I stopped reading halfway through. Its a troll. I could say Windows isn't ready for the desktop because there are no CLI utilities or scripting languages built in.
Windows has PowerShell. It has some features which I have never heard of on Linux (but I'd like to be proven wrong): the pipeline support typed objects and not just text streams that Unix tools spend their time parsing; powershell allows full access to the DotNET api.
If you want to do something in batch like resize and auto-rotate a bunch of digital camera pictures you need to search for and download a program that does exactly what you want and hopefully not get a virus.
You could use Powershell and jhead to accomplish the same thing on Windows. (Or even cygwin!) Or use jhead on MacOS X:)
Or you use powershell, access the DotNet image framework, even create a CmdLet encapsulating the hard nifty tricky details...
Have access to the offender email? -> Offender can encrypt all his emails. So that no-one would pose as him, nor anyone read his emails. Effect of having the password => absolutely none.
What kind of monitoring anyway? -> Offender can open hundreds and hundreds of accounts, send the password, register to a huge amount of spam. He would comply with the rules, but who would have time to read/process the emails anyway??? -> Offender could change passwords of his accounts on a daily fashion or open an account every day. -> Once email has been deleted, what good can "have the password" do. Let's say. A. Open new account on yahoo + send password B. Send email to prey, asking to reply on another email (not yet created). C. Erase traces of first email.... Seriously?
Totally ineffective way to achieve i don't know what.
J-1 visas are the way to go, but a company will not invest time if you are not planning to stay for at least 6 months...
I did this for a 6 months internship, in a small company in SC. They had some europeans employees (1 french, 1 german now naturalized) which helped the process. I did not know them personally but I tried to convince them that it would be a good idea to hire me...
In the end they wanted to keep me, but other visas that J-1 are hard to get. I ended up in a partner company in Germany for nearly 2 yrs, before I quitted for a much more interesting offer back in France.
Now I am planning to move to the UK, Canada or the US...
I personally hate to have to confirm that I want to download what I want to download... I never quite found out how to disable that in IE, but thank goodness, I don't use it often.
And anyway. Instead of carpet bombing it becomes carpet clicking. Do you want to download that? No.. Do you want to... ? No! No! Imagine a thousand times. Then you have to kill your webbrowser and potentially lose important work. I had rather downloaded crap.
Since the US have been condemned and keep on refusing to apply the WTO decision to allow online gambling in the states...
Antigua will have legally the right to become a PirateBay Heaven:)
This sounds like good old story. "Boo Apple does not let 3rd parties develop their own Application for this device, this will kill it!" W00t. And within a year Apple released an SDK.
Btw: they have just updated the SDK.
By the time some kind of device based on google API is released on the market, Apple would probably have had the time to had this background app feature, and once again it'll old story.
I think releasing the product to market before and addin extra features after, for the people who need it, is a good strategy. And the apple store for distributing apps and take 30% is a GREAT $$$$IDEA$$$$$ too!
Newtonian mechanics has been proven wrong, since it cannot accurately predict the behavior of large bodies in space at it should.
That said, for engineering purposes, the extra precision that Einstein's equations give is totally meaningless and much less compared to all the errors/tolerance we have due to the acceptable imprecisions of mechanic systems. In addition those equations are much simpler to use.
If you had done any physics or mechanics, you should remember how many times this approach is used... Ok. We don't care about this term because it is too small etc... That'
However I know at least one field in engineering which uses Einsteinian mechanics instead of Newtonian, where precision matters, GPS! Try implementing GPS with Newtonian mechanics and you will see it is plain wrong! You will end up in Alaska instead of Sahara:)
Yes. I forgot about the direct debit, but as you stress, it is pretty useless... I don't think ID thieves are so much interested in either sending money to charity or giving their real address for an electricity bill. In France, the requirements are so harsh that even charity organizations cannot be included in the Direct Debit scheme.
I don't know the UK system very well, but I have lived in Germany and France for some time.
Direct debit can only be set up for large institutions like major phone company, electricity company etc... These are either tight to a particular location or your ID is checked (for instance for mobile phones). It's pretty hard to do anything nasty with that.
Wire transfer over the internet requires a one time pad in Germany. You receive a list of codes via secure mail (the same as the one used to send you credit card PIN). In France it sucks, but basically it is not so different from the US, you have to sign up for the service and various password / identification schemes are put in place (although they suck compared to the German OTP).
In France one of my banks even required me to go to a branch to register the bank number before I could make a transfer.
Isn't your bank the only institution able to transfer money out of your account? Don't you have to show your ID? Don't you have to sign some documents???
My opinion is ID theft is only possible because the clerks in the banks are too lazy to check for an ID or a signature. Whenever you go to a bar in the US, they will look at your ID before they serve booze, but if you set up a $xxxx account/load no one will ever check it. This is just how ridiculous the system is. Account number without proof of identity should be as useless as a car without gas.
The big ban theory is a scientific theory and it can be tested in many ways. That does not mean it is true. It could only be partially true or totally wrong and fit our observations so far... The point it's testable and REFUTABLE if needed.
What happens before the Big Ban simply has no sense. Because BEFORE as we mean it, does not exist. Big Ban created time remember?
And the theory makes absolutely no assumption to what may have caused the initial state of the Big Ban. In a word, we don't have a clue...
The fact is, God is a totally untestable theory. You cannot either prove it or disapprove it by scientific means. What causes the Big Ban, what's "before" in manner of speech, there's no theory. And if there was one, it would be the same as God. Un-scientific, un-testable. It's likek every time science happens to give an answer to a question, it asks for many more at the same moment.
The Big Ban however is a scientific theory. It seems to have happened for many good reasons: the ever going expansion (or the illusion of it??), to fossile radition, etc... But it may be completely wrong also. After all many scientists believed the earth was going around the sun. The point is, unlike God, you can prove something about it/against it.
Anyway. Just to conclude in a word. I do not see what God has to do with the Big Ban at all. The two discussions (religion/science) are two unrelated and impossible to relate topics. One cannot prove or disprove the other. All dicussions about it are therefore pointless.
Yeah... but of course it bothers no one that DRMized WMA are incompatible with everything except M$ software and M$ operating system.
At least Apple ported its DRM scheme to Windows. Such cannot be said about M$. Microsoft has a problem with monopoly only when they do not have them.
Google: - you do not need IE to use the website - in fact it probably works better with FireFox - they do software. For linux and mac also!!!. - sometimes free software. -... even for the phone to replace that crap of Winblows mobile! =>> Balmer: "they are evil" + "this is just for the show. That mobile thing is no where to be seen" ==>>> Google: one month later "see it's there already. took us much lest time than winblowz viztoys !!"
Apple: - designed an mp3 player with probably a higher fee and slightly less feature than competitors. Did not want to pay royalties for their WMA proprietary format and relied on existing file formats. And put a USABLE GUI to the mp3 player so you don't have to be a geek to play songs!!! - iTunes. Wow ID TAG encoding. You guyz on PC are no longer required to put everything in the file title and can actually have a small database of all your files (=> trash winamp, wmp of these days etc... ) Oh burning a CD and ripping with the same software. TOO EASY. not geeky enough - M$ DRM are bad for customers. Ask those who already LOST what they bought with it. Apple answer: screw the majors. Same price for everything. You can burn your music. You're not happy? Go see elsewhere, customers are happy. There's no elsewhere? Then ppl will pirate your stuff. ==> M$. They're not using the standard WMA format ====> APPLE: WMA is not a standard. Does not work on Macs. You want us to use that for iPods???? No way! We have Macs to sell! Port you crap and let's talk after... When i mean port, don't do the same shit as we some of your previous software ports on mac (Windows Video Player for instance.. )
Yeah. And maybe u missed the point. It's just for FRENCH movies....
For your average normal (=american) movie you have first to wait the greedy MPAA has secured a licensing agreement in France, then dubbed the fucking movie, then released it in a theater, then DVD release 7 or more months after.
You just end up with a crazy system where movies are released in DVD in the US before they are in theaters in France. How many times did I see a movie in a plane before it was actually released in movie theaters here in Paris.
And to make things even more stupid, most movie theaters do not even broadcast the movies in dubbed version in Paris any more... at least not those on the champs élysées, business district, chatelet etc..
I agree. Apparently you're one of the very few users who use the only advanced features of MS Office that make it impossible to replace for no one.
But personally I have never had to write a single line of VBA in my life. When I write a text, I expect the formatting to be all the same on all computers, I expect the text writer to be able to import at least ONE useful vectorial image format, or to be able to erase a character in the middle of somewhere without changing the format of the whole line (oh god i hate this bug/feature of word.. ), or not have to open 3 modal dialogs and click 3 times on OK Button to see the changes on the page I'm editing (for instance style dlgs).
Why do I hate MS-Office so much? Because I have used dozen of other products before I ever had to use office. The UI is painful and not intutive. The products are locked down. I have never had to use a feature that exists in office (like the powerful VBA) and what i'm interested about is producing a document of quality in a timely and reliable fashion, without being too much stressed. That's what MS-Office fails to produce everytime I use it.
I hate OpenOffice for the same reasons I hate MS-Office. I think it's even worse. The UI suck as much (it's a copy) but the software does not even have the excuse of having more powerful features such as VBA. In addition, it's even less reliable than MSOffice.
"Our Apologies. At this time, the SpiralFrog Web site is available only to residents of the United States of America and Canada."
Oh grrrrrr!!!!. You deserve to be pirated just for that !
I'm just tired of waiting 6 months to see the movie in a movie house when I can just go and download it for free... and it's actually of better quality since the audio is not fucked up with dubbing. As a matter of principle i never go and watch movies that are released more than two months after the US release.
I never bought a single DVD because of the zoning. I never considered it worth the trouble (again i can download DivX for free)
I do buy audio CDs (i mean the real audio CDs those without crappy not even working copy protection...). Oh and yeah. I'm sick and tired of never finding the CDs I need coz they're not imported (sorry i downloaded those)
I wish you all the worst. May this business venture collapse and bring your company to bankrupcy. The world and the artists will be better off. You are a tool of the past. Artists do not need you for distribution. The only thing you can provide to artists is "marketing". You should become a mere tool in the hands of artists. Artists should squeeze you out to get the best deals and not the other way around.
Acutally I was also wondering what this feature was used for? Anyone knows?
My guess is that since Apple decided to unilaterally disable the feature (without giving any option to activate it for the mighty or protected folks) it is because it was probably never used.
The lack of freeware argument is sort of really astonishing to me too. I think it reveals the lack of knowledge of the user about the platform and especially of good places on the Net to find stuff (macupdates / versiontracker)
It might be true in terms of pure quantity: there are more freewares on Windows ok... but you usually have 3-4 competing freewares doing the same thing on Windows, but only one which is actually good. Let's take an example. A utlity like DiskSize on Windows has many many freeware/shareware/and even COMMERCIAL! applications. But I had to google and try 5 freewares before I found one that works. I think that was WinDirStat.
Maybe the author failed to get some windows software equivalent on Mac. But the reverse is also true. For instance go look for a QuickSilver equivalent. You have the clumbsy launchy, the fat google etc.. but none is going to be as cool.
As for office tools. To be honest, unless you are working in a particular business environment and need to exchange documents a lot, i think Apple Works is quite worth is money (otherwise you need MS Office). I find it much more smooth to use than it's MS or OpenOffice counterparts. But the author has a point. There's no real office freeware tools available. OpenOffice is not (YET) ported and it is a SAD lack. NeoOffice sucks. I think you may use Ragtime for free, but it's not well known and frankly the UI is not that good... You also have some cool sharewares like Mellel.
But there's the unmatchable OmniGraffle that neither linux/windows has. If you need to make diagrams to show complex ideas and that you are frustrated to spend hours on a software for something that would take just a couple of minutes by hand.... then OmniGraffle is for you. And I have searched for equivalents so good (and FAST) to use, but never found any on Linux or Windows. For my needs, VISIO is a POOR alternative. And visio provides stuff i really never needs, like the semantic aspect of graphs, which in fact is annoying me when i want to take some liberties... For instance a UML diagram which does not abide the norm.
End to finish with the Linux argument...
The author tested the Ubuntu distribution and apparently he was not so scared to play with the command line and he did not complain about missing software except games and photoshop. He also did not complain about hardware support and i think that is biased... Coz Mac has hardware support, photoshop and slightly more games than linux...
I might accept the critics he made about OS X coz somehow they're true, but the lack of criticism on Linux is shocking. The truth is that MacOS X has a much less troublesome and greater hardware support (generally speaking) than Linux has. The reason is that many more manufacturers do provide drivers for MacOS X than for Linux (of course there are exceptions) and that you need not recompile your kernel everytime you add something (now i understand the technical advantages for LInux to do so... but MacOS X goal is to be easy, so it uses binary compatibility, kernel APIs and all that stuff Linus does not want to hear about for his own good reasons)
As for the software, virtually anything you can run on Linux for free will run on MacOS X too for free (except anything that interacts heavily with the Linux kernel... except drivers i dont know). That said it's reserved to user which are not afraid to use X11 and type some command lines (so not everybody and the criticims to OS X is fair). But that was not the case of the user, who can use some basic command lines on Ubutun. So I think he should have mentionned it. Coz honest he has the level to install some Nix packages on the mac. As to say the interaction with X11 and Aqua is not perfect yeah... it's true... but the interaction between a Motif, WxWidgets, QT and GTK app on Linux is not much smooth either, so that argument is to mitigate, even though with time they all tend to mimic windows (observe for instance the displacement of the close button on linux windows manager before and after win95)
That's my point... the PIN on the magnetic stripe is snakeoil security. The bottom line is that you do NOT need the PIN to use the card.
I was living in SC up to 2005 and I never ever ever used a PIN except in an ATM.
So the fact that it calls the bank may make the store safer, but it defintively does not change anything for the user. Whoever checks those signed tickets anyway? Anyone can use YOUR card....
The bottom line is. Steal a credit card that is not visa or mastercard compatible in France or Germany (Smart card) and you have no choice than to throw it away. It's totally useless. Of course some vulnerabilities were discovered in the past but they were promptly patched up... Do the same thing with a vanila american VISA or Mastercard and you can put the credit of the legitimate user in jeopardy if he/she does not realize it soon enough.
And final argument. YOU CANNOT CLONE A SMART CARD. Or at least not as easily as a magnetic stripe and no one bothered... Cloning is the worst thing that can happen. On the French riviera where i used to live, the Italian mafia was hijacking ATMs to add a device which was cloning cards inserted into ATMs by tourist. Basically you do not realize that something is wrong unless you check your credit daily or get your card refused somewhere because your credit limit is reached.
Slashdot Mirror
Savannah is down too... but no one cares :)
http://savannah.gnu.org/
From what I heard, it has been done before
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu#Vendor_support
I did my research and found a TV tuner that would work under Linux so that I could run MythTV. How many tuner cards work with OSX?
Many TV tuners are supported on the Mac, so if you do you research well, you could probably find one that works on Mac, Windows and Linux, and maybe even Linux on non i386 hardware
http://www.elgato.com/elgato/na/mainmenu/products/software/EyeTV3/product3.en.html
Webcam drivers are bit irrelevant on the Mac, considered that Apple bundle WebCams with many of their hardware nowadays. But anyway:
http://webcam-osx.sourceforge.net/cameras/index.php
http://www.ioxperts.com/devices/supportedvideo.html
I stopped reading halfway through. Its a troll. I could say Windows isn't ready for the desktop because there are no CLI utilities or scripting languages built in.
Windows has PowerShell. It has some features which I have never heard of on Linux (but I'd like to be proven wrong): the pipeline support typed objects and not just text streams that Unix tools spend their time parsing; powershell allows full access to the DotNET api.
If you want to do something in batch like resize and auto-rotate a bunch of digital camera pictures you need to search for and download a program that does exactly what you want and hopefully not get a virus.
You could use Powershell and jhead to accomplish the same thing on Windows. (Or even cygwin!) Or use jhead on MacOS X :)
Or you use powershell, access the DotNet image framework, even create a CmdLet encapsulating the hard nifty tricky details...
Additionally this is stupid.
Have access to the offender email?
-> Offender can encrypt all his emails. So that no-one would pose as him, nor anyone read his emails. Effect of having the password => absolutely none.
What kind of monitoring anyway?
-> Offender can open hundreds and hundreds of accounts, send the password, register to a huge amount of spam. He would comply with the rules, but who would have time to read/process the emails anyway???
-> Offender could change passwords of his accounts on a daily fashion or open an account every day.
-> Once email has been deleted, what good can "have the password" do. Let's say. A. Open new account on yahoo + send password B. Send email to prey, asking to reply on another email (not yet created). C. Erase traces of first email.... Seriously?
Totally ineffective way to achieve i don't know what.
J-1 visas are the way to go, but a company will not invest time if you are not planning to stay for at least 6 months...
I did this for a 6 months internship, in a small company in SC. They had some europeans employees (1 french, 1 german now naturalized) which helped the process. I did not know them personally but I tried to convince them that it would be a good idea to hire me...
In the end they wanted to keep me, but other visas that J-1 are hard to get. I ended up in a partner company in Germany for nearly 2 yrs, before I quitted for a much more interesting offer back in France.
Now I am planning to move to the UK, Canada or the US...
If you want a Swedish chick of 99+ yrs old... Otherwise stick to the German, French, Italian ones.
I still fail to understand why downloading files to the desktop is a major security problem...
That's quite funny that Microsoft urged Apple to fix this, whereas the actual failure was in IE7.
It's not the job of Apple or Firefox (we don't know about this bug anyway) to fix everyone else (Microsoft) security problems.
I personally hate to have to confirm that I want to download what I want to download... I never quite found out how to disable that in IE, but thank goodness, I don't use it often. And anyway. Instead of carpet bombing it becomes carpet clicking. Do you want to download that? No.. Do you want to... ? No! No! Imagine a thousand times. Then you have to kill your webbrowser and potentially lose important work. I had rather downloaded crap.
Since the US have been condemned and keep on refusing to apply the WTO decision to allow online gambling in the states... Antigua will have legally the right to become a PirateBay Heaven :)
I guess the same kind of technique could be applied to steganographic data contained in HD playback or mp3s.
:P
Nice to know someone is actually looking for a way to destroy these
This sounds like good old story. "Boo Apple does not let 3rd parties develop their own Application for this device, this will kill it!" W00t. And within a year Apple released an SDK.
Btw: they have just updated the SDK.
By the time some kind of device based on google API is released on the market, Apple would probably have had the time to had this background app feature, and once again it'll old story.
I think releasing the product to market before and addin extra features after, for the people who need it, is a good strategy. And the apple store for distributing apps and take 30% is a GREAT $$$$IDEA$$$$$ too!
Newtonian mechanics has been proven wrong, since it cannot accurately predict the behavior of large bodies in space at it should.
:)
That said, for engineering purposes, the extra precision that Einstein's equations give is totally meaningless and much less compared to all the errors/tolerance we have due to the acceptable imprecisions of mechanic systems. In addition those equations are much simpler to use.
If you had done any physics or mechanics, you should remember how many times this approach is used... Ok. We don't care about this term because it is too small etc... That'
However I know at least one field in engineering which uses Einsteinian mechanics instead of Newtonian, where precision matters, GPS! Try implementing GPS with Newtonian mechanics and you will see it is plain wrong! You will end up in Alaska instead of Sahara
People not disabling the auto-run deserve to be hacked.
People enabling the auto-run by default on their OS deserve to be jailed.
Have you heard of VMWare ?
Yes. I forgot about the direct debit, but as you stress, it is pretty useless... I don't think ID thieves are so much interested in either sending money to charity or giving their real address for an electricity bill. In France, the requirements are so harsh that even charity organizations cannot be included in the Direct Debit scheme.
I don't know the UK system very well, but I have lived in Germany and France for some time.
Direct debit can only be set up for large institutions like major phone company, electricity company etc... These are either tight to a particular location or your ID is checked (for instance for mobile phones). It's pretty hard to do anything nasty with that.
Wire transfer over the internet requires a one time pad in Germany. You receive a list of codes via secure mail (the same as the one used to send you credit card PIN). In France it sucks, but basically it is not so different from the US, you have to sign up for the service and various password / identification schemes are put in place (although they suck compared to the German OTP).
In France one of my banks even required me to go to a branch to register the bank number before I could make a transfer.
How in hell is this possible?
Isn't your bank the only institution able to transfer money out of your account? Don't you have to show your ID? Don't you have to sign some documents???
My opinion is ID theft is only possible because the clerks in the banks are too lazy to check for an ID or a signature. Whenever you go to a bar in the US, they will look at your ID before they serve booze, but if you set up a $xxxx account/load no one will ever check it. This is just how ridiculous the system is. Account number without proof of identity should be as useless as a car without gas.
The big ban theory is a scientific theory and it can be tested in many ways. That does not mean it is true. It could only be partially true or totally wrong and fit our observations so far... The point it's testable and REFUTABLE if needed.
What happens before the Big Ban simply has no sense. Because BEFORE as we mean it, does not exist. Big Ban created time remember?
And the theory makes absolutely no assumption to what may have caused the initial state of the Big Ban. In a word, we don't have a clue...
The fact is, God is a totally untestable theory. You cannot either prove it or disapprove it by scientific means. What causes the Big Ban, what's "before" in manner of speech, there's no theory. And if there was one, it would be the same as God. Un-scientific, un-testable. It's likek every time science happens to give an answer to a question, it asks for many more at the same moment.
The Big Ban however is a scientific theory. It seems to have happened for many good reasons: the ever going expansion (or the illusion of it??), to fossile radition, etc... But it may be completely wrong also. After all many scientists believed the earth was going around the sun. The point is, unlike God, you can prove something about it/against it.
Anyway. Just to conclude in a word. I do not see what God has to do with the Big Ban at all. The two discussions (religion/science) are two unrelated and impossible to relate topics. One cannot prove or disprove the other. All dicussions about it are therefore pointless.
Yeah... but of course it bothers no one that DRMized WMA are incompatible with everything except M$ software and M$ operating system.
... even for the phone to replace that crap of Winblows mobile!
At least Apple ported its DRM scheme to Windows. Such cannot be said about M$. Microsoft has a problem with monopoly only when they do not have them.
Google:
- you do not need IE to use the website
- in fact it probably works better with FireFox
- they do software. For linux and mac also!!!.
- sometimes free software.
-
=>> Balmer: "they are evil" + "this is just for the show. That mobile thing is no where to be seen"
==>>> Google: one month later "see it's there already. took us much lest time than winblowz viztoys !!"
Apple:
- designed an mp3 player with probably a higher fee and slightly less feature than competitors. Did not want to pay royalties for their WMA proprietary format and relied on existing file formats. And put a USABLE GUI to the mp3 player so you don't have to be a geek to play songs!!!
- iTunes. Wow ID TAG encoding. You guyz on PC are no longer required to put everything in the file title and can actually have a small database of all your files (=> trash winamp, wmp of these days etc... ) Oh burning a CD and ripping with the same software. TOO EASY. not geeky enough
- M$ DRM are bad for customers. Ask those who already LOST what they bought with it. Apple answer: screw the majors. Same price for everything. You can burn your music. You're not happy? Go see elsewhere, customers are happy. There's no elsewhere? Then ppl will pirate your stuff.
==> M$. They're not using the standard WMA format
====> APPLE: WMA is not a standard. Does not work on Macs. You want us to use that for iPods???? No way! We have Macs to sell! Port you crap and let's talk after... When i mean port, don't do the same shit as we some of your previous software ports on mac (Windows Video Player for instance.. )
Yeah. And maybe u missed the point. It's just for FRENCH movies....
For your average normal (=american) movie you have first to wait the greedy MPAA has secured a licensing agreement in France, then dubbed the fucking movie, then released it in a theater, then DVD release 7 or more months after.
You just end up with a crazy system where movies are released in DVD in the US before they are in theaters in France. How many times did I see a movie in a plane before it was actually released in movie theaters here in Paris.
And to make things even more stupid, most movie theaters do not even broadcast the movies in dubbed version in Paris any more... at least not those on the champs élysées, business district, chatelet etc..
I agree. Apparently you're one of the very few users who use the only advanced features of MS Office that make it impossible to replace for no one.
But personally I have never had to write a single line of VBA in my life. When I write a text, I expect the formatting to be all the same on all computers, I expect the text writer to be able to import at least ONE useful vectorial image format, or to be able to erase a character in the middle of somewhere without changing the format of the whole line (oh god i hate this bug/feature of word.. ), or not have to open 3 modal dialogs and click 3 times on OK Button to see the changes on the page I'm editing (for instance style dlgs).
Why do I hate MS-Office so much? Because I have used dozen of other products before I ever had to use office. The UI is painful and not intutive. The products are locked down. I have never had to use a feature that exists in office (like the powerful VBA) and what i'm interested about is producing a document of quality in a timely and reliable fashion, without being too much stressed. That's what MS-Office fails to produce everytime I use it.
I hate OpenOffice for the same reasons I hate MS-Office. I think it's even worse. The UI suck as much (it's a copy) but the software does not even have the excuse of having more powerful features such as VBA. In addition, it's even less reliable than MSOffice.
"Our Apologies.
At this time, the SpiralFrog Web site is available only to residents of the United States of America and Canada."
Oh grrrrrr!!!!. You deserve to be pirated just for that !
I'm just tired of waiting 6 months to see the movie in a movie house when I can just go and download it for free... and it's actually of better quality since the audio is not fucked up with dubbing. As a matter of principle i never go and watch movies that are released more than two months after the US release.
I never bought a single DVD because of the zoning. I never considered it worth the trouble (again i can download DivX for free)
I do buy audio CDs (i mean the real audio CDs those without crappy not even working copy protection...). Oh and yeah. I'm sick and tired of never finding the CDs I need coz they're not imported (sorry i downloaded those)
I wish you all the worst. May this business venture collapse and bring your company to bankrupcy. The world and the artists will be better off. You are a tool of the past. Artists do not need you for distribution. The only thing you can provide to artists is "marketing". You should become a mere tool in the hands of artists. Artists should squeeze you out to get the best deals and not the other way around.
Fuck you universal. Die!
Acutally I was also wondering what this feature was used for? Anyone knows?
My guess is that since Apple decided to unilaterally disable the feature (without giving any option to activate it for the mighty or protected folks) it is because it was probably never used.
The lack of freeware argument is sort of really astonishing to me too. I think it reveals the lack of knowledge of the user about the platform and especially of good places on the Net to find stuff (macupdates / versiontracker)
It might be true in terms of pure quantity: there are more freewares on Windows ok... but you usually have 3-4 competing freewares doing the same thing on Windows, but only one which is actually good. Let's take an example. A utlity like DiskSize on Windows has many many freeware/shareware/and even COMMERCIAL! applications. But I had to google and try 5 freewares before I found one that works. I think that was WinDirStat.
Maybe the author failed to get some windows software equivalent on Mac. But the reverse is also true. For instance go look for a QuickSilver equivalent. You have the clumbsy launchy, the fat google etc.. but none is going to be as cool.
As for office tools. To be honest, unless you are working in a particular business environment and need to exchange documents a lot, i think Apple Works is quite worth is money (otherwise you need MS Office). I find it much more smooth to use than it's MS or OpenOffice counterparts. But the author has a point. There's no real office freeware tools available. OpenOffice is not (YET) ported and it is a SAD lack. NeoOffice sucks. I think you may use Ragtime for free, but it's not well known and frankly the UI is not that good... You also have some cool sharewares like Mellel.
But there's the unmatchable OmniGraffle that neither linux/windows has. If you need to make diagrams to show complex ideas and that you are frustrated to spend hours on a software for something that would take just a couple of minutes by hand.... then OmniGraffle is for you. And I have searched for equivalents so good (and FAST) to use, but never found any on Linux or Windows. For my needs, VISIO is a POOR alternative. And visio provides stuff i really never needs, like the semantic aspect of graphs, which in fact is annoying me when i want to take some liberties... For instance a UML diagram which does not abide the norm.
End to finish with the Linux argument...
The author tested the Ubuntu distribution and apparently he was not so scared to play with the command line and he did not complain about missing software except games and photoshop. He also did not complain about hardware support and i think that is biased... Coz Mac has hardware support, photoshop and slightly more games than linux...
I might accept the critics he made about OS X coz somehow they're true, but the lack of criticism on Linux is shocking. The truth is that MacOS X has a much less troublesome and greater hardware support (generally speaking) than Linux has. The reason is that many more manufacturers do provide drivers for MacOS X than for Linux (of course there are exceptions) and that you need not recompile your kernel everytime you add something (now i understand the technical advantages for LInux to do so... but MacOS X goal is to be easy, so it uses binary compatibility, kernel APIs and all that stuff Linus does not want to hear about for his own good reasons)
As for the software, virtually anything you can run on Linux for free will run on MacOS X too for free (except anything that interacts heavily with the Linux kernel... except drivers i dont know). That said it's reserved to user which are not afraid to use X11 and type some command lines (so not everybody and the criticims to OS X is fair). But that was not the case of the user, who can use some basic command lines on Ubutun. So I think he should have mentionned it. Coz honest he has the level to install some Nix packages on the mac. As to say the interaction with X11 and Aqua is not perfect yeah... it's true... but the interaction between a Motif, WxWidgets, QT and GTK app on Linux is not much smooth either, so that argument is to mitigate, even though with time they all tend to mimic windows (observe for instance the displacement of the close button on linux windows manager before and after win95)
That's my point... the PIN on the magnetic stripe is snakeoil security. The bottom line is that you do NOT need the PIN to use the card.
I was living in SC up to 2005 and I never ever ever used a PIN except in an ATM.
So the fact that it calls the bank may make the store safer, but it defintively does not change anything for the user. Whoever checks those signed tickets anyway? Anyone can use YOUR card....
The bottom line is. Steal a credit card that is not visa or mastercard compatible in France or Germany (Smart card) and you have no choice than to throw it away. It's totally useless. Of course some vulnerabilities were discovered in the past but they were promptly patched up... Do the same thing with a vanila american VISA or Mastercard and you can put the credit of the legitimate user in jeopardy if he/she does not realize it soon enough.
And final argument. YOU CANNOT CLONE A SMART CARD. Or at least not as easily as a magnetic stripe and no one bothered... Cloning is the worst thing that can happen. On the French riviera where i used to live, the Italian mafia was hijacking ATMs to add a device which was cloning cards inserted into ATMs by tourist. Basically you do not realize that something is wrong unless you check your credit daily or get your card refused somewhere because your credit limit is reached.