This is almost always because the scope of a project changes between when it's initially described and when it's delivered. A majority of projects I've been involved with fall into one of two categories:
1) requirements are agreed on, seem reasonable enough, but then detailed specifications are drawn up and client keeps pushing to add more things to specs until you have a 120 page document that will take 2 years to deliver. If, however, you tell the client it will now take 2 years vs. the 5 months you said when you were looking at a 2 page requirements document, they will cancel the project, and if they weren't paying for the requirements phase, forget about collecting any money for them (why you should always get paid for all phases of project planning). Since you can't do this, the client will eventually get upset, even though it's their own fault.
2) Project is delivered very early in prototype form, only to have the client say they want 50 more features that they forgot to describe in the requirements process, but they refuse to pay more, and refuse to acknowledge that the time frame must be pushed out to accomodate their new requests.
Yes, I've managed client relationships before and large (multimillion dollar) implementation and customization projects. I have reasonably good people skills, and still found these problems generally insurmountable when my client's company had a completely nontechnical person in the role of project sponsor and manager on their side.
The best predictor of success of a project in my experience are the lines of reporting and control in the client's company, and the existence of some technical knowledge in a position of responsibility and authority. If their CIO or President or whoever is the ultimate decision maker has a senior arhitect or tech VP that knows their shit AND functions as a trusted aid in the decision making process, these issues can usually be bypassed. If there is no senior source of technical knowledge, you can kiss the entire project's ass goodbye. Try to get as much money as possible from the client while it's going on, but forget about the project being "successful" in how its received by management.
I think "3" was getting that nice girl Sally McClintock to go for a romp with you behind the gymnasium after you told her she could pay you for nasa.gov access in a special way.
Besides the obvious fact that the nitty gritty might get a bit boring after a while on the same topics, I've found that everything in life is like that.
When I start a new job, the first few months are usually subsumed getting into the nitty gritty details, learning the math, the tools used in the job and so on. After a while, you become comfortable with that stuff, it's like second nature. And then you find yourself spending more time dealing with politics, people issues, and trying to bang the hot girl down the hall in marketing.
Please, this subject has been rehashed a million times. OBJECTIVE:Christian Ministries is beyond any reasonable doubt a parody site, it's just much more subtle than some of the others and some of the material contained therein has been repeatedly mistaken by real Christian fundamentalists as being sympathetic to their cause. Which is why you will see some of the "Dr. Richard Paley" essays linked to or discussed around legitimate fundie websites. I assure you that doesn't mean anything.
Heck, look at this page, then look at the page it links to, become-a-christian.com. They clearly think they are being linked to by a parody site, and I think that even the creation scientists are now realizing they've been had by the OBJECTIVE site. The "campaign" against Landover Baptist is tongue in cheek like the rest of the site. If they ever exerted pressure on anybody to take down the LB site, it was only to create outrage and notoriety for themselves - part of the big hoax that is O:CM.
Furthermore, I would argue that an applicant couldn't really know that their acceptance status was considered confidential *from themselves* if the decision had already been made and posted to their account. The fact that the official notifications hadn't been sent out doesn't really reaffirm the confidentiality of the information.
Now, if somebody had used this technique to access somebody else's admissions status, I would say it is pretty clear cut that they committed an unethical act.
If a school posts admission decisions by social security number in some obscure location and a student tells other students that it's there and they go look up their status before official notifications, have they committed an ethical violation? The school didn't tell them the information was there, but it was available to them for the getting if somebody else told them where to look for it.
I can see that the school is upset, but it seems that their wrath is inappropriately directed. They should be pissed at the ApplyYourself folks and at their own admissions staff for botching things so badly.
Spend less on gas and transportation. Save $100. Spend less on nice clothes for work. Save $250. Spend less on the eating out that happens when you work. Save $150. Spend less on stress releaving measures you incure because of your commute and work environment. Save 1000 bucks on your monthly call girl tab.
Watching your job get shipped off to India when your boss realizes "telecommuting" workers can easily be replaced with "outsourced" workers....
I don't think you know what you're talking about. It depends on where you go to school - CS, at a shitty school, is probably incredibly easy. Where I went to school, a CS degree was one of the hardest (though not as hard as physics, which was my major, but I took a bunch of the CS classes and I saw them dropping that major like flies).
The reason this is such an issue is that in many other businesses, it's impossible to blow as much smoke up somebody's ass as it is in the tech sector. It's hard for somebody who hasn't seen it in a hands-on way to recognize that just because software vendor X says their product has feature Y doesn't mean a damned thing because everybody lies in the industry. Especially when the word "enterprise" appears in front of "software" - that generally means "the features we are describing to you don't exist, we just think our tech guys might be able to build them if you pay us enough money".
In most businesses your supply chain consists of widgets that are far more quantifiable in terms of their properties, costs, and functionality. If you come from that kind of background, you are likely to get suckered several hundred times over. If you've been in the tech industry for some time, and especially if you've worked in an engineering role before, you know enough to know that you need to delegate technical analysis to smart people whose entire job is that, and who you trust aren't just trying to protect their own jobs or play office politics.
But with that said, I don't know that real engineering experience is necessarily so advantageous beyond that. When you are the CEO of a diversified company, you aren't going to have the time to do deep technical assessments of all of your products, competitors, and suppliers, you'll need to delegate those responsibilities no matter what.
This is not to suggest that people don't lie in other businesses, and that a bullshit detector isn't key there too, it's just that no business I've seen has so much free-flowing bullshit as the world of software because of the complexity of the product and competitive featurization-based sales.
This is true. If it weren't for the fact that once or twice a day I read a post here that makes me laugh raucously, or I actually learn a tidbit of useful information from a well informed comment, I would have gone long ago, as would have most people. Nobody comes to Slashdot for the "articles" the editors post these days, as they suck about 90% of the time.
We generally use the verb "weigh" to express units of mass, because there is no commonly used verbal form for mass. There is nothing inherently wrong with this, it's just a vagueness in the meaning of the word "weigh".
See NIST Special Publication 811 (1995 ed.), _Guide for the Use of the International System of Units (SI)_ by Barry N. Taylor (NIST is the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the successor agency to the National Bureau of Standards):
In commercial and everyday use, and especially in common parlance, weight is usually used as a synonym for mass. Thus the SI unit of the quantity weight used in this sense is the kilogram (kg) and the verb "to weigh" means "to determine the mass of" or "to have a mass of".
Examples: the child's weight is 23 kg the briefcase weighs 6 kg Net wt. 227 g
Yeah, I mean, being generous, that would pay for about 3 minutes of my time. Which is probably half of what it would take to fill out the claim form. So the only reason I would do this would be to piss off Microsoft and exact a miniscule form of revenge the next time Excel mysteriously eats five hours of work on my spreadsheet and VBA code.
Re:This version doesnt fix some new type of popups
on
Firefox 1.0.1 Released
·
· Score: 1
It is NOT a pop up. It doesn't "pop up" because it's not a fucking pop up window, it's just an image overlaid on top of the page. If you want to block it you will need an adblock rule to block the offending Javascript or div layer, period.
Bad link there - see my sig for the link to the official Slashfix home page.:) I haven't touched the code, nor thought about the rendering bug, nor needed to use CTRL-mousewheel or anything else in ages since it just doesn't affect me any more.
Probably the most useful 20 lines of Javascript I've ever written.
(this is really addressed to the parent poster, and a continuation of your thoughts)
Who will clean my apartment? Who will serve me food in a restaurant? Who will clean the dishes at said restaurant? Who will rent movies to me? Who will snake out my toilet when it gets clogged?
There are lots of service jobs out there that need "dumb" people to do them. Or at least undereducated and unambitious people. Ambitious, educated people are usually _bad_ at these jobs because they aren't happy doing them. And we all demand that these services be available to us with all the money we make (well, those of you still in shitty parts of the tech industry may not be making much anymore, but some of us were smart enough to move up or out and are doing just fine, thank you very much).
So if the price to pay for my comfortable life is stupid ads on TV that I skip with my Tivo, and dumb ads on the web that I filter out with AdBlock, then so be it. If you'd prefer to move to your digital utopia where everybody is an ubergeek, be my guest. I suspect that you'll find life in your little commune to be substantially worse without all the stupid people around.
AdBlock blocks by regexp too. I have yet to come across anything that AdBlock can't block with a regexp - the problem as the parent poster was pointing out is that with "floater" divs already, you sometimes have to view HTML to figure out the source of the foreign div... however, it's not too hard to figure out currently because they always come from somewhere else. It will be much trickier and more labor intensive when they bury them within the same domain by proxying the content. You'll still be able to track them down if you are clever enough, but it will be much more labor-intensive to do so manually.
Actually, even now DIVs don't show up as blockable elements in AdBlock natively, which I consider a major deficiency (unless I have an outdated version of AdBlock installed in Firefox here?). It just lists IFRAME, IMG, OBJECT, and EMBED tags, which are rapidly being replaced by Javascript-written foreign DIV tags.
The process of finding and blocking floaters in AdBlock needs to be made easier.
Please see this thread. There's a fairly exhaustive list of reasons to believe this is a fake/hoax/whatever. Basically almost everything on the site turns up blanks - there are no churches, universities, math problems, high schools, etc. by the names cited therein.
If you can provide even a modest piece of evidence for their existance, please do so. There have been a few legitimate evangelical and anti-evolutionist types who have cited or discussed the essays, yes, but they don't seem to have any idea what the hell Fellowship University is or whether these guys are for real either. Thus the pretty obvious conclusion that it's a hoax.
Yes, I just did the same (downloaded the documents from my PACER account). The strange part is, as best I can tell, the amended complaint was filed on February 8th, and the consent judgment agreement was signed by Mr. Webber's lawyer the same day. Something odd about that. And why was this guy raising money for a legal defense fund, then he rolled over and signed an outrageous agreement _AGREEING_ to pay a million dollars??? Would anybody in their right mind do that?
There must be some side deal going on here of some sort. I presume they aren't going to try to collect a million dollars from this guy, because I'm assuming he doesn't have a million dollars to spare. And why would he sign an agreement forcing himself into bankruptcy for the rest of his life?
Seeing as I have an account on the PACER system already set up, here's the case summary:
3:04-cv-02642 Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc et al v. Edward Webber David C Godbey, presiding Date filed: 12/14/2004 Date terminated: 02/16/2005 Date of last filing: 02/16/2005
Case Summary Office: Dallas Filed: 12/14/2004 Jury Demand: None Demand: Nature of Suit: 820 Cause: 17:501 Copyright Infringement Jurisdiction: Federal Question Disposition: Judgment - Judgment on Consent County: XX US, Outside State Terminated: 02/16/2005 Origin: 1 Reopened: Lead Case: None Related Case: None Other Court Case: None Def Custody Status: Flags: CLOSED, COPYRIGHT, RAMIREZ
Plaintiff Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc... (followed by contact info and list of other movie studios, presumably all the MPAA members).
The last document filed in the case is a "Consent Judgment and Permanent Injunction", signed and dated February 8th 2005. The guy's attorney signed it on his behalf, and apparently Mr. Webber *AGREED* to pay a million dollar judgement to the plaintiff - there was no trial ever held. I have to assume there is some side agreement that waives the financial agreement if he complies with their terms and plays nice or something like that, as I'm presuming this guy doesn't just have a million dollars to throw at the MPAA.
Oh yeah, and the Consent Judgment states that the defendent waives any and all right to appeal the Judgment, to have it set aside, or to obtain a new trial. So I don't understand how this guy claims he was going to put up a legal fight when it sounds like he rolled over like a fifty cent whore.
Let's take away control of the Internet from the corrupt, unaccountable, undemocratic, hopelessly bureaucratic organization that controls it today so we can make sure it's controlled by...
Palm doesn't lose to PPC on app availability, quite to the contrary, Palm still wins out there.
PPC wins out in media compatibility and multitasking.
PalmOne/PalmSource have been royally fucking the goat on making progress with their OS and their hardware over the last few years. The Treo 600 was good, and the Treo 650 is basically what the Treo 600 was supposed to be (a decent screen and working camera, and it's a fucking 600 dollar upgrade, AND they went ahead and made the software buggier and their hardware quality control worse in the process).
Why haven't they moved to Palm OS 6? Why isn't there real multitasking? I want to be able to switch back and forth between my email and phone app and web browser without losing my place and without UI delays. Why does this device only have 32 megs of RAM onboard? Why the atrocious GUI delays that didn't exist in the Treo 600 (like switching to the phone app - takes about 1-2 seconds, crazy)?
I still like the overall Palm offering better than the PocketPC offering, and there are no PocketPC smartphones that offer the same form factor and usability as the Treo 650, but I'm sick of watching the idiocy that goes on with the Palm platform.
I think you are looking for Preferential, which lists most of these (at least the ones that you would ever want to muck around with).
There are several other Firefox tweaking guides out there that suggest some specific values you might want to muck around with, and searching around on MozillaZine's forums will yield many specific tips and tricks (or just look in a few of the sticky posts there) for commonly used about:config hacks.
Just to correct one point - there is nothing "technically legal" about this. I sympathize with the guy in terms of the unfair competition (specifically - people selling boxes laden with illegal ROMs). However, MAME itself doesn't do anything illegal, and whining on about how technically people who own the original games can't legally play them in an emulated environment doesn't give him any more or less of a legal claim to the MAME trademark.
Just because he has a legitimate grievance with some people selling boxes on eBay does not give him the right to infringe on the MAME developers' existing legal trademark rights, whether registered or not. He is now violating the law by filing and using a fraudulent trademark claim, which he is entirely well aware is fraudulent, to prosecute third parties with whom he has a grievance. This is not legal, it is not moral and it is not ethical.
If he wants to make money off of MAME, then he should be offering legal ROM bundles that work with MAME for sale and prosecuting those who sell systems packaged with illegal ROMs - this does not require making any fraudulent trademark claims at all.
I haven't tried this with the specific examples referenced here, but it ought to work in general in Firefox and other *zilla browsers.
1) Type about:config in the URL bar 2) find dom.popup_allowed_events 3) change the value to the empty string
Now no events allow popups by default. That means if you want to let a site pop up a window from Javascript you will have to whitelist it.
This blocked the popups on drudgereport.com for me when I tried it a few months back. I don't leave this setting on, for now, since I prefer to choose not to frequent sites that maliciously abuse me with ads. However, if it starts to become a regular nuisance, I will set Firefox back to this aggressive anti-popup setting. After all, nobody really NEEDS to use Javascript popup windows, and if I can see where a legitimate site is trying to do so, it only takes a few seconds to whitelist them in FF's popup blocker.
Slashdot Mirror
This is almost always because the scope of a project changes between when it's initially described and when it's delivered. A majority of projects I've been involved with fall into one of two categories:
1) requirements are agreed on, seem reasonable enough, but then detailed specifications are drawn up and client keeps pushing to add more things to specs until you have a 120 page document that will take 2 years to deliver. If, however, you tell the client it will now take 2 years vs. the 5 months you said when you were looking at a 2 page requirements document, they will cancel the project, and if they weren't paying for the requirements phase, forget about collecting any money for them (why you should always get paid for all phases of project planning). Since you can't do this, the client will eventually get upset, even though it's their own fault.
2) Project is delivered very early in prototype form, only to have the client say they want 50 more features that they forgot to describe in the requirements process, but they refuse to pay more, and refuse to acknowledge that the time frame must be pushed out to accomodate their new requests.
Yes, I've managed client relationships before and large (multimillion dollar) implementation and customization projects. I have reasonably good people skills, and still found these problems generally insurmountable when my client's company had a completely nontechnical person in the role of project sponsor and manager on their side.
The best predictor of success of a project in my experience are the lines of reporting and control in the client's company, and the existence of some technical knowledge in a position of responsibility and authority. If their CIO or President or whoever is the ultimate decision maker has a senior arhitect or tech VP that knows their shit AND functions as a trusted aid in the decision making process, these issues can usually be bypassed. If there is no senior source of technical knowledge, you can kiss the entire project's ass goodbye. Try to get as much money as possible from the client while it's going on, but forget about the project being "successful" in how its received by management.
I think "3" was getting that nice girl Sally McClintock to go for a romp with you behind the gymnasium after you told her she could pay you for nasa.gov access in a special way.
Besides the obvious fact that the nitty gritty might get a bit boring after a while on the same topics, I've found that everything in life is like that.
When I start a new job, the first few months are usually subsumed getting into the nitty gritty details, learning the math, the tools used in the job and so on. After a while, you become comfortable with that stuff, it's like second nature. And then you find yourself spending more time dealing with politics, people issues, and trying to bang the hot girl down the hall in marketing.
Doesn't sound so terrible to me.
Those responsible for the sacking of the web developers, shall also be sacked.
Please, this subject has been rehashed a million times. OBJECTIVE:Christian Ministries is beyond any reasonable doubt a parody site, it's just much more subtle than some of the others and some of the material contained therein has been repeatedly mistaken by real Christian fundamentalists as being sympathetic to their cause. Which is why you will see some of the "Dr. Richard Paley" essays linked to or discussed around legitimate fundie websites. I assure you that doesn't mean anything.
Heck, look at this page, then look at the page it links to, become-a-christian.com. They clearly think they are being linked to by a parody site, and I think that even the creation scientists are now realizing they've been had by the OBJECTIVE site. The "campaign" against Landover Baptist is tongue in cheek like the rest of the site. If they ever exerted pressure on anybody to take down the LB site, it was only to create outrage and notoriety for themselves - part of the big hoax that is O:CM.
Furthermore, I would argue that an applicant couldn't really know that their acceptance status was considered confidential *from themselves* if the decision had already been made and posted to their account. The fact that the official notifications hadn't been sent out doesn't really reaffirm the confidentiality of the information.
Now, if somebody had used this technique to access somebody else's admissions status, I would say it is pretty clear cut that they committed an unethical act.
If a school posts admission decisions by social security number in some obscure location and a student tells other students that it's there and they go look up their status before official notifications, have they committed an ethical violation? The school didn't tell them the information was there, but it was available to them for the getting if somebody else told them where to look for it.
I can see that the school is upset, but it seems that their wrath is inappropriately directed. They should be pissed at the ApplyYourself folks and at their own admissions staff for botching things so badly.
Spend less on gas and transportation. Save $100.
Spend less on nice clothes for work. Save $250.
Spend less on the eating out that happens when you work. Save $150.
Spend less on stress releaving measures you incure because of your commute and work environment. Save 1000 bucks on your monthly call girl tab.
Watching your job get shipped off to India when your boss realizes "telecommuting" workers can easily be replaced with "outsourced" workers....
Priceless.
I don't think you know what you're talking about. It depends on where you go to school - CS, at a shitty school, is probably incredibly easy. Where I went to school, a CS degree was one of the hardest (though not as hard as physics, which was my major, but I took a bunch of the CS classes and I saw them dropping that major like flies).
The reason this is such an issue is that in many other businesses, it's impossible to blow as much smoke up somebody's ass as it is in the tech sector. It's hard for somebody who hasn't seen it in a hands-on way to recognize that just because software vendor X says their product has feature Y doesn't mean a damned thing because everybody lies in the industry. Especially when the word "enterprise" appears in front of "software" - that generally means "the features we are describing to you don't exist, we just think our tech guys might be able to build them if you pay us enough money".
In most businesses your supply chain consists of widgets that are far more quantifiable in terms of their properties, costs, and functionality. If you come from that kind of background, you are likely to get suckered several hundred times over. If you've been in the tech industry for some time, and especially if you've worked in an engineering role before, you know enough to know that you need to delegate technical analysis to smart people whose entire job is that, and who you trust aren't just trying to protect their own jobs or play office politics.
But with that said, I don't know that real engineering experience is necessarily so advantageous beyond that. When you are the CEO of a diversified company, you aren't going to have the time to do deep technical assessments of all of your products, competitors, and suppliers, you'll need to delegate those responsibilities no matter what.
This is not to suggest that people don't lie in other businesses, and that a bullshit detector isn't key there too, it's just that no business I've seen has so much free-flowing bullshit as the world of software because of the complexity of the product and competitive featurization-based sales.
This is true. If it weren't for the fact that once or twice a day I read a post here that makes me laugh raucously, or I actually learn a tidbit of useful information from a well informed comment, I would have gone long ago, as would have most people. Nobody comes to Slashdot for the "articles" the editors post these days, as they suck about 90% of the time.
I nominate you for post of the week. Seriously, I just snarfed my dinner.
We generally use the verb "weigh" to express units of mass, because there is no commonly used verbal form for mass. There is nothing inherently wrong with this, it's just a vagueness in the meaning of the word "weigh".
See NIST Special Publication 811 (1995 ed.), _Guide for the Use of the International System of Units (SI)_ by Barry N. Taylor (NIST is the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the successor agency to the National Bureau of Standards):
In commercial and everyday use, and especially in common parlance, weight is usually used as a synonym for mass. Thus the SI unit of the quantity weight used in this sense is the kilogram (kg) and the verb "to weigh" means "to determine the mass of" or "to have a mass of".
Examples: the child's weight is 23 kg the briefcase weighs 6 kg Net wt. 227 g
Yeah, I mean, being generous, that would pay for about 3 minutes of my time. Which is probably half of what it would take to fill out the claim form. So the only reason I would do this would be to piss off Microsoft and exact a miniscule form of revenge the next time Excel mysteriously eats five hours of work on my spreadsheet and VBA code.
It is NOT a pop up. It doesn't "pop up" because it's not a fucking pop up window, it's just an image overlaid on top of the page. If you want to block it you will need an adblock rule to block the offending Javascript or div layer, period.
Bad link there - see my sig for the link to the official Slashfix home page. :) I haven't touched the code, nor thought about the rendering bug, nor needed to use CTRL-mousewheel or anything else in ages since it just doesn't affect me any more.
Probably the most useful 20 lines of Javascript I've ever written.
(this is really addressed to the parent poster, and a continuation of your thoughts)
Who will clean my apartment? Who will serve me food in a restaurant? Who will clean the dishes at said restaurant? Who will rent movies to me? Who will snake out my toilet when it gets clogged?
There are lots of service jobs out there that need "dumb" people to do them. Or at least undereducated and unambitious people. Ambitious, educated people are usually _bad_ at these jobs because they aren't happy doing them. And we all demand that these services be available to us with all the money we make (well, those of you still in shitty parts of the tech industry may not be making much anymore, but some of us were smart enough to move up or out and are doing just fine, thank you very much).
So if the price to pay for my comfortable life is stupid ads on TV that I skip with my Tivo, and dumb ads on the web that I filter out with AdBlock, then so be it. If you'd prefer to move to your digital utopia where everybody is an ubergeek, be my guest. I suspect that you'll find life in your little commune to be substantially worse without all the stupid people around.
AdBlock blocks by regexp too. I have yet to come across anything that AdBlock can't block with a regexp - the problem as the parent poster was pointing out is that with "floater" divs already, you sometimes have to view HTML to figure out the source of the foreign div... however, it's not too hard to figure out currently because they always come from somewhere else. It will be much trickier and more labor intensive when they bury them within the same domain by proxying the content. You'll still be able to track them down if you are clever enough, but it will be much more labor-intensive to do so manually.
Actually, even now DIVs don't show up as blockable elements in AdBlock natively, which I consider a major deficiency (unless I have an outdated version of AdBlock installed in Firefox here?). It just lists IFRAME, IMG, OBJECT, and EMBED tags, which are rapidly being replaced by Javascript-written foreign DIV tags.
The process of finding and blocking floaters in AdBlock needs to be made easier.
Please see this thread. There's a fairly exhaustive list of reasons to believe this is a fake/hoax/whatever. Basically almost everything on the site turns up blanks - there are no churches, universities, math problems, high schools, etc. by the names cited therein.
If you can provide even a modest piece of evidence for their existance, please do so. There have been a few legitimate evangelical and anti-evolutionist types who have cited or discussed the essays, yes, but they don't seem to have any idea what the hell Fellowship University is or whether these guys are for real either. Thus the pretty obvious conclusion that it's a hoax.
Yes, I just did the same (downloaded the documents from my PACER account). The strange part is, as best I can tell, the amended complaint was filed on February 8th, and the consent judgment agreement was signed by Mr. Webber's lawyer the same day. Something odd about that. And why was this guy raising money for a legal defense fund, then he rolled over and signed an outrageous agreement _AGREEING_ to pay a million dollars??? Would anybody in their right mind do that?
There must be some side deal going on here of some sort. I presume they aren't going to try to collect a million dollars from this guy, because I'm assuming he doesn't have a million dollars to spare. And why would he sign an agreement forcing himself into bankruptcy for the rest of his life?
Seeing as I have an account on the PACER system already set up, here's the case summary:
...
3:04-cv-02642 Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc et al v. Edward Webber
David C Godbey, presiding
Date filed: 12/14/2004
Date terminated: 02/16/2005 Date of last filing: 02/16/2005
Case Summary
Office: Dallas Filed: 12/14/2004
Jury Demand: None Demand:
Nature of Suit: 820 Cause: 17:501 Copyright Infringement
Jurisdiction: Federal Question Disposition: Judgment - Judgment on Consent
County: XX US, Outside State Terminated: 02/16/2005
Origin: 1 Reopened:
Lead Case: None
Related Case: None Other Court Case: None
Def Custody Status:
Flags: CLOSED, COPYRIGHT, RAMIREZ
Plaintiff Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc
(followed by contact info and list of other movie studios, presumably all the MPAA members).
The last document filed in the case is a "Consent Judgment and Permanent Injunction", signed and dated February 8th 2005. The guy's attorney signed it on his behalf, and apparently Mr. Webber *AGREED* to pay a million dollar judgement to the plaintiff - there was no trial ever held. I have to assume there is some side agreement that waives the financial agreement if he complies with their terms and plays nice or something like that, as I'm presuming this guy doesn't just have a million dollars to throw at the MPAA.
Oh yeah, and the Consent Judgment states that the defendent waives any and all right to appeal the Judgment, to have it set aside, or to obtain a new trial. So I don't understand how this guy claims he was going to put up a legal fight when it sounds like he rolled over like a fifty cent whore.
Let's take away control of the Internet from the corrupt, unaccountable, undemocratic, hopelessly bureaucratic organization that controls it today so we can make sure it's controlled by ...
Oh, you said the UN?
Nevermind.
Palm doesn't lose to PPC on app availability, quite to the contrary, Palm still wins out there.
PPC wins out in media compatibility and multitasking.
PalmOne/PalmSource have been royally fucking the goat on making progress with their OS and their hardware over the last few years. The Treo 600 was good, and the Treo 650 is basically what the Treo 600 was supposed to be (a decent screen and working camera, and it's a fucking 600 dollar upgrade, AND they went ahead and made the software buggier and their hardware quality control worse in the process).
Why haven't they moved to Palm OS 6? Why isn't there real multitasking? I want to be able to switch back and forth between my email and phone app and web browser without losing my place and without UI delays. Why does this device only have 32 megs of RAM onboard? Why the atrocious GUI delays that didn't exist in the Treo 600 (like switching to the phone app - takes about 1-2 seconds, crazy)?
I still like the overall Palm offering better than the PocketPC offering, and there are no PocketPC smartphones that offer the same form factor and usability as the Treo 650, but I'm sick of watching the idiocy that goes on with the Palm platform.
I think you are looking for Preferential, which lists most of these (at least the ones that you would ever want to muck around with).
There are several other Firefox tweaking guides out there that suggest some specific values you might want to muck around with, and searching around on MozillaZine's forums will yield many specific tips and tricks (or just look in a few of the sticky posts there) for commonly used about:config hacks.
Just to correct one point - there is nothing "technically legal" about this. I sympathize with the guy in terms of the unfair competition (specifically - people selling boxes laden with illegal ROMs). However, MAME itself doesn't do anything illegal, and whining on about how technically people who own the original games can't legally play them in an emulated environment doesn't give him any more or less of a legal claim to the MAME trademark.
Just because he has a legitimate grievance with some people selling boxes on eBay does not give him the right to infringe on the MAME developers' existing legal trademark rights, whether registered or not. He is now violating the law by filing and using a fraudulent trademark claim, which he is entirely well aware is fraudulent, to prosecute third parties with whom he has a grievance. This is not legal, it is not moral and it is not ethical.
If he wants to make money off of MAME, then he should be offering legal ROM bundles that work with MAME for sale and prosecuting those who sell systems packaged with illegal ROMs - this does not require making any fraudulent trademark claims at all.
I haven't tried this with the specific examples referenced here, but it ought to work in general in Firefox and other *zilla browsers.
1) Type about:config in the URL bar
2) find dom.popup_allowed_events
3) change the value to the empty string
Now no events allow popups by default. That means if you want to let a site pop up a window from Javascript you will have to whitelist it.
This blocked the popups on drudgereport.com for me when I tried it a few months back. I don't leave this setting on, for now, since I prefer to choose not to frequent sites that maliciously abuse me with ads. However, if it starts to become a regular nuisance, I will set Firefox back to this aggressive anti-popup setting. After all, nobody really NEEDS to use Javascript popup windows, and if I can see where a legitimate site is trying to do so, it only takes a few seconds to whitelist them in FF's popup blocker.