Android: Connect to the internet, sync your contacts with gmail, open gmail with your PC, select "contacts", download the contacts as a CSV file on your PC, edit it via openoffice.org, reupload the edited CSV file to gmail, sync your phone again, disconnect it from the internet.
Or just edit the contact directly on the phone, much like with any other phone. It will auto-sync back to gmail. I tend to edit my contacts on the gmail interface because I prefer having a full sized keyboard, but if I'm out, I've never had any problem with conctact maintenance directly on the phone. I don't know what you're talking about with CSVs and openoffice... I don't even have an office suite installed.
Open your desk's drawer, take out the usb cable, connect your phone to the PC, select "mass storage mode", turn to the PC, search the phone filesystem for the photos (they're intuitively located in a "100MEDIA" subfolder in a "DCIM" folder, and called "IMAG%04d.jpg" - you'll have to figure out what files contain the photos you need), copy them to the PC, safely remove the usb device from the PC, put the usb cable back in the drawer.
I've never had to plug my phone in for anything other than development or charging. Sending images over bluetooth works just fine, but I tend to upload them to picasa or email them straight from the phone, either via the wifi or 3G.
Open "music" by selecting it from the applications menu. A fancy but unuseful cover flow display appears. Press the "three horizontal lines" glyph. Another menu appears. Press the "person with a microphone" glyph. The menu changes. Find YourFavouriteArtist by scrolling the whole list or pressing the "search" button and then tapping "Y", and select him. Press the "musical note glyph", then select the first track.
According to this article, it's between 25-30W, and it fits into any standard Mini-ITX case. Couple it with a low power hard disk or CF drive and it'll be very power efficient. It's also possible to run it completely passively cooled, and if you wanted to use it as a media frontend, it'd be more than capable. You can even get a version that comes with it's own external power brick rather than a PSU.
I'm not 100% sure since a lot of people here use "is" for that type of sentence. Maybe it's a regional dialect thing. Certainly in this case, I would personally have used "are", had I not initially written SPAG and then expanded it to something sensible without checking the context;). When I first wrote the post, I had made the point that I was referring more to when I'm paying attention, rather than an informal context like/. where I pretty much just dump brain to keyboard... should have left that in.
In school, the term "Spelling and Grammar" was always used, never "Spelling" or "Grammar" on their own. Most people seem to have developed this idea that it is a concept of it's own, rather than two concepts mashed together with an 'and' in the middle. In an exam of about 90-120 marks, only 4 marks were allocated to SPAG, so they didn't bother teaching it. Simply wasn't worth it to get a good grade. The closest student to me in the sp/g test I mentioned only scored something like 65%.
Generally, my spelling and grammar is good. I scored 100% in a comprehensive sp/grammar test in my last year of school, but there's a good chance I'll cock up something in the following post, just to make me look like a dick:). I can do all of the tasks you mentioned in the third paragraph pretty quickly, except I get a bit slow after 10x10. We didn't learn 11x, 12x tables, and we only learnt how to use metric units. Honestly though, living in the UK, imperial doesn't come up much. Though I did a huge amount of high-ish level maths in school. I think at one point, it was 20hr/week in maths lessons.
Obviously I can't go into the rest of your post here, other than mentioning that finding the differences between event-driven and object oriented programming is a little strange thing to ask. Event-driven isn't really in the same category, so it's entirely different, but can be a characteristic of both OO and non-OO code. My use of social networks is limited to Facebook with my other work colleagues (all older) and there are no pictures of me on it besides a standard passport portrait of my face. Oh, and I don't drink. I now work as a programmer for a great company and I don't have a degree. I finished school last year, because I am only 19.
I love Linux and run it on many computers at home, and have never been particularly fond of Microsoft, but you really have to give this to them. It's more open than what Adobe have to offer and they're being far more cooperative than Adobe generally were. Remember, mono/moonlight are *open source*.. not even just a binary blob provided by Microsoft.
They've repeatedly helped the Mono developers and have truly made an effort to set a new precedent with many of their.NET technologies. In general, they're far more open (in specification and implementation) than their previous development efforts. Their new file formats aren't perfect, but they're certainly better than what came before.
I suppose that this, codeplex and their other efforts could be all a big plot to win mindshare from OSS developers and users and convert them to MS, then they'll break compatibility again, but really if they think that will succeed, they're living in a fairy tale world. Honestly, I do think this is an attempt to be a bit more cooperative, even for business reasons. The best thing we can do as Linux users is support actions that facilitate open platform and do our best to stifle technologies that are clearly an attempt to do the opposite. For example, if you work in a MS shop, try to get them to use their more open products over their closed ones.
What I think this is truly indicating is that OSS (and Apple) are hurting Microsoft's profit, and they're doing their best to hold their position in a more cross-platform market.
Fair enough. If you want to use Linux without the package manager, that's entirely up to you. I was just saying it's a big difference between Windows and Linux (usually).
For me, dpkg/apt is a great package manager. I almost never get any dependency resolution problems that can't be solved by apt-get update. For packages that don't exist in the repository, they usually exist in a 3rd party repos, or are easy to make yourself with checkinstall or any number of other tools.
Also, as far as many Linux packages only using a dependency once, that is rarely true. Try ldd-ing any of your binaries and comparing what's common between them. Another reason is that I can apt-get the library dev version, develop against it, all without having to depend on a potentially large UI frontend for it. Bear in mind, Linux is made to be very developer friendly.
You'll also find that the average download produced by apt-get for a program will be smaller than the application on Windows. I've used Linux on dial-up before... And if you have any access to broadband, you can generate download lists for when you get access to it.
Also, as a developer, it's best practice to keep the dependencies for your projects in your source control repository, just in-case they disappear for whatever reason. If it disappears, release the source on your page since it's GPL.
"Slackware sucks, it has no package manager." [...] There are still some of us left that don't think the primary goal of every linux distro is to become a clone of the Windows desktop.
I always felt that a decent package manager was one of the things that really seperated Linux from Windows.:)
conclusion : positioning is not only unimportant, but also deteriorating to the sound quality after 2.1 (or stereo), because noone ever sits in the middle of an orchestra or a rock band while listening to music.
Only because they *can't* sit in the middle of a rock-band while listening to music. It's just not practical to do so, particularly in a crowd of more than five people.
Given that it *is* practical to have more than two/three audio channels, and that human ears are able to sense direction in more than left to right (ever seen someone look behind them when there's a loud bang?), why not have more than two/three channels?
Directional audio certainly enhances a film, there's no reason it can't enhance music either.
For the sake of completeness, while humans only have two raw audio-in channels, they can hear things in a vague sound-sphere because of our mental processing and head related transfer functions. This is very much human-dependent and fairly difficult to emulate, and isn't done in most recordings. Greater than two channel sound is generally best we've currently got access to with most consumer level hardware.
Humans don't recharge at sleep time; they recharge at mealtimes. Sleep-time is more like defragmenting, repairing errors and performing daily cleanup tasks.
Most windowing systems work this way at the core level when it comes to keyboard shortcuts. To interpret them, typically the default OS abstractions (APIs and such) can translate them into the default behaviors. UI elements work the same way. Technically they're drawn by the program but they use OS libraries (GTK, Cocoa, etc.) and that makes it fit in with the rest of the system.
Man teaches himself programming, writes some software in his own time and on a military paycheck. Military use his software for free and without permission.
Massive, rich, monopolising megacorporation writes buggy software. Military license it for $millions.
My MacBook Pro WiFi signal meter isn't even an indicator. While it's connected, it's on 4/4 95% of the time, 3/4 the remaining 5% of the time.
It *never* goes lower, even when it's disconnecting every 20 seconds. It just fluctuates between disconnected and full signal.
It's not the chipset either. Using various unofficial tools, I can measure the SNR in a way that actually corresponds with the connection's behaviour. It works too, because when I first used it, I thought "hey, the signal is great!". That enthusiasm wore off very quickly...
opening Firefox 3 in that environment (not doing anything) takes about 900 MB of ram. Wow, seriously? Are you reading the whole VM memory count (VSZ) or just the swapped in (RSS) number?
Firefox 3 (with 4 tabs open) for me is using about 1.1 GiB of VSZ with about 168 MiB of RSS. It's still the most memory intensive application currently running on my system but I never really notice too much of a problem, and I've only got 1 GiB of physical memory.
I wouldn't say so. Mathematics is a set of rules and axioms, but you need physics to help design the set of rules that is useful for modelling real life. You could design a custom mathematical system to be however you want and still be self-consistent, but be completely non-useful for questions involving reality.
Generally things like propositional logic and the axioms of mathematics are held to be self-evident physically. However, some things were thought to be mathematically self evident until physicists proved that they either weren't always true or that they depend on the universe in some way, Euclidian Geometry for example.
Then as the GP states, some people argue that maths is a subset of philosophy. Indeed, some people argue the other way around too.
My belief is that they are all interrelated fields that when combined can be used to answer questions about reality, but when studied individually can be interesting nevertheless (and sometimes even useful).
I propose we go a step further: forget real world appendages entirely. Lets go virtual appendages. If we can figure out how to translate thoughts into movement, assumably we could disable the actual arm's ability to move and feel with anaesthetic or something. All we need then is some sort of method for communicating sensory data back into the brain from the computer. Obviously that's not as easy done as said, but still... I hope it's possible.
One step closer to being able to shed this shitty world and move into a virtual house with an 750GB cupboard full of old records that are invulnerable to damage and fully indexed.:)
It'd could be like the device on that American Dad episode.. "Vacation Goo".
Seems that Flex provides a more complete Flash creation tool than this software. What's more, Adobe are supporting it under Linux, and you can pick up an alpha version of Flex Builder based on Eclipse already.
To me, it seems that this software would be more suited to a plugin for OpenOffice.org Impress.
Computer games seem to not play very well when on a HDTV, sitting at the couch. Due to the overscan of the TV, you need to set it up carefully so that all stuff appears onscreen, and then the controls visible are often too small to see at a distance... most games lack a UI size option, too, so you need to turn down the resolution to a non-native size. I tried it.
Console game developers *target* standard hardware where you're going to be using one or more of a standard type of handheld controller and sitting a few meters away from a (HD)TV of a standard resolution. Designing games to work like this requires effort, and until PC game developers consider this as a use-case at the very least, then PC gaming will not take off in the living room. A worrying amount of games still don't even support USB gamepads, let alone wireless stuff with weird features like motion sensitivity.
Plus I was pretty disappointed when my £1000-1-year-ago PC didn't play Crysis on anything above a combination of low and medium on 1024x768. I was going to upgrade to a new gaming PC with the latest graphics and CPU, but decided against it. I now own a PS3, and I am very happy with it.:)
How many home users give a shit about the TOS until they get a nasty letter?:)
Plus those with the inclination will discover things like freedns, noip, dyndns, etc. which, whether running a webserver or not, certainly help with the whole dynamic IP problem.
Indeed. This lawsuit is nonsensical. In addition to your above complaint, they claim that the iPod software is "crippleware" since it lacks the ability to play WMA files. This doesn't make sense. Even if one chip on the iPod supports WMA, it doesn't mean they could magically make the iPod work perfectly with WMA just by "uncrippling" it. They'd have to write the iTunes code to handle WMAs, they'd need to make sure iTunes on OS X and Windows supports WMA, they'd need to do quality assurance on it, in addition to licensing WMA and it's DRM.
I'm all for forcing Apple to open up their FairPlay DRM, but this doesn't make sense. It was the companies selling the music's choice to offer their music in WMA, knowing fully it wouldn't work on the iPod. MP3s work on the iPod, as others have mentioned. If I started selling my music in some weird proprietary format, I wouldn't expect Apple to pay me £800k year to license it, even if one of their chips had some support for it.
Apple licensing WMA wouldn't even change much. The same media is available for both suites (iTMS+iPod or PlaysForSure store/device) and there is nothing forcing anyone to choose one type of player over the other. It's not like if you buy a non-Apple player you can't use certain websites, can't connect to certain networks and can't open certain files (except the FairPlay stuff, which I said above might deserve changing). iPods supporting WMA wouldn't demonopolise anything.
On a sample size of something as small as 5 systems, as I quoted, you can't make very certain estimates about the 'true' probability of such an event occuring. It could be 0.1% per box of average use, and I might just be very unlucky. To be honest, I wasn't even trying to say "Windows crashes all the time" or any such thing. I was trying to say that there if there is a file that a corruption bug, it could potentially make a computer unbootable by playing with that file. Coupled with an interesting piece of information about how the things tends to happen to me at the worst time.:)
As for it happening on systems other than mine, I have observed it on corporate computers, and no it doesn't cause any problems, since there are usually lots of spare boxes lying around that you can just swap over. From my time working in an office on tech support, of the 1000 computers, about 2 or 3 would screw up every day in some way or other* and you'd just restore the hard drive from an image and give them a temp box to use in the meantime. Usually you'd just restore it without even looking into the problem, since usually all investigating it would do is waste time. If it didn't fix the problem, you might investigate it then. I understand this may be a different experience in different sized offices, nevertheless I'm just stating what I observed: unbootable bugs on client computers don't really cause too much of a problem. Servers also do have unbootable bugs sometimes, but usually for important things you have some level of redundancy or at least spares with the ability to get things back working quickly again.
As to why it happened frequently on my computers, it could be anything, from minor hardware problems to small bugs in the write caching code on Windows. I don't think it's anything I'm doing, unless you count using the computer far more often than a lot of other people. I always shut down the computer correctly, though they *do* sometimes crash on shutdown, but it's rare I notice this since I'm usually rebooting rather than turning it off completely. By default, XP reboots when it BSODs.
NT may be fairly stable, but the idea that all BSODs are because of the hardware or your vendor drivers is deeply flawed. Microsoft and Windows bugs do cause BSODs. To be fair, many of them only occur on certain hardware and usually corporate hardware (as in, basic graphics acceleration and such) is the most stable for running Windows. Remember: a bug that only exhibits itself on certain hardware can still be your/Microsoft's fault, since the hardware that exposes the bug may be using a particular set of features that causes the problem. Hardware-dependent does not imply malfunctioning hardware.
The hardware on my machines seems fine, memcheck passes, the hard drives are good and Linux never crashes (since I got nVidia cards, that is). You might want to reconsider your view that Windows has no bugs that can cause data corruption (as identified in the statement "If it occurs after a normal shutdown then it is hardware related and not Windows related."). It is possible it was my hardware, though at the same time, given the reliability of the systems when running Linux, which I use far more, it seems more likely to be something to do with the operating system.
* Doesn't necesarrily mean unbootable, but possibly icons not appearing on the desktop or some other strange issue.
Google this: Windows XP could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM
That seems to happen quite randomly, not sure of the cause, but it's happened to me on three (of five) systems, after a clean shutdown and all that. One of those times it happened on holiday, when I didn't have time to fix it, and another time it happened just as I was about to leave to a LAN party.:D Lucky eh?
If you read some of the OS X vulnerabilities, you'll see that they're often in non-Apple software, such as CVE-2007-5476 (Highly Critical) which describes a "vulnerability in Adobe Flash Player 9.0.47.0 and earlier, when running on Opera before 9.24 on Mac OS X". The Microsoft vulnerabilities tend to be referring only to the Microsoft software
Also, the way they rate vulnerabilities seems to be different. Microsoft "Highly critical" vulnerabilities seem to all be remote arbitrary code, and "Less critical" can be remote DoS, whereas "Highly critical" on OS X seems to sometimes include DoS. Infact, CVE-2007-4702 (less critical) doesn't even seem to be a security vulnerability. I thought it was discussed and found that the application firewall on OS X functioned as documented (though potentially not as a user would expect). CVE-2007-3036 and CVE-2007-0023 seem to describe similar vulnerabilities, but they're rated less critical on Windows than OS X.
Slashdot Mirror
What the hell? Is this post sarcastic?
Android: Connect to the internet, sync your contacts with gmail, open gmail with your PC, select "contacts", download the contacts as a CSV file on your PC, edit it via openoffice.org, reupload the edited CSV file to gmail, sync your phone again, disconnect it from the internet.
Or just edit the contact directly on the phone, much like with any other phone. It will auto-sync back to gmail. I tend to edit my contacts on the gmail interface because I prefer having a full sized keyboard, but if I'm out, I've never had any problem with conctact maintenance directly on the phone. I don't know what you're talking about with CSVs and openoffice... I don't even have an office suite installed.
Open your desk's drawer, take out the usb cable, connect your phone to the PC, select "mass storage mode", turn to the PC, search the phone filesystem for the photos (they're intuitively located in a "100MEDIA" subfolder in a "DCIM" folder, and called "IMAG%04d.jpg" - you'll have to figure out what files contain the photos you need), copy them to the PC, safely remove the usb device from the PC, put the usb cable back in the drawer.
I've never had to plug my phone in for anything other than development or charging. Sending images over bluetooth works just fine, but I tend to upload them to picasa or email them straight from the phone, either via the wifi or 3G.
Open "music" by selecting it from the applications menu. A fancy but unuseful cover flow display appears. Press the "three horizontal lines" glyph. Another menu appears. Press the "person with a microphone" glyph. The menu changes. Find YourFavouriteArtist by scrolling the whole list or pressing the "search" button and then tapping "Y", and select him. Press the "musical note glyph", then select the first track.
I use spotify so I can't comment.
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3562&p=12
According to this article, it's between 25-30W, and it fits into any standard Mini-ITX case. Couple it with a low power hard disk or CF drive and it'll be very power efficient. It's also possible to run it completely passively cooled, and if you wanted to use it as a media frontend, it'd be more than capable. You can even get a version that comes with it's own external power brick rather than a PSU.
I'm not 100% sure since a lot of people here use "is" for that type of sentence. Maybe it's a regional dialect thing. Certainly in this case, I would personally have used "are", had I not initially written SPAG and then expanded it to something sensible without checking the context ;). When I first wrote the post, I had made the point that I was referring more to when I'm paying attention, rather than an informal context like /. where I pretty much just dump brain to keyboard... should have left that in.
In school, the term "Spelling and Grammar" was always used, never "Spelling" or "Grammar" on their own. Most people seem to have developed this idea that it is a concept of it's own, rather than two concepts mashed together with an 'and' in the middle. In an exam of about 90-120 marks, only 4 marks were allocated to SPAG, so they didn't bother teaching it. Simply wasn't worth it to get a good grade. The closest student to me in the sp/g test I mentioned only scored something like 65%.
Note: I dislike the education system here.
Generally, my spelling and grammar is good. I scored 100% in a comprehensive sp/grammar test in my last year of school, but there's a good chance I'll cock up something in the following post, just to make me look like a dick :). I can do all of the tasks you mentioned in the third paragraph pretty quickly, except I get a bit slow after 10x10. We didn't learn 11x, 12x tables, and we only learnt how to use metric units. Honestly though, living in the UK, imperial doesn't come up much. Though I did a huge amount of high-ish level maths in school. I think at one point, it was 20hr/week in maths lessons.
Obviously I can't go into the rest of your post here, other than mentioning that finding the differences between event-driven and object oriented programming is a little strange thing to ask. Event-driven isn't really in the same category, so it's entirely different, but can be a characteristic of both OO and non-OO code. My use of social networks is limited to Facebook with my other work colleagues (all older) and there are no pictures of me on it besides a standard passport portrait of my face. Oh, and I don't drink. I now work as a programmer for a great company and I don't have a degree. I finished school last year, because I am only 19.
I love Linux and run it on many computers at home, and have never been particularly fond of Microsoft, but you really have to give this to them. It's more open than what Adobe have to offer and they're being far more cooperative than Adobe generally were. Remember, mono/moonlight are *open source*.. not even just a binary blob provided by Microsoft.
They've repeatedly helped the Mono developers and have truly made an effort to set a new precedent with many of their .NET technologies. In general, they're far more open (in specification and implementation) than their previous development efforts. Their new file formats aren't perfect, but they're certainly better than what came before.
I suppose that this, codeplex and their other efforts could be all a big plot to win mindshare from OSS developers and users and convert them to MS, then they'll break compatibility again, but really if they think that will succeed, they're living in a fairy tale world. Honestly, I do think this is an attempt to be a bit more cooperative, even for business reasons. The best thing we can do as Linux users is support actions that facilitate open platform and do our best to stifle technologies that are clearly an attempt to do the opposite. For example, if you work in a MS shop, try to get them to use their more open products over their closed ones.
What I think this is truly indicating is that OSS (and Apple) are hurting Microsoft's profit, and they're doing their best to hold their position in a more cross-platform market.
Fair enough. If you want to use Linux without the package manager, that's entirely up to you. I was just saying it's a big difference between Windows and Linux (usually).
For me, dpkg/apt is a great package manager. I almost never get any dependency resolution problems that can't be solved by apt-get update. For packages that don't exist in the repository, they usually exist in a 3rd party repos, or are easy to make yourself with checkinstall or any number of other tools.
Also, as far as many Linux packages only using a dependency once, that is rarely true. Try ldd-ing any of your binaries and comparing what's common between them. Another reason is that I can apt-get the library dev version, develop against it, all without having to depend on a potentially large UI frontend for it. Bear in mind, Linux is made to be very developer friendly.
You'll also find that the average download produced by apt-get for a program will be smaller than the application on Windows. I've used Linux on dial-up before... And if you have any access to broadband, you can generate download lists for when you get access to it.
Also, as a developer, it's best practice to keep the dependencies for your projects in your source control repository, just in-case they disappear for whatever reason. If it disappears, release the source on your page since it's GPL.
I always felt that a decent package manager was one of the things that really seperated Linux from Windows. :)
I agree with the rest though.
I don't need it to survive as such, but internet access is pretty much a job requirement when working in my field, so I need it to buy food. :D.
Nearly every Linux kernel module manages it.. (rmmod).
conclusion : positioning is not only unimportant, but also deteriorating to the sound quality after 2.1 (or stereo), because noone ever sits in the middle of an orchestra or a rock band while listening to music.
Only because they *can't* sit in the middle of a rock-band while listening to music. It's just not practical to do so, particularly in a crowd of more than five people.
Given that it *is* practical to have more than two/three audio channels, and that human ears are able to sense direction in more than left to right (ever seen someone look behind them when there's a loud bang?), why not have more than two/three channels?
Directional audio certainly enhances a film, there's no reason it can't enhance music either.
For the sake of completeness, while humans only have two raw audio-in channels, they can hear things in a vague sound-sphere because of our mental processing and head related transfer functions. This is very much human-dependent and fairly difficult to emulate, and isn't done in most recordings. Greater than two channel sound is generally best we've currently got access to with most consumer level hardware.
Humans don't recharge at sleep time; they recharge at mealtimes. Sleep-time is more like defragmenting, repairing errors and performing daily cleanup tasks.
Most windowing systems work this way at the core level when it comes to keyboard shortcuts. To interpret them, typically the default OS abstractions (APIs and such) can translate them into the default behaviors. UI elements work the same way. Technically they're drawn by the program but they use OS libraries (GTK, Cocoa, etc.) and that makes it fit in with the rest of the system.
So...
Man teaches himself programming, writes some software in his own time and on a military paycheck. Military use his software for free and without permission.
Massive, rich, monopolising megacorporation writes buggy software. Military license it for $millions.
Yeah. Seems fair.
My MacBook Pro WiFi signal meter isn't even an indicator. While it's connected, it's on 4/4 95% of the time, 3/4 the remaining 5% of the time.
It *never* goes lower, even when it's disconnecting every 20 seconds. It just fluctuates between disconnected and full signal.
It's not the chipset either. Using various unofficial tools, I can measure the SNR in a way that actually corresponds with the connection's behaviour. It works too, because when I first used it, I thought "hey, the signal is great!". That enthusiasm wore off very quickly...
Firefox 3 (with 4 tabs open) for me is using about 1.1 GiB of VSZ with about 168 MiB of RSS. It's still the most memory intensive application currently running on my system but I never really notice too much of a problem, and I've only got 1 GiB of physical memory.
I wouldn't say so. Mathematics is a set of rules and axioms, but you need physics to help design the set of rules that is useful for modelling real life. You could design a custom mathematical system to be however you want and still be self-consistent, but be completely non-useful for questions involving reality.
Generally things like propositional logic and the axioms of mathematics are held to be self-evident physically. However, some things were thought to be mathematically self evident until physicists proved that they either weren't always true or that they depend on the universe in some way, Euclidian Geometry for example.
Then as the GP states, some people argue that maths is a subset of philosophy. Indeed, some people argue the other way around too.
My belief is that they are all interrelated fields that when combined can be used to answer questions about reality, but when studied individually can be interesting nevertheless (and sometimes even useful).
I propose we go a step further: forget real world appendages entirely. Lets go virtual appendages. If we can figure out how to translate thoughts into movement, assumably we could disable the actual arm's ability to move and feel with anaesthetic or something. All we need then is some sort of method for communicating sensory data back into the brain from the computer. Obviously that's not as easy done as said, but still... I hope it's possible.
:)
One step closer to being able to shed this shitty world and move into a virtual house with an 750GB cupboard full of old records that are invulnerable to damage and fully indexed.
It'd could be like the device on that American Dad episode.. "Vacation Goo".
But the original post said "Generally". If you swap "some" with "no", you get "there is generally no level of quality control there".
I think that may have been what the poster meant.
Seems that Flex provides a more complete Flash creation tool than this software. What's more, Adobe are supporting it under Linux, and you can pick up an alpha version of Flex Builder based on Eclipse already.
To me, it seems that this software would be more suited to a plugin for OpenOffice.org Impress.
Computer games seem to not play very well when on a HDTV, sitting at the couch. Due to the overscan of the TV, you need to set it up carefully so that all stuff appears onscreen, and then the controls visible are often too small to see at a distance... most games lack a UI size option, too, so you need to turn down the resolution to a non-native size. I tried it.
:)
Console game developers *target* standard hardware where you're going to be using one or more of a standard type of handheld controller and sitting a few meters away from a (HD)TV of a standard resolution. Designing games to work like this requires effort, and until PC game developers consider this as a use-case at the very least, then PC gaming will not take off in the living room. A worrying amount of games still don't even support USB gamepads, let alone wireless stuff with weird features like motion sensitivity.
Plus I was pretty disappointed when my £1000-1-year-ago PC didn't play Crysis on anything above a combination of low and medium on 1024x768. I was going to upgrade to a new gaming PC with the latest graphics and CPU, but decided against it. I now own a PS3, and I am very happy with it.
How many home users give a shit about the TOS until they get a nasty letter? :)
Plus those with the inclination will discover things like freedns, noip, dyndns, etc. which, whether running a webserver or not, certainly help with the whole dynamic IP problem.
Indeed. This lawsuit is nonsensical. In addition to your above complaint, they claim that the iPod software is "crippleware" since it lacks the ability to play WMA files. This doesn't make sense. Even if one chip on the iPod supports WMA, it doesn't mean they could magically make the iPod work perfectly with WMA just by "uncrippling" it. They'd have to write the iTunes code to handle WMAs, they'd need to make sure iTunes on OS X and Windows supports WMA, they'd need to do quality assurance on it, in addition to licensing WMA and it's DRM.
I'm all for forcing Apple to open up their FairPlay DRM, but this doesn't make sense. It was the companies selling the music's choice to offer their music in WMA, knowing fully it wouldn't work on the iPod. MP3s work on the iPod, as others have mentioned. If I started selling my music in some weird proprietary format, I wouldn't expect Apple to pay me £800k year to license it, even if one of their chips had some support for it.
Apple licensing WMA wouldn't even change much. The same media is available for both suites (iTMS+iPod or PlaysForSure store/device) and there is nothing forcing anyone to choose one type of player over the other. It's not like if you buy a non-Apple player you can't use certain websites, can't connect to certain networks and can't open certain files (except the FairPlay stuff, which I said above might deserve changing). iPods supporting WMA wouldn't demonopolise anything.
On a sample size of something as small as 5 systems, as I quoted, you can't make very certain estimates about the 'true' probability of such an event occuring. It could be 0.1% per box of average use, and I might just be very unlucky. To be honest, I wasn't even trying to say "Windows crashes all the time" or any such thing. I was trying to say that there if there is a file that a corruption bug, it could potentially make a computer unbootable by playing with that file. Coupled with an interesting piece of information about how the things tends to happen to me at the worst time. :)
As for it happening on systems other than mine, I have observed it on corporate computers, and no it doesn't cause any problems, since there are usually lots of spare boxes lying around that you can just swap over. From my time working in an office on tech support, of the 1000 computers, about 2 or 3 would screw up every day in some way or other* and you'd just restore the hard drive from an image and give them a temp box to use in the meantime. Usually you'd just restore it without even looking into the problem, since usually all investigating it would do is waste time. If it didn't fix the problem, you might investigate it then. I understand this may be a different experience in different sized offices, nevertheless I'm just stating what I observed: unbootable bugs on client computers don't really cause too much of a problem. Servers also do have unbootable bugs sometimes, but usually for important things you have some level of redundancy or at least spares with the ability to get things back working quickly again.
As to why it happened frequently on my computers, it could be anything, from minor hardware problems to small bugs in the write caching code on Windows. I don't think it's anything I'm doing, unless you count using the computer far more often than a lot of other people. I always shut down the computer correctly, though they *do* sometimes crash on shutdown, but it's rare I notice this since I'm usually rebooting rather than turning it off completely. By default, XP reboots when it BSODs.
NT may be fairly stable, but the idea that all BSODs are because of the hardware or your vendor drivers is deeply flawed. Microsoft and Windows bugs do cause BSODs. To be fair, many of them only occur on certain hardware and usually corporate hardware (as in, basic graphics acceleration and such) is the most stable for running Windows. Remember: a bug that only exhibits itself on certain hardware can still be your/Microsoft's fault, since the hardware that exposes the bug may be using a particular set of features that causes the problem. Hardware-dependent does not imply malfunctioning hardware.
The hardware on my machines seems fine, memcheck passes, the hard drives are good and Linux never crashes (since I got nVidia cards, that is). You might want to reconsider your view that Windows has no bugs that can cause data corruption (as identified in the statement "If it occurs after a normal shutdown then it is hardware related and not Windows related."). It is possible it was my hardware, though at the same time, given the reliability of the systems when running Linux, which I use far more, it seems more likely to be something to do with the operating system.
* Doesn't necesarrily mean unbootable, but possibly icons not appearing on the desktop or some other strange issue.
Google this:
:D Lucky eh?
Windows XP could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM
That seems to happen quite randomly, not sure of the cause, but it's happened to me on three (of five) systems, after a clean shutdown and all that. One of those times it happened on holiday, when I didn't have time to fix it, and another time it happened just as I was about to leave to a LAN party.
If you read some of the OS X vulnerabilities, you'll see that they're often in non-Apple software, such as CVE-2007-5476 (Highly Critical) which describes a "vulnerability in Adobe Flash Player 9.0.47.0 and earlier, when running on Opera before 9.24 on Mac OS X". The Microsoft vulnerabilities tend to be referring only to the Microsoft software
Also, the way they rate vulnerabilities seems to be different. Microsoft "Highly critical" vulnerabilities seem to all be remote arbitrary code, and "Less critical" can be remote DoS, whereas "Highly critical" on OS X seems to sometimes include DoS. Infact, CVE-2007-4702 (less critical) doesn't even seem to be a security vulnerability. I thought it was discussed and found that the application firewall on OS X functioned as documented (though potentially not as a user would expect). CVE-2007-3036 and CVE-2007-0023 seem to describe similar vulnerabilities, but they're rated less critical on Windows than OS X.