1. Spyware which automagically clicks ads to earn revenue for the spyware affiliate (yes, Google does try to weed these bastards out but they're not 100% successful)
2. Competitors paying people to surf and click on other companies' ads
3. Sites which display ads and run the "get paid to surf the web" scams, where they pay you for every ad you click on their sites
Not all click-through advertisements are legitimate, and I can imagine that some cutthroat industries bemoaning a 1200:1 hit ratio (where a click turns into a sale) with this kind of crap going on, especially when there is no problem with the first impression of the target site.
Eventually your PCHDTV card will quit running or you will no longer be able to find a motherboard with 5V PCI slots, and then you'll give a shit about it because then it will affect you. In the meantime, you should be thinking about more than just yourself because self-centered thinking always comes back to bite you in the long run.
Is a label-owned network beginning to get it? All they need to do next is:
1. Make it cross-platform (I run Linux - presumably it requires Windows Media Player or their own player thanks to DRM?) 2. Make the purchased tracks unencumbered by DRM (see #1) 3. Offer a lossless-compression option
But this is a first step - they're finally beginning to grasp the concept that the "try before you buy" model actually works with music. That's what many folks used the original Napster for - to randomly search for and download music, listen to a bit of a bunch of tracks, delete the crap and then go to amazon.com or somewhere else and actually order the CD. I discovered a LOT of great music that way, music I'd never have discovered otherwise. I'd never have guessed I like Jazz as much as I do if it weren't for the original Napster network.
However, considering that the tracks are (presumably) DRM-encumbered and lossy, even if I were to set up a Windows box (or finagle with wine) to use the new Napster, I'd still go elsewhere to buy the CD, and get some nice artwork with the CD to boot.
No, you'll be running the Windows 2003 look, IIRC. No Luna theme. Basically Windows 2000 with a two-column start menu, just like Windows XP when run with the "classic" theme.
Every time this legislation comes up it gets thrown out. Why doesn't the MPAA embrace technology rather than buying off Congressmen and sneaking this line item into every damn piece of proposed legislation?
Yast, not so much, because it's point-and-click selection (or tab-and-space if you run it at a shell prompt). Need to add a YaST repository your buddy emailed you so you can get a DVD player and a non-linear DVD editor? Point-and-click to add the repository. Simple stuff, and yes, it's actually easier than some Windows apps in some respects.
yum and apt-get? If you know exactly what to request, you can type it at the command line. If you don't know what to type to get, say, klives, or don't even know the program exists but know you want a video editor, it's not much of a help to the user now, is it? At least YaST lets you browse the repositories and discover applications you might never discover otherwise.
On an off-topic note, that's how I discovered a LOT of music I ended up buying on CD I never would have found otherwise, thanks to Napster. I never ever would have discovered Herb Alpert/Tijuana Brass without randomly querying and downloading on Napster, and RIAA would never have gotten my money for those CDs otherwise. Sorry about the off-topic comment, but it's kind of related to the ease of YaST - by being able to visually browse the repository and read the descriptions, it's easy to discover a great deal of applications you might find you needed, without ever knowing to specifically look for "foo application" in the first place.
I know people who actually PAY gotomypc.com for their VNC/DynDNS service even though I tell them that they're basically paying a monthly fee for free software and dynamic DNS. Some people think that a for-pay option always has to be better than a free option. Some people are stupid like that.:)
Sometimes it's not a matter of not knowing there is documentation, but how to find the topic you need. man -k is useful, but only to an extent, and grep? Oh, please. The end user is not going to know the exact term to search for, how to search files in the filesystem, or grasp the syntax for grep, even as simple as it is. Tit-for-tat copying of commands from a very-well written howto for compiling a kernel in a pinch, sure, but not for something where you have to vary from the example even a tiny bit. It's not that people are stupid, either, but a threefold reason:
1. There are different kinds of intelligence and learning styles 2. People are often lazy 3. Help on *nix isn't particularly friendly to beginners, making #1 even more of a handicap
Admittedly #2 is the largest contributor to the problem, but compound it by the fact that Microsoft makes finding help very, very painless, between their fully-indexed online help, their very easy to search online knowledgebase, and their $125-%250/incident tech support. Also, it's even easier for developers - need to know what an API call does, or what its parameters are used for? Help is just a keystroke or a context menu away. and the IDE offers the very best online help of any IDE. I know that kdevelop is trying to mimic this behavior and it's getting there, but Microsoft's stuff is still vastly superior in this regard.
SuSE's KDE help is pretty good for searching documentation for an out-of-the-box installation, but as soon as you start upgrading packages, the help often breaks, and even out of the box, many help topics are often blank or have something which essentially says " to be written later "
I run Firefox 1.5.0.1 and MSN is indeed an available option. IIRC I did have to select "Add Engines" but it is most definitely in the list now, as is Dictionary, IMDB, and Wikipedia respectively.
Mumps is on topic, that Brady Bunch episode is the one where Bobby Brady thought he might have gotten the mumps, and it's off-topic?
What the hell are you wasting your mod points for? Go mod up an insightful or interesting post, and if you can't be bothered to click a link to check the context, leave a post the fuck alone. Don't waste mod points modding posts down, dumbass. Read the fucking FAQ, n00b.
I have an idea, a really novel one. No, really! Why can't they. . . no, wait, uh, let me think. Oh, I know! Apply the coating they used to use back when the tank was painted white, since that coating allowed for safer shedding of the condensation!
Sure, payload would be decreased by a few thousand pounds because of the mass of the paint, but at least the existing tank design was safer when painted with the coating it was originally designed and flown with.
Because the contract covers defined methods of distribution, and online distribution is not allowed by the license from the copyright holders, this means that the labels themselves are guilty of copyright infringement, and are doing so willfully, for profit, and by levying fees against the artists and mailing checks which are baased on the fraudulent fees, they are adding mail fraud on top of the simple copyright infringement (of which there would be 1.000,000,000 individual counts if files). This is a felony actiity, and obviously piracy (if we accept the new term piracy).
This is obviously not within fair use (simple trading of mix tapes for free, which is essentially what is done on P2P networks) but criminal activity, and as we all know, piracy funds terr'rists. Therefore, homeland security and the NSA should be closely scrutinizing the big labels (and their subsidiary "Indie (but not so Independent" labels) for terr'rist funding.
They're using dual-core AMD opterons and Athlon X2 processors and NVidia video cards, and brought SCSI back? How in God's name did I miss that headline?
Oh right, you're a Mac Fanboi abusing the AC feature. Carry on then!;)
They implemented it via ActiveX (which was why OWA only worked properly in MSIE - everyone other browser had a crippled exchange web mail client as a result), which essentially crippled AJAX techniques, especially with the advent of Service Pack 2.
Dunno, when I brought up BugMeNot in other threads I got modded flamebait.
It seems n00bs with mod points don't read the fucking faqs and need to feel important by modding people down, and when they see "BugMeNot" rather than fucking googling they assume you're insulting somebody and act in accordance with their ignorance and inferiority complexes. But then, that's just my guess.
Precursors, dating back to the Iran-Iraq war, right? (Who supplied Iraq with them is immaterial at this point)
Found: Roadside bomb loaded with sarin gas
Who produced it? "Militant" groups independent of Saddam? Saddam's regime? Imported from Syria? Anyway, saying that one Sarin-laced bomb was found makes Saddam guilty is like saying that one or two doped-up maniacs at Colombine slaughtering their peers makes the President a criminal. Claims of "facts" in a vacuum (without context or other qualification) mean and prove absolutely nothing.
Found: 1,000 radioactive materials--ideal for radioactive dirty bombs
Radium paint as which used to be used on watch hands would qualify. Could this "fact" be quantified? Are we talking refined uranium or plutonium dust? Or, are we talking about petrified wood which tests positive for radiation with a geiger counter? If it's the latter than I'm guilty of owning WMDs because I have a tiny piece of yellow petrified wood which tested positive with a geiger counter. There are many Americans guilty of owning WMDs by that standard - some are landowners, and some are geologists and rock collectors. In a vaccuum, "1,000 lbs of radioactive materials" is a strawman without more details to quantify exactly what this means.
Found: 17 chemical warheads--some containing cyclosarin, a nerve agent five times more powerful than sarin
1. That's not the "vast stockpiles" that intelligence claimed in 2001-2002, right? 2. Are these the "trace residual amounts" which was the case after Fox was discredited for jumping the gun and not getting details, for the sake of beating others to the punch, in the name of almighty nielsen ratings?
I think that at this point all but the most stubborn admit that WMDs were found. All but the most naive recognize that intelligence was faulty and Iraq had destroyed (or worse, used) most of what they had during the Iran-Iraq conflict, and that they were not guilty of the charges presented by George Bush, at least not to the radical extent he claimed. What I do question though, is this: was intelligence actually THAT far off, or was the intelligence "doctored" to skew the numbers before presenting it to Congress and the press? It's a question none outside of Bush's inner circle will ever know, at least not during the next 50 years or so, until it's all ultimately declassified. Very likely by that time anyone who cares about those details will be either dead or senile, or too old to otherwise care.
Well WMDs were found in Iraq - in trace amounts, mostly residual dating back to the Iran-Iraq war. Fox News just blew it out of proportion, jumping the gun on the development (which ultimately turned out to be non-news), while CNN and everyone else was more restrained.
If you want "Fair and Balanced" listen to both "liberal" and "conservative" outlets and come to your own conclusions based on the evidence, knowing that both put their own biased spin on the subject, and also tune to MSNBC, which seems to be more centrist.
That's what happens when jerks ignore the guidelines and focus on modding posts they disagree with down rather than being objective and modding well-thought-out posts up (whether or not one agress with them personally). Few people here seem to have enough self-control to moderate objectively.:(
Does Microsoft even realise they're being charged with illegal monopoly practises at the moment?
They don't care about being charged. Hell, they don't even blinked at being convicted here in America - they simply delay the next Windows release until the sanctions/limitations run out then do what they please with Longhorn/Vista/Windows XP + Shiny skin and DRM. I'm sure they'll pull a similar move in Europe.
Slashdot Mirror
Your post would be insightful were it not for:
1. Spyware which automagically clicks ads to earn revenue for the spyware affiliate (yes, Google does try to weed these bastards out but they're not 100% successful)
2. Competitors paying people to surf and click on other companies' ads
3. Sites which display ads and run the "get paid to surf the web" scams, where they pay you for every ad you click on their sites
Not all click-through advertisements are legitimate, and I can imagine that some cutthroat industries bemoaning a 1200:1 hit ratio (where a click turns into a sale) with this kind of crap going on, especially when there is no problem with the first impression of the target site.
Eventually your PCHDTV card will quit running or you will no longer be able to find a motherboard with 5V PCI slots, and then you'll give a shit about it because then it will affect you. In the meantime, you should be thinking about more than just yourself because self-centered thinking always comes back to bite you in the long run.
Is a label-owned network beginning to get it? All they need to do next is:
1. Make it cross-platform (I run Linux - presumably it requires Windows Media Player or their own player thanks to DRM?)
2. Make the purchased tracks unencumbered by DRM (see #1)
3. Offer a lossless-compression option
But this is a first step - they're finally beginning to grasp the concept that the "try before you buy" model actually works with music. That's what many folks used the original Napster for - to randomly search for and download music, listen to a bit of a bunch of tracks, delete the crap and then go to amazon.com or somewhere else and actually order the CD. I discovered a LOT of great music that way, music I'd never have discovered otherwise. I'd never have guessed I like Jazz as much as I do if it weren't for the original Napster network.
However, considering that the tracks are (presumably) DRM-encumbered and lossy, even if I were to set up a Windows box (or finagle with wine) to use the new Napster, I'd still go elsewhere to buy the CD, and get some nice artwork with the CD to boot.
No, you'll be running the Windows 2003 look, IIRC. No Luna theme. Basically Windows 2000 with a two-column start menu, just like Windows XP when run with the "classic" theme.
That gets funnier every time it's posted! ;)
Every time this legislation comes up it gets thrown out. Why doesn't the MPAA embrace technology rather than buying off Congressmen and sneaking this line item into every damn piece of proposed legislation?
Yast, not so much, because it's point-and-click selection (or tab-and-space if you run it at a shell prompt). Need to add a YaST repository your buddy emailed you so you can get a DVD player and a non-linear DVD editor? Point-and-click to add the repository. Simple stuff, and yes, it's actually easier than some Windows apps in some respects.
yum and apt-get? If you know exactly what to request, you can type it at the command line. If you don't know what to type to get, say, klives, or don't even know the program exists but know you want a video editor, it's not much of a help to the user now, is it? At least YaST lets you browse the repositories and discover applications you might never discover otherwise.
On an off-topic note, that's how I discovered a LOT of music I ended up buying on CD I never would have found otherwise, thanks to Napster. I never ever would have discovered Herb Alpert/Tijuana Brass without randomly querying and downloading on Napster, and RIAA would never have gotten my money for those CDs otherwise. Sorry about the off-topic comment, but it's kind of related to the ease of YaST - by being able to visually browse the repository and read the descriptions, it's easy to discover a great deal of applications you might find you needed, without ever knowing to specifically look for "foo application" in the first place.
I know people who actually PAY gotomypc.com for their VNC/DynDNS service even though I tell them that they're basically paying a monthly fee for free software and dynamic DNS. Some people think that a for-pay option always has to be better than a free option. Some people are stupid like that. :)
Sometimes it's not a matter of not knowing there is documentation, but how to find the topic you need. man -k is useful, but only to an extent, and grep? Oh, please. The end user is not going to know the exact term to search for, how to search files in the filesystem, or grasp the syntax for grep, even as simple as it is. Tit-for-tat copying of commands from a very-well written howto for compiling a kernel in a pinch, sure, but not for something where you have to vary from the example even a tiny bit. It's not that people are stupid, either, but a threefold reason:
1. There are different kinds of intelligence and learning styles
2. People are often lazy
3. Help on *nix isn't particularly friendly to beginners, making #1 even more of a handicap
Admittedly #2 is the largest contributor to the problem, but compound it by the fact that Microsoft makes finding help very, very painless, between their fully-indexed online help, their very easy to search online knowledgebase, and their $125-%250/incident tech support. Also, it's even easier for developers - need to know what an API call does, or what its parameters are used for? Help is just a keystroke or a context menu away. and the IDE offers the very best online help of any IDE. I know that kdevelop is trying to mimic this behavior and it's getting there, but Microsoft's stuff is still vastly superior in this regard.
SuSE's KDE help is pretty good for searching documentation for an out-of-the-box installation, but as soon as you start upgrading packages, the help often breaks, and even out of the box, many help topics are often blank or have something which essentially says " to be written later "
By that logic I am sitting directly over the exact center of the Earth at this moment. Hey, I'm always directly over the exact center. How about that!
Hmm,
I run Firefox 1.5.0.1 and MSN is indeed an available option. IIRC I did have to select "Add Engines" but it is most definitely in the list now, as is Dictionary, IMDB, and Wikipedia respectively.
Off topic?
Mumps is on topic, that Brady Bunch episode is the one where Bobby Brady thought he might have gotten the mumps, and it's off-topic?
What the hell are you wasting your mod points for? Go mod up an insightful or interesting post, and if you can't be bothered to click a link to check the context, leave a post the fuck alone. Don't waste mod points modding posts down, dumbass. Read the fucking FAQ, n00b.
Remember this Brady Bunch episode?
Aren't autographs information?
;)
Doesn't information want to be free?
Following the logic to its conclusion. . . don't autographs want to be free?
Didn't you hear?
We're not "citizens" any more. We're "taxpayers" or "consumers" most of the time, and in the months leading up to elections, we become "constituents."
I have an idea, a really novel one. No, really! Why can't they. . . no, wait, uh, let me think. Oh, I know! Apply the coating they used to use back when the tank was painted white, since that coating allowed for safer shedding of the condensation!
Sure, payload would be decreased by a few thousand pounds because of the mass of the paint, but at least the existing tank design was safer when painted with the coating it was originally designed and flown with.
You beat me to pointing that out. :(
The other thing I'd nention is this:
Because the contract covers defined methods of distribution, and online distribution is not allowed by the license from the copyright holders, this means that the labels themselves are guilty of copyright infringement, and are doing so willfully, for profit, and by levying fees against the artists and mailing checks which are baased on the fraudulent fees, they are adding mail fraud on top of the simple copyright infringement (of which there would be 1.000,000,000 individual counts if files). This is a felony actiity, and obviously piracy (if we accept the new term piracy).
This is obviously not within fair use (simple trading of mix tapes for free, which is essentially what is done on P2P networks) but criminal activity, and as we all know, piracy funds terr'rists. Therefore, homeland security and the NSA should be closely scrutinizing the big labels (and their subsidiary "Indie (but not so Independent" labels) for terr'rist funding.
That filter is in place because we've all seen those film clips of Ballmer, we know he's a nutcase, and don't need to read quotes from him on /. ;)
:( )
(I fully expect some Windows fanatic who lacks any sense of humor to mod this down as flamebait rather than chuckle and move on past
They're using dual-core AMD opterons and Athlon X2 processors and NVidia video cards, and brought SCSI back? How in God's name did I miss that headline?
Oh right, you're a Mac Fanboi abusing the AC feature. Carry on then!
They implemented it via ActiveX (which was why OWA only worked properly in MSIE - everyone other browser had a crippled exchange web mail client as a result), which essentially crippled AJAX techniques, especially with the advent of Service Pack 2.
Dunno, when I brought up BugMeNot in other threads I got modded flamebait.
It seems n00bs with mod points don't read the fucking faqs and need to feel important by modding people down, and when they see "BugMeNot" rather than fucking googling they assume you're insulting somebody and act in accordance with their ignorance and inferiority complexes. But then, that's just my guess.
Precursors, dating back to the Iran-Iraq war, right? (Who supplied Iraq with them is immaterial at this point)
Who produced it? "Militant" groups independent of Saddam? Saddam's regime? Imported from Syria? Anyway, saying that one Sarin-laced bomb was found makes Saddam guilty is like saying that one or two doped-up maniacs at Colombine slaughtering their peers makes the President a criminal. Claims of "facts" in a vacuum (without context or other qualification) mean and prove absolutely nothing.
Radium paint as which used to be used on watch hands would qualify. Could this "fact" be quantified? Are we talking refined uranium or plutonium dust? Or, are we talking about petrified wood which tests positive for radiation with a geiger counter? If it's the latter than I'm guilty of owning WMDs because I have a tiny piece of yellow petrified wood which tested positive with a geiger counter. There are many Americans guilty of owning WMDs by that standard - some are landowners, and some are geologists and rock collectors. In a vaccuum, "1,000 lbs of radioactive materials" is a strawman without more details to quantify exactly what this means.
1. That's not the "vast stockpiles" that intelligence claimed in 2001-2002, right?
2. Are these the "trace residual amounts" which was the case after Fox was discredited for jumping the gun and not getting details, for the sake of beating others to the punch, in the name of almighty nielsen ratings?
I think that at this point all but the most stubborn admit that WMDs were found. All but the most naive recognize that intelligence was faulty and Iraq had destroyed (or worse, used) most of what they had during the Iran-Iraq conflict, and that they were not guilty of the charges presented by George Bush, at least not to the radical extent he claimed. What I do question though, is this: was intelligence actually THAT far off, or was the intelligence "doctored" to skew the numbers before presenting it to Congress and the press? It's a question none outside of Bush's inner circle will ever know, at least not during the next 50 years or so, until it's all ultimately declassified. Very likely by that time anyone who cares about those details will be either dead or senile, or too old to otherwise care.
Well WMDs were found in Iraq - in trace amounts, mostly residual dating back to the Iran-Iraq war. Fox News just blew it out of proportion, jumping the gun on the development (which ultimately turned out to be non-news), while CNN and everyone else was more restrained.
If you want "Fair and Balanced" listen to both "liberal" and "conservative" outlets and come to your own conclusions based on the evidence, knowing that both put their own biased spin on the subject, and also tune to MSNBC, which seems to be more centrist.
That's what happens when jerks ignore the guidelines and focus on modding posts they disagree with down rather than being objective and modding well-thought-out posts up (whether or not one agress with them personally). Few people here seem to have enough self-control to moderate objectively. :(
They don't care about being charged. Hell, they don't even blinked at being convicted here in America - they simply delay the next Windows release until the sanctions/limitations run out then do what they please with Longhorn/Vista/Windows XP + Shiny skin and DRM. I'm sure they'll pull a similar move in Europe.