Besides the time wasted uninstalling their crap software on my computer, now in order to get my mp3 download of my affected album, I have to disassemble and cut up the artwork/case in order to waste MORE time sending in the original UPC code from my discs - and I don't know about you, but part of the reason I BUY music instead of pirate it is so I'll have the INTACT case/artwork.
All that to get a lousy mp3 copy of the album, so I can FINALLY listen to the damn thing in my car.
Screw SONY. This is not a settlement. This does not make me "whole" after what they did. This just wastes MORE of my time, requires me to destroy the album I purchased, and all I get is some crappy mp3s which I could rip anyhow with any decent oss software.
I appreciate the information on restrictive clauses. I read it with interest.
I'm not entirely convinced, however, that the the clause is restrictive - "American-led divers discovered a new type of Crustacean, that resembles a lobster but has its claws covered in 'sinuous, hair-like strands'."
Leaving out the clause would result in "American-led divers discovered a new type of Crustacean" and that would still be technically correct.
Or, I could just claim to be using 'which' restrictively, in the British-English fashion.
Either way, thanks for the links.
this is by FAR the worst grammar I have ever seen in a summary. I am actually depressed.
"American-led divers discovered a new type of Crustacean,(comma unnecessary) that (which)resembles a lobster but has it's (its, dammit) claws covered in 'sinuous, hair-like strands'. This species is so different, (comma unnecessary) from other Crustacean's (apostrophe inappropriate) that it was classified with a new Family name: Kiwaida. Unfortunately for the Kiwaida, the AP is already using this blind creature and a salad plate in the same sentence."
I guess the same argument to reposting AP content online applies to blogging.
In a print paper, it makes sense to reprint national content because most people subscribe to only one print newspaper. Generally, they don't have access to much more. (Mail-out subscriptions where your news arrives 3 days late really don't count.)
Online, it does seem really redundant to have the same story mirrored across several sites, be they blogs or news sites.
The paper I work for doesn't do this - our AP license does not allow us to republish online, only in print. So what we have on our site is a hosted-content package, where the AP story sits in a frame that appears to be our website, but is not. It's all hosted and maintained by the AP, and the story shows up once on Google News, not individually for every newspaper with hosted content set up.
For what it's worth, though, the NYT republishes very little AP content online - more often, they're the original source of the AP stuff that the rest of us reprint.
I'm sure it's news to most people, but most newspapers do not have the budget to station a photographer, reporter, etc in Iraq or anywhere else stuff is happening. Especially when we only have 5 reporters and 2 photographers on staff as it is.
The situation now is that we cover stuff in our area, we share that content on the AP with papers who aren't in our area, and vice-versa.
Given that there are tens of thousands of newspapers worldwide, it would be pretty moronic if every single one sent out a reporting team to every event that happened. Really..do we NEED 10,000 different versions of the same event? Let alone, 10,000 reporters and 10,000 photographers milling around the spot where the baby fell down the well?
The current system, where a few large news outlets send staff to events of nationwide interest, and local papers cover smaller events (our coverage of a severe local flood got republished nationwide a year ago) works much better. Believe me, when news happens, you do not need MORE looky-loos clogging up a flood-damaged town. Having the 4 papers in the state covering it is more than enough.
...religion infused the debate on SB96 from the beginning. [Senator Chris] Buttars forwarded the proposal because he insisted many evolution lessons contradict religious instruction. He is disgusted by the idea that humans evolved from what he calls a "lower species."
Ha! Wait until he reads the virus story! He thought APES were insulting..
Viruses, long thought to be biology's hitchhikers, turn out to have been biology's formative force.
Aiee! The creationists complained enough when scientists said humans evolved from apes. I'm sure they'll get their hackles up now! How insulting this new theory is.:tsk:
As far as science proving Creation is bunk though, it hasn't and it can't. No matter what mechanism you come up with for the evolution of the universe, you never scientifically find a means that necessarily exludes God from creating it and not being bound by its laws.
In fact, that's what makes Creationism utter bunk as a theory. In order to be considered valid, a theory must be disprovable.
From wikipedia: ..A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is non-scientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people often think) but a vice.
I am sitting on a computer that finally has security software installed as of last night.
We just spent over a month connected to the internet, raw, on XP Pro. DSL connection, computer on 18+ hours daily. Computer USED online 8+ hours daily. (My husband has a WOW problem...)
The security set-up? Windows security center. No physical firewall. Just a direct DSL connection.
The result? After 35 days of relatively unprotected surfing, I ran a full system scan....result?
9 bits of "malware". All of which were ad delivery tracking cookies, i.e. doubleclick. No viruses, no worms, no malicious activeX controls. BTW..we're using F-secure Internet Security Suite now..purely on the basis that they're the only company who actually detected the Sony rootkit.
So now I am wondering, how necessary is security software if you're not a total moron? If you're not opening the "naked pics of Paris Hilton" that some kind person emailed you....if you're not searching for "pr0n" or "warez" and clicking randomly on whatever pops up...if you are browsing in Mozilla and not going to seedy sites, just a couple of trusted ones...if you don't use instant messaging at all, and therefore aren't clicking on random links and files that are sent via AIM....if you're not downloading fun "shareware" games without reading the EULA...
Really...how hard does a person have to try to avoid viruses, worms, malware on either a PC OR a Mac? I'd wager that if you're not a horny gullible idiot, it's pretty effortless.
Isn't that kind of like how we all HAD to learn cursive, because it would be required in middle school, high school, college, the workforce, etc?
Except, of course, that nobody writes anything but their signature in cursive anymore.
Buy a 1993 or 1994 Altima - you can have your speed, signal indicators, and warning lights projected right onto your windshield. It was only available on some of them, though. You can retrofit one that didn't have the option, but it costs about $500 just in parts alone, and that's for used ones. You need a new dash, windshield, instrument panel, and ECU.
To use a bad analogy, we women are using Windows - we can run multiple programs at once, but we're not exactly stable.
Men are back in DOS - one program at a time.
At my workplace, we HAVE to keep around a few computers running Mac OS 9 - why? Because we need to run Quark 4.1. Why? Because the software used to build our classifieds pages - a third-party Quark plugin - will NOT work with any version of Quark newer than 4.1. It will not work with InDesign.
It also will not work with Quark 4.1 running in Classic mode on OSX.
Why don't we just upgrade?
Well, because upgrading the one plugin cannot be done without upgrading the ENTIRE classifieds management system - the software that's used to enter and manage the ads, the database that holds them, the software that syncs with the other software in accounting to bill for the ads.
We are looking at over $200,000 just to upgrade the software. Not counting purchasing individual licenses and dongles for individual computers that have to run it. Not counting the mandatory calls to the evil company that makes this software - they charge a $75 minimum for every support call plus $5/minute. (Yeah, it makes phone sex look cheap.)
(Why don't we just go with another, cheaper, less evil, company? Well...name one. There are very few companies programming this type of software, and they all will nail you with costs.)
And not counting the downtime involved in upgrading, troubleshooting, and restoring to full function of all those computers. One thing to be said about newspapers is that we literally have no downtime. There is nearly ALWAYS someone at the building, logged on and working. There are maybe 2, 3 hour windows each week where IT can take everything completely down without screwing everyone who's trying to get the paper out.
Sure, in magical pixie land where everything's flowers and rainbows, it's easy and cheap for any company to switch completely over to linux or whatever, but back in the real world, many of us would be happy not to be using 9-year old page layout software on a 7-year old OS on a day-to-day basis.
I recently went for 7 months with no car at all. We're a family of 3, including (at the time) a toddler of just over a year, and we walked everywhere - to get groceries, to get movies, to work, to the bus stop, to the bank, etc. Carrying a 20+ lb baby.
I joined Netflix when Blockbuster charged me $14.95 for returning ONE movie 15 minutes late. The sales slip said "due back on Friday, 12 pm" and I mistakenly thought that was midnight...it was noon. (Off topic - why the heck doesn't 12 pm come after 11 pm?)
At the time I was working a 4 pm to 2 am shift, and most days I was not even AWAKE by noon.
I realized that not only was Blockbuster's schedule completely incompatible with mine, but they were assholes too. They refused to remove the late fees - they had charged me for another 5 days for being 15 minutes late - why not ONE day late? There was a class action lawsuit against them a few years back for this.
Nevermind that I can't get the movies I want through Blockbuster anyhow - when's the last time you saw Cannibal the Musical on their shelves?
We just got a 6600 AGP too, and no complaints at all.
I had plenty to complain about with my previous card, an ATI Radeon 7500. Namely, that it kept crashing, and ATI's idiotic error reporting system would, in one screen, claim that error reporting would not disclose any of my personal info to ATI, and in the next screen, demand that I configure Outlook to enable them to send the email.
I don't make roasts either, but it sure would be nice to come home to piping hot lasagna without having to spend 2 hours making it after working the previous 8.
Of course, beyond lasagna, rolls, and breads, everything we make is in the saute pan or the wok.
SiteCatalyst delivers much more detailed information than we could get strictly from the server.
I work at a newspaper, and SiteCatalyst can track hits to individual stories that are delivered through a content management system.
This is important, because where the URL to a page may not change, the content will from day to day, and I have to be able to track visits to the content - not just the page.
It also enables us to easily pull up stats for an entire site section - it provides us with 10 variables on each page, so a given page could be categorized as an article, but also be attributed to the Sports section, and also attributed to a specific publication - so if I want to pull up stats for that publication as a whole, the sports section as a whole (either in just this publication or across publications) or articles as a group, I can do it instantly.
I don't think 2o7.net is inherently evil - yes, we use SiteCatalyst for site traffic, and that means customers get cookied with 2o7.net.
We're not using it for evil - just to see which areas of the site get more traffic, which are entry pages, which are exit pages, etc. It's pretty necessary information for a webmaster of a large site. There's no evil adware involved.
Suppose you're in a big library, books all the way up to the ceiling and surrounding you. This is your hard drive. Every bit of data on the computer is written into one of these books and filed away. The size of your HD determines how big your library is.
Your computer has a table in the middle of the library. Any time you want to work on a project, the computer hauls down all the necessary books and lays them out on the table to read, and write in. This is your RAM, and the amount of RAM you have determines the size of the table - how much information can be hauled out at once.
If your table is not big enough for whatever you're doing, the computer will have to temporarily put back a book, take one down, put that one back, take the first one down, etc. This is "virtual memory", and it is obviously slower than just having a big enough table.
Whatever you're working on is strewn all over your table, and you have the choice to throw it all out when you're done, or to file it in the library for future use. (saving).
The caveat is that your computer will put each new book in the first empty spot it finds on the shelf. Sometimes this means one book here, one there, etc. Next time your computer wants to look at that series of books, it has to check the card catalog, and haul them out from all over the library. This is "fragmentation" - if you "defragment" your hard drive, your computer sorts through the library and puts like books together. It will even put the books you read a lot on the bottom shelf, and the ones you rarely need way up on top.
It's not perfect, but I use some variation on that to explain RAM vs HD to my husband.
Slashdot Mirror
I just set the threshold high enough that there are 100 or fewer comments on nearly every story. :)
Gosh, it's almost like being back at absurd.org back when they actually updated it.
Seconded. I switched to having all the crap on one page because it was so darned hard to figure out where to start reading on page 2.
All that to get a lousy mp3 copy of the album, so I can FINALLY listen to the damn thing in my car.
Screw SONY. This is not a settlement. This does not make me "whole" after what they did. This just wastes MORE of my time, requires me to destroy the album I purchased, and all I get is some crappy mp3s which I could rip anyhow with any decent oss software.
I appreciate the information on restrictive clauses. I read it with interest.
I'm not entirely convinced, however, that the the clause is restrictive - "American-led divers discovered a new type of Crustacean, that resembles a lobster but has its claws covered in 'sinuous, hair-like strands'."
Leaving out the clause would result in "American-led divers discovered a new type of Crustacean" and that would still be technically correct.
Or, I could just claim to be using 'which' restrictively, in the British-English fashion.
Either way, thanks for the links.
Seriously?
If anything sounds like a recipe for a bored, overpopulated planet, that would be it.
In a print paper, it makes sense to reprint national content because most people subscribe to only one print newspaper. Generally, they don't have access to much more. (Mail-out subscriptions where your news arrives 3 days late really don't count.)
Online, it does seem really redundant to have the same story mirrored across several sites, be they blogs or news sites. The paper I work for doesn't do this - our AP license does not allow us to republish online, only in print. So what we have on our site is a hosted-content package, where the AP story sits in a frame that appears to be our website, but is not. It's all hosted and maintained by the AP, and the story shows up once on Google News, not individually for every newspaper with hosted content set up.
For what it's worth, though, the NYT republishes very little AP content online - more often, they're the original source of the AP stuff that the rest of us reprint.
I'm sure it's news to most people, but most newspapers do not have the budget to station a photographer, reporter, etc in Iraq or anywhere else stuff is happening. Especially when we only have 5 reporters and 2 photographers on staff as it is.
The situation now is that we cover stuff in our area, we share that content on the AP with papers who aren't in our area, and vice-versa.
Given that there are tens of thousands of newspapers worldwide, it would be pretty moronic if every single one sent out a reporting team to every event that happened. Really..do we NEED 10,000 different versions of the same event? Let alone, 10,000 reporters and 10,000 photographers milling around the spot where the baby fell down the well?
The current system, where a few large news outlets send staff to events of nationwide interest, and local papers cover smaller events (our coverage of a severe local flood got republished nationwide a year ago) works much better. Believe me, when news happens, you do not need MORE looky-loos clogging up a flood-damaged town. Having the 4 papers in the state covering it is more than enough.
Ha! Wait until he reads the virus story! He thought APES were insulting..
In fact, that's what makes Creationism utter bunk as a theory. In order to be considered valid, a theory must be disprovable.
From wikipedia:
..A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is non-scientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people often think) but a vice.
I am sitting on a computer that finally has security software installed as of last night. We just spent over a month connected to the internet, raw, on XP Pro. DSL connection, computer on 18+ hours daily. Computer USED online 8+ hours daily. (My husband has a WOW problem...)
The security set-up? Windows security center. No physical firewall. Just a direct DSL connection.
The result? After 35 days of relatively unprotected surfing, I ran a full system scan....result?
9 bits of "malware". All of which were ad delivery tracking cookies, i.e. doubleclick. No viruses, no worms, no malicious activeX controls.
BTW..we're using F-secure Internet Security Suite now..purely on the basis that they're the only company who actually detected the Sony rootkit.
So now I am wondering, how necessary is security software if you're not a total moron? If you're not opening the "naked pics of Paris Hilton" that some kind person emailed you....if you're not searching for "pr0n" or "warez" and clicking randomly on whatever pops up...if you are browsing in Mozilla and not going to seedy sites, just a couple of trusted ones...if you don't use instant messaging at all, and therefore aren't clicking on random links and files that are sent via AIM....if you're not downloading fun "shareware" games without reading the EULA...
Really...how hard does a person have to try to avoid viruses, worms, malware on either a PC OR a Mac? I'd wager that if you're not a horny gullible idiot, it's pretty effortless.
Isn't that kind of like how we all HAD to learn cursive, because it would be required in middle school, high school, college, the workforce, etc? Except, of course, that nobody writes anything but their signature in cursive anymore.
Buy a 1993 or 1994 Altima - you can have your speed, signal indicators, and warning lights projected right onto your windshield. It was only available on some of them, though. You can retrofit one that didn't have the option, but it costs about $500 just in parts alone, and that's for used ones. You need a new dash, windshield, instrument panel, and ECU.
To use a bad analogy, we women are using Windows - we can run multiple programs at once, but we're not exactly stable. Men are back in DOS - one program at a time.
At my workplace, we HAVE to keep around a few computers running Mac OS 9 - why?
Because we need to run Quark 4.1.
Why?
Because the software used to build our classifieds pages - a third-party Quark plugin - will NOT work with any version of Quark newer than 4.1.
It will not work with InDesign.
It also will not work with Quark 4.1 running in Classic mode on OSX.
Why don't we just upgrade?
Well, because upgrading the one plugin cannot be done without upgrading the ENTIRE classifieds management system - the software that's used to enter and manage the ads, the database that holds them, the software that syncs with the other software in accounting to bill for the ads.
We are looking at over $200,000 just to upgrade the software. Not counting purchasing individual licenses and dongles for individual computers that have to run it. Not counting the mandatory calls to the evil company that makes this software - they charge a $75 minimum for every support call plus $5/minute. (Yeah, it makes phone sex look cheap.)
(Why don't we just go with another, cheaper, less evil, company? Well...name one. There are very few companies programming this type of software, and they all will nail you with costs.)
And not counting the downtime involved in upgrading, troubleshooting, and restoring to full function of all those computers. One thing to be said about newspapers is that we literally have no downtime. There is nearly ALWAYS someone at the building, logged on and working. There are maybe 2, 3 hour windows each week where IT can take everything completely down without screwing everyone who's trying to get the paper out.
Sure, in magical pixie land where everything's flowers and rainbows, it's easy and cheap for any company to switch completely over to linux or whatever, but back in the real world, many of us would be happy not to be using 9-year old page layout software on a 7-year old OS on a day-to-day basis.
I recently went for 7 months with no car at all. We're a family of 3, including (at the time) a toddler of just over a year, and we walked everywhere - to get groceries, to get movies, to work, to the bus stop, to the bank, etc. Carrying a 20+ lb baby.
I joined Netflix when Blockbuster charged me $14.95 for returning ONE movie 15 minutes late. The sales slip said "due back on Friday, 12 pm" and I mistakenly thought that was midnight...it was noon. (Off topic - why the heck doesn't 12 pm come after 11 pm?)
At the time I was working a 4 pm to 2 am shift, and most days I was not even AWAKE by noon.
I realized that not only was Blockbuster's schedule completely incompatible with mine, but they were assholes too. They refused to remove the late fees - they had charged me for another 5 days for being 15 minutes late - why not ONE day late? There was a class action lawsuit against them a few years back for this.
Nevermind that I can't get the movies I want through Blockbuster anyhow - when's the last time you saw Cannibal the Musical on their shelves?
Boy, nothing as comfortable as a plastic bustier. Those models look even more miserable than most.
I had plenty to complain about with my previous card, an ATI Radeon 7500. Namely, that it kept crashing, and ATI's idiotic error reporting system would, in one screen, claim that error reporting would not disclose any of my personal info to ATI, and in the next screen, demand that I configure Outlook to enable them to send the email.
Of course, beyond lasagna, rolls, and breads, everything we make is in the saute pan or the wok.
SiteCatalyst delivers much more detailed information than we could get strictly from the server. I work at a newspaper, and SiteCatalyst can track hits to individual stories that are delivered through a content management system. This is important, because where the URL to a page may not change, the content will from day to day, and I have to be able to track visits to the content - not just the page. It also enables us to easily pull up stats for an entire site section - it provides us with 10 variables on each page, so a given page could be categorized as an article, but also be attributed to the Sports section, and also attributed to a specific publication - so if I want to pull up stats for that publication as a whole, the sports section as a whole (either in just this publication or across publications) or articles as a group, I can do it instantly.
I don't think 2o7.net is inherently evil - yes, we use SiteCatalyst for site traffic, and that means customers get cookied with 2o7.net. We're not using it for evil - just to see which areas of the site get more traffic, which are entry pages, which are exit pages, etc. It's pretty necessary information for a webmaster of a large site. There's no evil adware involved.
Suppose you're in a big library, books all the way up to the ceiling and surrounding you. This is your hard drive. Every bit of data on the computer is written into one of these books and filed away. The size of your HD determines how big your library is.
Your computer has a table in the middle of the library. Any time you want to work on a project, the computer hauls down all the necessary books and lays them out on the table to read, and write in. This is your RAM, and the amount of RAM you have determines the size of the table - how much information can be hauled out at once.
If your table is not big enough for whatever you're doing, the computer will have to temporarily put back a book, take one down, put that one back, take the first one down, etc. This is "virtual memory", and it is obviously slower than just having a big enough table.
Whatever you're working on is strewn all over your table, and you have the choice to throw it all out when you're done, or to file it in the library for future use. (saving).
The caveat is that your computer will put each new book in the first empty spot it finds on the shelf. Sometimes this means one book here, one there, etc. Next time your computer wants to look at that series of books, it has to check the card catalog, and haul them out from all over the library. This is "fragmentation" - if you "defragment" your hard drive, your computer sorts through the library and puts like books together. It will even put the books you read a lot on the bottom shelf, and the ones you rarely need way up on top.
It's not perfect, but I use some variation on that to explain RAM vs HD to my husband.
Um, you spelled "Consistently" wrong.