The point is that presentation software is different from word processing. You need the program to be local on your computer so that you can make the presentation, in someone else's office, and without access to the net. For this to be useful, at the very least, google will have to make the slideshow part of this program available to live on your local PC. Maybe something analogous to Adobe Reader.
I do training frequently and use powerpoint as one of my tools. The laptop that I use most often doesn't even have wireless networking, because it doesn't need it. Often I train in places where the internet wouldn't be available at all without major hassles. I hope that google gets it right.
IANAB (I am not a biologist;-) BUT come on during the last 3 million years humans have spread all over the planet and grown significantly as a species. Big evolutionary change comes as a result of stress on a population. Bacteria don't evolve a resistance to antibiotics in a vacuum, they evolve that characteristic when all of the non-resistant bacteria are killed off leaving the resistant strain to re-populate the the niche they fill. A successful population GROWS. A troubled population evolves or fails. Also we evolved the "killer-app" (the pre-frontal cortex) quite a while ago and began passing on survival characteristics as part of culture instead of genetics. culture "evolves" radically faster than genes do. So no f'ing kidding chimps have evolved genetically more in the last 6 million years they've had to to survive!
10) people who talk about this really cool thing they did in World of Warcraft.
9) TV commercials (until you've banished the tube from your house for a year you have no idea how awful these things are)
8) Most cellphone interfaces (it often requires more keystrokes to pick a # from my list than to dial it from scratch)
7) People talking on cellphones while tailgating me.
6) People talking on cellphones with the earbuds in public (what? huh? you talking to me? oh.)
5) Microsoft operating systems in general (except XP which is often annoying but doesn't rate top 10)
4) MS Genuine Advantage (as bad as any other malware and my firewall doesn't block it)
3) Popups (thanks Firefox for mostly fixing this annoyance)
2) Browser Hijacks (you only have to have one once for you to be forever scarred)
and the number one annoying tech related thingy is...
It's a basic primer on UNIX job control. Whee. Not that it isn't well done or useful to the target audience -- but how is this 'news', never mind 'stuff that matters'?
"Looks like someone has a case of the mondays!"
I thought that the slashdot community was supportive of people migrating away from windoze to the linux world. TFA covers things that are not obvious to people that don't have *nix experience. It was a nicely written article. It might spur discussion on further basic knowledge needed to deal with linux. The whole community of "nerds" includes slide-rules to slashdot. Not every nerd is a sysadmin. To me this was useful. I already had learned 75% but had forgotten some and a bit was new and might be handy. That is "stuff that matters" to me. If nothing else cranky sysadmins, when posed with a question about something this basic, could roll their eyes condescendingly and give a link to this handy page.
The better question is why is this posted under "devcelopers"?
This is interesting because it is an example of a flash-mob. It's more interesting because the mob itself was apparently unaware that they were committing a crime on behalf of anonymous third party. I think it is fascinating that one person did some typing on a keyboard and caused a mob of totally unrelated people to descend on a property and loot it.
"You don't know the POWER of the dark side of Craigslist. Join me and together we will rule Tacoma as father and son!"
He doesn't get the driving force behind the people who want these sort of laws. They don't want to reduce the SEM their children see, they want to eliminate it completely and will never be happy otherwise. Which shows just how far out there they really are. You can't uninvent things.
I object to the characterization that wanting to protect children from sexually explicit material is "far out there." There is ample evidence that exposing young children to sexually explicit material is harmful to psychological development. Children should be allowed to remain sexually innocent. There is nothing "far out" about that at all. In fact I think that suggesting otherwise is pretty extreme. I would be shocked if any parent or psychologist anywhere would say that it's okay to show a 6 year old graphic sexual imagery. It is "far out" to suggest that free speech be eliminated to achieve the goal.
I do intend to protect my son from of porn for as long as I can. Protecting him from 95% of porn isn't any protection at all. At some point I'm going to have to get some help (maybe in the form of filtering software) but I certainly won't rely on it as my only solution. Like ALL parenting duties, they key is spending time with your children. Being involved in their lives is more effective than regulation or tech band-aids. If a parent expects the government or a technical solution to do their parenting for them then they are not doing their jobs, period.
Truth is, porn isn't on the top of my list of concerns. I worry about the massive exposure of kids to advertising (which is designed to erode self-esteem). I worry about the mass dosing of children with sugars. I worry that my very intelligent and energetic son will be "diagnosed" with ADHD by some lazy teacher who will want to put him on drugs because school isn't challenging. I worry that when he is older he will be exposed to and pressured to use drugs and alcohol. I worry that the idiot tailgating us is gonna put us in the hospital. I worry that the government will use "but think of the children!!!" to turn our country into a police state. After all of that and a lot more, THEN I worry about porn.
The Court told the EPA that they had to DO THEIR DAMN JOBS, regulate greenhouse gasses, or provide a reasonable explanation why they won't. You see for years in the face of overwhelming evidence they have simply failed to act in accordance with the law.
On the other big topic of debate here, whether this qualifies as "news for nerds," not all nerds are monomaniacally obsessed with computers. Some of us are interested in science, which is a study of how the real world works.
hese people would be deciding that scientific research is bad (it's already begun, look at the funding cuts in science and technology and the government stance on stem cell research etc). These people will also be electing idiots into office, idiots who believe that a voice-in-the-sky talks to them. And these people will be teaching -- no proselytizing -- to our children.
Do you really want to live in such a society? I, for one, do not. If anything, it scares me to no end. Uh... DUH!
Small enough is when it's about the size of an iPod shuffle, projects the display on a heads-up display on my glasses, uses some kind of eye tracking / hand tracking interface, so I can use focus and eye position for "mouse" control and type in my pockets.
the FBI et al have always abused whatever powers they have. Hoover persecuted a whole bunch of people in the name of fighting communism. His victims included Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcom X. Later the cointelpro program was used against black nationalist organizations, the American Indian Movement, the anti-war movement. Later after the abuses of cointelpro were exposed the very same tactics were employed against people who opposed Reagan's Central American Proxy wars and death squads. The same crap was used against the environmental movement in the 1980s. In fact during that period I personally knew people who's mail regularly arrived crudely torn open and taped closed. Since you can always expect the government to push the limits and abuse it's power it makes sense to limit that power so that the abuses are relatively benign. When you give the government expansive powers then the abuses tend to be expansive as well. I guarantee that the government is doing terrible things that will only be proven 15 or 20 years from now when it is history and we can all calmly claim, "well thank goodness that doesn't happen anymore!"
OK, let's see how you acted on the Ubuntu free support forums:..... goes on to illustrate with quotes how one user failed to make good use of the unbuntu forums
This discussion about the jerk and his problems with ubuntu and his interaction with the forums can be used to illustrate the greatest strength and weakness of Ubuntu.
The forums.
They are really amazing. There is a huge community of VERY helpful people that will usually step forward to help you solve whatever problem you have, for FREE. That's a great strength.
The weakness is that answers often come in the form of several commands with lots of switches and operators that should be copied and pasted into the command line interface. It often works but leaves the seeker of help ignorant as to WHY it works. After months of using Ubuntu, and getting really excellent help from the forums several times, I am still so ignorant that I don't even feel worthy to post a question anywhere but in the "absolute beginners forum." When I've learned how to do something in win or mac I can show another person how to do it, because I understand. With linux my answer would be, "post a question on the forums." It's like that weirdo in the computer lab said back in 1989 when I asked a dumb question about how to do something on the unix mainframe, "It's Unix son. You just gotta know." There is a significant culture of elitism linux and the culture that nurtures it.
Several times I have been given a correct bit of advise, but I have to ask several follow-up questions before I know what the hell the original answer was suggesting that I do. Someone once told me that their family owned land near Peoa. I asked, "where's Peoa?" The answer was, "near Oakley." Which was true but totally unhelpful. With windows and mac I know that the difference between newbie and power-user is time and experience. With linux I'm beginning to believe that there is a huge hurdle that must be surmounted before time and experience will help at all. I fear that I will never make it past that hurdle.
I hate to make this analogy but it is very useful to me. Windows 1.0 thru 3.1 (and really all the 9x's) were just graphical user interfaces tacked onto DOS. The modern Linux distros are really just a hodgepodge of extremely varied GUIs tacked onto the OS and onto each of the many different applications. When you need to get something out of the ordinary done you have to get into the command line. I am past the age where I have years of time to spend learning the intricacies of another CLI. That's why my 3 year old son's computer runs linux. HE will have the time to learn this stuff. So I guess I'm breeding/raising my own tech support, much like my Dad did.
I remember similar stuff said about XP. Look what happened there. People that might be interested in Linux or OS X will try Linux or OS X. People who aren't, won't. In the end, very little will change. Not entirely true. Windows XP was actually eagerly anticipated by most of the windows using world. The possibility of a stable OS that would work with existing applications, games, and be compatible with the stuff we use at work, was exciting. It's easy to forget the dark years of Win9x (especially for me since I held out using DOS/Win3.1 until 1 year before XP came out) but they were terrible with BSODs every day. I remember how a computer could not be left on overnight and be expected to run well in the morning. I remember that even if you setup password protected logins you could bypass all of that by clicking 'cancel' at the login prompt. Windows XP was a HUGE improvement. It was massively adopted upon release.
Now Vista on the other hand has elicited nothing but hand wringing for several years. For what I can tell it has little good to offer except eye candy. On the downside the OS has DRM in it's DNA, it has a ridiculous security sceme. It fails to run lots of current software. It claims but fails to be more secure (can't use 3rd party anti-virus). It has extreme hardware requirements. I built my last new PC within months of the release of XP. I will not build a PC for Vista. I will not buy a PC with Vista. I do not look forward to the day that I must start using Vista at work.
The big question is this: Linux or Apple? I have an older PC in the house running Ubuntu. It's great, and it also sucks. It has tons of free software. It can't legally play DVDs. It is supremely stable and runs really fast on very antiquated hardware. Getting it to do something out of the ordinary (like using the midi keyboard I got for my son) requires navigating a byzantine maze of forums, scripts, command lines. It fit nicely with my philosophy. You can build your own. On the other hand, Apples "just work." They cost more. You don't get to build your own. Since I don't have as much time as I used to I'll probably buy an Apple for 90% of my use, and I might have a 2nd PC with linux for doing stuff that requires high end software that I don't care to buy.
That being said, am I a typical user? Hardly. I've been on the internet since 1988. I built my last computer myself. I know enough to know how little I know. Lots of people think I'm some sort of computer guru. I realize that I am just barely competent. I would never recommend linux to my Dad or a computer-clueless friend. I tell them, "Go buy a Mac. They just work." When they get their Apple, they are happy. I'd rather USE a computer than ADMINISTER one.
Sure, let the early adopters pay $500 for an iphone. My Razr cost me $50 with the contract. I've seen them for free now w/ contract recently. The iphone will come down.
Apple is on the right track with the interface. I have despised the interface on every cellphone I've ever had. My Razr is the worst of the bunch. I have to use over 10 keystrokes for at least a dozen different things I do on a regular basis. Unfortunately Apple is on the wrong track with keeping the platform closed. I'm sure that lots of original users of the Palm Pilot only used the included applications, but the overwhelming reason that the Palm platform is still around (10 years later!) is the profusion of third party applications. So I'm gonna wait for iPhone 2 or 3 when it uses a fast wireless protocol, someone has "opened" the platform, and there are good third party apps. Until then cost issues will keep me in cell phone user interface hell.
So if you're smart enough to read the box, why would you buy Vista for an upgrade on a machine that's more than a year old and can't run it?
Actually I haven't figured out ONE good reason to go with Vista regardless of what hardware you have. Could someone clue me in?
If there was a big poisonous black cloud on the horizon it would be good news if you learned that it was delayed until April. I can't figure out how this is any different.
Signed - a satisfied XP user who will be migrating to Apple and/or Linux.
This is why I suggested that the problem might require tracking whether the transaction itself took place. The patter one would look for is lots of bids near the end amount, but NO TRANSACTIONS. I realize that this would be very complex and isn't likely to happen.
As far as not knowing what I'm talking about, you are right I have never attempted to shill bid one of my own auctions. I suppose it is a no brainer that ebay would prevent shill bidding from the same account. My question remains. How did the parent poster know that a shill bidder drove up the price?
If you really mean this as an example of being cheated, I'd suggest that perhaps you could modify your bid strategy to not include bidding $100 for something worth $50. Not defending shill bidders, don't get me wrong, I'm just saying do your research of what something is worth before you set the number, _or_, overbid and know you're going to be highest. But don't complain about it if you use the latter approach.
WRONG.
When you sell an item on ebay you enter into a contractual arrangement. When you bid on an item on ebay you enter into a contractual agreement. Shill bidding is a violation of the contract. Period. It is fraud.
The parent poster my have been willing to pay $100 for the item but obviously would have preferred to have paid $50. Apparently there was no one else out there that wanted to pay more than $50 for the item. Under the TERMS OF THE CONTRACT the item should have sold for $50. However, the seller, by violating the contract and bidding on his own item gets more than the market would otherwise bear. Both the seller and the bidder are supposed to have some risk in an auction. There are ways for the seller to reduce the risk (reserve prices) but they may reduce the possible gains. That's how life works.
My question is, how does the buyer KNOW that the person who ran up the price was the seller and not another buyer? If the shill bidder used the actual login name of the seller then the bidder was under no obligation to pay. If it was a different login name then this person may just be complaining about the legitimate auction process.
Maybe this abuse could be prevented by requiring very secure user verification and by requiring a proof of transaction for every successful auction. If a pattern of successful bids that didn't result in completed transactions were found it would indicate this type of fraud. example: shillbidder1234 has bid on lots of auctions from fraudseller5678 and won several (by accidentally outbidding a real bidder) but no transaction has taken place... you have a case of shill bidding.
It was nice of them to float this idea, but in truth it was more of a sinker. I think it's important for a company to air out internal workings from time to time. I know they've been very regular with good products lately. You have to expect that from time to time they'll have a stinker. Actually I thought the article was a gas!
Actually I believe that all net-metering schemes allow you to put power back into the grid and deduct it from your bill. If you generate more than you use, they don't pay you, your bill is $0. So there is no benefit to generating too much.
Why not offer your users the option to simply download your material and let them use the player of their choosing?
Yeah right. I want to spend my time and CPU cycles exporting my video to different formats, then the money to host 3 or 4 versions of the same damn video on my website.
No way!
I can just upload any of a half a dozen formats to google video, let them wrap it in flash, then I embed it in my blog. Now grampa can watch videos of his grandson without me explaining the finer points of choosing a media player. My Mac friends can watch my stuff. My Mac&PC family people can watch my stuff. Even my 3 year old son can watch it himself on his computer. Yes that's right at 3 years old he has his own PC, it runs Edubuntu, and he can point and click.
I for one welcome our new Flash video overlords!
http://ukemike.blogspot.com/
I haven't bothered updating to IE7 on my home or work machines (both XPSP1). Is there a risk associated with having IE6 still on my computer? I rarely use it (maybe 3 times in 2006). I guess what I'm really asking is does IE6 have vulnerabilities that can be exploited by it just being installed on my PC?
Here's another: It was my understanding that one could not uninstall IE6 from an XP machine. I know that XP used to use IE6 for updates. Now that there is a separate update system in XP do I still need IE? Could I upgrade to IE7 then uninstall it? Wouldn't that be ironic?
Actually we are getting dangerously close to a nuclear war.
The US now has TWO Carrier Strike Groups in the Persian Gulf. The Gulf is getting so crowded that a US sub bumped into a Japanese tanker. Ted Koppel on NPR Friday evening said that people in the military have indicated that our assets in the Gulf are not useful for combating the insurgency in Iraq but are well suited for strikes on Iran. Koppel said that senior military personnel have told him that it is likely that the US will be at war with Iran before 2007 is over.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?story Id=6836561
In the last several weeks Bush has fired and reassigned several high level military and intelligence people that were in some way in his way to a broader mid-east war. Generals John Abizaid and George Casey who were opposed to an escalation in Iraq and John Negroponte who has recently stated that Iran is 10 years from having the Bomb.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/010807R.shtml
I'd say that the doomsday clock is definitely ticking, and we are in for a shit storm in 2007.
THANKS Steve! I had an unfulfillable lust for a bit of techno wizardry that I wasn't going to be able to have. Now the lust is gone.
It's kind of like seeing a really hot woman. You take a deep and breath go over to talk to her. As you approach, all full of nerves, she smiles and reveals a mouth full of rotting teeth. No thanks. I outta here!
Slashdot Mirror
The point is that presentation software is different from word processing. You need the program to be local on your computer so that you can make the presentation, in someone else's office, and without access to the net. For this to be useful, at the very least, google will have to make the slideshow part of this program available to live on your local PC. Maybe something analogous to Adobe Reader.
I do training frequently and use powerpoint as one of my tools. The laptop that I use most often doesn't even have wireless networking, because it doesn't need it. Often I train in places where the internet wouldn't be available at all without major hassles. I hope that google gets it right.
IANAB (I am not a biologist ;-) BUT come on during the last 3 million years humans have spread all over the planet and grown significantly as a species. Big evolutionary change comes as a result of stress on a population. Bacteria don't evolve a resistance to antibiotics in a vacuum, they evolve that characteristic when all of the non-resistant bacteria are killed off leaving the resistant strain to re-populate the the niche they fill. A successful population GROWS. A troubled population evolves or fails. Also we evolved the "killer-app" (the pre-frontal cortex) quite a while ago and began passing on survival characteristics as part of culture instead of genetics. culture "evolves" radically faster than genes do. So no f'ing kidding chimps have evolved genetically more in the last 6 million years they've had to to survive!
10) people who talk about this really cool thing they did in World of Warcraft.
9) TV commercials (until you've banished the tube from your house for a year you have no idea how awful these things are)
8) Most cellphone interfaces (it often requires more keystrokes to pick a # from my list than to dial it from scratch)
7) People talking on cellphones while tailgating me.
6) People talking on cellphones with the earbuds in public (what? huh? you talking to me? oh.)
5) Microsoft operating systems in general (except XP which is often annoying but doesn't rate top 10)
4) MS Genuine Advantage (as bad as any other malware and my firewall doesn't block it)
3) Popups (thanks Firefox for mostly fixing this annoyance)
2) Browser Hijacks (you only have to have one once for you to be forever scarred)
and the number one annoying tech related thingy is...
1) SPAM (in all of it's myriad forms)
The same old slashdot jokes/complaints/discussion that crop up every time no matter what the discussion.
Damn! what happened to my karma?
to hike, fish, ski, and sit on your porch watching the sunset while waiting for the apocalypse.
"Looks like someone has a case of the mondays!"
I thought that the slashdot community was supportive of people migrating away from windoze to the linux world. TFA covers things that are not obvious to people that don't have *nix experience. It was a nicely written article. It might spur discussion on further basic knowledge needed to deal with linux. The whole community of "nerds" includes slide-rules to slashdot. Not every nerd is a sysadmin. To me this was useful. I already had learned 75% but had forgotten some and a bit was new and might be handy. That is "stuff that matters" to me. If nothing else cranky sysadmins, when posed with a question about something this basic, could roll their eyes condescendingly and give a link to this handy page.
The better question is why is this posted under "devcelopers"?
This is interesting because it is an example of a flash-mob. It's more interesting because the mob itself was apparently unaware that they were committing a crime on behalf of anonymous third party. I think it is fascinating that one person did some typing on a keyboard and caused a mob of totally unrelated people to descend on a property and loot it.
"You don't know the POWER of the dark side of Craigslist. Join me and together we will rule Tacoma as father and son!"
I object to the characterization that wanting to protect children from sexually explicit material is "far out there." There is ample evidence that exposing young children to sexually explicit material is harmful to psychological development. Children should be allowed to remain sexually innocent. There is nothing "far out" about that at all. In fact I think that suggesting otherwise is pretty extreme. I would be shocked if any parent or psychologist anywhere would say that it's okay to show a 6 year old graphic sexual imagery. It is "far out" to suggest that free speech be eliminated to achieve the goal.
I do intend to protect my son from of porn for as long as I can. Protecting him from 95% of porn isn't any protection at all. At some point I'm going to have to get some help (maybe in the form of filtering software) but I certainly won't rely on it as my only solution. Like ALL parenting duties, they key is spending time with your children. Being involved in their lives is more effective than regulation or tech band-aids. If a parent expects the government or a technical solution to do their parenting for them then they are not doing their jobs, period.
Truth is, porn isn't on the top of my list of concerns. I worry about the massive exposure of kids to advertising (which is designed to erode self-esteem). I worry about the mass dosing of children with sugars. I worry that my very intelligent and energetic son will be "diagnosed" with ADHD by some lazy teacher who will want to put him on drugs because school isn't challenging. I worry that when he is older he will be exposed to and pressured to use drugs and alcohol. I worry that the idiot tailgating us is gonna put us in the hospital. I worry that the government will use "but think of the children!!!" to turn our country into a police state. After all of that and a lot more, THEN I worry about porn.
It surprises me how a website full of otherwise apparently intelligent people can display such ignorance.
6 2339
The Bush administration has consistently governed favoring crony-ism, special interests, and religious wackos, instead of science.
http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/news/2004/02/
The Court told the EPA that they had to DO THEIR DAMN JOBS, regulate greenhouse gasses, or provide a reasonable explanation why they won't. You see for years in the face of overwhelming evidence they have simply failed to act in accordance with the law.
On the other big topic of debate here, whether this qualifies as "news for nerds," not all nerds are monomaniacally obsessed with computers. Some of us are interested in science, which is a study of how the real world works.
Do you really want to live in such a society? I, for one, do not. If anything, it scares me to no end. Uh... DUH!
We do live in that exact society!
Bush has on several occasions stated that he takes policy advise from God.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/st
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/
Small enough is when it's about the size of an iPod shuffle, projects the display on a heads-up display on my glasses, uses some kind of eye tracking / hand tracking interface, so I can use focus and eye position for "mouse" control and type in my pockets.
the FBI et al have always abused whatever powers they have. Hoover persecuted a whole bunch of people in the name of fighting communism. His victims included Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcom X. Later the cointelpro program was used against black nationalist organizations, the American Indian Movement, the anti-war movement. Later after the abuses of cointelpro were exposed the very same tactics were employed against people who opposed Reagan's Central American Proxy wars and death squads. The same crap was used against the environmental movement in the 1980s. In fact during that period I personally knew people who's mail regularly arrived crudely torn open and taped closed. Since you can always expect the government to push the limits and abuse it's power it makes sense to limit that power so that the abuses are relatively benign. When you give the government expansive powers then the abuses tend to be expansive as well. I guarantee that the government is doing terrible things that will only be proven 15 or 20 years from now when it is history and we can all calmly claim, "well thank goodness that doesn't happen anymore!"
This discussion about the jerk and his problems with ubuntu and his interaction with the forums can be used to illustrate the greatest strength and weakness of Ubuntu.
The forums.
They are really amazing. There is a huge community of VERY helpful people that will usually step forward to help you solve whatever problem you have, for FREE. That's a great strength.
The weakness is that answers often come in the form of several commands with lots of switches and operators that should be copied and pasted into the command line interface. It often works but leaves the seeker of help ignorant as to WHY it works. After months of using Ubuntu, and getting really excellent help from the forums several times, I am still so ignorant that I don't even feel worthy to post a question anywhere but in the "absolute beginners forum." When I've learned how to do something in win or mac I can show another person how to do it, because I understand. With linux my answer would be, "post a question on the forums." It's like that weirdo in the computer lab said back in 1989 when I asked a dumb question about how to do something on the unix mainframe, "It's Unix son. You just gotta know." There is a significant culture of elitism linux and the culture that nurtures it.
Several times I have been given a correct bit of advise, but I have to ask several follow-up questions before I know what the hell the original answer was suggesting that I do. Someone once told me that their family owned land near Peoa. I asked, "where's Peoa?" The answer was, "near Oakley." Which was true but totally unhelpful. With windows and mac I know that the difference between newbie and power-user is time and experience. With linux I'm beginning to believe that there is a huge hurdle that must be surmounted before time and experience will help at all. I fear that I will never make it past that hurdle.
I hate to make this analogy but it is very useful to me. Windows 1.0 thru 3.1 (and really all the 9x's) were just graphical user interfaces tacked onto DOS. The modern Linux distros are really just a hodgepodge of extremely varied GUIs tacked onto the OS and onto each of the many different applications. When you need to get something out of the ordinary done you have to get into the command line. I am past the age where I have years of time to spend learning the intricacies of another CLI. That's why my 3 year old son's computer runs linux. HE will have the time to learn this stuff. So I guess I'm breeding/raising my own tech support, much like my Dad did.
Now Vista on the other hand has elicited nothing but hand wringing for several years. For what I can tell it has little good to offer except eye candy. On the downside the OS has DRM in it's DNA, it has a ridiculous security sceme. It fails to run lots of current software. It claims but fails to be more secure (can't use 3rd party anti-virus). It has extreme hardware requirements. I built my last new PC within months of the release of XP. I will not build a PC for Vista. I will not buy a PC with Vista. I do not look forward to the day that I must start using Vista at work.
The big question is this: Linux or Apple? I have an older PC in the house running Ubuntu. It's great, and it also sucks. It has tons of free software. It can't legally play DVDs. It is supremely stable and runs really fast on very antiquated hardware. Getting it to do something out of the ordinary (like using the midi keyboard I got for my son) requires navigating a byzantine maze of forums, scripts, command lines. It fit nicely with my philosophy. You can build your own. On the other hand, Apples "just work." They cost more. You don't get to build your own. Since I don't have as much time as I used to I'll probably buy an Apple for 90% of my use, and I might have a 2nd PC with linux for doing stuff that requires high end software that I don't care to buy.
That being said, am I a typical user? Hardly. I've been on the internet since 1988. I built my last computer myself. I know enough to know how little I know. Lots of people think I'm some sort of computer guru. I realize that I am just barely competent. I would never recommend linux to my Dad or a computer-clueless friend. I tell them, "Go buy a Mac. They just work." When they get their Apple, they are happy. I'd rather USE a computer than ADMINISTER one.
Sure, let the early adopters pay $500 for an iphone. My Razr cost me $50 with the contract. I've seen them for free now w/ contract recently. The iphone will come down.
Apple is on the right track with the interface. I have despised the interface on every cellphone I've ever had. My Razr is the worst of the bunch. I have to use over 10 keystrokes for at least a dozen different things I do on a regular basis. Unfortunately Apple is on the wrong track with keeping the platform closed. I'm sure that lots of original users of the Palm Pilot only used the included applications, but the overwhelming reason that the Palm platform is still around (10 years later!) is the profusion of third party applications. So I'm gonna wait for iPhone 2 or 3 when it uses a fast wireless protocol, someone has "opened" the platform, and there are good third party apps. Until then cost issues will keep me in cell phone user interface hell.
Actually I haven't figured out ONE good reason to go with Vista regardless of what hardware you have. Could someone clue me in?
If there was a big poisonous black cloud on the horizon it would be good news if you learned that it was delayed until April. I can't figure out how this is any different. Signed - a satisfied XP user who will be migrating to Apple and/or Linux.
This is why I suggested that the problem might require tracking whether the transaction itself took place. The patter one would look for is lots of bids near the end amount, but NO TRANSACTIONS. I realize that this would be very complex and isn't likely to happen.
As far as not knowing what I'm talking about, you are right I have never attempted to shill bid one of my own auctions. I suppose it is a no brainer that ebay would prevent shill bidding from the same account. My question remains. How did the parent poster know that a shill bidder drove up the price?
When you sell an item on ebay you enter into a contractual arrangement. When you bid on an item on ebay you enter into a contractual agreement. Shill bidding is a violation of the contract. Period. It is fraud.
The parent poster my have been willing to pay $100 for the item but obviously would have preferred to have paid $50. Apparently there was no one else out there that wanted to pay more than $50 for the item. Under the TERMS OF THE CONTRACT the item should have sold for $50. However, the seller, by violating the contract and bidding on his own item gets more than the market would otherwise bear. Both the seller and the bidder are supposed to have some risk in an auction. There are ways for the seller to reduce the risk (reserve prices) but they may reduce the possible gains. That's how life works.
My question is, how does the buyer KNOW that the person who ran up the price was the seller and not another buyer? If the shill bidder used the actual login name of the seller then the bidder was under no obligation to pay. If it was a different login name then this person may just be complaining about the legitimate auction process.
Maybe this abuse could be prevented by requiring very secure user verification and by requiring a proof of transaction for every successful auction. If a pattern of successful bids that didn't result in completed transactions were found it would indicate this type of fraud. example: shillbidder1234 has bid on lots of auctions from fraudseller5678 and won several (by accidentally outbidding a real bidder) but no transaction has taken place... you have a case of shill bidding.
It was nice of them to float this idea, but in truth it was more of a sinker. I think it's important for a company to air out internal workings from time to time. I know they've been very regular with good products lately. You have to expect that from time to time they'll have a stinker. Actually I thought the article was a gas!
Actually I believe that all net-metering schemes allow you to put power back into the grid and deduct it from your bill. If you generate more than you use, they don't pay you, your bill is $0. So there is no benefit to generating too much.
Why not offer your users the option to simply download your material and let them use the player of their choosing?
Yeah right. I want to spend my time and CPU cycles exporting my video to different formats, then the money to host 3 or 4 versions of the same damn video on my website.
No way!
I can just upload any of a half a dozen formats to google video, let them wrap it in flash, then I embed it in my blog. Now grampa can watch videos of his grandson without me explaining the finer points of choosing a media player. My Mac friends can watch my stuff. My Mac&PC family people can watch my stuff. Even my 3 year old son can watch it himself on his computer. Yes that's right at 3 years old he has his own PC, it runs Edubuntu, and he can point and click. I for one welcome our new Flash video overlords! http://ukemike.blogspot.com/
I haven't bothered updating to IE7 on my home or work machines (both XPSP1). Is there a risk associated with having IE6 still on my computer? I rarely use it (maybe 3 times in 2006). I guess what I'm really asking is does IE6 have vulnerabilities that can be exploited by it just being installed on my PC? Here's another: It was my understanding that one could not uninstall IE6 from an XP machine. I know that XP used to use IE6 for updates. Now that there is a separate update system in XP do I still need IE? Could I upgrade to IE7 then uninstall it? Wouldn't that be ironic?
Actually we are getting dangerously close to a nuclear war. The US now has TWO Carrier Strike Groups in the Persian Gulf. The Gulf is getting so crowded that a US sub bumped into a Japanese tanker. Ted Koppel on NPR Friday evening said that people in the military have indicated that our assets in the Gulf are not useful for combating the insurgency in Iraq but are well suited for strikes on Iran. Koppel said that senior military personnel have told him that it is likely that the US will be at war with Iran before 2007 is over.y Id=6836561
t ype=topNews&storyID=2007-01-07T185259Z_01_L0675940 5_RTRUKOC_0_UK-IRAN-NUCLEAR-ISRAEL.xml&WTmodLoc=To p%2BNews-C1-Headline-8
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?stor
Israel is drawing up plans for a NUCLEAR strike on Iran's nuclear power program.
http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/articlenews.aspx?
In the last several weeks Bush has fired and reassigned several high level military and intelligence people that were in some way in his way to a broader mid-east war. Generals John Abizaid and George Casey who were opposed to an escalation in Iraq and John Negroponte who has recently stated that Iran is 10 years from having the Bomb.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/010807R.shtml
I'd say that the doomsday clock is definitely ticking, and we are in for a shit storm in 2007.
THANKS Steve! I had an unfulfillable lust for a bit of techno wizardry that I wasn't going to be able to have. Now the lust is gone.
It's kind of like seeing a really hot woman. You take a deep and breath go over to talk to her. As you approach, all full of nerves, she smiles and reveals a mouth full of rotting teeth. No thanks. I outta here!