If your town is anything like mine, you're buying the MP3 player precisely so that you never, ever have to listen to the radio again.
Let me think - I could listen to grainy L.A.-style radio, commercial-saturated lite-rock and the two-laughing-assholes-in-the-morning "wacky" radio show, or alternatively I could never, ever do that again. I'd be willing to pay more for an MP3 player that doesn't allow that crap into my ears.
If you're the kind of person who'd install ad-block software, why would you listen to the radio?
That's why I have every email I've sent/received for decades.
I do too, and virtually all my music, and drafts of bad things I've written, and notes to self, and a zillion other things, and it occurred to me the other day reading about the demise of JWZ's RBA mailing list and the real reason that corporate document-retention policies exist, I started to wonder what would happen if I ever got sued, and my digital stash got raided.
Basically, then, my entire life would become a public document. The good parts, the bad parts, and even the ugly parts I don't like to look at myself.
Xandros gone! Xandros warned Xandros, but Xandros never listened to Xandros. Xandros was quiet one in family. SO! What can Xandros be doing for you? Everyone always coming to Xandros with problems. Great responsibilities. But Xandros does not mind. Xandros trained in crisis management. But only Xandros have no-one to talk to. No-one manages poor Xandros, you see. So Xandros talks to dirt. Sometimes talks to walls, or talks to ceilings. But dirt is closer. Dirt is used to everyone walking on it. Just like Xandros, but we've come to like it. It is our role. It is our destiny in the universe.
Step 1) For the love of God, stop making skinned applications. Use the UI-consistent widgets, they're dirt cheap, I promise.
Skinned apps make me want to scrape my eyes out.
That's it, really. Folks, you are under exactly zero obligation to tell those losers the truth when they ask you for your name, address, postal code, blood type, sexual inclination, shirt size and preference of home furnishings. And when they give a form with a checkbox that says "Our advertising department can come into your house at three in the morning and probe you with a variety of unlubricated metal implements", you don't have to agree to that.
Seriously: who actually tells those losers the truth?
Wood veneer is also generally pasted over particle board, to make cheap, nasty substandard crap look expensive, so that people who don't know any better spend way more money than the things are worth.
And, at $250 to $600 for a freaking computer case, I'd say that trick still works.
One question that I've had for years that I've never heard a satisfactory answer to is: how do we really know, beyond reasonable doubt, that fingerprints are unique identifiers?
I mean, I've been told that - we've all been told that for at least a century, maybe two. But has there ever been a significant study that actually checked that?
I'd love to see that, just to put my conscience to rest. The biggest assumption that biometric identification makes is that it is actually a unique identifier, but I haven't seen any evidence that this has been proved to be true.
Anyone who wants to point me to such a study would put my mind at ease.
The time was a decade ago, before XML and bootable CDs and the conversation went like this:
"We need to you to convert all of this old data to a usable format: Comma-delimited ASCII."
"No problem. I'll set up perl, do some regexes, it's all good."
"Perl?"
"It's a really good parsing tool. I'll just install it and..."
"You can't install new software on these computers. You'll be fired if you do."
(Gak!) "What am I allowed to use?"
"Whatever's there."
(Oh, no...)
It turned out that "whatever's there" means "a word processor", specifically Corel WP6 on Win3.1, and it wasn't all good; it was, as a point of fact, all bad.
And there was lots, and lots, and still more lots, of this data, which needed to be checked manually for incorrectly-placed linebreaks...
I just refuse to believe that the Trusted Computer Initiative will deliver more secure computing.
The important question isn't "whether or not it can be trusted", it's "who is trusting it to do what?"
I strongly suspect that the word "trusted" doesn't mean "the user can rely on this system not to do anything detrimental to the user's interests." I think it's going to mean "the manufacturer of this computer can rely on it not to anything detrimental to the manufacturer's, or their business partners', interests."
What I'd like is a system that I can trust my own interests to, but I'd settle for just "reliable".
Seriously. "If only everyone used distro X, the world would be fine!" Right. But you hear it all the time.
Mouse not working? Switch distros. Don't like your GUI? Switch distros. NIC not working? Switch distros. Neet DirectX 8.0 to play? Well, I guess you could call that a kind of distro switch, sure.
I don't know if you've noticed, but Linux gaming with very few exceptions falls into one of two categories:
Knockoffs, imitations of other games and
Games that suck.
And as long as it's a struggle just to get decent video card drivers released from the original manufacturers, what's never going to change.
Specifically, the bit in the ECMA Code of Conduct where it says they allow you, unlike virtually any other standards agency, to obtain a "standard" designation for proprietary patented technology.
It's the filesystem, not the firmware. The iPods apparently use an exotic, but the problem is easily fixed. I don't know if it's easily un-fixed, but if you're going to tear open an iPod for the contents, you probably don't care about that much either way.
So, anyway, I don't have the URL handy, but the word is that once you reformat those things they work correctly; it wuold obviously not be cost-effective for Apple to bump production costs by insisting that Hitachi munge their firmware, or to waste development time and money doing it themselves.
I used to work at a Prominent Canadian ISP, and this sounds very familiar.
If you're a big fan of "root causes", well, the root cause of crappy tech support is the business model. The people who work there get paid per hour, but the actual company, or in this case "branch-of-other-company-via-internal-billing" gets paid per call that comes into the building. Therefore somebody who is needs three or four calls to fix a problem, rather than just one, is three or four more times as profitable to the company as one who calls once.
In this environment, the ideal setup is about 95% braindead scriptreaders who can cheaply solve the great majority of problems given a flowchart and three or four tries and a tiny handful of people who handle the real problems from the persistent clients. But if you're actually good, and you want to keep your job, you have to play by Management's playbook.
There's an optimal point somewhere where the cheapness of tech-support expenses is balanced against the cost of losing clients, and I promise you, some very smart people have worked out those numbers.
Seriously, that's why consumer net access is so cheap, in both senses of the word, these days.
I'm not so concerned about Jackson's partly-revealed tit (she was wearing a pastie, people, there was nothing to see there that doesn't make the cover of SI once a year) but I swear to God, seeing Mike Ditka talk about how much better his wang works with his new pills is going to haunt me until the end of my days.
Every transaction you make at an ATM is associated with you, the bank, possibly your credit card or union, and all of that information can be audited, against your location, the amount of money you have, the amount of money that actually left the machine.
None of those things are true about votes, with obvious consequences.
If I could pick the lock or steal a key to the paper ballot box, I could tamper with the votes too.
There are no locks on Canadian ballot boxes. They're sealed, numbered containers produced and transported under guard by Elections Canada that need to be destroyed to be opened. As well, a restricted number of votes go into every box, which is audited. They are, in combination with the other precautions around them, effectively tamper-proof.
This is what I don't understand about the American push towards electronic voting - it solves the wrong problem. Sure, it's nice to get voting results back quickly, but the single most important thing about an electoral process is correctness, not efficiency. That's why Canadian ballots are great big things, with the candidate's names written in bold, thirty-point type with one circle next to them in which you can put either an X or a check mark, and voting booths have simple, crystal-clear diagrams in them showing how and how not to fill them out. Not little tiny things with bizzare folding layouts or punch-card bits.
In fact, you can bet that it will solve exactly zero problems, whatever that means. Like checking to see if clothes actually fit is a huge problem.
This is a marketing tool, and you can bet that it will be used to manipulate people. Your body image will almost certainly be automagically tweaked a bit, to make you stand straighter, be a little slimmer or better-muscled, have smoother skin, anything to help sell the clothes better.
In my opinion, the only interesting thing about it is how low marketers will stoop.
As of my starting to type this, there are six comments on this page. By the time I'm finished, there will probably be sixty all saying the same, obvious thing: if you want to stop seeing popups, get Firebird.
...until somebody makes a choice you disagree with, apparently.
We're all aware that the whole point of this "free software" exercise is that people are free to do whatever they want with it as long as they share, right? Even if other people think it's a bad decision?
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Let me think - I could listen to grainy L.A.-style radio, commercial-saturated lite-rock and the two-laughing-assholes-in-the-morning "wacky" radio show, or alternatively I could never, ever do that again. I'd be willing to pay more for an MP3 player that doesn't allow that crap into my ears.
If you're the kind of person who'd install ad-block software, why would you listen to the radio?
I read this usenet post every now and then when I'm trying to fix something, and it makes me want to cry every time I do.
If you don't know what that means, you're wasting everyone's time.
I do too, and virtually all my music, and drafts of bad things I've written, and notes to self, and a zillion other things, and it occurred to me the other day reading about the demise of JWZ's RBA mailing list and the real reason that corporate document-retention policies exist, I started to wonder what would happen if I ever got sued, and my digital stash got raided.
Basically, then, my entire life would become a public document. The good parts, the bad parts, and even the ugly parts I don't like to look at myself.
I'm not sure what I think about that.
Xandros gone! Xandros warned Xandros, but Xandros never listened to Xandros. Xandros was quiet one in family. SO! What can Xandros be doing for you? Everyone always coming to Xandros with problems. Great responsibilities. But Xandros does not mind. Xandros trained in crisis management. But only Xandros have no-one to talk to. No-one manages poor Xandros, you see. So Xandros talks to dirt. Sometimes talks to walls, or talks to ceilings. But dirt is closer. Dirt is used to everyone walking on it. Just like Xandros, but we've come to like it. It is our role. It is our destiny in the universe.
If you can't read, odds are good that censorship will never be that big a deal to you.
Step 1) For the love of God, stop making skinned applications. Use the UI-consistent widgets, they're dirt cheap, I promise. Skinned apps make me want to scrape my eyes out.
Seriously: who actually tells those losers the truth?
And, at $250 to $600 for a freaking computer case, I'd say that trick still works.
I mean, I've been told that - we've all been told that for at least a century, maybe two. But has there ever been a significant study that actually checked that?
I'd love to see that, just to put my conscience to rest. The biggest assumption that biometric identification makes is that it is actually a unique identifier, but I haven't seen any evidence that this has been proved to be true.
Anyone who wants to point me to such a study would put my mind at ease.
"We need to you to convert all of this old data to a usable format: Comma-delimited ASCII."
"No problem. I'll set up perl, do some regexes, it's all good."
"Perl?"
"It's a really good parsing tool. I'll just install it and..."
"You can't install new software on these computers. You'll be fired if you do."
(Gak!) "What am I allowed to use?"
"Whatever's there."
(Oh, no...)
It turned out that "whatever's there" means "a word processor", specifically Corel WP6 on Win3.1, and it wasn't all good; it was, as a point of fact, all bad.
And there was lots, and lots, and still more lots, of this data, which needed to be checked manually for incorrectly-placed linebreaks...
The important question isn't "whether or not it can be trusted", it's "who is trusting it to do what?"
I strongly suspect that the word "trusted" doesn't mean "the user can rely on this system not to do anything detrimental to the user's interests." I think it's going to mean "the manufacturer of this computer can rely on it not to anything detrimental to the manufacturer's, or their business partners', interests."
What I'd like is a system that I can trust my own interests to, but I'd settle for just "reliable".
Mouse not working? Switch distros. Don't like your GUI? Switch distros. NIC not working? Switch distros. Neet DirectX 8.0 to play? Well, I guess you could call that a kind of distro switch, sure.
I don't know if you've noticed, but Linux gaming with very few exceptions falls into one of two categories:
And as long as it's a struggle just to get decent video card drivers released from the original manufacturers, what's never going to change.
Why do you think they did that, I wonder?
Especially when the guy running the whole show thinks that returning integers is better than throwing exceptions, (really, who needs traceability or exception handling?) and you need the guy on the other team to explain it to you.
Jeebus. Looking at those, it's no wonder that the Mono people are imitating, instead of innovating.
So, anyway, I don't have the URL handy, but the word is that once you reformat those things they work correctly; it wuold obviously not be cost-effective for Apple to bump production costs by insisting that Hitachi munge their firmware, or to waste development time and money doing it themselves.
If you're a big fan of "root causes", well, the root cause of crappy tech support is the business model. The people who work there get paid per hour, but the actual company, or in this case "branch-of-other-company-via-internal-billing" gets paid per call that comes into the building. Therefore somebody who is needs three or four calls to fix a problem, rather than just one, is three or four more times as profitable to the company as one who calls once.
In this environment, the ideal setup is about 95% braindead scriptreaders who can cheaply solve the great majority of problems given a flowchart and three or four tries and a tiny handful of people who handle the real problems from the persistent clients. But if you're actually good, and you want to keep your job, you have to play by Management's playbook.
There's an optimal point somewhere where the cheapness of tech-support expenses is balanced against the cost of losing clients, and I promise you, some very smart people have worked out those numbers.
Seriously, that's why consumer net access is so cheap, in both senses of the word, these days.
I don't think it's Cthulhu.
I am going to be scarred for life.
Every transaction you make at an ATM is associated with you, the bank, possibly your credit card or union, and all of that information can be audited, against your location, the amount of money you have, the amount of money that actually left the machine.
None of those things are true about votes, with obvious consequences.
There are no locks on Canadian ballot boxes. They're sealed, numbered containers produced and transported under guard by Elections Canada that need to be destroyed to be opened. As well, a restricted number of votes go into every box, which is audited. They are, in combination with the other precautions around them, effectively tamper-proof.
This is what I don't understand about the American push towards electronic voting - it solves the wrong problem. Sure, it's nice to get voting results back quickly, but the single most important thing about an electoral process is correctness, not efficiency. That's why Canadian ballots are great big things, with the candidate's names written in bold, thirty-point type with one circle next to them in which you can put either an X or a check mark, and voting booths have simple, crystal-clear diagrams in them showing how and how not to fill them out. Not little tiny things with bizzare folding layouts or punch-card bits.
This is a marketing tool, and you can bet that it will be used to manipulate people. Your body image will almost certainly be automagically tweaked a bit, to make you stand straighter, be a little slimmer or better-muscled, have smoother skin, anything to help sell the clothes better.
In my opinion, the only interesting thing about it is how low marketers will stoop.
Of course I'm a student, so I'm pretty much doing that anyway.
Use Mozilla. Tell your friends.
...until somebody makes a choice you disagree with, apparently.
We're all aware that the whole point of this "free software" exercise is that people are free to do whatever they want with it as long as they share, right? Even if other people think it's a bad decision?