I've got to agree on the part about GMail being much less cluttered. The Yahoo Mail Beta wants to behave like Outlook, Thunderbird, et al - that is, display a menu with "Inbox" "Trash" and whatnot, a pane/frame listing the emails in your box, and a pane with the contents of the message. Which would be fine by me, except that being in a web-browser (space occupied by the toolbars) and their excessive space dedicated to ads and Yahoo logo's leave no room for sorting through my mail list and reading the damned messages...
while I see your point on how there isn't really any alternative to Project, its hard not to see that there are many times the people who use Word/Writer, Excel/Calc, and PowerPoint/Impress. Personally, it makes more sense to do the common ones (stated above) first, because you can catch more people, thus making more people aware of GoogleDocs (and other apps). You can have an ass-kicking app, but if nobody knows about it and theres already at least a $300USD app that can do it, pick something like a word processor or spreadsheet app to make and get your name out there...
Maybe I'm reading too much between the lines here, but it said the project was OSS *and* either sponsored or blessed by Microsoft. Again, maybe it's nothing, but I see MS setting a trap here so that anybody with DOC and ODT conversion becomes a target for future lawsuits by MS (kinda like the SCO deal - "Oh, you must have our code, so we're gonna sue the crap outta you")...
Because then if I actually need a 20GB drive for my phone, I have to go buy a new one to replace my already Bluetooth phone I just bought 2 months ago. Now I know Moore's law (think it was Moore's) says stuff is outdated 6 months after release, but for a new model phone (not the economy/free phone either), I don't think so...
I understand your point of view since it's mine also, but from the view of the average joe idiot who hits "cancel shutdown" and then wonders why his system is still vulnerable a week after he downloaded the updates...
"In the end, they recommend putting off the whole upgrade for at least a year"
I entirely agree with this - not so much because of the reasons you pointed out though as it is from a security standpoint. I don't intend on using either Vista or IE7 for at least a year due to all the unpatched vulnerabilities that will exist.
Remember how MS touted Vista's kernel was supposed to be untouchable, and even the (horrible though they are) antivirus companies such as Symantec and McAffee couldn't even tap in - and then I seem to remember a Slashdot article about some company or other that developed a way of tapping into the kernel without Vista ever even noticing.
Another Slashdot story from only a day or 2 ago brought to light somebody who had gotten through Vista's DRM system by breaking the driver.
Even if MS's claim of Vista actually being better than previous Windows versions was even half true (which we all know is a claim they've made with every version) these issues would still keep me from using Vista - even if the issues have been fixed, they were key selling points/components of MS's "supremo next-gen operating system so good it runs on fairy dust" - and so for me, for those components to have ever been so broken is unacceptable.
actually, I would think you wouldn't even need that much - a site like gnu.org or some-odd sourceforge site usually has all the content it needs, the stuff just needs put into a sensible layout with some decent images to fill in the blank parts of the page so it doesn't look so dead... a lot of these projects kick ass, but the site aesthetically looks like crap or the navigation makes no sense (at least if you've never gone to a sourceforge site, and even if you have...) so that you can't find what you need...
The summary stated that Westinghouse said "Oh, just use an HDMI to DVI cable" - except that would defeat half the point of trying to use HDMI in the first place - the handshake is to let the DRM know that it's ok to send the 1080p signal because there isn't a recording device in between the PS3 and TV set (for pirating media such as movies)...
The other half of using HDMI is for the audio and video to be on one cable. It's actually rather funny, because my brother-in-law still thinks that HDMI is just for putting the a/v on one cable, and that there's no DRM involved...
yes, I agree that it is useful to be able to simply type something like "yum -y install ysoftware xsoftware etcsoftware" or use a gui frontend, click some checkboxes, and then hit "download & install"
on the other hand, thats only easy IF you know what the package name is when doing it by cli, or if you are using a gui frontend, finding which of the cryptic names is the one you want. For example, OpenOffice Base isn't included in the default install via yum, and the name can be hard to type out sometimes. The last issue I have with things like yum and apt-get, is "what if you're at the cheapo relative's house who doesn't have a 'net connection" or your's is down? In such a case, you're for pretty much sol - where as with something like a Windows InstallShield wizard type where you just click your way through the installer you have on a usb jump-drive, and then you're running OpenOffice...
ah, I thought this was just a story dupe of the screen-capture method that I mentioned had been submitted, and the submission for this one only said that one of the sites linked to discussed the method
I was testing/.'s FireHose system earlier today and saw another submission on this - except that one made it more clear as to what was done to get around the DRM content protection. Basically, its the same thing you can do with a DVD, VCD, or any video file - xvid, h264, etc encoding in avi, ogm, or mastroska containers - that is, make frame-by-frame screen-captures of the video and stitch the resulting images together for a new video file without DRM. To my knowledge, yes, this method does result in a pretty much exact copy of the video, except that because it's basically taking those million frames in the video and saving them as raster images and putting in a fast, 25-30fps slide-show...
or at least thats how I understand how it was done anyway - btw, I think it had said it was something like the Intervideo WinDVD player used, though there are other players which I am sure can do this (from the other article I mentioned)...
I've seen people rhetorical questions on here like "When has this kind of attack happened before?" - I'll tell you when, except it wasn't from a "terrorist" or "guerilla fighter" using a shoulder fired AA rocket - it was a flight from New York City, refueled in Alaska, and was destined for South Korea, shot down by a USSR missile from a fighter jet back in the Cold War, who then claimed that it was a deliberate attempt by the US to probe Soviet Air Defenses...
The reason I see for this system is primarily for commercial jets over hostile Mid-East countries and others in the Far-East such as China and North Korea. An incident such as this, which happened in the early 80's and could very well initiated WW3 between the US and USSR - now imagine how a country even more paranoid than even the USSR was such as North Korea, Iran, or China, would react if we even got slightly pissed they had shot down commercial jet...
The funny thing about this "Games for Vista" is that if for example WINE and/or Cedega type products for Linux systems are ever able to play these "Vista only games" (while Vista is still only a year or 2 old) you could then play "Games for Windows" better on non-Windows systems - and then maybe even get it working through CYGWIN, thus somewhat backporting "Games for Vista" to WinXP (not sure about earlier Windows versions, but probably those too)...
The crappy part of this is its likely to never happen due to patent/legal issues...
I thought that was supposed to be something to the effect of "NO COMPLEMENTARY LAPTOP with WinXP SP2, which is Vista capable - as in you will still have to buy Vista for YOU! Mr. Mossberg!!!"
I don't know about other people, but I find bs that marketing depts use the "Vista Ready" to hook people when it's the same grade PC it was a year ago when the model was actually new or mid-life...
First off, the summary author says something to the effect that he was guessing that the 10x a day firing limitation would be because of the energy required - much more likely is because of the heat produced by the armature (which contains the tungsten projectile) would warp the rails.
Second off, some people have mentioned guidance systems for the projectile - from what I can see, the projectile would be moving at such speeds air friction would melt most any guidance package...
First off, since when the hell does having an email account and knowing how to check it (and possibly even delete old mails too!!!) make a person a geek? Second off - there's a lot of actual geeks out there (like me for example) that know how to use boolean modifiers in a search engine and get proper results, but yet don't get the work done for at least 2 reasons
1: lazyness
2: you're geeky and smart enough to realize the assignments are bs
Alright, now that I'm through ranting on that, yes I fully agree that most people that go through college are idiots when it comes to even using a computer, and that initial placement tests should be given along with math, reading, writing, etc. How many people on here can agree with me that an at least semi-technical class like basic HTML should not have people in it that still can't tell the difference between a chassis (case) and a modem or call the whole thing a cpu? The most I've ever seen fellow freshmen and sophmores use a computer is to "check out that hot bitch on MySpace"
I think thats kinda the point of his joke - just as MS did not create or otherwise even give a damn about RSS until it became a semi-big buzzword and realized the usefulness of how it could provide up-to date links to news feeds, etc that has become so widespread (such as the FAT system) that MS would be able to sue every web company and end-user/regular joe browsing the net that uses RSS in their site or people that visit sites making some kind of use of RSS - and in the gp's joke, everybody that ever ran Win9x or used the FAT system...
Visitors to Google's sites rose 9.1 percent to 475.7 million...
Is it just me, or does that try to compare percentages with flat numbers? Personally, I didn't know you could do that... As far as I know, when you compare numbers, you typically compare the same types of numbers - ex: increase from xx% to xx%, or ### to ###.
Except that from what I've seen with console games, its either been perfect with no bugs at all (the kind of quality you see from the games that have no rival) or the ones from moderate/mediocre and cheap developers that cut corners all the time. I don't really see any reason that the quality development houses would suddenly start producing crap just because they can now patch if needed (many of EA's games for example, are crap at v1.0 and only are worth playing after like patch 1.2 or so). Since the quality developers won't really be screwing things up too much, that leaves the discussion of the cheapo dev-houses. At the very least this leaves the chance for dev-houses with games that have everything from gameplay, story, and graphics - but didn't go through the debugging (or as much as they should have) will have the chance to get patched now.
No they never were window managers - Metacity (GNOME) and KWin (KDE) are their window mangers. However, the reason why I see your statement as a moot point is that most people don't give a crap about what their *window manager* is - they care about their *desktop environment*. Most people working in offices that barely know how to use their computer and don't care how it runs, just that the desktop environment looks decent (to them, which is probably at least Win9x style - average GNOME and KDE is much better than this) and that they can edit the MS Word.doc files in OOo that their coworkers still on Windows send them.
Back to the point of responding to you - it's a minor technicality to most people won't care about nor comprehend - this is the target audience that the Linux movement in general needs to target for Windows to Linux conversion. The only time the average person will need to worry about having to use one of the light-weight window mangers that happen to also be a desktop environment is when their hardware is old enough that a basic GNOME desktop won't run on it - but for the most part, offices with first-generation 1.5GHz Pentium 4 HP/Compaq's or Dell's that choke on WinXP, I would think that the GNOME gui (heck, if that runs slow, they can use Xfce) would run much faster than the WinXP gui did for them...
I thought that was to save the CRT from monitor burn-in because with a white background and black text on systems from the 80's and early 90's when this was implemented, the actual cathode tube lighting up the phosphorus (I think thats what the stuff is) that resulted in you seeing pixels/"stuff" on-screen - if this was all white it would be burning a white image across your whole monitor, thereby shortening the monitor lifespan and giving it a greyish look towards the end of its lifetime.
On another note involving this monitor burn-in, if I remember right, its also why screensavers were invented - to keep the accumulated burn-in relatively the same across the screen, versus just text or a desktop/taskbar/panel ghost image from burn-in...
try vlc-player, also, ffdshow also helps (I can't remember if ffdshow is packaged into vlc, and if it's not it can be used seperately with other media players)
I think you missed my point. If a 17"^2 monitor running 1024x768 (pretty much the minimum standard anymore for most of us right?) - and 2"^2 of that monitor is something like 200x150 resolution - then proportionally 640x480 is should be something like a *effectivelly* proportional 3 or 4 times the resolution with the glasses compared to a 17" monitor running 640x480. Remember now - thats *effective resolution* not actual resolution...
actually, wouldn't any images/video be downscaled on a 2" eyeglass at 640x480 look as if it were high-def? I know even 800x600 looks like crap anymore on a 17" monitor, but on a 2" screen - I would think it'd look damned good...
Slashdot Mirror
I've got to agree on the part about GMail being much less cluttered. The Yahoo Mail Beta wants to behave like Outlook, Thunderbird, et al - that is, display a menu with "Inbox" "Trash" and whatnot, a pane/frame listing the emails in your box, and a pane with the contents of the message. Which would be fine by me, except that being in a web-browser (space occupied by the toolbars) and their excessive space dedicated to ads and Yahoo logo's leave no room for sorting through my mail list and reading the damned messages...
while I see your point on how there isn't really any alternative to Project, its hard not to see that there are many times the people who use Word/Writer, Excel/Calc, and PowerPoint/Impress. Personally, it makes more sense to do the common ones (stated above) first, because you can catch more people, thus making more people aware of GoogleDocs (and other apps). You can have an ass-kicking app, but if nobody knows about it and theres already at least a $300USD app that can do it, pick something like a word processor or spreadsheet app to make and get your name out there...
Because then if I actually need a 20GB drive for my phone, I have to go buy a new one to replace my already Bluetooth phone I just bought 2 months ago. Now I know Moore's law (think it was Moore's) says stuff is outdated 6 months after release, but for a new model phone (not the economy/free phone either), I don't think so...
I understand your point of view since it's mine also, but from the view of the average joe idiot who hits "cancel shutdown" and then wonders why his system is still vulnerable a week after he downloaded the updates...
"In the end, they recommend putting off the whole upgrade for at least a year"
I entirely agree with this - not so much because of the reasons you pointed out though as it is from a security standpoint. I don't intend on using either Vista or IE7 for at least a year due to all the unpatched vulnerabilities that will exist.
Remember how MS touted Vista's kernel was supposed to be untouchable, and even the (horrible though they are) antivirus companies such as Symantec and McAffee couldn't even tap in - and then I seem to remember a Slashdot article about some company or other that developed a way of tapping into the kernel without Vista ever even noticing.
Another Slashdot story from only a day or 2 ago brought to light somebody who had gotten through Vista's DRM system by breaking the driver.
Even if MS's claim of Vista actually being better than previous Windows versions was even half true (which we all know is a claim they've made with every version) these issues would still keep me from using Vista - even if the issues have been fixed, they were key selling points/components of MS's "supremo next-gen operating system so good it runs on fairy dust" - and so for me, for those components to have ever been so broken is unacceptable.
actually, I would think you wouldn't even need that much - a site like gnu.org or some-odd sourceforge site usually has all the content it needs, the stuff just needs put into a sensible layout with some decent images to fill in the blank parts of the page so it doesn't look so dead... a lot of these projects kick ass, but the site aesthetically looks like crap or the navigation makes no sense (at least if you've never gone to a sourceforge site, and even if you have...) so that you can't find what you need...
The summary stated that Westinghouse said "Oh, just use an HDMI to DVI cable" - except that would defeat half the point of trying to use HDMI in the first place - the handshake is to let the DRM know that it's ok to send the 1080p signal because there isn't a recording device in between the PS3 and TV set (for pirating media such as movies)...
The other half of using HDMI is for the audio and video to be on one cable. It's actually rather funny, because my brother-in-law still thinks that HDMI is just for putting the a/v on one cable, and that there's no DRM involved...
yes, I agree that it is useful to be able to simply type something like "yum -y install ysoftware xsoftware etcsoftware" or use a gui frontend, click some checkboxes, and then hit "download & install"
on the other hand, thats only easy IF you know what the package name is when doing it by cli, or if you are using a gui frontend, finding which of the cryptic names is the one you want. For example, OpenOffice Base isn't included in the default install via yum, and the name can be hard to type out sometimes. The last issue I have with things like yum and apt-get, is "what if you're at the cheapo relative's house who doesn't have a 'net connection" or your's is down? In such a case, you're for pretty much sol - where as with something like a Windows InstallShield wizard type where you just click your way through the installer you have on a usb jump-drive, and then you're running OpenOffice...
ah, I thought this was just a story dupe of the screen-capture method that I mentioned had been submitted, and the submission for this one only said that one of the sites linked to discussed the method
I was testing /.'s FireHose system earlier today and saw another submission on this - except that one made it more clear as to what was done to get around the DRM content protection. Basically, its the same thing you can do with a DVD, VCD, or any video file - xvid, h264, etc encoding in avi, ogm, or mastroska containers - that is, make frame-by-frame screen-captures of the video and stitch the resulting images together for a new video file without DRM. To my knowledge, yes, this method does result in a pretty much exact copy of the video, except that because it's basically taking those million frames in the video and saving them as raster images and putting in a fast, 25-30fps slide-show...
or at least thats how I understand how it was done anyway - btw, I think it had said it was something like the Intervideo WinDVD player used, though there are other players which I am sure can do this (from the other article I mentioned)...
I've seen people rhetorical questions on here like "When has this kind of attack happened before?" - I'll tell you when, except it wasn't from a "terrorist" or "guerilla fighter" using a shoulder fired AA rocket - it was a flight from New York City, refueled in Alaska, and was destined for South Korea, shot down by a USSR missile from a fighter jet back in the Cold War, who then claimed that it was a deliberate attempt by the US to probe Soviet Air Defenses...
Korean Air Flight 007
The reason I see for this system is primarily for commercial jets over hostile Mid-East countries and others in the Far-East such as China and North Korea. An incident such as this, which happened in the early 80's and could very well initiated WW3 between the US and USSR - now imagine how a country even more paranoid than even the USSR was such as North Korea, Iran, or China, would react if we even got slightly pissed they had shot down commercial jet...
The funny thing about this "Games for Vista" is that if for example WINE and/or Cedega type products for Linux systems are ever able to play these "Vista only games" (while Vista is still only a year or 2 old) you could then play "Games for Windows" better on non-Windows systems - and then maybe even get it working through CYGWIN, thus somewhat backporting "Games for Vista" to WinXP (not sure about earlier Windows versions, but probably those too)...
The crappy part of this is its likely to never happen due to patent/legal issues...
I thought that was supposed to be something to the effect of "NO COMPLEMENTARY LAPTOP with WinXP SP2, which is Vista capable - as in you will still have to buy Vista for YOU! Mr. Mossberg!!!"
I don't know about other people, but I find bs that marketing depts use the "Vista Ready" to hook people when it's the same grade PC it was a year ago when the model was actually new or mid-life...
First off, the summary author says something to the effect that he was guessing that the 10x a day firing limitation would be because of the energy required - much more likely is because of the heat produced by the armature (which contains the tungsten projectile) would warp the rails.
Second off, some people have mentioned guidance systems for the projectile - from what I can see, the projectile would be moving at such speeds air friction would melt most any guidance package...
I think thats kinda the point of his joke - just as MS did not create or otherwise even give a damn about RSS until it became a semi-big buzzword and realized the usefulness of how it could provide up-to date links to news feeds, etc that has become so widespread (such as the FAT system) that MS would be able to sue every web company and end-user/regular joe browsing the net that uses RSS in their site or people that visit sites making some kind of use of RSS - and in the gp's joke, everybody that ever ran Win9x or used the FAT system...
Did this confuse anybody else?
are you using Firefox and the Adblock Plus extension? that seems to help a helluva lot...
Except that from what I've seen with console games, its either been perfect with no bugs at all (the kind of quality you see from the games that have no rival) or the ones from moderate/mediocre and cheap developers that cut corners all the time. I don't really see any reason that the quality development houses would suddenly start producing crap just because they can now patch if needed (many of EA's games for example, are crap at v1.0 and only are worth playing after like patch 1.2 or so). Since the quality developers won't really be screwing things up too much, that leaves the discussion of the cheapo dev-houses. At the very least this leaves the chance for dev-houses with games that have everything from gameplay, story, and graphics - but didn't go through the debugging (or as much as they should have) will have the chance to get patched now.
No they never were window managers - Metacity (GNOME) and KWin (KDE) are their window mangers. However, the reason why I see your statement as a moot point is that most people don't give a crap about what their *window manager* is - they care about their *desktop environment*. Most people working in offices that barely know how to use their computer and don't care how it runs, just that the desktop environment looks decent (to them, which is probably at least Win9x style - average GNOME and KDE is much better than this) and that they can edit the MS Word .doc files in OOo that their coworkers still on Windows send them.
Back to the point of responding to you - it's a minor technicality to most people won't care about nor comprehend - this is the target audience that the Linux movement in general needs to target for Windows to Linux conversion. The only time the average person will need to worry about having to use one of the light-weight window mangers that happen to also be a desktop environment is when their hardware is old enough that a basic GNOME desktop won't run on it - but for the most part, offices with first-generation 1.5GHz Pentium 4 HP/Compaq's or Dell's that choke on WinXP, I would think that the GNOME gui (heck, if that runs slow, they can use Xfce) would run much faster than the WinXP gui did for them...
I thought that was to save the CRT from monitor burn-in because with a white background and black text on systems from the 80's and early 90's when this was implemented, the actual cathode tube lighting up the phosphorus (I think thats what the stuff is) that resulted in you seeing pixels/"stuff" on-screen - if this was all white it would be burning a white image across your whole monitor, thereby shortening the monitor lifespan and giving it a greyish look towards the end of its lifetime.
On another note involving this monitor burn-in, if I remember right, its also why screensavers were invented - to keep the accumulated burn-in relatively the same across the screen, versus just text or a desktop/taskbar/panel ghost image from burn-in...
try vlc-player, also, ffdshow also helps (I can't remember if ffdshow is packaged into vlc, and if it's not it can be used seperately with other media players)
I think you missed my point. If a 17"^2 monitor running 1024x768 (pretty much the minimum standard anymore for most of us right?) - and 2"^2 of that monitor is something like 200x150 resolution - then proportionally 640x480 is should be something like a *effectivelly* proportional 3 or 4 times the resolution with the glasses compared to a 17" monitor running 640x480. Remember now - thats *effective resolution* not actual resolution...
actually, wouldn't any images/video be downscaled on a 2" eyeglass at 640x480 look as if it were high-def? I know even 800x600 looks like crap anymore on a 17" monitor, but on a 2" screen - I would think it'd look damned good...