I think its less a sense of humour loss and more an overdeveloped sense of political correctness. It just seems that half the western world wakes up in a morning looking for ways to be offended. And if they can't take offence directly they do it by proxy, taking offence for some random social demographic who they feel *would* be offended if they knew about it.
As someone who does live in the outside world i have to say i can point to a lot of people who now think very seriously before travelling to the US. And almost everyone i know who had considered looking for work there (i'm in scientific research) has shelved the plan. This stupidity really is costing your country.
I'd disagree about the guns. Even the "ceramic" guns have some metal parts. Appropriate wiki link here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glock. You are also assuming that the xray machines only "see" metal. This has been incorrect for many years, with the next gen ones being developed to identify the approximate chemical composition (organic/liquid/metal etc) via how xrays are absorbed (basically calculating density). If you don't believe me, look at the screen next time you go through airport security. Items like ceramic or glass knives will clearly show up.
Of course, if you carry it on your person through the metal detector you might get it through, though looking at the kyocera homepage (http://global.kyocera.com/prdct/fc_consumer/kitchen/kyotop.html it looks like they connect the handle to the tang using metal pins.
I'd disagree about the guns. Even the "ceramic" guns have some metal parts. Appropriate wiki link here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glock. You are also assuming that the xray machines only "see" metal. This has been incorrect for many years, with the next gen ones being developed to identify the approximate chemical composition (organic/liquid/metal etc) via how xrays are absorbed (basically calculating density). If you don't believe me, look at the screen next time you go through airport security. Items like ceramic or glass knives will clearly show up.
Of course, if you carry it on your person through the metal detector you might get it through, though looking at the kyocera homepage (http://global.kyocera.com/prdct/fc_consumer/kitchen/kyotop.html it looks like they connect the handle to the tang using metal pins.
What economy? Thats already on long term vacation itself. Of course, if the dollar drops much lower the economy might pick up again as shoppers from other countries decide its worth going to the US even with the stupid flight restrictions.
I noticed The Economist jokingly described the US dollar as the "Yankee Lira", a witty resposte to a more famous quote a few years back that called the canadian dollar the "Northern Peso". I must say, i did laugh.
Sadly they will CONTINUE molesting children and STOP photographing it. It pushes against my freedom of information beliefs, but in cases like this i can see the argument for not telling the world how you solved the crime...
What you have here is a fundamentally malfunctioning legal system. A punishment should fit the crime committed, not the collective crimes of everyone else who breaks the same law. Being punished to "serve as an example to others" is a concept which should have been left behind in the middle ages.
There's definitely a difference between a £20 interconnect cable and the cheap black job they put in the box with your cdplayer. I suspect its mostly related to shielding, but you can tell one from the other even on a normal midrange stereo. Beyond that i doubt most mortals can tell. I tested a £30 cable against a £500 one (on £10k's worth of equipment) and i couldn't tell the difference.
Btw, can anyone explain how a speaker cable can be directional?
As a former employee of a HiFi shop i can say that this is an area which demonstrates some of the strangest and least empirical methodologies imaginable. Some of the customers are far from normal too. We had a guy who got the local electric company to lay a dedicated cable from the main copper in the road direct to his HiFi. Another had a custom listening room built as an annex to his house. Then of course there were the cd-freezing, green-pen-toting brigade...
Frankly, the drug dealers were our best customers - they just wanted something loud and they didn't f**k you around by insisting you order the latest greatest cable as reviewed by their favourite HiFi magazine. Paid in cash too.
No its not. In all places except the equator the length of sunlight changes slightly every day. The arctic and antarctic circles describe the latitudes at which the sun actually doesn't set one day per year.
If you go north of the arctic circle (or south of the antarctic circle) the effect gets greater and greater. This doesn't make them uninhabitable areas but it does mean that you can have weeks without a sunset (or a sunrise in the winter). A good example is Tromsø in north Norway. Its a fairly significant place, with a population of 60,000+ and a university. Yet they get a month of sunshine (and the same of darkness) every year - see http://www.gaisma.com/en/location/tromso.html. And Tromsø isn't even all that far north.
Hell, even where i am (a couple of hundred km short of the arctic circle) it doesn't really get dark during the summer. The sun "sets", but it only just dips below the horizon and so the twilight is extremely bright. Indeed, it can be brighter at 1am on a clear night than at midday with heavy clouds.
With freedom comes responsibility. So yes, maybe you should have the right to grow and weaponise anthrax at home, but your neighbour should also have the right be safe from catching anthrax due to your incompetence in handling said material. Implicit within your freedom is a responsibility towards your neighbour (and everyone else). This is why (in theory) you CAN grow anthrax at home, provided you fulfil all the requirements for a license to run a biotech research establishment.
Isn't there a large market for this in the supercomputer/rendering arena? Stuff like realistic-behaving orc armies and that type of thing. Maybe they're planning to integrate this into their high end offerings (Havoc aboard the Itanic?).
Any level of copy protection is an inconvenience to the end user:
1. Install keys are a pain, but we're all used to them now and we accept them. Very few users send the software back or refuse to upgrade just because of install keys.
2. Phone home activation is a bigger pain. It gives you some control but can cause headaches for the customers IT dept. It can also make cracked versions more appealing, and makes non-internet connected computers impossible to activate. In general though, it is acceptable if its a once only affair. However, regular phone-home checks are more than enough to sway the purchasing decision against your product.
3. Locally installed license servers can be a pain, but they offer both you and the end user complete control over whats going on. They do represent an initial setup hurdle, but after that they offer considerable flexibility in that the end user can install your software on all the computers on their system and then there is a limit applied on how many clients can run at any one time. Your customer can then buy a small number of licenses and upgrade to more if necessary. Obviously this still needs the customer to have a decent internal network, but not necessarily internet connected, which is an issue in some places.
4. Hardware dongles are just a menace and a guaranteed way to drive your customers away.
At the end of the day i think you need to evaluate how important your software is to your customer. If its critical, and they have no alternative, then you have the option of going the Microsoft route and pissing them off as much as you like cos they need you more than you need them. This may come back to bite you in the arse.
If your software has little or no value to the home user (i.e. they have no use for or it or wouldn't pay for it anyway) then you can probably get away with just a license key activation cos business customers tend to be a little more honest by nature. This also makes your product appealing to small companies cos they can buy one license (so they feel honest) and use it on 3 or 4 computers. This *is* technically "stealing", but you've still sold one more copy than you might have done.
If you really want to have total control, and you think your customers will accept it, then the license server is a good choice. Your sales people should be able to dress it up as a convenient way for the IT staff to manage their licenses and if some sort of phone home is needed then only one hole needs to be drilled through the firewall. In future revisions you could also expand its role into an update server or something.
It is possible to do some mix and match. For instance, Intel distribute the free versions of their C++ and Fortran compilers with both a phone home activation code AND a license key file. I find this to be quite convenient (though admittedly it doesn't stop the software being replicated across several machines). You could for instance sell single or double licenses to small companies (in the expectation that they will use it on more than one or two computers) and sell license servers to larger companies (who might be more strict about license accounting). This sort of flexibility (not adopting a one size fits all approach) would reduce the chances alienating whole segments of potential customers.
So in summary, you are selling a product and that product has to be acceptable to your potential customers. If its not, they won't buy. Consider your target market and implement your controls accordingly. And if you can afford it, don't be afraid to offer flexibility in the licensing systems.
> Anyone care to wager if it were a man like George Bush who had lead the colonies
> to victory rather than Washington? You think it all would have gone the same?
No, a man like George Bush wouldn't have led anyone to victory. The most likely course of events is that he'd lead for one battle, maybe two, and then mysteriously get shot in the back of the head by "an enemy sniper" (i.e. friendly fire). Someone like Washington would then take command. If that didn't happen, we (the English) would still be in charge.
Then i guess they're going to have to use some other trick to draw the attention of the audience to what they want you to see. I guess there are a number of ways, have the characters more heavily coloured than the background (done very nicely by Spielberg in Schindlers' list with a red child on b&w background), have the characters much larger in frame than usual, maybe layer the background like a cartoon so that perspective is screwed up and the background seems 2D rather than 3D.
There are other ways than depth of field to emphasize an object, but its not easy even in stills photography. In movies i'd guess its going to be very hard to get the right "look" consistently. Good luck to them.
>Many people experienced improved sound quality from using a special pen
> to draw round the outside of their CDs. They expected it to sound better and so it did.
Actually it wasn't a special pen - it was any generic dark marker. They also reckoned freezing the CD improved things too. As these ideas (incredibly) weren't published anywhere near April 1st we tried them out in the Hi-Fi shop where i was working (it was a slow day). We came to 2 conclusions:
1) It was a crock of shite. None of us could hear the difference after freezing/inking the CDs.
2) The audiophile turntable sounded better than the audiophile cd player. In large part due to the heavy dynamic range compression on CDs. I still find old vinyl recordings more enjoyable than modern digital remasterings for exactly that reason.
> WHEN A CAMCORDER IS FOUND OPERATING IN YOUR THEATER
> 1) Pull the customer with the camcorder from the theater.
>......
>......
> 5) Boot customer from premises with no refund.
6) Await litigation for conducting an illegal search, infringement of privacy and god alone knows what else.
Sadly this is a two edged sword, and the abuses are rampant on both sides. Its nice to think that an old fashioned clip-round-the-ear is the solution, but while there is a climate where people litigate if you so much as cough in their direction, there will be zero tolerance laws and the need to call in heavily armed police for everything more serious than a crying baby. Better get used to it, or move to a country where common sense still prevails.
As a regular flier in cattle-class, i'd just like to say that its nice to see first class passengers getting the preferential treatment they deserve. First on, first off and first into the mountainside...
Citations aren't really a great way to monitor quality either, cos each of those "recycled papers" will cite previous ones. So you should look carefully and see WHO is citing the paper, as often it will be the authors themselves citing earlier work. This is not necessarily a problem (it may be that there are very few people working in a field, and self-citation is unavoidable), but some scepticism is required.
A much better indicator of paper quality would be a weighted combination of the Journal quality (impact factor is a common measure), citation count and something like the number of different citing authors. You can probably add some other factors too.
> Packet shaping looks like a method for ISPs to have higher
> advertised speeds without actually increasing the capacity
> of their network as they should.
There seems to be an automatic assumption that ISP level QOS equals bandwidth/download capping. That isn't necessarily true. I run QOS on my home connection and it means that when i'm downloading large quantities of data i can still talk ok on the VOIP. I haven't seen my bandwidth being reduced though - I just get to use what i have more effectively. Correspondingly, it would be negligent for an ISP *NOT* to use their resources efficiently, as excess infrastructure is paid for by their subscribers. Indeed, perhaps the users of TW should be complaining less about the traffic shaping now and more about how long its taken to implement...
You can say the same for most of the other major chip makers - IBM and Sun both do the same, and in years gone by DEC used to make an arse-kicking Fortran compiler for the Alpha. In fact, probably the only major chip producer that doesn't make compilers is AMD.
Slashdot Mirror
I think its less a sense of humour loss and more an overdeveloped sense of political correctness. It just seems that half the western world wakes up in a morning looking for ways to be offended. And if they can't take offence directly they do it by proxy, taking offence for some random social demographic who they feel *would* be offended if they knew about it.
Very customer friendly, i must say. This caught my attention in particular:
"Warranty could be exercised only once per purchased product"
Is this legal?
As someone who does live in the outside world i have to say i can point to a lot of people who now think very seriously before travelling to the US. And almost everyone i know who had considered looking for work there (i'm in scientific research) has shelved the plan. This stupidity really is costing your country.
Of course, if you carry it on your person through the metal detector you might get it through, though looking at the kyocera homepage (http://global.kyocera.com/prdct/fc_consumer/kitchen/kyotop.html it looks like they connect the handle to the tang using metal pins.
Of course, if you carry it on your person through the metal detector you might get it through, though looking at the kyocera homepage (http://global.kyocera.com/prdct/fc_consumer/kitchen/kyotop.html it looks like they connect the handle to the tang using metal pins.
What economy? Thats already on long term vacation itself. Of course, if the dollar drops much lower the economy might pick up again as shoppers from other countries decide its worth going to the US even with the stupid flight restrictions.
I noticed The Economist jokingly described the US dollar as the "Yankee Lira", a witty resposte to a more famous quote a few years back that called the canadian dollar the "Northern Peso". I must say, i did laugh.
Sadly they will CONTINUE molesting children and STOP photographing it. It pushes against my freedom of information beliefs, but in cases like this i can see the argument for not telling the world how you solved the crime...
What you have here is a fundamentally malfunctioning legal system. A punishment should fit the crime committed, not the collective crimes of everyone else who breaks the same law. Being punished to "serve as an example to others" is a concept which should have been left behind in the middle ages.
At the time, Oxford UK
Btw, can anyone explain how a speaker cable can be directional?
Frankly, the drug dealers were our best customers - they just wanted something loud and they didn't f**k you around by insisting you order the latest greatest cable as reviewed by their favourite HiFi magazine. Paid in cash too.
No its not. In all places except the equator the length of sunlight changes slightly every day. The arctic and antarctic circles describe the latitudes at which the sun actually doesn't set one day per year.
If you go north of the arctic circle (or south of the antarctic circle) the effect gets greater and greater. This doesn't make them uninhabitable areas but it does mean that you can have weeks without a sunset (or a sunrise in the winter). A good example is Tromsø in north Norway. Its a fairly significant place, with a population of 60,000+ and a university. Yet they get a month of sunshine (and the same of darkness) every year - see http://www.gaisma.com/en/location/tromso.html. And Tromsø isn't even all that far north.
Hell, even where i am (a couple of hundred km short of the arctic circle) it doesn't really get dark during the summer. The sun "sets", but it only just dips below the horizon and so the twilight is extremely bright. Indeed, it can be brighter at 1am on a clear night than at midday with heavy clouds.
With freedom comes responsibility. So yes, maybe you should have the right to grow and weaponise anthrax at home, but your neighbour should also have the right be safe from catching anthrax due to your incompetence in handling said material. Implicit within your freedom is a responsibility towards your neighbour (and everyone else). This is why (in theory) you CAN grow anthrax at home, provided you fulfil all the requirements for a license to run a biotech research establishment.
Quit whining - i live in Norway. Britain is where i go for cheap shopping....
Just an idea.
1. Install keys are a pain, but we're all used to them now and we accept them. Very few users send the software back or refuse to upgrade just because of install keys.
2. Phone home activation is a bigger pain. It gives you some control but can cause headaches for the customers IT dept. It can also make cracked versions more appealing, and makes non-internet connected computers impossible to activate. In general though, it is acceptable if its a once only affair. However, regular phone-home checks are more than enough to sway the purchasing decision against your product.
3. Locally installed license servers can be a pain, but they offer both you and the end user complete control over whats going on. They do represent an initial setup hurdle, but after that they offer considerable flexibility in that the end user can install your software on all the computers on their system and then there is a limit applied on how many clients can run at any one time. Your customer can then buy a small number of licenses and upgrade to more if necessary. Obviously this still needs the customer to have a decent internal network, but not necessarily internet connected, which is an issue in some places.
4. Hardware dongles are just a menace and a guaranteed way to drive your customers away.
At the end of the day i think you need to evaluate how important your software is to your customer. If its critical, and they have no alternative, then you have the option of going the Microsoft route and pissing them off as much as you like cos they need you more than you need them. This may come back to bite you in the arse.
If your software has little or no value to the home user (i.e. they have no use for or it or wouldn't pay for it anyway) then you can probably get away with just a license key activation cos business customers tend to be a little more honest by nature. This also makes your product appealing to small companies cos they can buy one license (so they feel honest) and use it on 3 or 4 computers. This *is* technically "stealing", but you've still sold one more copy than you might have done.
If you really want to have total control, and you think your customers will accept it, then the license server is a good choice. Your sales people should be able to dress it up as a convenient way for the IT staff to manage their licenses and if some sort of phone home is needed then only one hole needs to be drilled through the firewall. In future revisions you could also expand its role into an update server or something.
It is possible to do some mix and match. For instance, Intel distribute the free versions of their C++ and Fortran compilers with both a phone home activation code AND a license key file. I find this to be quite convenient (though admittedly it doesn't stop the software being replicated across several machines). You could for instance sell single or double licenses to small companies (in the expectation that they will use it on more than one or two computers) and sell license servers to larger companies (who might be more strict about license accounting). This sort of flexibility (not adopting a one size fits all approach) would reduce the chances alienating whole segments of potential customers.
So in summary, you are selling a product and that product has to be acceptable to your potential customers. If its not, they won't buy. Consider your target market and implement your controls accordingly. And if you can afford it, don't be afraid to offer flexibility in the licensing systems.
> to victory rather than Washington? You think it all would have gone the same?
No, a man like George Bush wouldn't have led anyone to victory. The most likely course of events is that he'd lead for one battle, maybe two, and then mysteriously get shot in the back of the head by "an enemy sniper" (i.e. friendly fire). Someone like Washington would then take command. If that didn't happen, we (the English) would still be in charge.
There are other ways than depth of field to emphasize an object, but its not easy even in stills photography. In movies i'd guess its going to be very hard to get the right "look" consistently. Good luck to them.
> to draw round the outside of their CDs. They expected it to sound better and so it did.
Actually it wasn't a special pen - it was any generic dark marker. They also reckoned freezing the CD improved things too. As these ideas (incredibly) weren't published anywhere near April 1st we tried them out in the Hi-Fi shop where i was working (it was a slow day). We came to 2 conclusions:
1) It was a crock of shite. None of us could hear the difference after freezing/inking the CDs.
2) The audiophile turntable sounded better than the audiophile cd player. In large part due to the heavy dynamic range compression on CDs. I still find old vinyl recordings more enjoyable than modern digital remasterings for exactly that reason.
> 1) Pull the customer with the camcorder from the theater. ...... ......
>
>
> 5) Boot customer from premises with no refund.
6) Await litigation for conducting an illegal search, infringement of privacy and god alone knows what else.
Sadly this is a two edged sword, and the abuses are rampant on both sides. Its nice to think that an old fashioned clip-round-the-ear is the solution, but while there is a climate where people litigate if you so much as cough in their direction, there will be zero tolerance laws and the need to call in heavily armed police for everything more serious than a crying baby. Better get used to it, or move to a country where common sense still prevails.
As a regular flier in cattle-class, i'd just like to say that its nice to see first class passengers getting the preferential treatment they deserve. First on, first off and first into the mountainside...
A much better indicator of paper quality would be a weighted combination of the Journal quality (impact factor is a common measure), citation count and something like the number of different citing authors. You can probably add some other factors too.
Boy do i feel stupid buying one of those big heavy SLR things with the expensive lenses...
> advertised speeds without actually increasing the capacity
> of their network as they should.
There seems to be an automatic assumption that ISP level QOS equals bandwidth/download capping. That isn't necessarily true. I run QOS on my home connection and it means that when i'm downloading large quantities of data i can still talk ok on the VOIP. I haven't seen my bandwidth being reduced though - I just get to use what i have more effectively. Correspondingly, it would be negligent for an ISP *NOT* to use their resources efficiently, as excess infrastructure is paid for by their subscribers. Indeed, perhaps the users of TW should be complaining less about the traffic shaping now and more about how long its taken to implement...