Funny, I went the other way. After a long period of wasting time having long conversations with your wife, reading books, going biking, building mame cabinets and remodelling my house, I realised that was all a huge effort to expend just to avoid watching TV. Bought a 42" plasma, never looked back.;)
Oh, come on. I hate it when people make me defend Microsoft, but the fact is a lot of spyware is installed manually by users, via a bundle with some other product, and there is no way Microsofts OS can differentiate between user-installed spyware and legitimate apps.
So yeah, Microsoft is at fault for the security holes that allow spyware to be automatically installed, but factor those out and there's still a need for anti-spyware for the computer-illiterate masses.
Yes, but sending robots tootling around the solar system is frankly not very exciting, and the biggest payoff of all from spaceflight derives from the extent to which it captures the public imaginations.
By your terms, we'll be "winning" if we're still in Iraq in 20 years time. The fact is no way in hell did the coalition expect to still be fighting an insurgency in 2006, the insurgents have clearly done well to extend the fighting long past the point the coalition expected.
And as to this "strategic goal" you ascribe to the insurgents, I'd like a citation on that. See, there's a whole bunch of groups involved in the insurgency, probably with a whole bunch of different goals. The group that had a strategic goal was the coalition, and that goal was to get rid of Saddam and get out quickly. We failed on that, and the fact we may eventually succeed in our subsequently modified goals is neither here nor there.
I didn't say they were winning, I said they were "doing rather well". Having dragged the conflict out as long as they have, and with the insurgency showing no signs whatsoever of tailing off, means my statement is pretty much indisputably accurate.
You can try to do a Dubya-PR-machine on the issue, and turn the situation into "we are winning" if you like, but to most of the planet it looks like we're trying not to compound one huge fuckup with another (i.e. pulling out without leaving a stable government in place). Best that can be done at this stage, but it doesn't sound like "we are winning" to me.
I measure their effectiveness by the fact that the coalition forces are still there several years after they expected to be able to pull out, and by the fact that the insurgency is still going - the main aim of such a campaign is to be a continuous thorn in the side of their enemy, and to keep going, both of which the insurgents are doing very well.
Well, "terrorists" is a rather loose term these days, especially amongst Americans, but since we're talking about the Iraqi insurgents in this article, I have to say they seem to be doing rather well with their improvised communications arrangements.
You're missing the point. It's not about preventing security-breaching hardware getting into secure locations, it's about having a US-based company to blame if it does happen. A US-based company that manufactures its products in China can still be held responsible in a US court, a Chinese company can't. And the Bush government really likes to have people to blame when things go wrong.
3gp is a container, what you said makes as much sense as saying you're unimpressed with the quality of AVI video. It depends what codec was used (MPEG4 basically), what bitrate, and the quality of the playback software and hardware.
and of course, you won't be able to redownload files you've paid for.
Of course that's down to the vendors. I've bought a fair few DRM'd Microsoft Reader ebooks, and the main vendors do allow you to redownload those, for example. It should be a legal requirement for all vendors of DRM'd media files to do that IMHO, but I guess that's about as likely as a very unlikely thing.
Well, I agree that perhaps my example didn't provide sufficient context, but are you saying the word "patent" in the original sentence didn't provide enough context to illustrate that it was referring to, um, patents? I think you just defeated your own argument.
Actually, the phrase "Patent law unambiguously grants..." tells us that the intellectual property being referred to later in the sentence is patents, not any other form of IP. If I say "Brewery best practice tells us that the optimum amount of hops in the beverage is...", you wouldn't complain that "beverage" wasn't specific enough, would you?
Speak for yourself. When I can't tell the difference between a rendered character and a live one, then I'll start wondering if graphics are approaching "good enough". Of course better physics and AI is also necessary to improve immersiveness, but there's no way I'd say graphics need no further improvements anytime soon.
I'm kind of surprised that some hasn't managed to come up with a distro that does the vast majority of what guys like this expect out-of-the-box. Since we know almost all that stuff is possible with some effort, it should be possible to comeup with a distro that does it, no? Take the distro with the best hardware support, install whatever is needed to play DVDs etc regardless of whether it pisses some people off, etc.
Then there's the expectations part, where I was going to explain that peoples expectations need to be managed when it comes to what to expect when switching. But actually, this guy had pretty reasonable expectations - wanting the OS to work with his graphics and sound hardware is certainly reasonable. Wanting to play common multimedia formats found all over the net is perfectly reasonable. Being able to deal with complex MSOffice documents is something that will have to be possible to make switching practical for a lot of people. The iTunes business is not quite so reasonable - if Apple don't say it's compatible with Linux, then there's no reason to expect to be able to use it, although it's reasonable to want to, if you have an ipod.
Reasonable article, even if we've seen the like often enough.
I suspect they made that particular change because a large majority of users wanted it, so although I was actually speaking in general terms, yes, the rest are indeed "some people". And BTW I prefer KDE as it happens, Mr Coward.
Because one man's common sense is another man's stupidity, and they want to avoid having the million configuration options necessary to cater for everybodys views. Having some people need a handful of extensions to tweak the things that bother them, while only having a small number of core configuration options is actually a much neater solution IMHO.
Personally I've been using the TabX extension to get a close button on my tabs since I started using Firefox, having the close button attached to the thing it closes seems like common sense to me;), so I won't even notice that change.
Interesting, I hope sure someone will do such a comparison at some point, just to satisfy curiosity. However I have to say that speed is way down on my list, behind security, functionality, reliability, and extensibility. The time spent reading a page is much so greater than the time taken to render it that I really couldn't care less about whether one browser renders a particular page half a second faster than another.
More to the point, do they really think anyone would pay to see it, even if it wasn't pirated? I saw their previous one, and while it was a creditable effort as these things go, I'd rather watch reruns of DS9 than *pay* to see it. In fact I kind of felt I was doing them a favour by spending the time to watch it.
I want the word free taken off all anthems, pledges, etc
Nah, you just need to get the legal department to add some disclaimers. For example:
"Land of the free (except where such freedom may be deemed by government agencies to conflict with the ability of the state to protect any such notional freedom from any perceived external or internal theats)"
"I Pledge Allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty (see disclaimer under freedom) and justice (pursuant to the ability of the pledgee to afford the aforesaid justice) for all."
Slashdot Mirror
Funny, I went the other way. After a long period of wasting time having long conversations with your wife, reading books, going biking, building mame cabinets and remodelling my house, I realised that was all a huge effort to expend just to avoid watching TV. Bought a 42" plasma, never looked back. ;)
Why does it seem Microsoft is running out of good ideas?
;)
Wait...I've missed something here. You seem to be implying that Microsoft were previously overflowing with good ideas - what were those again?
Oh, come on. I hate it when people make me defend Microsoft, but the fact is a lot of spyware is installed manually by users, via a bundle with some other product, and there is no way Microsofts OS can differentiate between user-installed spyware and legitimate apps.
So yeah, Microsoft is at fault for the security holes that allow spyware to be automatically installed, but factor those out and there's still a need for anti-spyware for the computer-illiterate masses.
Yes, but sending robots tootling around the solar system is frankly not very exciting, and the biggest payoff of all from spaceflight derives from the extent to which it captures the public imaginations.
By your terms, we'll be "winning" if we're still in Iraq in 20 years time. The fact is no way in hell did the coalition expect to still be fighting an insurgency in 2006, the insurgents have clearly done well to extend the fighting long past the point the coalition expected.
And as to this "strategic goal" you ascribe to the insurgents, I'd like a citation on that. See, there's a whole bunch of groups involved in the insurgency, probably with a whole bunch of different goals. The group that had a strategic goal was the coalition, and that goal was to get rid of Saddam and get out quickly. We failed on that, and the fact we may eventually succeed in our subsequently modified goals is neither here nor there.
I didn't say they were winning, I said they were "doing rather well". Having dragged the conflict out as long as they have, and with the insurgency showing no signs whatsoever of tailing off, means my statement is pretty much indisputably accurate.
You can try to do a Dubya-PR-machine on the issue, and turn the situation into "we are winning" if you like, but to most of the planet it looks like we're trying not to compound one huge fuckup with another (i.e. pulling out without leaving a stable government in place). Best that can be done at this stage, but it doesn't sound like "we are winning" to me.
I measure their effectiveness by the fact that the coalition forces are still there several years after they expected to be able to pull out, and by the fact that the insurgency is still going - the main aim of such a campaign is to be a continuous thorn in the side of their enemy, and to keep going, both of which the insurgents are doing very well.
Well, "terrorists" is a rather loose term these days, especially amongst Americans, but since we're talking about the Iraqi insurgents in this article, I have to say they seem to be doing rather well with their improvised communications arrangements.
You're missing the point. It's not about preventing security-breaching hardware getting into secure locations, it's about having a US-based company to blame if it does happen. A US-based company that manufactures its products in China can still be held responsible in a US court, a Chinese company can't. And the Bush government really likes to have people to blame when things go wrong.
Why, Steve Ballmer of course ;)
Maybe, but times change.
3gp is a container, what you said makes as much sense as saying you're unimpressed with the quality of AVI video. It depends what codec was used (MPEG4 basically), what bitrate, and the quality of the playback software and hardware.
hmmm 'lessthan|greaterthan' symbol doesn't come up.
;)
What? You mean the < and > sybols? You must be doing something wrong man
and of course, you won't be able to redownload files you've paid for.
Of course that's down to the vendors. I've bought a fair few DRM'd Microsoft Reader ebooks, and the main vendors do allow you to redownload those, for example. It should be a legal requirement for all vendors of DRM'd media files to do that IMHO, but I guess that's about as likely as a very unlikely thing.
While standard is all about being open, fair and compatible with others
;)
Well, in reality it's just about the last of those three. But hey, one out of three aint bad
Well, I agree that perhaps my example didn't provide sufficient context, but are you saying the word "patent" in the original sentence didn't provide enough context to illustrate that it was referring to, um, patents? I think you just defeated your own argument.
Actually, the phrase "Patent law unambiguously grants..." tells us that the intellectual property being referred to later in the sentence is patents, not any other form of IP. If I say "Brewery best practice tells us that the optimum amount of hops in the beverage is ...", you wouldn't complain that "beverage" wasn't specific enough, would you?
The graphics are good enough already.
Speak for yourself. When I can't tell the difference between a rendered character and a live one, then I'll start wondering if graphics are approaching "good enough". Of course better physics and AI is also necessary to improve immersiveness, but there's no way I'd say graphics need no further improvements anytime soon.
I'm kind of surprised that some hasn't managed to come up with a distro that does the vast majority of what guys like this expect out-of-the-box. Since we know almost all that stuff is possible with some effort, it should be possible to comeup with a distro that does it, no? Take the distro with the best hardware support, install whatever is needed to play DVDs etc regardless of whether it pisses some people off, etc.
Then there's the expectations part, where I was going to explain that peoples expectations need to be managed when it comes to what to expect when switching. But actually, this guy had pretty reasonable expectations - wanting the OS to work with his graphics and sound hardware is certainly reasonable. Wanting to play common multimedia formats found all over the net is perfectly reasonable. Being able to deal with complex MSOffice documents is something that will have to be possible to make switching practical for a lot of people. The iTunes business is not quite so reasonable - if Apple don't say it's compatible with Linux, then there's no reason to expect to be able to use it, although it's reasonable to want to, if you have an ipod.
Reasonable article, even if we've seen the like often enough.
It would also be nice for Firefox and Mozilla to understand URL files generated by IE. Safari seems to manage.
Firefox 1.5 already does, on my machine.
I suspect they made that particular change because a large majority of users wanted it, so although I was actually speaking in general terms, yes, the rest are indeed "some people". And BTW I prefer KDE as it happens, Mr Coward.
Because one man's common sense is another man's stupidity, and they want to avoid having the million configuration options necessary to cater for everybodys views. Having some people need a handful of extensions to tweak the things that bother them, while only having a small number of core configuration options is actually a much neater solution IMHO.
;), so I won't even notice that change.
Personally I've been using the TabX extension to get a close button on my tabs since I started using Firefox, having the close button attached to the thing it closes seems like common sense to me
Interesting, I hope sure someone will do such a comparison at some point, just to satisfy curiosity. However I have to say that speed is way down on my list, behind security, functionality, reliability, and extensibility. The time spent reading a page is much so greater than the time taken to render it that I really couldn't care less about whether one browser renders a particular page half a second faster than another.
More to the point, do they really think anyone would pay to see it, even if it wasn't pirated? I saw their previous one, and while it was a creditable effort as these things go, I'd rather watch reruns of DS9 than *pay* to see it. In fact I kind of felt I was doing them a favour by spending the time to watch it.
I want the word free taken off all anthems, pledges, etc
Nah, you just need to get the legal department to add some disclaimers. For example:
"Land of the free (except where such freedom may be deemed by government agencies to conflict with the ability of the state to protect any such notional freedom from any perceived external or internal theats)"
"I Pledge Allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty (see disclaimer under freedom) and justice (pursuant to the ability of the pledgee to afford the aforesaid justice) for all."
Problem solved!