choice of someone giving me their POV based on their understanding of the math and having an encyclopaedia sized copy of the math which I can work with to get my own POV, well that's a matter of whether I'm overachieving and truly engrossed or looking for coffee table material in which case, sure, I'll look at this book.
But not one more thing by Kaku and those in that stripe. I'm tired of popular crap about "this is really how the universe works" and at the time of first printing it has already been contradicted by seven different Discover articles which themselves descend from thirty plus serious physics journals. A one page pamphlet would do that says, "We have no farking idea. We THINK it goes this way, but we don't really know. Here's a an artist's rendering and some fancy quotes. They've not been fact checked because there are no facts, only suppositions. You can get books with serious formulas at your local college bookstore."
...not much. Two boxes running FC3 wit SEL, and neither one has caused me to do any SEL-specific twiddling during any of my configurations, updates, etc. if SEL is doing anything at all for my machines, it's not making itself obtrusive enough to even notice it.
Okay, so maybe that can be taken to mean it ain't working at all so after a couple intrusive checks later tonight, if I find it still working and doing its thing properly, then I'll just ignore this whole thing. Nice that Novell is taking security seriously. Nice that there's an alternative method and system. Total impact on me: none whatsoever at the moment.
Either way beats the fark out of anything from MS though. Nothing security related is unobtrusive unless it isn't working on Windows. Hmmm... Better go check on the SEL asap...
(note that I have been using BSD systems for some 8 years but it's been about a year or two since I had to install one from scratch; I just remember that the install worked a lot better back then)
A lot of things worked better back then but Levitra doesn't do anything for ease of BSD installation and configuration.
It's like Hotel California sometimes. "You can ifconfig any time you like, but you get no ip..." (guitar solo)
They haven't been pushed together afaik, but they all of course can be gotten seperately.
Interactive Imaging Systems used to have two different displays. One was basically a VGA sort of output to a mini-screen you had to look inside a viewport to see and it appeared to the user like a 30" screen or so. But it was like using one of those old porno peep loop machines in the back of an arcade. They also currently have this lineup although they've pulled the vaporhardware thing before. Like with the aforementioned peep screen.
Finger-ring trackballs are rarely seen, though TigerDirect was once carrying them and a local library issued them to their librarians' workstations. Only time I've seen them really.
Fold up keyboards have been around a while.
Like you, I just haven't seen anyone package everything together. Though Xybernaut still sends me amazing amounts of press releases about their products which I know of no one first hand using.
Seriously, I used to carry around a big-arse artist's portfolio case with a three-foot wide drafting board and giant pads to do design sketches back in high school and the total weight was close to thirty pounds with everything in the case.
Someone makes a three-foot wide laptop with screen to match, I am soooo there. Full size keyboard, graphics tablet, and folding joystick right in front of me, big-arse 32" or so screen in front of me, maybe even fold-out flat speakers. How is this too big? I'm sick of chiclet keyboards, undersized screens, cramming all that power into too small a space and creating an upside down hot plate to scortch my crotch with.